Chatting to authors

With Kathy Lette. Auckland Writers and Readers Festival 2012, Aotea Centre. Friday 11 May 2012, Flickr, CCL-AWRF-2012-05-11

I bet this has happened to you: you’re reading a great book and you think – gee, I’d really like to interview this author. I did that for years before the day came when I sat opposite my first real  live author – absolutely scared witless and thinking – be careful what you wish for!

Here’s the authors I’ve interviewed (click on their names to read the full interviews):

Lionel Shriver: A 15 year old girl who changes her name from Margaret Ann to Lionel – just to pique her father – is not someone to be toyed with. This was my first interview ever at my first ever Literary Festival. I walked with heavy boots to her hotel, but I floated back on a little cloud nine. That was when I realised that there was nothing to be scared of, because authors love librarians!

William Dalrymple: He didn’t sit still for one minute in this interview held on the top floor of an Auckland Hotel. I had to chase him around trying to keep up with him. I was already nervous (he is a famous travel writer of books like Nine Lives – in Search of the Sacred in Modern India), and my uncertainties around the technology involved in getting the whole thing recorded were greatly exacerbated by Dalrymple’s restlessness. I start hyperventilating just thinking about it.

Kathy Lette: This interview really was like chatting to a good friend over a coffee. What a blast! Irreverent, sexy, fun, OK maybe a bit flippant. But at least she sat still!

Andrew Miller: Forever endeared himself to me by being the only author I have ever interviewed who asked: “How are things in Christchurch?” We were just post earthquake and the gap between life in Christchurch and life in Auckland made me feel so sad. His best known work is Snowdrops, a debut novel that made the Booker Long List in 2011. He was a pleasure to interview.

With Jeffrey Eugenides, Auckland Writers and Readers Festival 2012, Aotea Centre. Saturday 12 May 2012. Flickr, CCL-AWRF-2012-05-12

Jeffrey Eugenides: that is correct – the Pulitzer prizewinning author for his novel Middlesex. Terrifying to interview. Read right to the end and you will know why. The photo says it all really. 

John Lanchester: One of those interviews that never really had a lift-off point. I was chatting to him about his book Capital – which I had loved. His Publishing Agent sat with us throughout the interview. What did she think I would do to him?

Laurence Fearnley: I am a big fan of this Kiwi writer. We bonded over a coffee at one of the WORD festivals. She really thinks about her interview answers. She gives you her full attention. I am so fond of her.

With NoViolet Bulawayo, Christchurch WORD Festival 2014, 30 August 2014. Photo by Roberta Smith.

NoViolet Bulawayo: A young Zimbabwean author who was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2013 for her novel We Need New Names. We chatted for ages. I had to ruthlessly edit what had been recorded to get this interview down to a reasonable length. So young, yet so wise (her not me!)

There’s no doubt that interviewing is nerve-wracking – I felt my stress levels rise just writing this blog!  But I would not have missed these opportunities for anything. How about you? Do you have an author you would like to interview?

Author interviews and Ice Queens

The film adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s We need to talk about Kevin  starring Tilda Swinton is being touted as a winner of the  Palme d’Or at this years Cannes film festival.

This time last year our intrepid blogger Roberta interviewed the author at the Auckland Readers and Writers Festival,  so we can feel somewhat connected, even if it is vicariously!

Whenever I think of that particular book it sends shivers down my spine, and Tilda Swinton I think is an inspired choice as the mother – “the original ice queen” as a colleague just commented.  I wonder who will be the stand out author at this year’s festival?  There always seems to be one or two that the team take a particular shine to.

The Dalrymple Interview: Eating, Drinking, Chatting, Chasing

Let me say right upfront what a delight William Dalrymple was to interview. Charming, eloquent and fun, he was happy to free range over any number of topics – India, libraries, his home  and his writing. You can read a transcript of my interview with him on the Christchurch City Libraries website.

However, to get the full flavour of a Dalrymple encounter you need to visualise the event as a piece of street theatre. This man does not sit still – ever. In the thirty minutes I had with him he ate biscuits, drank coffee, water and juice, threw himself about the room fetching and carrying for both of us whilst tossing conversational gems over his shoulder. I scurried about clutching my Marantz all the while trying to remember  Richard’s instructions about sound quality. Such a pity we never caught it all on film.

Suffice it to say that by the time he left to meet up with Josie his “minder” (who used to be an NLA by the way), he was on a caffeine and sugar high. He left the room exhorting me to “Eat, Drink, Help Yourself!” I pressed the stop button on the recorder. Heaven help the next interviewer was all I could think.

Seven minutes with Bernadette Hall

Poet Bernadette Hall was one of three Cantabrians who flew the flag for Christchurch at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival. She kindly gave us some of her time for a bit of a chat. This seven-minute interview covers:

• The ‘crucial and essential’ role of writer’s festivals in building a community of writers;
• The Hagley Writers’ Institute  as a yeast in the mix of a healthy Christchurch poetry scene;
• How Hall is trying to change her poems and is writing short fiction.

I started the interview (which was just after a chat by Emily Perkins, Damien Wilkins and Fergus Barrowman, and before a late lunch) by asking what it was like to attend the festival as a writer.

Bernadette Hall read with Alison Wong, Ian Wedde, Jessica Le Bas, Ben Brown, Jeffrey Paparoa Holman and Alicia Sometimes at the festival.

With luck she will appear at the  Christchurch Writers Festival in October.

Wilkins, Perkins classic Kiwi authors

Emily Perkins and Damien Wilkins are classic New Zealand writers in the sense that writing isn’t the only thing they do. Both have other strings to their bow, other jobs – Perkins as host of The Good Word, and Wilkins as a lecturer at Victoria University.

Their careers also follow a similar path: major early success – Not her real name for Perkins and The Miserables for Wilkins. Both made careers overseas and both now work in New Zealand and both are published in New Zeland by Victoria University Press.

Fergus Barrowman, their publisher and former teacher, hosted, and was rightly proud of their success. An absorbing, and detailed session followed, which concentrated on the writing process, the challenging and invigorating process of teaching creative writing.

We discovered that Wilkins dislikes satirical writing, and prefers dialogue, which took him a long time to learn; Perkins dislikes protected characters The readings from each author were well chosen and appreciated by the audience.

The session could easily have gone on for another hour, as one of the audience landed a great topic, with the great question of what is the New Zealand story? Colm Toibin had written it was about children.
Wilkins agreed – as New Zealand is a young literary culture it made quite a lot of sense. Our films are also full of child’s commentary on the adult world. Janet Frame had a hotline to child fears, he said;  a child’s lack of power, lack of control. Perkins said for an author the child as agent is a thrilling kind of figure. Barrowman added that Katherine Mansfield  never created an adult relationship in her writing which was as interesting as the relationships of the children in her work and that she satirised adults.

What do you think – is the great New Zealand story set on a farm? Is all the emotion in the silences? Is it about childhood? Tell us your great New Zealand story.

Manifesto for a slow communication movement

I have arrived back at work from the Auckland Festival to find around 90 emails waiting for me.  Apparently I should consider myself lucky, according to John Freeman, editor of Granta magazine and author of Shrinking the World – the average office worker sends 200 emails a day.  In 2007, approximately 35 trillion emails were sent and received.  And it’s not just email.  We blog, belong to Facebook and Twitter, receive RSS feeds from everywhere, get all our news online and carry our i-Pods and Blackberries with us everywhere we go.

Freeman began his writing career as a book critic, but when he found he was spending more time reading the emails related to his reviews than reading the actual books he was reviewing, he realised something had to change.  Shrinking the World (US title: The Tyranny of Email) is his manifesto for a Slow Communication Movement, and is one of those deceptively simple little books that can cause a real re-thinking of your life, if you let it.

The desire to feel connected to those around us is a good one, Freeman remarked during Sunday’s session, but the finiteness of life means we must choose what to prioritise – it is physically impossible to have 1500 friends.

The problem, he says, is that email itself represents a form of intermittent reinforcement.  It is an enjoyable habit that is chemically enhanced – we get the reward we want from pushing the button or clicking on the icon, but only every third or fourth time we click.  And increasingly we are living simultaneously in the physical and the virtual world.  In any situation that removes us from electronic communication, we are painfully aware that we may be “missing stuff” – hence people’s reluctance to turn cell-phones off at the movies (or in a Festival session), and the fact that the minute the lights come up, the very first thing people do is lunge for their phones.  Freeman calls it the “electronic fidget”.

He says there is so much information in the world today, and that thanks to instantaneous electronic communication we have access to all of it, but asks, “Do we have the empathic bandwidth for any of this information to be meaningful?”  and again references the ‘1500 Facebook friends’ comment.

He’s not a Luddite, however.  Questions about the degradation of grammar in schoolchildren were met with a shrug and the comment that kids have enough smarts to be able to differentiate between appropriate and inappropriate usage.  He’s also not saying we should not be using these technologies at all.  What he is suggesting is that we step back enough to recognise the damage that is being done to our attention span, our empathy, and our ability to process more than seven seconds of information at a time.

The back of the book offers both the manifesto for slow communication, and what he laughingly refers to as a ’10 step intervention programme’.   I’m going to try at least numbers 2, 3 and 10.  I’m thinking it’s going to be a hard road.

Imperial psychopaths, Microsoft with an Army

William Dalrymple’s presentation The Last Mughal was the last major session of the festival and what a way to go out. The man is a wonderful writer and a great performer. His voice swoops up and down in emphasis, his turn of phrase is dramatic and the history he recounts is fascinating and tragic.

The court of the last Mughal emperor in Delhi was a place of little political power or financial wealth in 1857 but it was a place of great cultural wealth. Dalrymple described it as like the age of Shakespeare for South Asia. The emperor himself, now very old, was a fine poet. It was also a place where Muslim and Hindu cultures met harmoniously.

The rise of religious fundamentalism and the arrogance of conquerors that beset the British East India Company (think Microsoft with an army says Dalrymple)  lead to actions which precipitated a calamatous uprising and the eventual destruction of the Mughals and their beautiful city Delhi. The British, lead by people whom he describes as imperial psychopaths were ruthless in their crushing of opposition.

Backed by some lovely slides illustrating the art, the people and the places Dalrymple held us absorbed in his tale and finished by reading a beautiful poem attributed to the emperor as he lay in a British prison and one which is still widely read in India today.

Thomas Keneally – Storyteller

Thomas  Keneally took the plunge as a writer by sending his first novel to an English publishing firm whose address he got from the copyright page of a book. Publication was his salvation as he says here:

What has followed is a prolific writing career of novels and histories centred around a rich vein of stories. The people he writes about tell stories that make history and our lives a bit more explicable. He prefers writing novels where you can be “so intimately in the character” but he loves history too and his mantra is “If you tell the story of one you tell the story of all in the way imagination can get a purchase on”

A wicked laugh punctuates his stories. Talking of doing the schools session he said it was “very hard to be a hip geriatric” but there is always the miracle of well read kids. He clearly remembers what it was like to be a teenager. He lived in Homebush which for him was “the epicentre of Australian boredom”. He describes how he desperately wanted to “compete with the jocks and run with the nerds”.

Books were important  from an early age.   Libraries featured in his attempts to impress the girls. Hear it in his own words as he describes the Mitchell  Library

I think Thomas Keneally will go on telling stories till he dies and we are all the richer for it.

Sunday @ the festival : Festival highlights

So the festival has come to an end, after another full day. The magnetic strip on my Bank of Adjectives card as worn thin, and my verbal credit limit has been reached. Here’s the under ten-minute audio wrap up:

• Roberta went to Yi Yun Li, a creativity workshop, Rick Gekoski and William Dalrymple;
• Marion sampled Marti Friedlander, John Carey at the Michael King memorial lecture, Rick Gekoski and William Dalrymple;
• Bronwyn went to a session asking what good was religion, John Freeman on shrinking the world and libraries, and Rick Gekoski;
• Richard had real world day – digital publishing in Read any Good Bytes lately, and Jeffrey Paparoa Holman’s Best of Both Worlds session, as well as a chat with Bernadette Hall.

And, once you’ve digested that, get a feel for the overall buzz of the festival with our selection of highlights in this six-minute clip, complete with the gravelly laugh of Thomas Keneally …

We hope you have enjoyed the coverage and we look forward to your comments as we continue our conversations in the days ahead. Remember there are photos on the Christchurch City Libraries flickr and that you can view all of the festival posts on a single page.

Religion, War, and Frankie Goes to Hollywood

Over breakfast this morning, today’s session titled Religion: What is it good for? led inevitably to impassioned discussion regarding Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Bruce Springsteen, and the (mis-)appropriation of pop music for literary purposes.  Sadly, our lot failed to reach consensus, unlike the panelists in the real Festival session.  Adrian Wooldridge, Michael Otterman and Antony Loewenstein were remarkably united on several fronts, not the least being their disdain for Richard Dawkins.  I’ve already outlined some of the main points about these three guys here, and for Michael Otterman’s session, here, and told you it’s impossible to cover their topics in a short blog post, so won’t revisit, but I will attempt to provide a bit of the flavour of this combined session, before you rush off to find the books.

Chair Sean Plunket led off with a request for each speaker to make his own personal declaration of their beliefs.  In their own words – Antony Loewenstein identifies himself as a Jewish atheist who is agnostic about whether religion is good or bad; Michael Otterman is an agnostic cultural Jew from New York, which means he loves Seinfeld and eats bagels on Sundays; and Adrian Wooldridge, having been born C of E, is therefore an atheist who is relatively sympathetic to religion, and who also enjoys Seinfeld.

Whether or not you believe in God, Wooldridge says, current research shows that religion itself is