New Zealand Post Writers and Readers Week 2006 - our report

The New Zealand Post Writers and Readers Week in the New Zealand International Arts Festival was truly a readers and writers festival. Several participants emphasised their view of themselves as readers as well as, and sometimes more than, writers.

Michael Cunningham

Michael Cunningham’s books are more concerned with reading and writing than most. As a reader he is interested in the books we find or that find us and won’t let go. After living a life essentially without books his came when he was 15. Sneaking a smoke beside the ‘pirate queen’ of his high school, the really cool girl all high schools have who is smarter and tougher than everyone else, Cunningham found himself drawn into a debate about the respective merits of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. When the cool girl responded to his loyalty to Leonard with the question “have you ever thought of being less stupid” he was unable to answer, but he did take her suggestion to read a book by T. S. Eliot or Virginia Woolf. The band-aid coloured prefab that served as his high school library had no books by Eliot. Mrs Dalloway was the only book by Woolf and it had never been out.

Cunningham’s first attempt to read it was not successful - he couldn’t follow it but he could see its density, its music and its muscularity, language he’d never come across before. Mrs Dalloway made him a reader, then a writer with the ambition of writing a book about reading a book. The hours is his tribute to Woolf and to how important reading can be.

Cunningham felt that Woolf and Joyce had proved forever that it is the depth of a writer’s perception that forms the subject of a novel. It is all about the penetration a writer is able to bring, as an example he strongly urged the audience to read Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker. AIDS is a subject because as a gay survivor he doesn’t know how he can leave it out of his books; as if a writer lived in London during World War Two and didn’t mention the Blitz.

Writing a novel after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in September 2002 felt like a puny gesture but then Cunningham felt stories were needed more than ever. The standard wisdom says it takes about 10 years to process such events into fiction but there have been numerous 9/11 novels published recently, Cunningham speculated that this may have been a counter-reaction to observing the United States government spurn international advice and embark on the Iraq war.

There was some debate in the festival about beautiful writing, and whether the insistence on beautiful sentences is deadening, but Cunningham loves a carefully crafted sentence and has no desire to see writing follow the visual arts in discarding beauty as anything worth striving for. He’s had had it with the notion of the writer as a bad girl or boy good writing comes from a place of deep lucidity.

While the symbolic power of the mad writer and of writing as a gift aligned with madness was very powerful and while Virginia Woolf insisted that her sensibility was informed by her descent into depression, her real heroism lay in her ability to carry on working.

Competence is the enemy of writing or of any art form it is always important to feel that you are over-reaching. If you start to feel like an expert suddenly it’s Chicken McNuggets, not being an expert means you pay more attention to craft.

Cunningham is with Flannery O’Connor in wondering how there can be any surprises for the reader if there haven’t been any for the writer. Writers must not love their characters too much and they must not hate them at all.

When in his ‘20s he would start a novel only to abandon it when it wasn’t working out and start a new one. It took him some years to understand that every novel would have a point like that and he would have to work through it. The hours had this point because of its difficult structure, so difficult his agent and publisher expected it to sell a few copies then go straight to the remainder tables.

In Specimen days Cunningham used a three part structure, each part very different as they come from three fiction genres. Each genre is treated with respect rather than as pastiche because he loves them and tried to understand how each form worked.

“Are you gay writer” seems to be a favourite question to ask out gay authors (Alan Hollinghurst was asked it at the Auckland Readers and Writers festival). Cunningham said yes he is a gay writer but he is writing towards a world where there is no longer a need to break writers into sections, all the fiction is in one section and we are trusted to choose the books that will mean something to us. Edmund White has said that when he wrote he felt thousands of young gay men looking over his shoulder looking for stories about their lives but for Cunningham every good novel is about his life.

Audiences at writers’ festivals, especially audiences for fiction writers, tend to be made up of fans why would you pay good money to see a writer you didn’t like?

Questions therefore are rarely critical but Cunningham copped a beauty when a reader asked him if the success of the movie version of The hours had changed him, after all his books before that one were good and Specimen days, his book after it, was not. Managing to remain un-defensive Cunningham replied that he had begun thinking about Specimen days before The hours hit big, and that he had written the book he intended to write, he didn’t think it was bad but that “if we have to break up over it, I’m sorry”.

Michelle de Kretser

De Kretser was another charmer and another who described herself as a reader rather than a writer. Writers come from readers, often passionate readers, she was a child built by books and could imagine a life without writing but not a life without reading. “I’ve always been a reader but I’ve only been a writer for the last eight years”. Her first profession as an academic and reviewer was just an excuse for hanging around books.

After taking a year off work to cook and garden and finding time hanging heavy de Kretser imposed on herself the disciplinary measure of writing 500 words a day. Three or four months later she began to suspect she was writing a novel, something that would have been too daunting had she set out to do it. A combination of events lead to the subject matter for this novel, The rose grower. After announcing her intention to cook and garden during her year off she was given roses as presents so like any good reader she got books out of the library on roses. The discovery that crimson double-petalled roses first appeared in Europe at the time of the French Revolution combined with a spell of living in France and a reading of Citizens, Simon Schama’s history of the period lead to writing the novel she wanted to read about the period, a way of sidling into it so she was not alone with her imagination.

De Kretser sees the French Revolution as the first moment of the modern when ideas like the nation state, democracy, equality before the law had their first expression, beginning in good will but ending in terror.

The interaction of the individual and history is at the centre of both de Kretser’s novels, although she found the ‘difficult’ second novel even more difficult because it dealt with a country she cares about, Sri Lanka. De Kretser spent her first 14 years there before moving to Australia (her life there “not so much wild swans as ten budgies”) Memories of Sri Lanka are bound up with reading detective fiction so in The Hamilton case she looks at how the perception of crime changes over time by using the programmatic genre of the detective story. She wanted all the clichés of Ceylon; tea, elephants and all the planter paraphernalia of Somerset Maugham’s Malaya but with a narrative hook. The novel is not autobiographical as such but does contain things she has thought, seen and read.

Empires produce incongruities and create new forms and realities and de Kretser felt that Ceylon’s 500 years of intercourse with the West had its unofficial history written in the flesh, hers included. With Dutch and Sri Lankan parents, the dissonance between her name and her appearance is a history of colonialism in itself as anyone with a name like hers is expected to be blonde and white.

On whether it is useful or burdensome for writers to come to festivals, de Kretser found it useful to meet those strangers who read the things she sent out into the world. Performance taking over from the words on the page is a worry though when what the writer really wants to say should have been said in the pages of the books.

Paul D Miller

Writing may be a little retro…: On words and sound was a group session looking at whether words interwoven with sound qualify as literature. Considering the relationship between language and the evolution of popular culture lead to some fascinating arguments. Writer, musician and conceptual artist Paul D Miller, best known as D.J. Spooky, said that writing may be a little retro but that’s cool too… you can always squeeze something out of the past and make it new. The printed word is only an instrument in his creative toolbox, he wrote prose, essays, journalism and poetry but he also sang and DJ.’d it was all sampling, collaging and mashing up.

Miller sees sampling as a paradigm shift in the history of words, an uneasy tension between citation and quotation, between context and content in which meaning is unmoored. Tailored media is the way of the 21st century, taking fragments and re-assembling them, as with the IPOD that has transformed the way we listen to music.

There is lots of aesthetic room for lots of visions. The Beats like Kerouac and Burroughs were irreverent to the culture and now the beats used in sampling are the same. Music is now decontextualised, part of a global electronic folk culture. Every generation has its tools Bob Dylan was vilified for going electric.

Miller’s language comes from recording, from writing with sound and using a different literacy, a new way of putting things together, just as James Joyce and Gertrude Stein did with words. Literature has never been about fixed meanings and the digital media has unmoored it even further. As William Gibson would have it, technology has fragmented the world. The Gutenberg galaxy has a print mentality, the world now is about customisation.

Empires always over-reach and scramble everyone up. The rise of conservatism has seen a fear of collage - they want to go back to the days before globalisation meant that material like offensive cartoons could be seen everywhere all at once. Sampling is an exchange, a way to understand cross-cultural dialogue.

Don McGlashan

Don McGlashan has been involved with New Zealand music for years, in Blam Blam Blam, The Front Lawn, The Muttonbirds and now with his new band, The Seven Sisters. He has also been a Writer-in-Residence at Auckland University and was a little less sanguine about the brave new modified world.

In fact he was horrified by the singularity implicit in the iPod advertising of everyone being in their own little world. Memory is shared with other people who know the same songs but who owns the collective memory? Songs are personal narratives and stories, fragments of the media landscape internalised and turned upside down.

Sampling hasn’t changed things for McGlashan as people have always borrowed from the past, but he regards some sampling as theft. If this is so, theft is infinite, with white artists from Elvis to Beck to the Beastie Boys able to be accused of stealing from African American culture. Miller saw it as part of the gift economy.

McGlashan draws from a restricted colour palette informed by his old records but is less concerned with issues of ownership than with those who say that meaning doesn’t matter, that the audience constructs its own meaning.

He sees a whole generation who don’t know who is talking to them, who is hungry for ideas and meanings. Artists describe the world so they need to use words in a coherent way; there is a truth and we need to be told it. The post-modernist idea that everything is O.K. plays in corporate hands because they want to keep us unhappy and dissatisfied.

Gareth Shute

Gareth Shute won a prize at the 2005 Montana Book Awards for Hip Hop music in Aotearoa. His written text is work about other people’s memories, so in a sense they still own part of them. Photographs sometimes can be used and at other times subjects refuse to give their permission, or allow them to be used inside the book but not on the cover.

Hinemoana Baker

Hinemoana Baker uses poetry and music to explore identity and space. She addressed the problem of the ceremonial uses of language in New Zealand, as in the haka. Baker felt the words to the haka used by the All Blacks didn’t belong to them and didn’t belong on a T-shirt. She had two feelings; so many things had been taken, but as an artist part of the rigour is to find where things are located in the landscape. The beginning of the artistic process is to go back and begin at the location.

Songs and poems are very different as a poem has to perform on the page in a way that a song does not. In the Tuwhare show the songs that worked best were the ones where the songwriters had gone with musicality of the poems.

Louise Erdrich

Something of a writers’ writer, Louise Erdrich has accolades from the likes of Philip Roth, who called her one of the most interesting American novelists to have appeared in years, and Thomas Berger, who called her a great world writer.

Erdrich began as a poet, and after series of traumatic events she began writing stories. Then she found the characters wouldn’t go away and even when she thinks she is writing about something separate she is still embarked on a process of discovery, of connecting up the dots between these characters,

The stories are episodic but there is a shape, they are pieced together like a quilt then the narrative is reinforced. Working on one large book by publishing many recently she has known how the book is going to form by keeping notebooks,.

Being the eldest child of young parents is lucky for a writer. Erdrich was able to be close to her grandparents, story tellers who had time for her as one of seven children. As a child she loved to listen and was an inveterate eavesdropper, tapping into the oral tradition of the story that keeps going around with a little bit more being added each time.

During her time in New Zealand she found comparisons between Maori and Native American culture inescapable; the oral tradition, the warrior culture, the importance of family and the parenting of children by the larger community.

Often when she publishes a story in a book people will send her similar stories but she doesn’t want to tell stories if people have told their own, secrecy is implicit when they have confided in her. One story she could share was about how a consignment of glass eyes were sent to the reservation. They were all blue except for one and the lucky recipient of that one was often asked if people could borrow it.

Writing and illustrating children’s books is a way of blowing off steam as a writer and also serve to make Erdrich’s devoutly Roman Catholic mother happy as their lack of sex or violence means they can be shown to anyone. The birchbark house shadows and echoes the Little House on the Prairie books and is often taught alongside them in American schools, seeing the Ingalls family through a different window.

Janet Frame

The goose bath, a posthumous collection of poems by Janet Frame, was launched at the festival. The collection was co-edited by Frame’s niece and literary executor Pamela Gordon and poet and academic Bill Manhire and they shared insights into this most ‘elusive and allusive’ of writers.

Poetry was Frame’s first love and she frequently recited it, as did her mother and sister. Because she held poetry in such high regard she was reluctant to publish it, ‘sneaking’ it into her prose instead, but this posthumous publication did have her blessing. Frame’s letters and a novella are still to come.

In producing a posthumous poetry collection it’s impossible to know how the poet would have ordered them. In Frame’s case there were about 300 poems so Bill Manhire, who put them in order, had a huge task. Tossing them in the air was one possibility given their quality, but eventually he settled on the order of a human life. Initially the editors only wanted to include poems Frame regarded as finished but they wanted some that weren’t anyway and they were at pains to point out that this is not the book Frame would have made

On one hand Frame laboured over movement, poise and posture in her poems and often felt she couldn’t get the movement right. On the other hand she was interested in rogue free verse as an expression of the richness of the world.

With this seemingly contradictory attitude to poetry Frame called herself a Georgian poet and saw herself as an observer but phrases recur throughout her work as concepts evolved throughout her life. Bits of poems can be seen in the autobiography but as poetry they are sharper, deeper and more magical. Gordon said that Frame was always a trickster, always keeping her distance and as the poetry lets the reader in she didn’t want as to do that until she was dead.

Changed lives

Virginia Woolf served as the link between Michael Cunningham and noted biographer Lyndall Gordon, whose subjects include T. S. Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Henry James and Mary Wollstonecraft as well as Woolf. These are lives she regards as triumphs, not defeats and her work in illuminating them has been described as vivid, subtle, full of lightly worn learning. New and challenging ways of looking at the work of her subjects are presented, sending readers scurrying back to the work..

Gordon is a biographer who is fascinated by the life span, the way someone like Mary Wollstonecraft was not born a genius but became one. Wollstonecraft was born into a home of persistent domestic violence towards her mother (she would sleep outside her mother’s door as a child in an attempt to protect her) and decided she would never marry.

As marriage was truly disastrous for women in the late 18th century and as her father had squandered his inheritance leaving her no dowry Wollstonecraft had to become a new kind of creature, one who could not tread the beaten track. Hobbs has found it difficult to leave Wollstonecraft behind but through her has discovered the domestic affections a morality of gentleness, temperance, compromise and listening.

As a biographer Gordon is really interested in what can’t be categorised, a quality Michael Cunningham sees as common to good fiction and good non-fiction as no human can be categorised.

Fiction and non-fiction are terms applied to opposite ends of the spectrum but subjectivity and person-ness colour non-fiction just as much as fiction is based on the observable world. Fiction is the art of the possible, biography the art of the probable. The novel is the great empathetic art form as the writer is trying to let the reader know what it is like to be someone else, but biographies need the narrative momentum of the novel.

Gordon thinks there is no such thing as a definitive biography. Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s lives were so thoroughly documented that there was very little mystery about physical details but the sense of possession readers feel for Virginia still leads to argument and theories. Was Virginia a repressed lesbian, an abused child, a manic depressive, an oppressed woman? Was Leonard her oppressor or her help-meet? Was their marriage a real marriage or a convalescence? Cunningham sees it as real and loving if difficult, Gordon turned to the correspondence to find the sense of a live and adoring marriage, although the letters were edited and cannot be taken as gospel.

The bastard child

Are comics “the bastard child of fine art”, only of “appeal to moronic children” as A.R.D. Fairburn would have it? As a mass medium comics may have steadily declined since the 1950s but the role of the graphic novel has changed in the last 50 years, evident from their authors being invited to more literary festivals.

Once ephemeral but now produced to exquisite standards, graphic novels can be hard to ‘place’ but the struggle to locate them also means they can move about freely. Panellists for this session are all accomplished practitioners of the form in different ways but the notion or perception of home permeates the work of all of them; Joe Sacco with his works on Palestine and Sarajevo, Dylan Horrocks with Hicksville and Tim Bollinger with his political pamphlets.

Joe Sacco was a failed journalist who had always put words and pictures together and his comics are informed by literature. Palestine was a series of nine comic books that sold miserably until collected into book form, when they took off in a different way, attracting readers who normally would never read it.

In Palestine Sacco wanted to instruct himself and to show the reality of life for the people, something that is possible in comics where the writer can bring the reader into the home. When he began Palestine he could only draw in the comic style but he had to consciously change because it was such a serious subject.

The graphic novel is one of the most labour intensive art forms in existence. Novelists only have to write but graphic novelists have to write the story and do the drawings and even the lettering. There has been a revival of the hand-made approach with hand done lettering and drawing so the lettering can inform the story.

The panellists all agreed that there is no such thing as good or bad drawing, there is honest drawing. For some cartoonists the way they draw is the story in Marjane Satrapi’s work her very simple drawings really serve the story.

Cartoonists miss the disposable nature of cartoons, when they travelled under the radar they could do what they wanted because no-one was paying attention. Tim Bollinger keeps going with the ephemeral form where the voice of one person gives lots of freedom when their work is self-published for reasons other than commercial gain. Bollinger can address all sorts of serious ideas it’s a license to misbehave and it’s possible to move back and forth between the high and the low-brow.

Simon Armitage

Widely regarded as one of the leading poets of his generation and compared more than once to Phillip Larkin, Simon Armitage claims never to have seen himself as a writer.

Armitage’s first two books were portfolio experiments in form, then when he became more confident he could take more risks. In his poetry he strains for a spontaneous improvised effect, but the challenge is that the seemingly more spontaneous pieces actually take longer than others.

So how do you make a living from poetry? Apparently you don’t. If you’re Simon Armitage you write a number of adverts but have it written into your contracts that you can’t be associated with the products.

If poetry gets too popular it might not be doing its job. There should always be something dissenting about it - after all it doesn’t even get to the right hand margins of the page.

Just as readers might find poetry is too intense to curl up with so Armitage doesn’t find it possible to write poems every day. By working on prose in between he can get on with something and work on it until he gets it right. He did say there would definitely be no more novels as they felt too much like work, although he has signed a contract with Penguin to write another prose book on music.

All points north is an intermediary between poems and novels. It’s not so important if a short piece of writing gets screwed up. The Alans Bennett and Ayckburn are heroes, as are other Northern artists like Ted Hughes, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth.

Armitage most admires writing that sounds like speech, not writing that sounds like writing or like thinking.

A writer has to be able to put themselves in the mind of the person reading the poem; a common reader, not a specialist. There is a danger in relying on live readings of the poetry it is important to send the poems out and see what echo they get.

Shaun Tan

Shaun Tan

“The west Australian wunderkind” has revolutionised the picture book with works like The rabbits, his moving and provocative fable of colonialism; The lost thing, where he plays with tradition, alienation and industrialisation; and The red tree, his book about depression.

With a background in Art History Tan originally wanted to be a writer although he reads science books and could have been a scientist as the other members of his family are. Perhaps this is why his work tends to be analytical and he feels he can never be spontaneous.

When asked now “what do you do” he answers “I’m a narrative artist”. Lots of his stories are about ideas of belonging, which could be to do with being a Chinese Australian growing up in Perth on the frontiers of suburbia.

Tan doesn’t distinguish between popular culture and high art but he dislikes obscurity. Although he didn’t like the text of The rabbits it did give him great license to do what he liked.

After The rabbits he was left with lots of ideas and wanted to explore the idea of living in a city with nothing natural left in it. This lead to The lost thing where all the houses are identical, all the people are grumpy and there are direct quotes from the present Australian government in the collage bits.

The question of belonging is picked up again and again in Tan’s work. In The red tree a series of paintings illustrates emotions as the person shown is dislocated within themselves. It is an experimental book born out of his interest in the ways picture books can be played with and a good excuse to use lots of images he had without a context for them. Each picture is an internal landscape with no connection to the next. He never thought of it as being about depression, more about a person’s confusion over their place in the world.

Making heaps of little pictures and paintings all the time Tan does not see illustration as a decorative art. He likes to take a well worn story and put a new spin on it so we can look at it afresh and loves the sense of dislocation about books, the sense of entering another world. In his pictures the laws of physics don’t apply.

In a swing away from his usual style Tan is now working on a graphic novel based on archival photographs of immigrants in the early 20th century.

Peter Wells

Peter Wells is a film-maker, a perspicacious journalist, an accomplished essayist, a prize-winning short-story writer and novelist.

Is he a gay writer? His reply to this perennial question was that he is an out writer, as the first out New Zealand writer it seems this fact has followed him forever. What he creates is to do with his identity, with “the love lines of difference”.

Wells read a passage from Iridescence, his ‘imagining’ based on a real case he first came across when doing his doctoral research 30 years ago. In 1870 in London there was an explosive scandal when two men were arrested in a theatre wearing women’s clothes. The police thought they were working-class but they were well-connected, one of them living as the wife of a man with links to the Royal household. The idea of hidden lives was most fascinating, of people leaving a huge scandal in England to come to a place of safety in New Zealand.

Why did he choose to read an explicit passage featuring a sexual encounter in a balloon? Chair Elizabeth Alley found it strong stuff for a Saturday morning but Wells finds writing about sex and sexuality very interesting, not shameful.

For a trained historian there is a tremendous tension when blending fact and fiction but research is a love second only to writing. Feelings of ambiguity about the past don’t prevent a constant urge to examine it but memory serves a different function for different writers. John Updike said that a writer should be a spy as a child and a self-interrogator as an adult.

Work in progress includes a film script based on the life of Frieda Stark and next a faux memoir about the men who returned from World War Two. This will be an inter-generational story told by a son and a daughter who have a different view of events.

This is just a small sample of the hugely varied programme on offer in Wellington, but the ideas and recommendations that came out of any of the sessions should keep most readers happy for a while.