Words on Wheels Daily Blog

Hello everybody,

This is the day we set off from Wellington, to convene in New Plymouth this evening. The first events are on tomorrow, at the Waitara Library, Spotswood College and Puke Ariki Foyer. I hope everybody reading this is planning to head along to one of our events, the full array of which take in Inglewood, Stratford, Eltham, Hawera, Waverley and Opunake, as well as Waitara and New Plymouth. The itinerary can be seen here.

I will be in touch tomorrow evening to let you all know how the first day goes. Briar Grace-Smith, David Hill, Janet Hunt, Duncan Sarkies and Alison Wong will all be taking turns to blog about events of the coming days.

cheers, Sarah Forster (from her messy desk at the New Zealand Book Council, Wellington)

Friday 12 February - Sarah Forster (images by Janet Hunt)

They give you extra stuff with your food in Taranaki. (Duncan Sarkies) Like dutch biscuits with your latte, and two marshmallows and a chocolate fish with your iced chai tea… it’s the little things that matter when four exhausted authors and an exhausted tour manager sit down to a hurried lunch between events on Friday 12 February.

The tour began with an excellent event at 10.30am in Waitara. 30 people filed in, many of them buying books on their way in to be signed by our fantastic writers. Alison and Duncan settled in, while David and Janet greeted their many friends from the region, one of whom very kindly put up the Book Council banner while I wasn’t looking! Briar, unfortunately, had been waylaid the day before and didn’t get to the plane in time, instead joining us after the first event at 12 noon.

Waitara was great, with many very good questions being asked about writing and publishing. The readers all read some of their work, and the audience were very obliging and purchased a good number of books for our first day!

After picking Briar up and having lunch, we headed to Spotswood College, where the lovely Emily Scott had arranged for some keen writers and readers to see us. A good wee group of around 30 students, one of whom had nearly finished a first draft of her novel! Duncan read a fantastic piece about flushing a toilet from Two Little Boys, David read about kisses from Duet, Briar read about love from Nga Pou Wahine, Alison read a few of her poems from Cup and Janet read from Wetlands, a beautiful piece about Taranaki.

Then it was time for the big Gala Opening event. I had a half hour turnaround at the motel to check emails and left the writers to collect themselves and headed out to order everybody around. The writers came and met Mayor Peter Tennent, Jonathon Young MP and Bill Macnaught, Manager of Puke Ariki Library. The speeches were short, the readings long and very touching, and the evening went extremely well.

Thank you to everybody in Waitara and New Plymouth for putting on such a fantastic opening day of the tour for us. We feel very welcome.

Saturday 13 February - David Hill (images by Janet Hunt)

Morning session at Inglewood. Janet was once Head Girl here and has just come back to live here. David began full time writing here. An excellent audience hear us read (Alison’s terrific poem of talking to her son; Janet’s succinct accounts of natural life; Duncan’s wonderfully irreverent prose; Briar’s evocative character narrative.) David wangles last spot. Lots of questions afterwards: writer’s block; writer’s voice; writers’ habits: accompanied by superlative sandwiches and savouries.

Sarah drives us south, perched on the driver’s seat of the van like a diminutive nymph piloting a 747. The mountain remains a rumour in the clouds, but the roadsides are packed with blonde summer grass, daisied, roses, blue stuff.

Much writers’ talk en route – editors money, possible projects, how Briar’s mum and dad met in Stratford, the origins of certain books. It’s one of the great pleasures of WOW tours.

A clean new motel in Hawera, and a motelier of gruff rural charm. We unpack, unknown, and eat very early – not at the fast food franchise built on R.H. Morrieson’s cruelly-demolished house. Then back to Stratford Public Library – in Prospero Place – isn’t that great? Another good audience, another great session. A mixed crowd here, the most men we have had of any event.

Janet’s hand-crafted godwit E7, already the group’s unpaid mascot, sees us safely back to Hawera.

Sunday 14 February - Janet Hunt

Most of the day was free with a panel event in the Hawera Library in the evening. After a gentle start, we drove to Tawhiti Museum, a wonderfully idiosyncratic and truly amazing place in the countryside nearby. The museum is housed in an old dairy factory that its proprietor, artist Nigel Ogle, has transformed with life-size and scale models depicting scenes from the past.

Ogle’s latest exhibition tops all previous efforts — with the help of WETA workshop he has created an all-around experience of the life and times of New Plymouth sealer and trader, Dicky Barrett, the highlight of which is a boat trip along the inky waters of a subterranean canal. As you float silently past, you witness Barrett and his men trading muskets with the Maori and later, living with and fighting on their behalf. There’s even a battle scene in which rifles and cannon are fired across the bow. ‘World class,’ said another visitor.

No call to Taranaki is complete without a visit to the maunga so after a bite to eat in Stratford we headed for the Mountain House, stopping along the way for a short walk along bush tracks to the Potaema wetland. This bog, which is inside the park boundary, is familiar to me from researching the wetland book but today we were in for a treat with first, the sights and songs of a pair of miromiro (tomtit) and then the calls and sights of the rare matata (fernbird), with its long draggled tail, in the bog itself. Cool.

By the time we reached the plateau above the mountain house, cloud had descended but it was still wonderful to take a 10-minute amble through the mist, up the track between hebe, leatherwood and daisy before turning back. At David’s suggestion, there was an ice-cream stop at Stratford before R & R at the motel in anticipation of the evening event.

Evening session: It’s Valentine’s Day. About 16 people came to the Hawera library where Alison read love poems and an extract involving lovers from her book As the Earth Turns Silver, David’s character suffered the agonies of writing a love poem and Duncan regaled us with an hilarious account of an unlikely seduction. A trailer was run for Briar’s feature film The Strength of Water, and she described the writing and making of it, and I attempted to rise to the occasion by telling how godwits fly to the other end of the world in order to make love and raise a family.

Monday 15 February – Alison Wong (images by Janet Hunt)

The morning we’ve waited for with trepidation: an early rise and ‘Speed Date An Author’ in Hawera. No, not a way to turn around one’s love life after an abysmal Valentine’s Day. We were joined by local writer Victoria Winder to do sessions with groups of secondary school students from around Taranaki: five lots of 20 minutes, one after the other, each of us tackling a different topic in hopefully an interesting and helpful way.

There were two boys and forty-odd girls. David commented that the boys had got lucky – yep, not a bad way to speed date unobtrusively.

We had kids who were interested in all kinds of genres: poetry and/or lyrics, fiction, screen/scriptwriting and journalism. Virginia taught kids how to review; Janet, how to tell the truth; Duncan, how to lie; Briar, how to stalk; and David, how to steal… I was beginning to wonder whether my session about language should actually be about swearing but then Duncan would be better at that one… Apparently some of the kids were fantastically convincing with their lies...

Afterwards plenty of students asked pertinent questions and we chose a student each to give a free book to, or in the case of Janet, an entire school. They were all sent away with information about competitions to enter, including one organized by the Book Council and judged by Sarah, where the kids are supposed to make use of their newfound knowledge, hopefully not to commit crime, but to write a story or a collection of poems.

Just about all of us needed an afternoon’s nap and/or we unwound in front of telly before we taking off late afternoon in The Beast (our notorious van) for our southern- most stop, Waverley. We gave Sarah her first and much needed break and headed off on our own. God save Taranaki.

David, our local raconteur, drove and related the classic sights, like the chimney of the abandoned freezing works at Patea. He did an able impersonation of our esteemed leader with a Book Council spiel, then Duncan introduced us to our cosy and enthusiastic audience.

We all read material we hadn’t used on tour so far: Briar and Duncan entertained from novels-in-progress (Duncan always gets laughs, if not strange looks); Janet read about peat, with local references, from Wetlands of New Zealand; David, a heartbreaking story which had been broadcast on National Radio; and me, from my novel coupled with poems, including one I’d just written in the afternoon about our escapades the previous day. David reveled in the fact that the poem started with his name and described him as ‘suave’. Duncan reveled in a woman’s comment that she hadn’t realised he was so young!

On the way back, David recommended Patea cemetery – he doesn’t look like a serial killer, does he? (He’s now telling me I’m not allowed to mention certain other things, ha ha.) As we gazed at Mt Taranaki rising above cloud, Janet told us Hone (Tuwhare) always referred to it as ‘The Nipple’.

We did a drive-by of KFC, the late-lamented site of Ronald Hugh Morrieson’s house, picked up Sarah and, at dinner toasted Briar, who had just found out her film, The Strength of Water, had won the Grand Jury Prize at the Paris Film Festival – to add to other previous awards like an audience award at a festival in southern France. Go Briar. Go NZ writing!

Tuesday 16 February - Duncan Sarkies

Today was a quieter day, a morning session at the Hawera High School and an evening reading in Eltham. I always have the same struggles before each reading. I write in the vernacular a lot. And because we do a lot of reading to older audiences I find I have to vet my writing a little. I'm always looking for the sex, the drugs, the swearing, the general offensiveness of my characters, and trying to decide what I should read and what words or paragraphs I should skip.

The same goes for reading to high school students. I'm a bad role model, I guess, but I've had a lot of great feedback from teachers and students that suggest they appreciate someone writing about the sort of stuff that they hear regularly, but they wouldn't write themselves. It makes me think of that case of the kid that got suspended for something he wrote in a story. I forget where it happened, but I remember I really wanted to stick up for the kid and to fight for his freedom of speech. I think that when people are scared of what they think and what they say, they bottle it up and it comes out in more dangerous ways. (Graham Capill springs to mind)

So the greatest thrill for me has been seeing the kids respond to writing that is uncensored. I think it wakes them up and feels a bit more relevant to them. I'm getting a real kick out of seeing teenagers getting excited about reading and writing. I feel like we're able to make a real impact on a few of them. Seeing them respond so well has been a real highlight.

The other highlight for me has been the other writers. I guess we're in a privileged position. We get to hear such a wide variety of material from such a diverse set of voices every day. I love listening to Alison's slow, deliberate and beautifully thoughtful prose. I get mesmerised listening to Briar and hearing excerpts from her future novel. I love hearing the passion in Janet's voice as she makes environmental writing so accessible, and David's writing is so immediate and so lively that I find myself leaning forward with my ears pricked up whenever he reads.

And it is wonderful to hear them all answer questions and find out that we share passion and perseverence, and also to see that we approach our writing so differently. There's no one way to do it. As Martin Sheen said in Badlands, 'it takes all types to make a world'.

Gee, we really are lucky.

Just in case you want to know what conversation topics writers talk about, here are some of the things we discussed last night at dinner:

• The names of our first pets (for the record, Buttons, Darcy, Punky, Timmy and Tom)
• Fibonacci and mathematics
• Infinity
• Cultural greetings (bows, hugs, handshakes and kisses)
• Torture techniques
• Budget adventures bus tours
• Superlatives (Positive and negative)
• Eddie Murphy's singing career
• Badly behaved writer gossip
• Being crushed by the legs of Wonderwoman

Wednesday 17 February – Briar Grace-Smith

David speaks at the powhiri. We stand in a line that wiggles to sing in support. The kids listen, watch, yawn and smile carefully. Two girls from speed-dating return, that’s what happens when you give naughty (but talented) kids a spot prize. Some boys stand next to Duncan but don’t speak. We walk along the ridge over the sea. Black and white cows whip their tails and glare. Janet balances her camera on an electric fence post and leaps into shot. A lop sided snap. The audience ask if writing feels like a rotten tooth or giving birth but it’s really an exciting journey that no one understands you’ve been on because they never saw you go. We catch the lift, a platform moving us through space to David’s luxury tower suite. A blue glow emanates from his windows. The spa bath is filled by a tap that pours water from the ceiling. It has a neck cascade, a dial ring, wave action and back massage jets. Tired now, we can’t stop laughing.



Thursday 18 February - Sarah Forster

A quick start from Opunake, me cursing myself for not opting for a nice late start in New Plymouth, unaware at this point that three of us are going to struggle to make it to the plane on time! We arrive in good time for the 10am event, and our set-up has been capably handled by Journalism lecturer Robin Martin and Marketing Manager Danny Hall. The audience is about 40-strong, all listened gratefully to the smuttiest reading of the tour by Duncan Sarkies, the least innocent reading by Alison Wong, and Janet, David and Briar's wonderful pieces. Of course I had to ask if there were any questions directly after Duncan made his final reference to bodily extrusions being wiped on a sheepskin rug...

After the event, Janet, David and Briar went their separate ways, with lots of good wishes and promises to keep in touch from the tour group. Alison, Duncan and I headed then to town, where I went direct to the library and started counting and packing books. Various uncontrollable factors intervened, meaning not only did I spend 2 hours dealing with books to go back to Auckland, but I also missed lunch(!), then very nearly our plane. We arrived about 20 min before we were due to fly, and the Air NZ hostess didn't bat an eyelid - and it only cost $50 to get 4 extra pieces of luggage to Wellington! Thanks to Duncan's koru club membership...

Everybody agreed that it was an invaluable experience, and one they would love to repeat. Long live the 2010 Words on Wheels Taranaki tour!