KidsFest 2015

KidsFest is full of winter holiday fun for kids in Christchurch and Canterbury. It runs from 4 to 18 July 2015. Book now – KidsFest is always popular and many events book out quickly.

• See KidsFest events at Christchurch City Libraries.
• Browse the KidsFest website for events.

Preschoolers ‘Have a Go’ Day – Saturday 11 July

Come on down to the ‘Have a Go’ day at Pioneer Recreation and Sport Centre to have a go at some of the fun activities that Christchurch City Council offers. All activities on the day are free! Includes Bubbletimes, Storytime, The Southern Centre and Tumbletimes.

KidsFest at the library

2015 KidsFest events at libraries include:

Stop motion animation 8 to 12 year olds
Discover the process of producing animated movies. Plan an original story, create your own characters and craft your own movie using stop motion photography.

Minecraft 8 to 12 year olds
Minecraft game zone is a 3D gaming experience, and also sessions about Minecraft for absolute beginners.

Family game time
Game on! This is a chance for a family play-off using both traditional board games and online games.

Book ‘n’ Beats 10 to 13 year olds
This is an introduction to the iPad music app Garageband.

Let the book bug bite 4 to 7 year olds
Children will re-create their own bug story using a ‘story creator’ app on the iPad.

Creating comics: Who’s the star? WORD Christchurch event for 8 to 13 year olds
Creating comics: Your wonderful world WORD Christchurch event for 8 to 13 year olds
Join famous cartoonist, author and designer Sarah Laing and find out about creating cartoon characters and worlds.

NZ stories with Sharon Holt
Join award winning author Sharon Holt as she presents her Te Reo singalong books.

Back with the future 8 to 12 year olds (and their grandparents)
Bring your family history into the future! Record a conversation between you and your grandparent/grandchild using old family photographs and the interactive story telling iPad app, Puppetpals.

Fly story Fly – Kirsty Collett
Fly Story Fly is an interactive storytelling experience that brings picture books to life

Science Alive! will be bringing their Mindball sessions to our libraries too.

See the full list of KidsFest events at Christchurch City Libraries. Bookings open 9am Tuesday 2 June.

More KidsFest events

Here’s a few events that sound awesome:

• Creepy crawly night at the Museum
• The Press Night of D’Light at the Botanic Gardens
• The Christchurch Brick Show
• Explore the world of tiny houses
• Imagination Playground
• More FM Lantern Parade

See the full list on the KidsFest website.

Find out more

• Read our page on KidsFest and its history
• Browse the KidsFest website for events
• Like KidsFest on Facebook

When last did a book make you cry?

My answer to that question is: last week – which is when I started reading Moloka’i.

Set in Hawaii in the 1890’s, Moloka’i tells the story of the scourge of leprosy on the island’s inhabitants. In particular it is the life story of Rachel, a child of only seven, who contracts the disease and is banished to a leprosy settlement on the island of Kalaupapa. Here she is utterly confused, surrounded by terrifyingly disfigured patients and separated from her beloved family.

Are you crying yet?

Moloka’i is exactly the sort of book I usually avoid: vaguely historical, set in a place I don’t know and don’t really want to know, with a child protagonist and about a disease that I fear in a kind of primitive, medieval way. Why then am I reading it? Two words for you: Book and Club. And say what you will about Book Groups, they do get you out of fossilized reading holding patterns.

After a few chapters of this Alan Brennert novel, I was too miserable to sleep. The only book antidote that I had on hand was J.M. Coetzee’s Three Stories. If you have read any of Coetzee’s work, like The Life and Times of Michael K or Disgrace (he was the first writer to ever win the Booker Prize twice with these two works), you will be agog that anyone would consider his writing cheering.

But Coetzee has mellowed. In the three stories in this little book he considers, in this order: the improbability of loving a house; the sorrow of loving a land and the something of loving a parrot (I may have to read that one again.) But I did read all 70 pages of Three Stories and drifted off to sleep in a most satisfactory manner.

How about you – which books have made you cry? And which have soothed your troubled brow?

Do chicks dig time lords?

I have no idea how I found this book. I was just sitting at the computer looking for a book. Now the book I was looking for didn’t have anything to do with chicks, digging or time lords, but there it was.

And I wanted it.

I have been often told, that one should never judge a book by its cover. I did. The psychic paper, the scarf and the key to the Tardis all said ‘read me’. And maybe the title Chicks dig time lords: A celebration of Doctor Who by the women who love it.

I quite like time lords, so I was curious. I knew Verity Lambert liked time lords, and I wasn’t surprised to learn that Carole Barrowman did too. But a whole book written by chicks who dig time lords was a surprise. They all had different reasons for liking them and they all quite possibly had favourites.

While Doctor Who is off air, the Doctor is hopefully repairing his Tardis and maybe even getting its chameleon circuit to work. I think I could help him out. Not because I can run in high heels and mini-skirt. I can’t. I could get his Tardis fixed.

He probably can’t travel back through time and space to arrive outside the Tardis repair shop on Gallifrey, but he could go to the planet-sized library which contains every book ever written and get a book on how to repair a Tardis. That’s where I come in. I have a library card which isn’t valid for all libraries in time and space, but since when do small details like that stop the Doctor and his companions?

I do know how libraries are organised and I know how to ask the right questions. If the library has a copy of a Tardis repair manual, I could find it with the help of the Librarian. If the Tardis materializes within the library, we won’t need to borrow the repair manual, but if he does borrow it, the Doctor will be able to keep it for ages, then travel back in time and return it on time. How cool would that be?

Do you dig time lords?

Dare I ask, which one?

While you are waiting for the return of Doctor Who, why not borrow a DVD featuring your favourite Doctor.

Anna Smaill – from a writing musician to a musical writer

Meeting Anna Smaill is almost like a scene from a modern James Bond movie. Hurrying up the stairs of Aotea Centre, she is not aware that I am following right behind her. Once inside the lobby, she reaches for her phone. Before I can say hello, the phone in my pocket starts to ring. Anna slowly turns around, puzzled, still holding her phone close to her ear. We find ourselves in an awkward moment. We don’t know what to do with our hands – greet each other or turn off the phones. Looking at each other, we burst out laughing, leaving the phones to echo around the lobby.

Even though Anna published her debut novel The Chimes at the beginning of this year, she is definitely not a new name in New Zealand literary landscape. Her poetry featured in Best New Zealand Poems in 2002 and 2005, as well as numerous journals and magazines, before it found a permanent home in her first collection of poetry Violinist in spring (2006). Despite her dedicated academic pursuits – Masters in English Literature (Auckland University), Masters in Creative Writing (IIML, Victoria University of Wellington) and a PhD (University College London) – she never felt entirely suited for academic world. Most of all, she enjoys writing fiction. “It’s because it draws on all parts of me and it’s fun.” She quickly adds how “really really hard” it sometimes is.

Her musical background has evidently marked not only her poetry but also her prose. Themes and style of The Chimes, dystopian novel set in alternative England, stem from the idea of music as an overpowering and navigating force of reality. An immense musical instrument, the Carillon, controls lives of remaining population. Brainwashing happens regularly with Matins, which tells “Onestory” – the only acceptable truth about the “Allbreaking”, the fatal discord, that broke with the past (now refered to as a “blasphony”) and established the present order. This is followed by violent erasing of – not only personal but collective memory as well – at Vespers with the Chimes. Among “memoryloss”, people who have suffered incurable damage, and “prentisses”, workforce which helps maintain the functioning of this complex musical tyranny, run by the Order, are outcasts. They forge for the “Lady”, a metal substance out of which the Carillon is made, and hold on to their “objectmemories”, the only remnants of their previous lives and selves. These enable them to trigger and nurture their personal memories.

The main character of the story, Simon, is a young orphan, who joins the pact of outcasts and soon realizes he possesses a special talent, that might change everything. With its unique style, which draws from the music, myriads of themes, relevant to a present day, and a clever narrative this work holds a reader in a grasp of perplexity and amazement until the very end.

I met up with Anna at Auckland Writers Festival to talk about her work, her life and The Chimes – of course.

Lives of people in The Chimes basically depend on their memories. What are your first memories of books, reading or libraries?

We used to go religiously to the library on Friday nights with my family. But I used to go to the library every day on my own after school as well, so it was almost like a second home for me. On Friday night we actually got the books out and we had a big red sack that we filled with books. I remember coming home and feeling reassured and excited. It was a bit like coming home from a supermarket after you just bought enough food for the week – only that I had enough reading material for a week. I was a total bookworm. Also, my family didn’t have a television.

We, children, were really lucky as our parents read to us a lot. I do remember the frustration before learning to read. I was trying to get my sister to read out Tintin comics for me. I also remember wishing to escape to my room to be able to read in peace during children’s parties. I found reading much more exciting.

Libraries are – just like museums and galleries – treasurers of collective memory. What is your opinion on cutting down library fundings, which is becoming a real fashion all around the world?

It’s a worrying development. People have a right to access literature. I do see it as a worrying sign. Although here in New Zealand libraries are so much part of the community, they are used by a broad section of the community and they feel very vital. In the UK, it didn’t feel like they were being that well used. There is more time to go to the library, here in New Zealand. In UK people are time-poor.

What has brought you to writing? Where does the need to write stem from? Is it just the fear of letting memories slip away, as you mentioned in a post on your web page, or are there any other inner motives and impulses?

The first impulse is the sense of time going past. It’s almost having the experience of pathos in the moment, having feeling of something happening that is already gone. I’ve always had very acutely this feeling of things being transient and ephemeral and I wanted to capture them.

Creative nonficion

Have you heard of the term “Creative Nonfiction“? The only so-called creative nonfiction that I was aware of was the books that over the years have been discredited for “creatively”  bending the facts. The likes of James Frey who was selected for Oprah Winfrey’s monthly bookclub one day and exposed the next for fabricating his criminal record and rehab experiences. Or Margaret Jones who published a memoir of her childhood in LA’s gangland only to be later discredited.

The Library handily lists these titles as “imaginary biography” but we don’t take them off the shelves. More recently – and perhaps more seriously – the young cook Belle Gibson (of the Whole Pantry fame) was outed as making up her illness which led her to claim that her recipes had cured her of cancer.  So, creative license has always been a less than savoury aspect of nonfiction.

What I hadn’t realised is that Creative Nonfiction is now becoming an actual genre. Editor/ author Lee Gutkind describes Creative nonfiction as “dramatic, true stories that use scene, dialogue and close, detailed descriptions – techniques usually employed by poets and fiction writers.”

Now you could be forgiven if like me you think that many aspects of nonfiction have always had a creative bent – think of biographies, travel stories, memoirs.  These will often use dialogue, have a story that explains an event rather than just straight facts and will include the author’s opinion and ideas as opposed to a straight text book or news item which, theoretically at least, sticks to the facts.

I wonder if there a need for a name/genre for those easy to read, entertaining and informing books that have always graced our shelves. Do we need courses to teach prospective writers how to be more creatively nonfiction-like, or are we able to work out the differences for ourselves?

The Art of the Novel

It’s 8:15 on Sunday morning and there’s already a queue of at least thirty people waiting to get into the free ‘Art of the Novel’ session. It’s not due to start till 9am and by the time I’m half way through my coffee the line stretches round the corner and out of sight. The room seated 350 people and it looked pretty full by the time everyone was sitting down!

I sat between a very serious aspiring novelist and a group of younger chattier aspiring novelists. The men behind me were also deep in a conversation about writing and almost everyone had note pads.

Enter our three novelists. Stephanie Johnson from New Zealand, Emily St John Mandel from Canada, and from England came David Mitchell, wearing a pair of bright pink stripey socks, so I was immediately taken with him. His work is amazing too, of course, but the socks!

The session was roughly broken up in to three parts, the ‘pre-writing’ stage, the writing itself, and then the editing and publishing stage.

“Research is great procrastination,” Stephanie Johnson said, as the three of them talked about building up their knowledge before (or just as often, during) their writing. For her latest novel, Station Eleven, Emily spent a lot of time on survivalist forums, which was fascinating, but a little scary.

David Mitchell’s ideas for his next book circle around his head like planes in a holding pattern, waiting to come down. He seems to have a very organised mind, or at least his mental organisation system resembles a kind of organised chaos. Whenever he finds a second hand book he thinks might be useful for one circling plane or another he’ll buy it and store it away, with a bookshelf put aside for each potential novel.

David and Emily both agreed that they would get so sick of working on old novels that the thought of starting a new one was terribly exciting! The new ideas can get very flirty and pushy, so it’s a matter of keeping them under control while you slog through the final days of your current project.

Some great bits of writing advice came out of the session:

About letting ideas sit and stew:

“You do need composting time. It’s good to have at least a part time job that forces you out into the world to pretend to be a normal.” – Stephanie Johnson

“I have to write the novel itself to figure out where the novel is going… it’s an incredibly inefficient way to write a book really.” – Emily St John Mandel

About fear, and challenging yourself by stepping outside your comfort zone:

“I want to know that I’ve bitten off more than I can chew this time.” – David Mitchell

“I try not to think about the audience when I’m writing. Which audience member would I pick anyway? I write the kind of thing I want to read.” – Emily St John Mandel

“When you’re really writing and it’s going well, the experience shouldn’t be too different to reading, or knitting.” – Stephanie Johnson

On editing:

“Sometimes I retype my entire draft, or read it all aloud. A ‘random page edit’ is a great way to pick up mistakes, print out and pick up page 3, 250, 180, whatever, and you’ll find all sorts of errors that you won’t notice if you read your story in order.” – Emily St John Mandel

“I don’t try to make it perfect the first time, that first draft is just about bringing a thing into existance.” – David Mitchell

On writing odious characters:

“When we’re being odious ourselves, remember, we self justify. Have your villains do the same.” – David Mitchell

“No one is one hundred percent odious all of the time, or if they are, they came by it honestly.” – Emily St John Mandel

By ten o’clock it was clear that the audience would have stayed much longer but it was time to move on, or rather, move out into the signing queues for some quick one-on-one writing advice.

For the writers among us, do you have any writing advice to share?

• Search out catalogue for Creative Writing resources
• Check out our Writing page
• See other posts from the Auckland Writers Festival, including blog posts about David Mitchell and Emily St John Mandel.

Lyttelton Harbour Festival of Lights 2015

The Lyttelton Harbour Festival of Lights is an annual event of lights, music and fun celebrating the Lyttelton community, Matariki, the Māori New Year and the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year.

The Festival runs over nine days from 13 to 21 June, and this year boasts two stages active throughout the night, on London Street and at Albion Square. The programme features a parade, masquerade balls, music, waiata, food and wine, live poetry performances, art exhibitions, and, of course, fireworks.

Highlights of the 2015 programme of events [4.4 MB PDF] include:

Saturday 13 June

• Mask and headgear making workshop at Lyttelton Farmers Market, 10am-1pm
• Matariki 2015 at Albion Square, 11am-1pm
• DJ Missy G at the Porthole Bar, 8.30pm
• Toque guitar duo at Civil and Naval, 9pm

Sunday 14 June

• Afternoon Jam at the Porthole Bar, 3.30pm

Monday 15 June

• Astro Dome by Science Alive at Lyttelton Primary School, Voelas Road campus, 4-7pm
• ¡No Siesta Fiesta! at Freemans Deck, 7pm: Spanish and South American music

Tuesday 16 June

• Lyttelton Bingo-tini at The Lyttelton Club, 6pm till late: Bingo, Martinis, and prizes galore

Wednesday 17 June

• A Night with a Future Star at the Porthole Bar, 8pm

Thursday 18 June

• Children’s stories and craft after dark at Lyttelton Library, 6.30-7.30pm
• Celebrating Lyttelton Writers at Freemans Dining Room and Bar, 7-8pm
• Josh Rennie-Hynes at the Porthole Bar, 8pm
• Graham James at the Wunderbar, 8pm

Friday 19 June – Street Party

• Lyttelton Soup Kitchen at The Lyttelton Club, 5pm till late
• “We are a Tribe. We come by land and sea and air, travelling through time and space” parade, 6pm
• The Lyttelton Port of Christchurch Fireworks display, 7.30pm
• Visit the beautifully restored church of St Saviour’s at Holy Trinity, 6.30-9pm, including a 20-minute selection of musical pieces performed by The Cathedral Grammar Combined Choir from 8pm
• Sexy Animals at the Wunderbar, 8.30pm
• DJ Willie Styles at the Porthole Bar, 10pm
• Kitchen Collective at Civil and Naval, 10pm-2am

Saturday 20 June

• A Feast of Strangers at Naval Point Yacht Club (for Lyttelton Harbour Timebank members), 6.30pm
• Lyttelton Masquerade Ball at The Lyttelton Club, 7pm
• Labyrinth Masquerade Ball at the Wunderbar, 8.30pm
• DJ at the Porthole Bar, 8.30pm

Sunday 21 June

• Mathoms and Art Market at Diamond Harbour Hall, 2-5pm
• Carmel Courtney Trio at Freemans Deck, 3pm
• Mid-Winter Swim at Naval Point Yacht Club, 3.30pm
• Afternoon Jam at the Porthole Bar, 3.30pm
• Alliance Française Music Festival at the Wunderbar, 6pm
• Festival Poetry Session @ Lyttelton Coffee Co., 8-10pm

Lyttelton links

The following resources are helpful for Lyttelton visitors and locals:

Lyttelton from Purau, 1852, CCL PhotoCD 4, IMG0079

• Transport options for the Festival
• Metroinfo bus timetables. Lyttelton can be reached on a number 28 and a number 535 bus.
• Information on Lyttelton Library.
• Find out more about the museums of Banks Peninsula.
• CINCH listings for Lyttelton — Lyttelton organisations listed in our Community information directory.
• See images of early Lyttelton in our heritage photo collection.
• Read books about Lyttelton.
• Find out about the Lyttelton Port Company.

Previous Lyttelton Festivals of Lights

The 2015 Festival is the eleventh time the Festival has been held. Read our post about the 2014 Festival and our interview with Wendy Everingham about the 2007 Festival of Lights.

Seeing and hearing Philip Ball

Dr Philip Ball, who gave a talk in Christchurch last week, has an intimidating CV that includes working in an editorial role at Nature magazine for 20 years, an impressive clutch of awards, and an academic background that includes an undergraduate degree in Chemistry and a PhD in Physics. So no slouch in the brains department, then.

He writes columns for a range of publications, as well as books about science and technology but placed within the wider cultural context. It’s science but it’s the literature of science, the art of science, and the myth of science all rolled up into one multi-disciplinary ball. His books also have really tantalising, curiousity-piquing titles like –

• The music instinct: How music works and why we can’t do without it

• Serving the Reich: The struggle for the soul of Physics under Hitler

• Unnatural: The heretical idea of making people

• 30-second Quantum Theory: The 50 most thought-provoking Quantum concepts, each explained in half a minute

His talk on Friday Invisibility: a cultural history drew on ideas found in his latest book, Invisible: The dangerous allure of the unseen. I was interested in this right away as “invisibility” is my favoured super-power. No Adamantium claws for me, thanks. Being invisible presents so many opportunities for mischief.

It turns out, that this idea is sort of what the talk was about, as Ball addressed the audience directly at the beginning and asked:

“If you had the power of invisibility what would you do with it?”

We were then told that if our minds went straight to “power, wealth or sex” then we shouldn’t feel too bad, as that’s very much in keeping with the rest of humanity as far back as Plato (and further). Invisibility, we were told, is not a technical problem but a moral one.

In The Republic Plato uses the story of The ring of Gyges to illustrate the dangers of unfettered power. Like the One Ring of Middle Earth, this piece of jewellery bestows invisibility upon the wearer. Gyges, a humble shepherd, uses this power to seduce the queen and kill the reigning king and becomes “like a god among men” because unfortunately, invisibility corrupts.

Invisibility, it seems, isn’t necessarily a super power that you would want to have. Right, so I might have to go with super strength or metal claws, after all.

And yet people have been questing after this ability for as long as we have had the idea of it.

Modern technologies involving meta-materials, that can redirect light, are one possible route towards a “cloaking technology” but this is some way from true invisibility. Camouflage is one thing, completely disappearing is quite another.

Much of Ball’s talk leapt deftly from science to magic and back again, highlighting the similarities in purpose of the two and how they sometimes walk along side by side. For instance, in the 19th century there was a resurgence in interest in things spiritual, séances, spirit mediums and unseen forces, at the same time that invisible forces like x-rays were being discovered.

Ball argued that the notion of being able to communicate with another unseen being via the spiritual “ether”, made it much easier for people to accept the technological equivalent of communicating with someone at a distance via radiowaves.

Ball also made some allusions to literature, pointing out that H G Wells’ The invisible man is essentially a rewriting of the Gyges myth but using science instead of magic. As such, instead of the protagonist becoming god-like, his “power” is a curse. In order to be invisible he has to be naked so he suffers the cold and sore feet. He is no king. Modern invisibility still corrupts the soul but it also belittles.

It was a fascinating talk that covered everything from bizarrely painted “dazzle” warships of the First World War to Harry Potter to Star Trek and back again and illustrated the importance of magic and myth in the context of technology.

“Myth is no blueprint for the engineer. It’s more important than that.”

More Philip Ball –

• Radio New Zealand interview with Philip Ball
• Philip Ball’s website
• Philip Ball in the library catalogue

The Christchurch Marathon

Central Library Peterborough will be a tad more athletic than usual on Sunday, 31 May as the annual Christchurch Marathon takes place. The library is on the marathon route, at the beginning of the course as runners make their way from the Cathedral Square start towards Hagley park, and at the end of the race as they head back to The Square for the big finish.

The route of the Christchurch marathon has changed in recent years due to the earthquakes. It started in 1981 as the same course run during the 1974 Commonwealth Games, the one that saw Brit, Ian Thompson run the second fastest marathon of all time, (2 hrs, 9 mins, 12 secs). Forty years later this is still the fastest marathon ever run in New Zealand and the Christchurch Marathon continues to have a reputation as a “fast and flat” course.

Central Library Peterborough will be open as usual on Sunday but access from the street will be pedestrian only until 2pm. Library visitors will need to park further away than usual and walk to the library (but at least it won’t be 26 miles, so that’s something to be thankful for).

About the Christchurch Marathon

• 2015 course map
• Race day information
• History of the Christchurch Airport Marathon

World Wide Knit in Public Day – Saturday 13 June 2015

Ahoy knitters! We are hosting a World Wide Knit in Public event at Central Library Peterborough on Saturday 13 June 10am to 12pm. There will be tea and coffee and some biscuits to sustain you.

This event will be held in conjunction with Knit world (just down the street a bit at 189 Peterborough Street) and they are supplying a couple of secret prizes on the day too.

Daleks do not knit! World Wide Knit In Public Day at Shirley Library, 14 June 2014.  Flickr: CCL-2014-06-14-WWKIPDay-ShirleyLibrary-DSC_4494.JPG

There is another cool-sounding event Knit around the Orbiter!

The library caters to all your knitters and crocheters:

• See our crafts and collecting page.
• Browse our latest hobbies and crafts titles.
• Hobbies, crafts and games events at the library.
• Find in our collection:
  • Knitting
  • Handicraft
  • Crocheting