Miscellany

Speech to Zonta, 2008

Mum said I was born knowing how to read; it’s true I can’t remember that process. When I read, it’s almost as if I’m gobbling up the words – sometimes a substantial first course, other times a delicious dessert – occasionally upsetting my delicate little tum – perhaps that’s why I take such delight in editing? Certainly by the time I was nine I was working alongside teacher helping other kids to read. And by the time I got to secondary school I was so in love with words, my nickname was Dickie, short for Dictionary.

At home I would arrange my books tidily on the shelf, first by size, then by colour, then by author … until one day I discovered subject order, and the joy of bringing like things together and separating unlike things. This is called ‘classification’ and is the basic skill of library order, so it might not seem altogether surprising that when I left school I became a librarian. In fact, I think nowadays if I said to a careers adviser at school, “I like books and reading and words”, she might have suggested a career as a journalist. Then I would have got to writing proper long, long ago …

But my time in libraries was not entirely wasted. In my thirty year career I not only read and read and read – Heaven for me is being permanently surrounded by books. I also set up ten new learning resource centres, for the Army, in schools and in universities. I was the first faculty librarian to fully catalogue her library by computer – at the School of Business and Management Studies in West Midlands University.

I was one of a rare breed – only four a year got accepted at Garnett College in Roehampton for training as a tutor-librarian. Our role was to combine teacher and librarian and take the message of literacy and learning into the world! Garnett College was also where I first confessed to a deep, dark secret desire – to be a poet! In our family of mathemagicians, a word wizard was definitely out of place. But at Garnett I met my first poet, Philip Crick, who told me my work was full of 16th century conceit – I still haven’t worked out whether he was complimenting me or insulting me. He became my poetry mentor, the kindest and most knowledgeable a woman could wish for, editor and I began to get poems published in the UK under my maiden name of Jennifer Brice. It seemed better not to allow the poet to clash with the professional.

Once I dreamed of becoming England’s Poet Laureate. I was especially hopeful when Philip Lark died, and wrote to the governing body, suggesting that as he had been such a success, they might like to try another poet-librarian. Nothing came of that, and I blame my first publishers, Aquila. This was a literary small press of high repute and uncertain cash flow. I was arranging the launch of Working in the Cracks Between, and they kept promising that yes, yes, don’t fret; your books will be there on time. The day dawned, with celebrity guests expected and the media, and still I had no books. We spent the afternoon frantically putting together a quartet of broadsheets and an order form for everyone, and I nearly died of shame. A book launch without the book …I got over it, eventually, but I was never as keen on poetry as before.

Fortunately, yesterday’s book launch of The Word for Food did go off all right, in spite of the fact that Winston Peters was late to the launch. I made an analogy in my introduction of him between fishing and politics – go where the groups gather, hook your bait with something juicy, and reel them in. I think the same analogy is true of writing.

It was when I left Garnett College that I became a co-founder of the Feminist Library Workers, a short-lived organisation that had a profound impact on librarianship in Britain. I remember thinking at my first meeting there was something deeply wrong with me. It took me ages to work out what it was. I was the only woman at that inaugural meeting in a dress and wearing make-up!

How different it was when I lectured the Denver, Colorado, branch of the National Organisation of Women. The feminists there were all size 6, smartly groomed and power-dressed in designer suits. I think they found my message a bit overwhelming; in those heady days I was a rabid feminist, going on Reclaim the Night marches, hassling men on the Underground, raising women’s consciousness so high a downfall was inevitable.

The Feminist Library Workers was a necessary step towards equality in librarianship. At that time it was a profession 75% female-dominated, but with men occupying 90% of the top 10% of management positions. I believe there is still some inequity – and I think there always will be.
That’s because many women prefer, as I did, to stay home and take care of their children when they are young. I worked out once that that means we are usually seven years behind men of equal qualification.

The Feminist Library Workers met at the London Women’s Centre, richly funded by the left-wing Labour Government, and a hotbed of rabid feminism. I also founded the first Women and Words group there, which launched many a woman into a profitable writing career, especially with the new co-operatives that were emerging to publish women’s work – Virago, for instance, and The Women’s Press. I set up about four Women & Words groups in all, in different cities. The last, in York in the late 1990s is still going strong, and I am still in touch with them, keeping them up to date on my own writing news. Feminism taught us to value ourselves and our sisters, and I still do.

Then Margaret Thatcher came along, and showed us the downside of female power. I am still a feminist – but nowadays I confine myself to defining that as a belief in gender equality. Coming to New Zealand when you had a female prime minister, a female chief of justice and a female governor-general was heady stuff.

It was during my years as a feminist librarian that I first began to write – articles for Spare Rib and Ms, and for professional library and information journals. On the side I also wrote romance novels under my married name of Jane Harmer! Then I was appointed editor of Library Work, a magazine that targeted women non-professionals with an ambition to better themselves. Nowadays the only feminist journal I subscribe to is Mslexia, the best writing magazine in the world.

All this campaigning for a better world for women was setting a pattern for doing voluntary, unpaid work; often to the detriment of my own writing – something all women do, and to which I am now reconciled. I had a revelation last year that I have always been more intrigued by the writing process than fired up with the desire to be a best-selling author. This could be giving myself permission to fail, a clever excuse for under-achievement. I hope it is not.

In the late 1980s I finally got my honours degree – in English Literature and History – the first person in my working-class family to become a graduate. Scholarship can be deeply rewarding; and I still hold fast to the belief that, “A day is wasted that you don’t learn something new.”

There was no need to found a Women & Words group here, as Tauranga was home to New Zealand’s longest-running self-help group for writers, now Tauranga Writers Incorporated. Last year as some of you may remember we organised a Jubilee Jamboree for our 40th birthday that included a Gala Anniversary Dinner with Dame Fiona Kidman as our celebratory guest, and publication of This Side of the World, writings garnered from the 40 years of our history. A brief commercial break – I do have copies here at the special price of $20 only.

Churchill said of Britain and America that they were two nations divided by a common language. American-English has its individualisms, and so does New Zealand English. I had barely touched base here than I signed up with Study Link to do a creative writing course online in fiction and poetry with Whitireia Polytechnic. I wanted to learn now to write Kiwi – to lose the more formal style imposed on me in the UK where most of my writing was for academic and professional journals for as lesson plans for my university teaching.

I loved what I found here in New Zealand literature – the strength of the poetry, the power of the short short story – a pioneer history and a tradition for self-published memoirs and community stories that enthralled. I was thrilled to bits in 2007 to become “a Reed author” with Poetry Pudding during the year that Reed celebrated its centenary. Reed was the first truly New Zealand publisher, a phenomenon from its first days when the Reed brothers, AH & AW, established it. Unfortunately, 2007 was also the year that they sold the company, and it became a subsidiary of Penguin under its new name, Raupo.

You should be proud of your country’s writers. In haiku, a form adapted from the Japanese, they lead the world. One of the most celebrated haijin – or masters of haiku – lives here in Tauranga, Sandra Simpson, a journalist with the Bay of Plenty Times. Another is Catherine Mair of Katikati, recently honoured with the Queen’s Service Medal for her poetry and for Community work. Catherine is the originator of the Haiku Pathway now run by the Katikati Open Air Art committee. Bravado will be publishing the winners of its biennial haiku competition in our November issue.

Tauranga Writers provided the impetus for my first publishing venture here – a CD of ten Bay poets reading their own work, called Where Poets Gather after a poem from Sue Emms, one of the readers. Sue, whom I first met in the group, was to become my New Zealand writing mentor and my best friend. She is the author of Parrot Parfait and Come Yesterday, both award-winning novels. She was also a contributor, naturally enough, to The Little Red Hen, a community magazine on alternative living that I took over from Rose Webber, who had founded it. The Hen eventually collapsed, due to the proliferation of free magazines and newsletters from Tauranga Environment Centre, EBOP and the Department of Conservation. You can compete with cheap. You can’t compete with free.

So that door slammed shut, but Sue and I immediately forced open another, when we founded Bravado: a literary arts magazine from the Bay of Plenty, at that time the only region in New Zealand without its own showcase journal. Bravado has gone from strength to strength, and is now running its 5th International Poetry Competition, which last year attracted nearly 700 entries. Bravado is a good mix of emerging and established writers, and has always attracted respect and the right kind of attention from the literary elite.

The July issue will be in the bookshops soon, and contains writing by famous children’s author David Hill, by Iain Sharp, a regulator contributor to The Listener and to the Sunday Star Times, and our new delight, The Petri-Dish, a witty last page from Marcel Currin, the Bard of Brookfield. Marcel is a rising star in the New Zealand poetry world, and like many other Tauranga Writers, now pops up regularly in New Zealand anthologies. For example, in Harvey McQueen’s collection of garden poems, The Earth’s Deep Breathing, and in the Random House poems on parenting published as Swings and Roundabouts.

You are all cordially invited to attend Montana Poetry Night this Friday, where you can judge Marcel’s talent for both performance poetry and songwriting. He is joined by Darryl Belbin, our Welsh songbird, and by the irrepressible Hannah Jone, backed by Belisha Bellydance.
She has promised to perform the rude bits from A Life in Action that the library censored last year. Loose Canons is not only a fun occasion for our national day of poetry, it also launches regular poetry live sessions in Tauranga. So this Friday if you can get to the Orange Zephyr Café in Wharf Street for a 7 pm start.

Tauranga Writers has a mission statement – to get you started in writing, and to get you published. Bravado’s intention is to provide a showcase for writing talent of all kinds. With the growing success of both, Sue and I were approached by Waiariki Institute of Technology to develop an online creative writing course for them. This we embraced with enthusiasm, and it has been going strong for four years now, evolving non-stop. This year I added Indian Writing in English and I am presently engaged in creating a module on Technical Texts, while Sue gets to grips with another on Screenwriting.

It was Sue who pointed out to me that I had written 40,000 words for Indian Writers in English – definitely book-length. That is why you should never assume ‘writer’ is simply a description for a person whose books you can buy from Whitcoulls or Books a Plenty. Writers write – in all sorts of situations, and for many different purposes.

I am not only a writer, but also an editor. The late, lamented Bernard Gadd described me as “possibly New Zealand’s best; certainly the most sensitive.” I was deeply flattered, and I do enjoy editing, which to me is as creative as the original writing itself. I believe along with Farrukh Dhondy that "the only true writer is a rewriter." Unfortunately, not all writers are capable of self-editing – you get too close to the work, you have handled your words and phrases too often. Bringing in a professional editor makes senses, especially if you intend to self-publish. How else will you get external validation as to your work being genuinely of ‘a publishable standard’?

Editing does have its problems. My friend Robin Lee-Robinson was married to Barry Crump for twelve years, and wanted to tell her story. He was a national icon, and a big money-earner, and she was forced to go the self-publishing route. Unfortunately, she didn’t get an editor – and In Salting the Gravy, which is a gripping tale, was slammed by the critics for its complete lack of editing and its “hideous proofing”. (I quote The Listener.)

I am now editing Robin’s second book, Talkback Toast, a reminiscence of Radio Pacific, where she was producer of Barry’s popular show, Bush Telegraph. That reveals another problem – that editing can make a book better, but it does not of itself create a great book, especially when the writer doesn’t understand that editing is usually done on a final draft.

I think we have ended up with a good book, but you will understand that an editor’s lot is not always happy when I tell you that throughout the process of editing Robin has bombarded me with additional text that in total exceeded the original manuscript she handed over.

A couple of years ago I also had problems with the biography of local celebrity George Claridge, who developed the Bayfair residential estate and was a prime mover and shaker, first in Dunedin, where he built the university campus and organised the layout of the city streets, later in the Bay. George was also an inventor - his environmentally-friendly, silent flush toilet was designed when he was 99 and is now a bestseller with hotels throughout the world. At 102, he is still on the roading committee here in Tauranga.

George founded the bowls league in New Zealand, and he was also the leading main in our very first talkie, Down on the Farm. He had a fascinating tale to tell, and told it in the robust style of your typical Kiwi bloke. Unfortunately, his wife Billie would then read the work we had done together, and refine it, in case he upset anyone. Anyone? I would mutter. They’re all dead now, which was true. At 100, you have outlived most of your contemporaries.

For instance, George would say, “So I told him, ‘Take the money or I’ll push your teeth past your tonsils’”. Then Billie would come along and say, “That’s not very nice, dear”, and I’d have to rewrite it as, “Take the money, or I’ll be extremely cross.” It was her amended version that got published – for family circulation only - but I did consider handing over the uncensored manuscript to George’s son as a family archive.

Life as a writer keeps me busy. I am hoping to write one or two ‘big stories’ a year for North and South. I did one on feral cats, and I am now investigating prison libraries. I am regularly published in the kind of literary journal no one has ever heard of, and I still do the unpaid voluntary stuff. Our monthly newsletter from Tauranga Writers, Update, which I put together, goes to about three hundred recipients not just here but all over New Zealand. We have a Saturday column on the Books page in the Bay of Plenty Times and a Poets Corner that I am responsible for.

I am prose editor of Bravado, as well as the editorial team co-ordinator. I mentor two writing wannabees a year, and take on two manuscripts at a time as an editor. I am now working with Angie Belcher on her family history – she was born a descendant of the Sicilian Famularos who settled in Lower Hutt and has begun the process of discovering, recovering and uncovering that makes family history so compelling and unique.

I am also working with a scholarly philosopher who has uncovered absolute proof of the existence of God. We are beginning with the Book of Daniel … Heady stuff, and as he speaks Aramaic and understands ancient Hebrew texts, I am hoping I will not find myself out of my depth. We could create a new Da Vinci Code between us!

The writing process is always about expanding your limits, thinking outside the square. That’s why Tauranga Writers launched the Go, Write! initiative in March this year. It’s a plan to encourage people to build on what they’ve done with their writing, and take it in another direction. To this end, I provided Debbie Tipuna, a talented local illustrator, with a picture book text. We’ve done infomercials for companies, and worked with charitable organises to create press releases, and flyers. We’ve set up a young writer’s wiki on BackPorch in Wetpaint. We now want to create a draft creative writing programme for use in prisons, working with the Books in Prison Trust and the Department of Corrections.

And we’re hoping to start Writers Anonymous very shortly, if we get the funding. This is a in response to the many enquiries we get from people with an aching desire to simply tell their stories – people from an abusive background, or who are struggling to overcome mental, emotional or physical health problems,

I myself am bipolar, and I would say I’ve had a troubled past. I write because I must. I write to be published. And I am also aware of the healing power of all the expressive arts. My mother mulled things over as she worked on the complicated pattern of an Aran sweater. My daughter is an art therapy tutor at Turning Point Trust. I have sat in on dramatherapy and music therapy classes with both young and old, including in Grendon Underwood in the UK, which is for violent psychiatric offenders. I have seen the miracles it wrought there. I know what writing has done for me – it even got me through last year’s tragedy when I lost Gina, my eldest daughter.

Writing is just another means of bringing out into the open and dealing with all the complications and complexities of our everyday living. It seems to me bringing that Writers Anonymous may turn out to be most important work I do.

posted by Jenny Argante @ 2:29 PM