The past awaits: An hour with Vincent Ward

The Boston Globe describes Vincent Ward as one of the world’s great image-makers, and the session I attend today at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival would certainly back this up.

As Vincent talks with Charlotte Ryan from bFM (who has great hair, by the way), we are treated to a selection of photos, movie stills, paintings and film clips that have mostly been selected from his recently published book, The Past Awaits: People, Images, Film. Accompanying this visual feast are anecdotes, notes and asides from Vincent, not just about the book and the process of making it, but also some truly deliciously icky Hollywood gossip, some secret (he made us promise not to tell) details about what he’s working on at the moment (a movie, a book, an art exhibition), and some real insight into what motivates him. 

In the past, he says, there has always been a division between different media. Film, photography and painting were all kept quite separate. “What interests me,” he says, “is saying, What if you didn’t have any of that separation?  If you could use all these media in layers in a single work, to express something in whatever way you need to?”

There is a great deal of audience buy-in, and supportive nodding, and some great questions at the end.  The session finishes with a question about what his overall message or theme might be, and Vincent says it’s about “… trying not to drown, but to swim, and trying to fly and not to fall.” 

This, I think, is a fitting description, perhaps, for what all the writers (and us festival-goers too) are trying to do, and I think about this, and write it down, and leave the festival behind for another year.

Fantasy worlds: “A strange hooded figure came to my door … “

… and offered me writing skills, in exchange for a piece of my soul “ and that, apparently, is how Garth Nix got started writing fantasy.  He says.  We are not sure we believe him, and the other authors on the panel at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival this afternoon also look a little startled by this – their answers to the question of how each of them began their writing careers were a little different from Garth’s. 

Elizabeth Knox grew up creating fantasy worlds with her sisters, Cassandra Clare simply wrote what she wanted to read, and Margo Lanagan’s was a pragmatic decision to move to fantasy because she wanted to sell more books than she had been. 

I was really looking forward to this session, and wasn’t disappointed.  Entitled Fantasy: Freedom all round, and chaired by Paula Morris, it was crammed full of discussion about everything from ‘adult’ book covers, to themes of social commentary, genre snobbery, escapism versus reality, plotters versus pantsers*, urban exploration and shadow cities, and how fantasy writing is simply a socially acceptable form of lying (Garth Nix again – this man is seriously funny.  Also, I think he might lie a lot). 

As always with sessions where there is a panel of people, it’s impossible to fully share what everyone said about everything.  And so I will say again what I have said a lot this weekend – find the books, search the web, read up on all these guys, and then come find me and we can talk glorious genre fiction like total fantasy nerds!

* as in flying by the seat of your …

On the way to Sydney, we stopped in Auckland

In a packed session at the 2011 Auckland Writers and Readers Festival Nicola Legat (publisher at Random House, Festival trustee) spoke with three regional winners of the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize. You can read some background information about these writers and the Prize itself in a previous blog of mine. These writers are on their way to the Sydney Writers Festival for the announcement of the overall winner of the prize.

Aminatta Forna (whose mother incidentally lives in New Zealand) was born in Sierra Leone, and raised in the UK. She won the Best Book category for the Africa region of the Prize with The Memory Of Love. This novel, about love and war, is set in Sierra Leone, and in her deep radio-quality voice, she read us an excerpt. She has well-crafted turns of phrase – “leaning across her frame like an old woman at the garden gate” (a child using a bamboo(!) walking frame). One of the protagonists is Kai, a young doctor in a hospital that is severely underfunded, coping with shortages of what we would call essentials, with equanimity  – “scalpel poised like a conductor when the generator fails, waiting for the lights to go back on”, and of proceeding with operations with no anaesthesia available, tying patients to the bed, giving them a twisted sheet to bite from until they faint from pain – whew.

Sunday @ the festival: Push your literary limits

Here’s our audio wrap-up from our final day at the festival – and as we bid farewell to Auckland, we thank the organisers, writers, poets, experts, volunteers and audiences for their energy, dedication and all-round pleasantness over the last few days.

We have tried to convey the breadth and depth of the festival, and hope you have enjoyed the coverage. Keep your eye on the blog for the final few posts over the coming days.

Festivals like this are, in the end, about people who love reading and writing. They’re also about trying the unknown, and pushing your literary limits. So, if you want to write, write. If you need to read, read. Your library is a permanent literary festival. Use it.

[12 min 54 sec, 12.1Mb .mp3]

• View photos from the festival on the library flickr
• Read more posts from the festival
• Visit the official website

Auf wiedersehen Southern Blues Bar

The Southern Blues Bar is the third building along (Nurse Maude in the foreground)

The Southern Blues Bar developed out of a musicians club formed by some blues enthusiasts in the 1980s. Originally it was only for the members of the club, but eventually it  was turned into a commercial venture. By the 1990s ,when I spent a bit of time there because I had a friend who played in a band, it was booming.

It catered to the really late night crowd, having got a 24-hour licence on the basis that it was a musicians club – and musicians go out to relax after they finish working, late at night. The clientele included everyone from bikies, to local musicians, to … librarians. Some famous names performed there, Charlie Musselwhite, and Robert Lockwood Jnr. for example, as well as a lot of local talent.

Thursday night was jam night. Originally this was to encourage the talented, but shy, members of the club to get up and perform. Over the years though, it fostered quite a lot of amateur talent. I remember going to hear a friend who was doing a jazz course at Hagley Community College. She and her classmates got up and performed there for the first time in public, an opportunity they were unlikely to get anywhere else. Sadly the earthquake was it’s downfall and it was demolished in December 2010.

All may not be lost though. Already somebody has organised a “Southern Blues Bar Revisited” at the Sandridge Hotel. You can find out more about the Southern Blues Bar in this article from New Zealand Blues Society website.

This one’s for Christchurch

I was a little nervous prior to attending  The Press Christchurch Writers’ Festival session (kindly hosted by the2011 Auckland Writers And Readers Festival) – was I wearing waterproof mascara? Would I sit there, squirming uncomfortably, while listening but not wanting to listen to horrific earthquake stories? Did I really want to be reminded of what is an enduring reality back home?

This session came about because last year’s The Press Christchurch Writers’ Festival was cancelled due to the September quake. Then this year’s one because of the big kahuna in February. They’re now aiming to have a Festival in September 2012 – as long as a big enough venue can be found (a rather scarce commodity post-quake). I applaud their tenacity, and well done Morrin Rout and Ruth Todd (Christchurch festival organisers) for perservering to bring us a well-needed cultural diversion.

Fiona Farrell spoke of writing a poem ‘The Horse’ (to help her animal mad sister understand what was happening). She gave the quake a horse persona, and it quivered and stamped as tiny flies (aftershocks) bit it, and we, lying  “on the back of a huge beast”, hang on for dear life. This was followed by ‘The Tarp’. The chimney in her Christchurch flat fell through the roof and “when the rain falls, it scribbles decay on the ceiling”. A young man placed a tarpaulin over the damaged roof and a poem was born. Last was ‘Julia At Tai Tapu’ and is about the strange beauty of liquifaction volcanoes in the night – “and Julia glides about her park, a sweet vibration in the dark”.

Tusiata Avia read a poem about driving to find her young daughter in the CBD – “everyone is leaving for their home in the sky”. She spoke about coming back later to search for the memories of buildings and read ‘St Paul’s Trinity Pacific Church’, which had the repetitive phrase “no evidence of” , referring to events that have happened in the past at the church, but now “we all fade into the archaeology”. Last was a poem about the CTV building, that had its lift shaft left standing, long after the rest of the building was removed – “the inner workings of The Rapture, sheared open for all of us to see”.

Charlotte Randall is a novelist, and  as “I usually write 80,000 words, so that would have taken too long to read out” she instead discussed the exciting idea, that she is thinking of continuing Halfie’s story (new novel Hokitika Town, set in 1865 goldrush Hokitika), setting him as an adult in San Francisco during the 1905 earthquake. She then went on to talk about the benefits of natural disasters – that neighbours get to know one another, go out to dinner together, all sorts of ‘social cocooning’ going on.

Carl Nixon was only on stage briefly, and appeared to be quite upset to be talking about ‘his’ Christchurch, the one of the past, where he has set the majority of his work. He appeared at a loss as to how to incorporate the ‘new’ Christchurch into his imaginings. He read part of a short story ‘The Last Good Day Of Autumn’ because it was set near buildings that now no longer exist or are badly damaged (Antiqua Boatsheds, Museum, Arts Centre).

Joanna Preston is a poet who spends a lot of time in Australia, but had arrived back in Christchurch 24 hours before the September shake. She told of hearing car alarms ‘screaming like children’ afterwards, and the beautiful Spring day that followed – “it felt like walking in the Underworld, everything was so quiet and unreal”. She read ‘Aftershock’ written by Shaun Joyce (one of her students), ‘The Fault’ – how that word now has so many meanings, and lastly ‘The City And The City’ which had the haunting line “a bright shop front translated into a coffin lid”.

Berlin resident Sarah Quigley has written a column for The Press for the last 13 years and was due to email one through, when she heard about the February quake from a friend. Whilst frantically trying to establish whether her family and friends were alright, she wondered whether or not there would indeed be a paper published in the next while. She was amazed to find that yes, The Press would be printed, under very difficult circumstances, and her column featured on 26 February. She read out that column, (I remember sitting on my couch at home, reading that same column, marvelling at the speed with which she had written it and made it into print) and it was heartrending to imagine someone sitting on the other side of the world, unable to help, not knowing the fate of her loved ones.

Morrin Rout led a round of applause for The Press, saying that she too had been amazed to find a copy on her doorstep the morning after the February quake, and spoke of how reassuring it was to hold it in her hand and be able to read the news of the disaster, rather than just listening on the radio or following it on TV. Ruth Todd concurred heartily, as she’d been without power at the time.

So, no tears from me, though a few throat wobbles at times. At first it felt strange to be sitting in a large multi-layered building, with many, many other people in it, in a city that has skyscrapers and beautiful verandahed, brick-fronted heritage buildings, and know that it is light years away from Christchurch in every way. But, afterwards I left with a warm fuzzy feeling of comradeship, perserverance and hope. Thanks Auckland for letting a little bit of Christchurch shine.