Exercise 1 from The Fiction Class
Five obsessions
1. Money.
2. Worms.
3. Writing.
4. Knowing things.
5. Understanding the past.
Money is my metaphor for madness, and that is the obsession I intend to explore. As for the others – worms – an extreme phobia, which I have found is not uncommon. I think of them as creeping up on me and I find it difficult to understand intellectually their value in the world, and the feeling of horror, terror even, that strikes me when I see one.
Writing is an obsession that has got misplaced, because the writing process seems to fascinate me more than simply getting on with some writing that will bring me fame and fortune. Knowing things – ah, yes – I hate to be out of the loop; I hate secrets; and I hate not understanding why people withhold information, or fail to explain themselves and thus become a mystery I can never unravel.
Again, I do understand intellectually that we all have a right to our privacy, but I fill up their silences with my own confused and psychotic ‘explanations’, and the unknowns seem to get in the way of a true knowing, and therefore liking or loving. This is linked with understanding the past, because as much as other people puzzle me, I puzzle myself and often do not understand how I came to do this, that and the other which has stranded me where I am – a place I do not really want to be.
But it is money that obsesses me most – the lack of it, a strange contradiction in that I despise and detest it, hate profiteering, cannot understand why someone like Athene Thierry (‘the Onassis heiress’) has $56 billion – it seems obscene – and why I cannot hold on to or respect money that belongs to me. It as if I want to disdain it, and yet so doing puts me in positions of extreme poverty, limits my choices and causes extreme stress. I know I should manage it better, and yet a curious fatigue comes over me when confronted with the ‘necessities’ of personal financial management.
Yet by a strange contradiction, when I was working, I was noted and praised regularly by the auditors for my excellent budgeting and balancing skills. Expenditure never exceeded income and I got more for my buck than many other departments in-house or in similar organizations. This neglect of my own finances has a detrimental effect on my emotional and mental health, and yet I cannot seem to break free of both obsessing about the lack of money and doing nothing to better manage what I have got or what I could gain, with some application.
Too much of the work I do, for example, is voluntary and unpaid. What is all that about? I wish I knew. And how mad is it to only feel right with yourself’ when you have no money and are in crisis because of it. So unhealthy – as I believe all obsessions must be. All that money confers is choices.
Yet who would I be with ‘enough’ money. As a person who believes too much is enough, when would there BE ‘enough’ money? And how would I tell – ever again – that someone loves me for myself alone and not for what I do, or give? I already have doubts about that …
Why do writers need libraries?
Why do writers need libraries? For the same reasons – and more – that other people within the community need libraries:
- for easy access to information;
- to continue informally with life-long education;
- for their leisure time reading and resource use.
Information is the lifeblood of any enterprise. If you don’t know, you can’t do. You need to know all the possibilities and what the limitations might be. For example, I am writing
The Poetry Activity Book about the reading and writing of poetry. I want this to be firmly New Zealand-based and biased.
My research has included:
- checking out the competition – has anyone published anything similar?
- checking out the market – what is my readership likely to be?
- checking out the content against what’s available both to borrow and to browse through in
Tauranga libraries, in other public, academic and national libraries and through inter-library
loans;
- checking out a publisher – who is likely to be interested in my manuscript and who will do
best by me?
- checking out copyright for quoted poems and excerpts, and sourcing illustrations.
My education has included:
- learning from what other writers write that is similar to or different from what I want to write;
- learning from the past and from the present, because writers are part of a literary tradition
yet must write in the here and now;
- learning about tactics, techniques and tools for a writer;
- learning about the resources available and how to use them from trained, interested
and responsive professionals.
I could expand on how much libraries have offered me both as a reader and a writer over the years, from early childhood to the present day. I am a teacher and a librarian and a writer and an editor, and in all these roles my local library has never failed me. I was worried about coming to New Zealand, because I was used to the resources of a much older country, with access in London and York to the two prime resources – the British Library in Paddington, a legal deposit library whose books go back to the Middle Ages, and the British Lending Library at Boston Spa, whose proud boast is they can get you any book anywhere in the world.
I need not have worried. In the years I have lived in Tauranga, I have come to appreciate that, whatever else it lacks for the cultured mind and the artistic temperament, it has a supremely good library service with the most friendly and helpful staff I have ever come across.
I ought to know: I was one of them for a while, and it was a privilege to be a member of this dedicated and hard-working band of enthusiasts. Reading is both my work and my relaxation – I come here to study magazines I might write for, subjects I might write about, and anything else I need to know to do my job properly and to enjoy my hours off.
One practical job I enjoyed doing for the two years I was employed there was checking the catalogue against a list of names to see which writers were going to benefit that year from the authors fund. New Zealand is a peculiar market in which to sell books. Our biggest book chain is Whitcoulls, which is not New Zealand-owned and which seems to have a prejudice against New Zealand writers, and against local and self-published books.
Self-publishing, especially of family and community history, has been a strength of New Zealand literature, and it is supported here by the purchases made for the New Zealand Room – and what a treasure-house for the writer that is – and by a very supportive bookshop, Books-a-Plenty, privately owned and a strong contributor to the Bay’s book ethos.
We can’t buy all the books we’d like to, even to help our fellow-writers. We can go to their book launches, often held in libraries. We can borrow their books from the library so they qualify for author’s fund payments. We can request their books, so that every library buys a copy and increases sales.
Another peculiarity of the New Zealand book markets is how small it is. In a population of four million, with one quarter of that population aged between 18 and 35 living and working abroad, with children and the unemployed and retired not contributing except indirectly to the national income, we have a small customer base to sell our books to. Yet New Zealand is also a country that sells many of its books abroad, to praise and honour; and where at home it has the highest percentage of readers and writers per capita among the population in the English-speaking world.
We also have a strong tradition of supporting the literary arts – a huge number of funds and grants available, including the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Merit if John Key agrees to keep that up. Creative Tauranga has been a friend to writers in the Bay.
But the library has been our biggest support, mainly because libraries create readers, and reading creates thinkers and doers, and without readers, writers will dwindle and decline. Finally, do remember that writers don’t only write for magazines and books. Nearly everything you pick up from the instructions on a soup packet to the screenplay for your Saturday video has been written by a writer.
Writers, I would argue, whose growth and development has been assisted by a healthy, innovative and proactive library service.
Who do you think you are?
Who do you think you are?
What sort of question is that? (Gruff.) “Who do you think you are?” It’s usually asked like that when people want to indicate you’re getting above yourself. But in the UK and in America and Australia – and hopefully some time soon in New Zealand – it’s also the name of a TV programme where celebrities get to find out their heritage – their family’s history that made them who they are.
You don’t have to be famous to do this, of course, and once you start to dig deep into anyone’s life there are always surprises. That’s what makes family history so totally fascinating. When I was a child my Dad used to look at me and say, in his deep rich voice, “Girl, you’re a real blight.” I was hurt. I didn’t think I was that bad …
Then when I was about eleven we went down to Cornwall and I found out that his mother’s maiden name was Blight, and she came from a shipbuilding family in Cornwall. I also found out that the reason his Cornish family lived in Devon was that she had eloped with one of her father’s carpenters, and had been cast off without a shilling ... Or so the story went.
My dear Dad had such a big nose that his nickname in the Army was Birdie Brice. My sister and I were relieved that our noses were relatively normal, and when my first grandchild was born, I couldn’t help remarking to HIS father, “Oh, what a sweet little nose.” “Yes, it is a Sweet nose”, he replied, “He takes after my mother’s family, the Sweets.”
We inherit so much from our ancestors, and not only the size of our noses. An d for many of us, at some time or another, the desire to answer that question, “Who do I think I am?” leads us to writing a memoir, a biography or a full-blown family history with an extended genealogy.
When I came to New Zealand, I found that there was here a great tradition of researching and writing the story of who you are, and it has been my pleasure over the last few years not only to read many of those histories, but to teach people how to write them.
As for reading them, well, one of the things I soon discovered in Tauranga was the treasure trove that calls itself the New Zealand Room. I was a teacher-librarian all my life and I know what I’m talking about when I tell you Tauranga City has a great library service. In the New Zealand Room you can find family histories, local histories and the many, many stories of our city, our country and our culture. Only recently, Jenny Jenkins, a local history teacher, published
Battle at the Gate: the Story of the Battle of Gate Pa. In this beautifully illustrated children’s book she tells the true story of Heni, the young Ngaiterangi woman who, along with the rest of her iwi, showed mercy to the wounded and dying British soldiers.
Some of those soldiers are buried in the Elms cemetery, and you can see Heni depicted in a stained glass window at the old church in the Historic Village at 17th Avenue. Jenny’s father is a member of Tauranga Writers, to which I belong, and he wrote the poem that first inspired his daughter to research this old narrative.
Tauranga Writers itself clocked up 40 years of history last year that made it the longest-running self help group for writers in New Zealand, and yes, we too produced a book.
This Side of the World is a celebration of story, memoir, history, poetry and prose as presented over those years by local writers, some of whom have gone on to become well-known locally and nationally, like playwright Bronwyn Elsmore, farmer and conservationist Field Candy, children’s writers Phyllis Johnson, Jean Bennett and Lynley Dodd, and novelist Sue Emms, who was my writing mentor when I came to Tauranga, and is now a close friend and partner in many writing projects we have undertaken together. Then, of course, there is me – now world famous in New Zealand!
Sue and I shared the work not only
This Side of the World, but of two other exciting initiatives of which I am extremely proud. I used to edit a community magazine in Tauranga called
The Little Red Hen. I took it over from its founder Rose Webber and for a year or so we sailed merrily along taking the environmental message out into the Bay.. Unfortunately, local and national organizations like DoC and EBOP began to get in on the act, and, with all the government funding they get, their newsletters were free. Well, you can compete with cheap - but not with free; and so
The Little Red Hen quietly folded.
It was then that I recalled how when I asked Sue if she’d like co-edit the
Hen, she replied, “No, thanks, but if you ever start a literary journal, let me know.” I had already discovered that the Bay of Plenty was the only region in New Zealand that did not have its own magazine of the literary arts, and so lo! In November 2003
Bravado was born, and has been going strong ever since. We have always produced a good mix of established and emerging writers, and I make sure, as prose editor, that there’s always some memoir or local history included in the pages. Such writing is, after all, a particularly Kiwi tradition.
Bravado also became known for the excellence of its poetry, and for the last five years has run an International Poetry Competition that attracts over five hundred entries, on average. Compare an early Bravado with the last (you can do this on
www.bravado.co.nz.) We’ve come a long way, baby, and we know who we are!
Partly because of
Bravado, and partly because of my own activities as a writer, including a weekly column in the Bay of Plenty Times, and partly because of writing workshops I did for the University of Waikato, I was head-hunted by the Waiariki Institute of Technology to create and develop an online course for writers. Naturally, I invited Sue to join me in that task. Today the Diploma in Creative Writing has been running for five years with over fifteen modules on offer that cover all kinds of writing from Technical Texts to Poetry and Scripts, as well as Contemporary Maori Writers and Indian Writers in English.
Sue and I have written most of the modules between us – some 40-50,000 words for each. This proves that a ‘writer’ is not only someone whose books you can borrow from the Library. In fact, to be a writer all you have to do is sit down and write – and you would be surprised how many people are doing just that, scribbling poetry in secret, keeping a journal not to be opened until after they die, or sending off stories to competitions and telling no one until the glorious day they come 3rd or 2nd or – Hallelujah! – they win!
One of the first modules I created was what was then called Writing Based on Family & Personal History, and which now has the much more interesting title of Penning the Past. This remains a universally popular choice for students, and one result of its fame for me was that I got into the business of helping people to write their own story, either as editor or ghostwriter. Often this was as a legacy for their descendants, or to make sense of a troubled or traumatic past.
This is not as easy as you might think. Yes, you are now answering the question, “Who do I think I am?” – but how honest can you be? Memory is a faulty and unreliable thing. And how honest will others let you be? In 2007 I was commissioned by his son to write the story of George Claridge, who was then fast approaching his 100th birthday. George has had a fascinating life. He was the leading man in New Zealand’s very first talking film, Down on the Farm. He is the brains behind our national Bowls Association for whom he wrote the rules and a best-selling guide to coaching. He designed the first Dunedin University buildings and laid out that city’s inner roading system. When he moved to Tauranga, he developed the Bayfair residential estate, and is now, at 102, still on the city’s roading committee trying to get them to see sense and put new roads where they are most needed, with what he calls ‘maximum efficiency and minimum fuss’.
George has also been an inventor all his life, and only three years ago came up with what he calls ‘the whispering toilet’, whose trade name is SilentNite. He got the idea for this when staying at a hotel with his wife Billie, Neither of them could sleep for the flushing of loos up and down the corridor . His toilet is not only quiet, it is also ergonomic and environmentally-friendly, and is selling in the hundreds to hotels around the world.
Billie has been a wonderful helpmeet to George throughout his life; but on that question of ‘telling it as it is’, she was definitely not helpful to George and I as we worked our way through the long story of his life. He would say something like, “So then I told him, If you don’t do as I say, I’ll stuff your teeth past your tonsils.” Billie would read it, and go, “Oh, George, that’s not very nice”. And we’d have to rewrite it as, “So then I told him, I am getting angry with you.” Not quite the same impact, eh?
Billie was worrying about upsetting the people who featured in George’s life story. I wanted to say to her, “What people, for God’s sake? Most of them are dead!” In the end the published version,
Tried and Tested, is the story of George according to Billie. The uncensored manuscript is now a family archive.
I’m often asked, “Where do you begin to write a life story?” The answer to that is simple. You begin at the beginning with a chronology, year by year; and that’s what I did with George. This is a man, after all, who was born in 1906. It seems strange that you would have to research your own life, but you do. We’re not writing as we were then, we’re writing as we are now. Memory is unreliable, as I said, and when things happen to you, that is the perspective you remember them from. When rewriting as story, you will often find yourself pondering more deeply on the reactions and responses of other people who were involved along in that story along with you, some of them before you were born.
If you’d like to know the basic guidelines are for telling your story with integrity and meaning, it is to write out the episode or incident as a factual account, and then:
· Check your chronology.
· Check the location.
· Check what others were present or involved.
· Check what happened before .
· Check what happened after .
Whether you’re recording a story that is told to you by someone else, or working from archives, letters, diaries, and other old records, concentrate on what the facts are and how they fit together. See what questions you’ll have to ask of yourself and of others to fill in the missing gaps.
When you do this, you often make fascinating discoveries, and this, too, happened with George. All her life his mother had thought she was illegitimate, a matter of much shame to her. When I did the basic genealogical research, I found out that this was not so. Her parents were married a year and a half before she was born. But yes, there had been a shameful secret in the family that lay behind the reason why her husband and child emigrated to New Zealand. When her only child was born, she suffered a series of epileptic fits, triggered by the pregnancy and worsened by the birth. In Victorian times, little was known about this disorder, and, for the lower middle classes, contraception was abstention. She was treated as mentally ill, and a danger to herself and her child. George’s grandfather was warned against resuming marital relations, and the marriage effectively ended. His wife was institutionalized and died in a Liverpool infirmary when she was only 31.
Her husband was already a steward working the boats from Liverpool to New Zealand. He simply reversed the order of his sailings and took his three year old daughter with him to Wellington. He regularly visited his wife until her death; but isn’t it sad that he never, apparently, told the little girl the true story. She thought that she was a bastard; and it’s obvious her father thought she was better tainted by that stigma than by the stigma of a ‘mad mother’.
Paul Bennett was a man with a troubled past, too. An outstanding athlete, like most of his family, he was when young well on his way to becoming New Zealand’s first Maori world surfing champion. But Paul threw fame away, he almost threw his life away, on drugs – starting with pot and ending up with P. He destroyed his ambitions, his marriage, and his health. At 36, suffering nightly visions of Satan and his demons of Hell, and with his lungs shot to pieces, Paul was given six months to live. Only a lung transplant could save him, and he had just been diagnosed with hepatitis, which excluded him from surgery.
Paul came home to die – his parents had already lost another son to drugs. He visited his whanau and the urupa where his brother and ancestors were buried. He called on them to help him. He says that they did, and that they continued to sustain him during the long years since that it has taken him to turn his life around. This is the journey he recounts in
Walking with the Taniwha, which I was pleased to edit for him. Paul will never recover that splendid good health he took for granted when he was a young boy, but he is alive, and doing great work in the world as a drug counsellor. Now when he is asked, “Who do you think you are?” it is a question he can answer with pride.
Some people can’t make sense of a troubled past. I personally believe that what you suppress, repress and cannot express is what ultimately destroys you. I have had two failures. I was ghostwritng the story of a woman who was New Zealand’s first woman prison guard to work in a man’s prison – and who alternated her life as a prison warder with prostitution. She was a girl who had been repeatedly sexually abused as a child, and she never got over it. She wanted to tell her story: get rid of it, get past it. She never could. Whenever we got close to dealing with the real and ongoing trauma that had damaged her life, she would back away – fail to turn up for appointments, or turn up drunk. In the end I had to tell her, “Skye, you’re not ready to tell your story yet. Come back when you are.” I learned recently that she has died, her story still untold.
Finding out who the hell you are is the most important part of a human being’s emotional and intellectual growth and development. You need to know who you are because your only job on earth is to be the person you were meant to be; to be yourself and no other. We come into the world so perfect, and we are so easily damaged. Putting it down on the page in private, or in print for sharing with others is a great means of addressing the harm that life does to us, if we let it. Get it down, get it out, get rid of it. That is why I have become very interested this last year in ‘write to heal’ courses, or writing as therapy; and why perhaps the next work I will be doing is to develop a course in creative writing for prisoners. Until we can find the words to express our hurt, it will poison and fester inside. Some of us are lucky enough to be able to speak of past wrongs and injuries. Others never found the trust in others that is needed to share your own story.
Sometimes the world just doesn’t want to know. One of the first people I met at Tauranga Writers when I came here in 2000 was Robin Lee-Robinson, who married Barry Crump when she was a sweet young thing of 22 and he was 43, and who stayed married to him for twelve years, against all odd. Barry was by then a famous man of great charisma, one of the earliest progenitors of what I call ‘the Kiwi bloke genre’. I have read
A Good Keen Man and
Wild Pork and Watercress, shortly to be made into a film. I have also read his brother’s account,
In Endless Fear, of life with their fiercely abusive father, Wally Crump.
Sadly, the children of abusive parents often become abusers themselves, and that was the case with Barry and Robin – and his other wives too, if truth be told. Far from the popular myth that it was Barry who ‘shot through’ his marriages, it was usually the wives who threw him out or left him. That was the case with Robin, but when she tried to tell her story of this, the longest marriage of Barry Crump, she came up against a wall of silence. Nobody wanted to bring down a national icon who epitomized all that was staunch and finely upstanding in Kiwi manhood.
Eventually Robin self-published her story,
In Salting the Gravy, and it has been a runaway success in spite of the fact that she didn’t know me then, and so it was badly put together. (LOL) She has found both peace and profit from telling her story, and in making sense of who she really is. Certainly not the woman who lived in Barry Crump’s shadow for so many years. One excellent result was that it demonstrated to her that she could come up with a writing project and carry it through. Another was that, with the bad times before her and set down in black and white, she was able to remember all that she had learned from Barry as “the bushman’s apprentice”. She rediscovered the fact that, although their marriage was troubled and eventually no longer sustainable, there had been as well much love and laughter.
Robin has written another book,
Talkback Toast: a Reminiscence of Radio Pacific, and this time she found an excellent editor– me! If I ever thought editing was a cushy job, I found out differently working with Robin. She has so many good stories to tell, but she is not computer-literate and she doesn’t understand, as I do, the concept of order – that chronology of which I spoke – and the processes by which you discover the natural flow and clarity of your written work. If I ever set up a literary agency in Tauranga - which I am often asked to do – I will call it Rumpelstiltskin after the dwarf who saved a queen from her royal husband’s ire by turning straw into gold.
Robin and I are immensely proud of the final product, and I am pleased to report it is selling well, with a second print-run coming soon.
Talkback Toast is the story of the now defunct Radio Pacific and of regular callers to the radio station, among them Trevor Watson, a grand old man of 94, who has shared his life, his wisdom and his love of Auckland on air for many, many years. Robin also talks about the Bush Telegraph, Barry’s extremely popular radio show for which she was the producer, and shares with us other, more kindly stories of her life with the last bushman. She came to Tauranga when she left Barry because he said he hated the town and would never live here. Ironically, when he remarried for the fifth and last time, he and his wife Maggie came to Tauranga, and here he died and is buried in the Pyes Pa cemetery. Robin tells me she took a copy of
In Salting the Gravy and laid it on his grave.
Writing is very good means of finding out who you think you are, and it also reveals, almost without us knowing it, many thing about ourselves that are deeply-hidden. I have a joke, “How do I know what I think until I see what I wrote?” I could as easily say, “How do I know who I am until I spread out my memories and make of them stories and poems?” In Greerton is a lady who calls her business Living Legacy, and who will help you to put photographs and anecdotes together to create a memoir of your life. I have started doing this at home, picking a photo out at random and attaching to it a story or a poem. A pattern is emerging that shows the influences that have made me who I am and taught me things to do – a good mother, a bad manager of money, a woman of active mind and lazy body, a teacher, dreamer and thinker, and, above all, a woman with a talent not only for writing her own stories, but for helping others to write theirs.
Spiritof the Hour
A silly idea of Betty's, but best to say nothing. Putting down empty cups, brushing off crumbs, we drift away.
Out in the garden trees lean closer, nodding wisely. Friends and strangers circle the empty pond, two by two. The air fills up with words, stroked to deeper meaning by a friend's ritual gesture. The house stands by, solid and agreeable. In its spaces are hoarded pockets of silence that allow expansion.
During a fallow period there may be no acknowledgement of the harvest planned for. What seeds are here for planting? What little growths hint obliquely at a flowering?
In the games room, a ping-pong ball is bounced fiercely to and fro. Pausing in the doorway, a passer-by could make a meaning out of such hot exchanges tempered by rule and laughter. No winners. Only a shared desire to reach some agreed standard.
Many of us are writing now. Even while we deny it, the impulse is there to perform the set task, explain ourselves, explore a circumstance.
Beyond the grey stone floor of the hall elaborate tiles rebuke the plainness, scorn rag-rug disguises. Up above are rooms I don't know, rooms not yet explored. Some these you have broached and entered. Overhead, too, is the light-well; put there to encourage access to the heavens and shed a gleam on dark places.
I do not know these rooms. I do not know this building's history. I do not know what is locked away inside these other, human shapes that move and signal. Are they choosing words to tell a story or hide a story? Will it be private and individual, or spread itself out to become, from one building, a town, a nation, a world newly-made?
From the shrubbery, the bickering of two in opposition sends out a ripple of disquiet that touches us all. On the path, expert and novice attempt to fuse explanation, understanding.
Church bells ring out a measured peal. But there is no bird-song, although these cloudy dimensions were meant to be tested by the sweep of wing, safely tied at the corners by phrase and rhythm. Footsteps, light and hurried, echo down a shadowy corridor. We are returning, counted in and reckoned. The door stands open. We turn expectantly, as it moves, widens.
A silly idea of Betty's, we all agree. So why do we await an entry? Who will be first to introduce the spirit of the hour?
Note:
This piece was done as workshop writing on a theme set by the tutor: Spirit of the Hour, which was taken as the Muse.
Labels: creative writing, creativity, writing workshops
The Write Place for Saturday 31st May 2008
Published in The Bay of Plenty Times
Over the past month I’ve been thinking deeply about the difference between being a writer – when fame and fortune beckon, ha ha ha! – and being in love with the writing process. I came to the conclusion that most writers have something of both within them. I was first published at nine – in the local Hong Kong daily - a prize-winning poem artfully decorated with monkeys to make it more appealing. Ah, the innocence and triumphs of my youth.
Last year I was delighted when Reed published Poetry Pudding, a compilation of poems by Kiwi poets for Kiwi kids that I had assembled and worked on for nearly two years. This year I was even more delighted when it was named a ‘Notable Book of the Year’. I was thrilled to bits in April when North & South, which is my favourite magazine, published an article I’d written on feral cats. I liked working with editor Virginia Larson. I liked the responses I got from readers. I liked the money, too.
I also like the writing process; sometimes, I suspect, at the expense of ‘being a writer’.
Ultimately what matters for me is that when I’m writing, I’m focused, involved and enormously happy. I feel about writing like I used to feel about library work: “This is so much fun, I ought to be paying you.” (Note to editor: Cover your ears.)
This bout of deep thinking was triggered by a remark tossed out by Sue Emms, my Whakamarama friend and writing buddy. Sue and I worked together to develop the online Diploma in Creative Writing course for Waiariki Institute of technology. Later other tutors joined us – the late lamented Kingi McKinnon, James George, poet Owen Bullock and Rotorua-based children’s writer Sharon Whills. What we teach our students is that ‘the writing process’ is the means by which you become a writer.
Naturally, over the years, the course has evolved, broadened, changed, and most of my writing so far this year has been concentrated on something absolutely new. Indian Writing in English (IWE) deals with a fascinating and hugely respected genre that has garnered fame, fortune or both for writers as diverse as Tagore, Naipaul, Rushdie, Desai, Seth and Roy.
I joke that my main qualification for creating IWE was being born in an elephant stable in Jhabulpor. In fact, because of that, I’ve been reading books about India and by Indians for over four decades. So IWE was a rewarding undertaking for me both as a teacher and as a writer. I hope it proves equally rewarding for those who embark upon it.
IWE encourages the exploration of the Indian literary tradition, and what it means to write authentically in this particular ‘ethnic voice’. To find out what it means to be Indian.Writers write what is known to them; and about what fascinates them as unknown and worth exploring. I had a chance to do both in creating this module. IWE also reinforces a belief I hold dear: good fiction and great literature from all the countries of the world is one of the best means there is to explore other cultures and other forms of being.
IWE will, I hope, play an important role in this - as has our course on Māori writing.Though writing the module was a challenge, it was also enormous fun, and yes, I did get paid! I was responsible for the main text. Sue, who is lead tutor on the Diploma in Creative Writing, was responsible for tweaking and transforming that text into student-friendly teaching on Moodle (the program Waiariki uses to deliver its online courses.)
The remark she so casually threw out was this: “Jenny, I did a word count, and you wrote 40,000 words for IWE.”
That is book length, and excludes all the words that didn’t make it to the final draft; that were lost when I revised and rewrote for ‘best words in best order’. Is it writing that will bring me fame or fortune? Probably not. Did it fully utilise my experience and expertise of the writing process. You bet.
Writers don’t always end up in publications on shelves in bookshops and libraries, like Joy Cowley and Margaret Mahy. They don’t always make it as front page news like Sebastian Faulks has done with his new James Bond adventure.
Yet still they are writers: and writers write.
For details of the Diploma in Creative Writing go to
http://ctc.waiariki.ac.nz.
Labels: indian writers english writing orkshops
On the death of Nia Glassie
When my first child, Gina, was born I was in a daze of love. Any previous love, for parents, for my husband, was a pale, weak thing beside this fierce bright flame that now consumed me. Her father Glen and I carefully unwrapped the hospital blanket to examine Gina in the minutest detail. We counted her toes and fingers over and over. “So here you are”, we said in wonder. “So this is you.”
Glen was not a smoker, but he knew what was expected of a first-time Dad and handed out cigars with rash abandon. A traditional Scot of the old kind, yes, he had been hoping for a boy; but, like me, what we got seemed right and inevitable. Gina belonged to us.
We were lucky enough to rediscover this miracle of the newborn with another beautiful daughter. That daughter’s special gift to me has been four grandchildren of wondrous and diverse personality. If home is where your heart is, then I don’t need any other reason to live in New Zealand.
When Gina was only a few months old, a neighbour’s young son crept up to her pram and emptied a bucket of sand over her sleeping form. I now realize that he was sadly disturbed; but I was only 20 then, and I still remember that moment when I heard Gina’s muffled squawk of distress and went outside to see a mound of wet grey sand where my rosy-cheeked babe had been.
Once we had cleaned her up and the clinic nurse had checked her over, I went to see his parents. If he had been older than seven; if she had been permanently harmed; I am not sure I could have contained my blind rage that someone, anyone, should dare to lay a hand upon my own darling girl.
That fierce protective love that woke in me when my first child was born turned me into a different woman. What I had never been able to demand for myself, I was now determined to insist on for my children. I knew I would fight to the death to protect any child of mine.
With love for my own child came increased empathy for the health and well-being of other children temporarily in my care, by choice or by circumstance. I feel rage daily at how children are treated in this harsh, unloving world. Chinese girl babies abandoned in orphanages, Indian fetuses aborted, for ‘being the wrong sex’. Romanian orphans driven to madness through failure of the most basic care and attention that is every newborn’s birthright. Young girls genitally mutilated without cause in a barbarous ritual of circumcision.
And babies born daily to mothers and fathers who can’t be bothered to pull on a condom before they engage in random, disastrous couplings that have nothing to do with love.
“And then I fell for another baby …”
You hear that phrase over and over, as if getting pregnant is an accident waiting to strike any female down without cause or consent. Here’s the world news: pregnancy results from unprotected sex. Contraception has been regarded as reliable for nearly two centuries. If you need to know how it works, send me an e-mail and I’ll fill you in.
I’ll begin by stating that you’re not ready to be a parent at 14, 15 or 16. You’re not ready to be a parent or care for a child until you’re ready to commit to a steady relationship and to mature responsibility for the safety, happiness and well-being of a totally helpless human being.
The slogan for the Family Planning campaign in the UK used to be, “Every child a wanted child.”
Was Nia Glassie ever a wanted child? I doubt it. She was simply yet one more accidental offspring of an irresponsible and uncaring mother. Lisa Kuka, at 34, is young enough to go on and breed more children to be the playthings of fate. I hope she is offered sterilization in jail, and I would believe in her court-displayed remorse much more if she agreed to it.
I saw no signs of remorse from William and Michael Curtis, nor from Oriwa Kemp. I saw only sub-moronic indifference. I wish the law of the land could enforce sterilization on them, too.
I don’t care what brought them to do the unspeakable; they are probably a lost cause. Nia Glassie was not. Like our own loved and wanted children she came into this world with nothing except the wonderful, confiding gift of herself. Nia Glassie was trashed and mis-treated and thrown away in what should have been the protective security of her home.
Hone Kaa, head of the child advocacy group Te Kahui Mana Ririki, says, “We can be sure Nia isn’t going to be the last (to die like this). We might pray that she is; but in the end it is the behavior of adults that secures the safety of our children. We have got to learn to nark.”
We have got to learn compassion, and how and when to act.
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.
A Brief Summary of My Writing Life
When we were girls in England my sister and I loved reading and we used to go three or four times a week to the library. We read books like Forever Amber and Scaramouche, rollicking tales of love and adventure. A long-term favourite of mine was Green Dolphin Country by Elizabeth Goudge, a love story set in 19th century New Zealand. I longed to write books like that, and to go to New Zealand.
“I want to be a writer when I grow up”, I said to S. as we walked home with our arms full. But in a family of mathemagicians, word wizardry was not appreciated. I was always first or second in class but Dad would run his finger down my report card until he came to mathematics, and bawl me out when he saw the usual F for failed. In secret I wrote stories and poems that I never showed to a soul. “You’re fond of books”, said the careers teacher, “why don’t you try library work?”
So at 17 I became a library assistant, at 20 I got married, and at 26 I got divorced. My first husband was an airline pilot who resented the time I spent scribbling as much as I resented the time he spent away from home, and with other women. One day he burned all my stories and poems and I burned all his love letters in retaliation. No happy ending for us.
Now I was a single mother of two daughters, busy training first as a chartered librarian and then as a teacher. I was doing plenty of writing, but not the sort I dreamed of – course notes, essays and a thesis; annual reports and committee minutes, and resources for classroom learning. From time to time I wrote the occasional article that was published, unpaid, in a professional journal.
My girls were 12 and 14 when I got married again. A. had two children from a previous marriage and his own dream – to be an artist. Like lots of women, I found it easier to help someone else get what they wanted than to get it for myself. Soon A. was off to art school in Stafford and within two years the uncomplicated man I’d met when he worked on the shop floor at Cowley was an Artist in a smock, earning a living as a ceramic sculptor.
A. took up pipe-smoking and grew a beard. He was now ‘a free soul’ who left worrying about our four kids and how to pay the bills to me. His son was a disturbed child, and that marriage ended when Jeremy attacked my youngest daughter with a knife. The house bought with my superannuation (taken out early) was sold and I had to split the proceeds with A.
Starting over was hard work, and once again I put my dreams on hold. During my time with A. I had written two romance novels as ‘Jane Harmer’ that were published by Robert Hale, but I knew that kind of writing was not for me. When I left A. and moved to Wolverhampton, I got involved with a women’s writing co-operative that published a monthly magazine called Distaff. The other editors encouraged me to create new poems and stories. Some I sent to magazines and competition and I had enough success to encourage me to go on.
But there was never enough time left over from working to seriously engage with writing.
To be a writer is hard. You have to be able to deal with rejection, and, if poetry’s your thing, with the problems of small press publication. Like having a book launch organized in London and the publisher rings you up on the day and says, “Sorry, Jenny, they’re not ready. I ran out of money.” My friends and I got to work frantically and put together a set of 12 broadsheets and a presentation of words and music to keep the punters happy. We took orders for Writing in the Cracks Between (Aquila) and the book finally came out six weeks later.
About this time I met and married M. “I’ve been married twice before”, I told him. “I don’t think I could stand another marriage break-up. So be very sure that you want to last the course.” M. was a good man, a lay preacher, who worked hard for Oxfam and Amnesty and the Hunger Project. I found myself driving him to distant towns and villages to take church services. My writing skills were put to good use – sermons and reports on meetings, letters concerning political prisoners, funding applications and project plans.
I was still working full-time as a teacher-librarian, which also involved much writing. I had given up writing poetry after the book launch that didn’t happen, and rarely found time to sit down and create a character, work out a plot, and write the stories that still crowded my brain.
I wanted to build a home with M. but he had his own ideas on that. “People should live in bedsits”, he would say, “or in communes. You should buy wallpaper you don’t like and train yourself to like it”.
He would give away large sums to anyone in need, but to get any housekeeping money from him was an impossible task. He bought his clothes from op shops and his favourite breakfast was leftover spaghetti, eaten cold. Once when I threw out a baked potato for the birds he ran down the garden and got it back. He brushed off the dirt and grass and had it for his tea.
After four years, we parted, and five years later I finally brought myself to sign the decree nisi.
We still love each other, and we’re better apart. My girls were grown up. G. earned good money in the catering business, and A. doing an arts degree when I moved to London to start a new job. I was clinically depressed and writing was something I had put aside and forgotten. That dream, I thought, had died.
I ended up working for HRH Consensus as a freelance abstractor, producing online information bulletins for clients like Hewlett Packard, Ricoh and the World Wildlife Fund. We had a client brief for each of them, and our team would start work at 6 a.m. and cut out stories and reduce them to a brief paragraph under different headings to be on the client’s desk by noon. We worked under pressure, and there was one young guy there who kept us sane.
L. was the first to help if you had a computer shut down, or couldn’t work out if a story should be in and out. L. would go out at 9 a.m. and come back with croissants and hot coffee to keep us going. L. was first to finish and would immediately help whoever was lagging behind. L. was also dark and good-looking, and a New Zealander far away from home. I told J. who also worked at Consensus, “That’s exactly the sort of young man I’d like one of my girls to marry.”
A few months later I wanted to go to America and stay two months with my sister, still my best friend, still a reader like me, and struggling with her own sorrow at losing a daughter, A., to a brain tumour. I asked my boss if I could train my A. to take over my job for two months, and she agreed. The company paid me to train A. and paid A. while she was training. She had finished her arts degree and needed the cash and took to the work like a duck to water.
I flew off to Colorado and came back to find L. had moved in with A. and I was out of a job! They preferred my daughter to me and that was OK – I was soon working happily elsewhere. A. and L. got married and first G. was born and then S. I was the happiest grandma in the world and found out the real goodness of A. and L. as they loved and cared for their boys and for me following a serious back operation that put me out of work.
Dad died and I moved home to York to be near my mother, who, sadly, died less than a year later. Then A. told me L. was homesick and wanted to go back to New Zealand, and now that her beloved grandparents were gone, she had agreed to go with him and start a new life in Godzone. G. and I waved them goodbye. “You can join them when you retire”, said G. “I don’t want kids and I do like to travel. I can come and see you there.”
I flew out for a visit when L. was born, and I liked what I saw of New Zealand. I came home to my job in York Hospital, 20 hours a week only because of the back problems that prevented me working full-time. I got a computer and rediscovered writing. I set up a Women & Words writing circle that is still growing strong. I did the occasional piece, but mainly I helped other women write.
Women & Words met monthly in York’s historic Red House and I was coming away from there one sunny day in August when I tripped over a small irregularity in the pavement and into disaster. I fell diagonally with my whole weight across my left ankle. I heard it crack and the pain was excruciating. But that wasn’t all. I was wearing expensive sandals with Velcro ankle straps. The strap on my right ankle burst open under pressure, but the strap on my left ankle did not. The leather was literally cutting into my ankle and as I lay there screaming I could see white bone and ligaments curling back and red blood spouting. Japanese tourists were taking photos and my friends came running. The paramedics arrived eight minutes later - the longest eight minutes in my life. One of them was kneeling on the ground and I asked the other what he was doing. “Picking up bone”, she said.
I had three operations to save the foot which is now reattached with three titanium rods to keep it in place. I told the surgeon who performed this miracle, “I love you and I want to have your baby, but we’ll have to go to Italy.” (A woman of 60+ had just given birth in Milan.)
Recuperation was a slow and painful process and G. suggested I went to New Zealand to recover. When I agreed, she bought me a return ticket and put me on the plane.
I needed a new passport before I could go, and when the application form turned up some impulse took hold of me. Where it asked for occupation, I wrote ‘Writer’. That was a bold step for a woman in her 50s who had tried and failed for so long.
I’ve now been out here five years. I joined Tauranga Writers and met S. E., a short story writer and novelist. Sue became my best friend and writing mentor, and a continuing inspiration. Within six weeks of landing I sold a story, Green, to New Zealand Women’s Weekly. Within six months I won prizes in the Friends of Whakatane Short Story Competition and the Takahe Cultural Studies Essay Competition. I enrolled on the Whitireia online creative writing course to learn ‘to write Kiwi’, doing a Poetry module and Short Fiction 1 and 2.
Within a year I had poems and stories published in Poetry New Zealand, Blackmail Press, Magazine, Catalyst and other publications. I sold work in the UK and America. I was newsletter editor for the New Zealand Poetry Society for a year, and I do regular book reviews for different papers. I’m secretary of Tauranga Writers – visit out website at
www.taurangawriters.org.nz. Usually it’s me who writes our Saturday column in the Bay of Plenty Times, the Write Place.
Last year Hen Enterprises published Constructive Editing and in 2007 will bring out The Crafty Entrepreneur. For two years I’ve been part of the Editorial Collective that produces Bravado, a literary arts magazine from the Bay of Plenty that this year secured substantial funding from Creative New Zealand. (Yes, I wrote the application!) I’m a creative writing tutor at Wairaiki Institute of Technology in Rotorua and one weekend I did a seminar on memoir for the Rotorua Writers WORDshop.
Living and working in New Zealand is not all joy. I often long to go back if only to say a proper goodbye to family and friends as I could not do when I left. It’s so many miles away when things go wrong. G.’s first husband died only six weeks after I got here and there was no way I could return for the funeral.
I also hate the IRD. We’re mutually incompatible and I resent the time and energy it takes to keep them off my back and how they can dip into my bank account and help themselves whenever they feel like it. I am fighting the Equity Campaign alongside many other expat pensioners here and in Australia who lose out on income simply because a son or daughter fell in love with a Kiwi or Ocker. But if home is where your heart is, then I’m where I ought to be.
Tauranga, simply put, is where I want to live and die. And Kiwis are amongst the kindest people in the world, as I first learned from L.
Finally, this year, I finished a novel that I’ve long wanted to write. Roads has been entered for the Richard Webster Popular Fiction Award. I don’t know yet who has won, but it’s probably not me, as this love story is set in the Midlands (UK). But merely to sit down and finish something that is 60,000 words long has been worthwhile. I’m now working on another book, Under a Different Moon, set in 1963. The action takes place between York, Denver and Taos (New Mexico) - all places I know. The heroine Meredith is an English girl whose mother’s marriage to a US Marine did not work out. (I know about failed marriages, too.) The hero Joel is madly sexy and I love him to bits. He’s half all-American boy and half Zuni warrior, a devastating combination that Meredith simply can not resist.
I still do too much for other people, especially childcare for A. who has now had her 4th – and last - child, R. Will I finally make it big-time as a writer? Yes, that’s possible now I have resurrected my dreams.
And signed up with a creativity coach to help make those dreams come true.
