An Interview With – Page 2

An Interview With Janis Freegard

Posted on July 7, 2011

Janis Freegard is a Wellington-based writer of poetry and fiction. She was born in South Shields in the North-East of England and spent part of her childhood in South Africa and Australia, before her family settled in New Zealand. Her poetry collection, Kingdom Animalia: The Escapades of Linnaeus, was published by Auckland University Press in May. Her writing has appeared in many journals and anthologies including AUP New Poets 3, Big Weather: Poems of Wellington, Voyagers: Science Fiction Poetry from New Zealand, The Iron Book of New Humorous Verse, The NZ Listener, Landfall, The North (UK), JAAM, Poetry NZ and Trout. She works in the state sector and lives in Vogeltown with an historian and a cat. She also has a blog: http://janisfreegard.wordpress.com

Janis’ poem A Life Blighted By Pythons was my Tuesday Poem this week.

First things first: why Linnaeus?

I wanted the book to have some kind of structure. As the poems were about animals (or at least had an animal in them somewhere), it seemed like a good idea to arrange them according to their taxonomic classification. I’d learned a little about taxonomy at university and when I worked at the Department of Conservation (trying to prevent trade in endangered species).

Our modern classification system has so many categories, though, that I soon realised it was going to be too hard to write poems for every different class of animal. That’s when I hit on using Linnaeus’ six groupings (mammals, birds, amphibians, fish, insects and worms). Linnaeus was the eighteenth century Swedish naturalist who came up with the two-word classification system for plants and animals that we still use today (such as Homo sapiens for human beings).

Once I started organising the poems into the six categories, I decided to write about Linnaeus himself as well. He was an extraordinary man. I can’t help but admire his commitment and tenacity in trying to categorise every plant, animal and mineral on the planet.

More generally, why zoology? (As someone who can proudly boast of being a BSc in Botany (Failed), I am naturally hoping that the other kingdoms will get a look-in in future collections. I can’t help feeling that the Archaea, for example, are not well represented in contemporary poetry.)

I agree that the Archaea are sadly neglected, and I hope poets everywhere will rise to the challenge of remedying that! I have a Botany degree, so zoology might not seem like an obvious choice. But I do seem to write a lot of poems about animals and I thought the animal kingdom would be a good theme for a collection.

I very much enjoyed your selection of poems in AUP New Poets 3. Is there a lot of continuity between those poems and the poems in Kingdom Animalia, or do the new poems mark a sharp break with your previous work?

Thanks Tim. Several of my poems in AUP New Poets 3 have animals in them (such as the ‘Animal Tales’ sequence) so I do think Kingdom Animalia carries forward some of the strands from that selection. Both books also contain some prose poems and both have elements of surrealism.

If someone described you as a “nature poet”, would you be pleased, alarmed, indignant, or unruffled?

I don’t mind being described as a nature poet, but I’m not sure it gives the full picture. Perhaps I could be a sometimes absurdist nature poet who also writes about life in the city and love.

You are great at running fun, memorable book launches. How do you manage it?

Thanks Tim, and thanks for coming to the launch! I see a book launch as an excuse for a bit of a party – I want people to feel entertained and enjoy themselves. And the planning is just as much fun as the event. I had such a good time designing the invitation, choosing the venue, making the fresh asparagus rolls and dressing up in a bird mask (like the one on the cover of the book). I also had some great helpers on the night.

My knowledge of your work is mainly through your poetry, but it is bookended by fiction; I first heard your name when your story “Mill” won the Katherine Mansfield Award in 2001, and I’ve just received my copy of the Christchurch earthquake appeal fundraising anthology Tales for Canterbury, which includes your story “The Magician”. Have you kept writing fiction as well as poetry?

Yes, I’ve always enjoyed writing both poetry and fiction, although at times one takes precedence over the other. Poetry had the upper hand while I was focusing on Kingdom Animalia and now I’m getting back into fiction a bit more. I haven’t written many short stories over the past few years, though, as I’ve been focusing on writing a novel. Sometimes the lines between poetry and fiction get a bit blurry – I like writing prose poems, which seem to belong in the grey area between the two.

Is being a member of a writing community important to you, or could you work away just as happily in isolation from other writers?

I really value opportunities to interact with other writers. I belong to a long-standing poetry group that meets monthly to share poems and give each other feedback. I often take along poems that aren’t quite working and it’s very useful to hear others’ thoughts on how I might improve them. It also means I get to read everyone else’s excellent poems. I also enjoy being part of the New Zealand Poetry Society and going along to Poetry at the Ballroom Café in Newtown.

I belong to a great fiction writing group too, which has been meeting for about eight or nine years. I could work away quite happily on my own, but it is good having the groups. They also act as a helpful spur to write.

Which poets would you recommend to readers who enjoy your poetry?

People who like my poetry might also like Vivienne Plumb’s work (I know I do) and Mary Cresswell’s (ditto). I have too many favourite poets to list them all (and my poetry mightn’t have much in common with theirs) but I’d have to include (alphabetically) Simon Armitage, Jenny Bornholdt, Selima Hill, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Roger McGough and Bill Manhire. I like punk era performance poets too, like Patti Smith, John Cooper Clarke and Linton Kwesi Johnson. And I’ll go and watch Sam Hunt read any time I can.

Similarly, who are some of your favourite fiction writers?

Jeanette Winterson’s top of the list – there’s one of her short stories (The 24-Hour Dog from The World and Other Places) that I have read over and over and every time I read it, I think: I might as well give up writing now because I’ll never be able to write something that good! Sometimes I just read the first paragraph and sigh because it’s so wonderful. I’m also a big fan of Canadian writer Jane Rule (one my favourite books is This is Not for You), Jean Watson (Stand in the Rain, The World is an Orange and the Sun, The Balloon Watchers, Three Sea Stories), Noel Virtue, Lewis Carroll, Banana Yoshimoto (I’ve just finished reading The Lake), Ronald Hugh Morrieson, Haruki Murakami, Sarah Waters and Tove Jansson (better known for the Moomin books, but her adult fiction is also wonderful, in a very understated, quiet way). I could rave on, but I’ll stop there.

Finally, if you don’t mind me asking, what projects are you working on now?

I’m working on two poetry collections (which may converge eventually) and I’m finishing the first draft of a novel. I’m also planning a collaboration with an artist.

How To Buy Kingdom Animalia

Kingdom Animalia is available from most book shops that have a good poetry selection, such as Unity Books, university bookshops and Te Papa, and many online booksellers, including Fishpond and Wheelers, or people can get it directly from Auckland University Press.

An Interview With Laura Solomon

Posted on June 23, 2011

Laura Solomon has an honours degree in English Literature (Victoria University, 1997) and a Masters degree in Computer Science (University of London, 2003). Her books include ‘Black Light’, ‘Nothing Lasting’, ‘Alternative Medicine’, ‘An Imitation of Life’, ‘Instant Messages’, ‘The Theory of Networks’, ‘Operating Systems’, ‘Hilary and David’, In Vitro and ‘The Shingle Bar Taniwha and Other Stories’. She has won prizes in the Bridport, Edwin Morgan, Ware Poets, Willesden Herald, Proverse Hong Kong and Essex Poetry Festival competitions.

Laura’s poem Janet Frame’s Adversaries Have Their Way. Janet is Lobotomised and Spends Her Life Selling Hats in Oamaru. was my Tuesday Poem this week.

Laura, you are best known as a writer of fiction, and in vitro is your first collection of poetry. Have you been accumulating the poems in this collection for a while, or have they all been written recently?

I wrote the poems between 2006 and 2009.

For those who don’t know your work, how would you describe your poetry – does it follow a particular style or poetic tradition?

Fairly experimental, but also quite lyrical.

While I was reading in vitro, I noted down descriptions like ‘clinical’, ‘forensic’, and ‘disenchanted’ – though, lest this make the book appear too gloomy, many of the poems are also very entertaining! But do you think these adjectives can fairly be applied to these poems?

Some of the poems are quite bleak or severe in subject matter, but lightened up with comedy.

I see that you have published several novels as e-books in Hong Kong. Was it a difficult decision to have them published in e-book format, and are you happy with the result?

Happy with e-book for Hilary and David, not sure yet whether the sequels to Instant Messages are going to be ebook or normal printed book yet.

I have the impression – forgive me if I’m wrong – that you, like I, write fiction that doesn’t fit neatly into the categories that New Zealand publishers, and perhaps other international publishers, are comfortable with. Do you ever think “Oh, if only I’d written good old realism”, or, “time to get cracking on that paranormal romance”?

No, I just write what I feel like and hope for the best.

How do you think the publishing scene overseas compares to the New Zealand scene, particularly in its hospitality to work that doesn’t fit neat category definitions?

Just the same, difficult to break into UK market, none of the agents or publishers seem interested, so I just keep entering UK competitions from NZ. Seem to do better in comps, than just straight submitting to agents and publishers, not sure why.

Which (if any) poets would you describe as influences on your work?

Atwood, Rich, Plath.

How about writers of fiction?

Atwood, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson.

If you have the opportunity, what direction(s) do you see your writing heading in next?

That’s a secret!! ☺

Book availability

Laura’s collection in vitro is available from HeadworX, and there are more publication details of Laura’s other books on Beattie’s Book Blog – check the first comment.

An Interview With Tracie McBride

Posted on June 1, 2011

Tracie McBride lives in Melbourne, Australia with her husband and three children. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in over 50 print and electronic publications, including Horror Library Vol 4, Dead Red Heart, Abyss and Apex, JAAM 26, and Electric Velocipede. She won the Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best New Talent for 2007. She is an associate editor for horror magazine Dark Moon Digest and vice president of the writer’s co-operative Dark Continents Publishing. Her first short story and poetry collection Ghosts Can Bleed was released in April 2011.

Tracie’s poem “Contact” was my Tuesday Poem this week.

Tracie, I was about to say you’re the first Australian writer I’ve interviewed for this blog, but I wonder whether that’s accurate. As a New Zealander who now lives in Melbourne, do you now consider yourself to be an Australian writer now?

I moved to Melbourne in 2008, so I don’t know if I’ve been here long enough to claim to be Australian. I like to think of myself as a hybrid, an Aussie-Kiwi, or as my son calls it, a Kozzie. Being an Australian resident certainly opens up market opportunities that would have been unavailable to me in New Zealand.

It’s clear from looking at your blog that you are well connected to the Australian speculative fiction writing community. Other than their size, do you notice major differences between the Australian and the New Zealand writing communities?

I think that the two communities approach the business of writing in much the same way. Both congregate online, in writing crit groups and at conventions, and both are aware of being small players on a large international stage. Any differences can be traced directly back to the differences in size. Australia has several small press publishers and magazines dedicated to speculative fiction. Consequently, Australian writers can better afford to specialize in their chosen genre or subgenre, and are confident to give their stories distinctly Australian settings. You’re more likely to find New Zealand speculative fiction writers submitting to US publications, or tailoring their work for the School Journal or for literary publications.

Let’s turn to your first collection, Ghosts Can Bleed, published by Dark Continents Publishing. It’s an unusual collection, in my experience, in that it contains a mixture of fiction and poetry. Has it been your plan all along to integrate the two in this way?

Short answer – no.

Long answer – I never even thought of publishing a collection of my work before I joined Dark Continents Publishing. My plan has always to establish something of a track record with my short fiction and poetry, then write a novel. Problem is, I’m not a novelist. When the president of Dark Continents, David Younquist, said, “OK, guys, part of the deal of being a member of the group is that you have to contribute a novel for us to publish in the first year,” I had a small panic attack, and then replied, “Ummm…will a short story collection do?”

I love the short form, and I view a lot of my poems as being short stories in disguise, so it never occurred to me to separate out the poems. They are as much representative of my work as my short stories.

I was very pleased to see that your story “Last Chance To See”, which was one of the highlights for me in the issue of JAAM I edited, is included in the collection. I recall that story as having a very effective mixture of horror and pathos. Would you describe that story as typical of your style?

I’m still trying to figure out what my style is…

“Last Chance To See” is the first story in the collection, because it is the one of which I am most proud. It was also reprinted in a recent Australian horror anthology, Devil Dolls and Duplicates. The story was inspired by true life events, so it has emotional resonances for me that I hope I will carry through to the reader.

I rarely write “straight” horror. My stories are usually tempered with something else – they’re often a blend of genres, or are laced with black humour, or else they feature a level of emotional detachment. So in that respect, “Last Chance To See” is both typical and atypical of my style.

As well as being a writer, you’re also a vice-president of Dark Continents Publishing, a new publisher which was launched at the World Horror Convention in Austin, Texas a few weeks ago. I see that your first submission period opens on 1 June 2011. For the writers who read this interview, what sort of work is Dark Continents looking for?

We call ourselves publishers of dark speculative fiction, but that definition is broad, which is evident in the titles we launched in Austin. Will we consider the traditional horror staples such as zombies, werewolves, vampires and ghosts? You bet. Horror poetry? We’ll take a look. Short story collections? We can be persuaded. Paranormal romance? Maybe. YA and children’s stories? Probably not just yet, but we hope to spread our net even wider for subsequent submission periods. Something well written that a major publishing house would turn down due to excessive quirkiness? Ooh, I’d LOVE to see something like that land in the slush pile. Just give us a chance to turn it into the Next Big Thing…

Your poetry has already appeared in one collection from Dark Continents Publishing, The Spectrum Collection, which was designed to showcase your authors. How has that collection done so far?

So far it has been well-received. The idea behind the Spectrum Collection was to give prospective readers a sampler of our different writing styles. Because our styles are so diverse, we haven’t been able to please all of the people all of the time. The feedback from reviewers so far has been interesting, with most of the reviewers choosing different pieces as stand-outs. But they all agree on one thing – we have some very talented writers in our stable.

Every publisher I know of, large or small, is grappling with the issues of production, distribution and marketing that have arisen from the growth of the Internet in general and e-publishing in particular. What is Dark Continents’ approach?

With the exception of a couple of titles that have a lot of illustrations, most of our books are available as e-books in multiple formats, and those illustrated volumes will probably also be e-published as soon as e-book reader technology catches up. Our e-books are priced to reflect customer expectations. The bulk of our marketing is online, as are our ordering systems. Our printer is Lightning Source, which has printing plants in the US, UK, and as of June 2011, Australia, thus making it feasible to sell and ship our books to anywhere in the world.

Lightning Source uses Print On Demand technology, so there is no need for us to carry stock; we only print what we sell. Current technology, the Internet and e-publishing is our friend – we don’t grapple, we embrace.

What if any writers do you regard as your main influences?

To be honest, the writers who have the most direct influence on my work are the members of my crit groups. They don’t just influence the finished product, they give me an incentive to knuckle down and write something in the first place.

But if you want to know whose work I admire and aspire to, which is a different question, that list is long and varied. For short stories, my current literary crush is Joe Hill. I’m reading his collection 20th Century Ghosts. He takes cheesy B grade premises and turns them into something resonant and meaningful. And I am quite taken with the work of one of the Dark Continents crew, British writer Simon Kurt Unsworth. His 2010-published stories earned a pile of Honourable Mentions from Ellen Datlow, and after proofreading his forthcoming collection “Uneasy Tales”, I can see why.

What are your writing ambitions, and what projects are you planning, or currently working on?

Still haven’t entirely given up the notion of writing a novel, just waiting for the right Big Idea to enter my head. I always have some little project on the go, be it a short story anthology I’m aiming for here or a new poetry magazine there. I’m working on a collaborative poetry project with New Zealander and fellow Dark Continents member John Irvine.

One of my passions is fostering a love of writing and storytelling from an early age; I work as a teacher aide at a local primary school, and my three children are aspiring writers. So David Youngquist and I hope to carve out some time in the near future to work on an anthology of stories written for children, by children. And come June 1, I expect to be neck deep in the Dark Continents slush pile.

How to buy “Ghosts Can Bleed”

For Kindle – http://www.amazon.com/Ghosts-Can-Bleed-ebook/dp/B004XTX056/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=A24IB90LPZJ0BS&s=digital-text&qid=1305899075&sr=1-1

For Nook – http://productsearch.barnesandnoble.com/search/results.aspx?store=EBOOK&WRD=ghosts+can+bleed&page=index&prod=univ&choice=ebook&query=Ghosts+Can+Bleed&flag=False&pos=-1&box=Ghosts+Can+Bleed&ugrp=2

Paperback – http://darkcontinents.com/2011/04/28/ghosts-can-bleed/

How to buy books from Dark Continents Publishing

The paperbacks for all the Dark Continents Publishing books can be ordered directly from the Dark Continents website. With the exception of Anomalous Appetites and Blood Curry, they are all available as e-books from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

An Interview With Mary Cresswell

Posted on March 30, 2011

Mary Cresswell is a Wellington poet who lives on the Kapiti Coast. She came to New Zealand from Los Angeles in 1970, after having lived in various parts of the US, in Germany, and in Japan. She graduated from Stanford University in California with a degree in history and English literature. She is retired from freelance work (science editor and proofreader) and has spent at least one lifetime in the Wellington workplace.

Her first book appearance was with Mary-Jane Duffy, Mary Macpherson, and Kerry Hines, co-authors of Millionaire’s Shortbread (University of Otago Press, 2003). This book is illustrated with collages by Brendan O’Brien, has an afterword by Greg O’Brien, and introduced these four poets to the Wellington scene.

Nearest & Dearest, Mary’s collection of her parody and satiric verse, was published in 2009 by Steele Roberts and is illustrated with cartoons by Nikki Slade Robinson. At that time I interviewed her for the first time.

This is a first for me, Mary – a re-interview, and it indicates that you’ve had success in getting two books published in relatively close succession. Before we get onto your new poetry collection, Trace Fossils, how did things go with your 2009 collection, Nearest & Dearest? Collections of light poetry are still quite rare in New Zealand – do you think that this affected the critical and popular reception of Nearest & Dearest, for either good or ill?

There was no critical notice in NZ, which didn’t surprise me. In the US, I got a very good notice in the well-established print journal Light Quarterly, but the US has a lot of humour written by women – not just Dorothy Parker years ago but many women today. I fondly remember Hen’s Teeth, Crow Station, and lots of good women stand-up comics, but NZ seems to me to have handed written satire and parody over to the boys. (If anyone can tell me otherwise, please get in touch!!)

The publisher and I sold just under 150 copies between us. Most of my sales, many of them multiple copies, were to groups of women who would never browse poetry shelves but who were pleasantly astonished that reading poems could be fun. … On the other hand, I was surprised by a number of people who were nonplussed (embarrassed?) by the contents, didn’t know what to say. Perhaps they had no experience of responding to satire or to sarky women fronting up in print.

Trace Fossils was first runner-up for the Kathleen Grattan Awards in 2009, judged by Fleur Adcock – a notable achievement! Is the published version of the manuscript the same as that submitted for the Kathleen Grattan Awards, or has it changed since then?

It’s exactly the same. The manuscript wandered around some years before that. One reason I am so very glad to see it in print now is that I am starting to have trouble recognising the author – and I’m extremely happy to be on the receiving end of Steele Roberts’ very attractive design and presentation.

Trace Fossils is divided into four sections of roughly equal length. What is the significance of these four sections within the collection? Were most of the poems written with an eye to this particular collection, or did the shape of the collection derive from the type of poems that you had been writing?

The section names are intended to be vaguely geological and to suggest eras, different from each other and long in time. Trace fossils themselves may or may not represent anything, and they are a geological construct, a fascinating one (they also have a very funny classification system – take a look). In the introduction, I nominate trace fossils as a metaphor for our memories of loss and our ways of observing loss.

The poems themselves were written at various times and in various forms: counted syllables, sonnets, prose poems, ghazals, concrete poems, ovillejo, accentual poems, free verse in a variety of lengths and shapes. I assembled them more with an eye to connection than to form; they were none of them written with a particular book in mind.

I spent some time recently talking with a fellow poet about the marketing and distribution of poetry collections – that is, letting people know about new poetry collections, and getting poetry collections to places, whether physical or virtual, that people can buy the books if they wish. I imagine the poets reading this interview, at least, would love to know whether you have any innovative ideas on either of those topics!

I wish. Virtual: I have no clue. Finding more about this side of things is my next project. Physical: The books I have sold were sold by word of mouth – people rang me. Local museums, educational groups and art galleries are sometimes prepared to handle books by local authors, especially if the books can be tied in with current shows, if you do the record-keeping and paperwork, and if you are prepared to donate some of your profit to the organisation. (And if you accept it as a one-off, not a continuing relationship.) I suspect special-interest groups, like writing classes, might be worth trying if you’re prepared to give a reading. I expect any reading is a place to sell books.

Do you have any poetry readings planned around the publication of Trace Fossils – and if so, where can people hear you read?

No, no readings. As you know, there are poets who perform with panache and poets who potter on paper. There is a lot of overlap, I’m glad to say, but I generally prefer not to do solo readings. The main reason for this is that a lot of my poetry is based on word play (both visual and syntactic) and shifts of register. I think that much of this goes west when people hear the poems read out loud and only once. I write page poetry that is to be looked at and re-read. I wish I could bounce and rap, but I can’t.

If you don’t mind me asking, what projects are you working on now?

No, I don’t mind, but there’s nothing all that coherent. It’s been years since I finished the poems included in Trace Fossils, and I have shifted more and more to formal patterns, particularly ghazals (at the moment) but also other repeating structures. I enjoy working in accentual (as opposed to accentual-syllabic) forms. Somewhere down the line I would like to end up with a book built on a skeleton of ghazals but fleshed out with a variety of other poems. I’m still writing light verse and publishing it in the US and the UK, but as always this is a separate department. My main immediate project will be trying to get my head around what might be useful in the world of e-publishing.

Book Availability

Trace Fossils can be ordered from the publisher, Steele Roberts, and is available at independent bookshops.

Nearest & Dearest can also be ordered from Steele Roberts.

Sample Poem

I published Mary’s poem “The Sound Of Now” as my Tuesday Poem this week – check it out!

An Interview With Owen Bullock

Posted on March 2, 2011

Owen Bullock has published a work of non-fiction, Making Canons and Finding Flowers – A Study of Selected New Zealand Poety Anthologies (VDM, Germany, 2008); a book of haiku, wild camomile (Post Pressed, Australia, 2009); the novella A Cornish Story (Palores, UK, 2010), and a number of chapbooks of poetry. His first full collection of longer poems, sometimes the sky isn’t big enough, has just appeared from Steele Roberts (New Zealand). He has
edited several poetry magazines, including Spin and Poetry NZ. He lives near the Karangahake Gorge in the North Island of Aotearoa/New Zealand.

Details of how to buy all Owen’s books are at the end of this interview. Owen’s poem choosing was my Tuesday Poem this week.

Later I’ll focus on your new poetry collection, sometimes the sky isn’t big enough, but first, I want to ask you about a couple of your other books. First of all, which poetry anthologies did you look at in your non-fiction book Making Canons and Finding Flowers – A Study of Selected New Zealand Poetry Anthologies (VDM, Germany, 2008), and if it isn’t an impertinent question, what did you conclude about these anthologies?

I looked at ten anthologies covering the 1940s to 1980s, over four chapters. Firstly, I wrote about the Curnow anthologies of 1945 and 1960. Next came the three editions of the anthology Vincent O’Sullivan edited for Oxford between 1970 and 1987 (which I called ‘Confirming the Canon’).

Chapter three discussed Recent Poetry in New Zealand, edited by Charles Doyle (1965), The Young New Zealand Poets, ed Arthur Baysting, (1973), 15 Contemporary New Zealand Poets, ed Alistair Paterson (1980) and The Oxford Book of Contemporary New Zealand Poetry, ed Fleur Adcock (1982).

Chapter four, titled ‘Some Alternatives’, looked at Private Gardens – An Anthology of New Zealand Women Poets, ed Riemke Ensing, (1977), Big Smoke – New Zealand Poems 1960-1975, ed Alan Brunton, Murray Edmond and Michelle Leggott (2000) and Real Fire – New Zealand Poetry of the 1960s and 1970s, ed Bernard Gadd (2001).

I originally intended to write about 17 anthologies (I discovered 50 at the time – there are more now), but this was a Masters Thesis and I felt restrained by the word count.

I very much wanted to read each anthology as a book and discuss them in those terms. I wanted to chart developments and preoccupations of poets; I didn’t want to wade in with a theory and try to prove it.

Academics tend to talk about various privileges which ‘inform’ the selections of editors and other such things. But I concluded that a very strong privilege was that of association, between groups of writers, University presses and employees. Part of this is natural and I think I’ve got a firmer grasp of that now than I did them. I’ve tried hard in my editing work to avoid cliques and naively thought that was what everyone else was trying to do as well, but that’s not the case.

Complaints about anthologies are virtually obligatory and I firmly believe we learn nothing from history, interesting though it may be. There is always an establishment (even if it’s a young one which has just displaced another) and some people who are worthy will miss out, such as women writers like Elizabeth Smither, Jan Kemp, Peggy Dunstan, Christina Beer and Anne Donovan omitted from the 1976 edition of the Oxford anthology.

My drive for independence has meant risking losing certain writing friends at times. I may have been harder on my friends when they have submitted poetry to me for a magazine than on others, which is tricky, because I’m not so independent that I don’t need friends. I do wish poets could be more thick-skinned about their writing and realise, as Kai Jensen told me early on, that we have the potential to be part of a literary tradition. Whether or not someone accepts individual poems of ours isn’t very important in the overall scheme of things; poetry is what is important, not our poems.

You are of Cornish descent, and your novella A Cornish Story (Palores, UK, 2010) has recently been published. How has it been received in Cornwall?

It was well received. I did several book signings and readings on local radio and in St Ives during the Gorseth (a Cornish cultural festival, modelled on the Welsh Eisteddfod). Palores has good distribution through Cornwall, but my publisher, Les Merton, said that whilst I was out and about it wouldn’t hurt to offer the book to smaller bookshops and even village shops. So, I became a bit of a salesman for three weeks and sold quite a few copies, especially in West Cornwall.

It was gratifying when I read in St Ives to find that many fellow-writers had already read the book and were able to comment on my use of dialect. I felt very accepted by the writing fraternity there; they didn’t seem at all bothered that I have lived in New Zealand so long. I also had a glowing review in The Cornish Banner which described the book as ‘a masterpiece of Cornu-English’ and went on to suggest that it should be studied in Cornish schools.

During the book signings a few people re-appeared from my past, including my Primary School headmaster. Others came to say hello who knew someone else in my family – I couldn’t have been happier.

As an immigrant to New Zealand myself, albeit without a great deal of influence over the process as I was two years old at the time, I’m always interested to know: what led you to emigrate to New Zealand, and how do you feel about that decision now?

My ex-wife is a kiwi and we always intended to come here at some stage. We lived in Wales for a couple of years before that. It was a big adjustment for me initially, but I don’t regret it.

You’ve become well known as a poet since you emigrated to New Zealand, but also well known as an editor. What do you like about editing? Do you feel that it detracts from, or helps with, your own writing?

I enjoy the interaction with other poets and also seeing what is possible through poetry. Often you read a poem that isn’t entirely successful but which points in a certain new direction. I think it helps one’s writing as long as the editing task is not so lengthy that you don’t get enough time for your own work. I got to the stage a couple of years ago where it was getting too much, partly because I was teaching as well and was very caught up in other people’s writing. I took a break then, but editing tasks seem to be coming back to me now.

So, let’s turn to sometimes the sky isn’t big enough. How would you describe the collection to the reader who isn’t familiar with your work – or, for that matter, the reader who is?

Well, it’s more or less the best of my published poems from the last twelve years; it’s also those which fit together well. This book represents only about a quarter of what I’ve had published in magazines so I’ve been quite ruthless in my selections. There’s a thread running through it of the disintegration of a relationship, and more general biographical elements sitting behind the focus on the possibilities of language.

Has the collection been a long time in the making, or did it come together relatively quickly?

I’ve worked on this grouping of poems for several years, editing and shuffling pieces around endlessly. I’ve also gone through several titles, trying to find the right one. In the end Sophie Fisher who did the lay-out work came up with the title, which I’m very happy with.

Which writers (of fiction and poetry) have been most influential on your own work, and which writers do you most enjoy reading – which isn’t always the same thing?

Yes, influence and taste are different. Early on, I was inspired by Thomas Hardy and Jack Clemo, then Dylan Thomas and Gerard Manley Hopkins, Louis MacNeice and James K. Baxter. After discussions with Alistair Paterson, I read more contemporary poetry and was excited by writers like Michael Harlow, Pooja Mittal, C.K. Stead and Tracey Slaughter. Further afield, I’m fond of Miroslav Holub and Charles Bukowski. But I think that when you do a lot of editing, you become more conscious of the individual poem than of particular writers.

I like variety and there are actually very few writers who have much variety in their work. Many people talk about a writer finding their voice; I’ve always felt this to be a tremendously limiting idea. It usually means some kind of halt in development. I think a poet needs to have many voices, and if you attempt a number of genres this tendency is enhanced and expanded. If I have any ambition as a writer, it is to publish as many books as possible in the greatest range of genres. I guess underlying that is the belief that a poet should be able to do anything.

In prose, I greatly admire Paul Gallico and Samuel Beckett, though I don’t think either has influenced me particularly. Along with my mother’s speech patterns, Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s work inspired me to write ‘A Cornish Story’. For pleasure I read people like Mary Webb and Conan Doyle – melodramatic, but good ripping yarns. The ultimate novel would seem to me to be The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett, in which almost nothing happens and where all elements of storytelling are stripped bare. So, you could say I’m a mass of contradictions.

Is it important to you to be, or feel, part of a literary scene, or could you work just as happily in splendid isolation?

I like the encouragement one can get from other writers. I have often worked in isolation, though, and I think an element of that is necessary.

If you’re prepared to say:- what writing project(s) are you working on now, or do you plan to work on?

Encouraged by the response to ‘A Cornish Story’, I am working on an historical novel which links parts of my life in Cornwall and New Zealand. There are always poems and haiku, tanka and haibun to write as well. Last year I wrote my third full-length screenplay (all of which need further development). This year, I am going to make my first short film, from a short a short story of mine called ‘The Watcher’, published recently in Takahe.

How to buy Owen Bullock’s books

sometimes the sky isn’t big enough is available from Steele Roberts.

wild camomile is available from Post Pressed. This excellent review of wild camomile has just gone online.

Making Canons and Finding Flowers and A Cornish Story are available from Blackwells.

More on A Cornish Story

A Cornish Story by Owen Bullock. Palores Publications, UK, 80pp. Six pounds, available from online booksellers such as Blackwells.

A Cornish Story centres on the character of Melville, a labourer in the China Clay mines of mid-Cornwall in the 1980s. That world is ruffled when Melville is suspected of a crime of which he is innocent, though tempted to commit. Redundancy looms, but so does the prospect of an unexpected new relationship. In a village where change is not highly regarded, Melville struggles to direct his own life.

Owen Bullock’s story records the patterns of speech of his parents’ generation and older, through a phonetic and poetic prose – sounds which are swiftly passing. Owen grew up in the tiny hamlet of Greensplat, near St Austell, in the heart of the China Clay country. Owen left Cornwall at the age of twenty and, after living in Wales for a time, emigrated to New Zealand. He has published poetry and haiku internationally and his work as a poet and editor is well-known to New Zealand readers.

I Only Read It For The Interviews

Posted on January 19, 2011

One of my tasks this week is to draft the questions for my first blog interview of 2011, with poet Owen Bullock. I’ve been conducting author interviews since 2008, and here is how you can access them:

Links to 2008 interviews (third item in the post)

Links to 2009 interviews

Links to 2010 interviews

February

An Interview With Bryan Walpert

March

An Interview With Robert McLean

April

An Interview With Vana Manasiadis

May

An Interview With D J Connell

June

An Interview With Penelope Todd

July

An Interview With Chris Bell

An Interview With Kathleen Jones

September

An Interview With Renee Liang

October

An Interview With Kerry Popplewell

November

An Interview With Douglas Van Belle

An Interview With Kerry Popplewell

Posted on October 27, 2010

Kerry Popplewell has lived in Ngaio, Wellington, with her husband Bruce for many years in a house that looks over to the hills running south from Mount Kaukau; it gets all of the sun and most of the wind. They have two adult children and more grandchildren than they ever anticipated, though the only other permanent residents aat the moment are a large black Labrador called Louis and a Burmese cat called Bailey – both ‘hand-me-ups’ from one of their children. (Their home has always had cat(s) or dog(s) or some combination of both.)

Born near the end of 1940, Kerry spent the war years with her mother at her grandmother’s home in Pahiatua. When her father returned from the Pacific theatre, the family moved to Napier where she grew up. She still feels a real connection with Hawke’s Bay, especially with the Kaweka and Ruahine ranges where she and her husband have often tramped. Both her parents were teachers, her father Jim Reidy being the first principal of Colenso High School. She thinks teaching must be a form of hereditary insanity since, having gained an MA in English at VUW and studied at the University of Chicago, she returned to lecture in English for nearly ten years before resigning to care for her children; and, once they started school, she taught Mathematics as well as English at Onslow College for fifteen years.

In 1995 she took a year’s leave without pay, travelled overseas for some months and decided to retire early. It was then she started to write poems: “I’d always meant to be a poet but it took me a while to realise that to be one you had to complete poems!” Several courses she took at the International Institute of Modern Letters helped her start to do so.

Leaving The Tableland was launched in May 2010. I think that was the best-attended book launch I’ve been to – there must have been over 100 people there. For those who were not present, what led you to choose that particular venue, and what made it such a success?

I thought that if I were to have a launch, I’d like it to be a party for friends as well – and, as many of those we know well are trampers, the choice of the Tararua Tramping Club hall seemed fitting. One of my friends suggested it, possibly in jest, and I thought ‘Why not?’ It felt good being in a familiar place, even if the absence of an oven meant we had to buy a small portable one for $8 on Trade Me to heat the pastries! Roger Steele, my publisher, said he’d never had a launch in a tramping club hall before but he got keen on the idea and insisted we heat cheerios in a billy over a primus.

Do your work on your poetry in your head as you walk, or are the two – writing poetry and tramping – quite separate activities?

Mostly separate, though I do remember composing a haiku climbing up a ridge above Gollan’s Valley. Odd phrases, rhythms or ideas may come to me tramping but as for a poem, I need – literally – to have a pen in hand. But of course the places I tramp in and the experiences I have in the mountains provide material for my poems – as do all the other facets of my life, be it family, friends or faith.

If it isn’t an indelicate question, when did you first think of putting a collection of your poetry together?

Hmm. The really indelicate question would be asking why it took me so long to do so! Right from around 1996 when I started not just to write but also to submit poems for publication I thought I’d get round to collecting them sometime.

Was the path from initial idea to published collection straightforward?

No, but mostly because of my advanced skills in procrastination. Then, in 2006, a friend suggested I apply for one of the Manuscript Assessment Awards the New Zealand Society of Authors offer each year. I was fortunate enough to be given one and even more fortunate in getting James Norcliffe as my assessor. After all the detailed advice he gave me, I felt I really had to get moving. Even so, it was probably a year after Roger Steele agreed to take on my book that the collection came out – I needed to do a good deal more work on it myself.

You taught for many years. Was teaching something that helped or hindered your poetry – or is that too simplistic a question?

In my case, I think ‘hindered’ as teaching, no matter the subject matter or level, will absorb every bit of time and creative energy you are prepared to give it. But then teaching was something I truly enjoyed, so I’m not consumed with regret for all those unwritten poems! Other poets are able to combine writing and teaching very successfully.

Did a particular person inspire you to start writing poetry?

I think the poets I read did that – but certainly Helen Hill, the teacher to whose memory my collection is dedicated, encouraged my own efforts. I must have been a trial to her in some ways, pestering her to read the whole of Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” and “Lycidas” to our fourth form (Year 10) English class. Later I appreciated her reluctance! Helen Hill was also responsible for introducing me to tramping so she certainly had a big influence on my life.

Which poets do you feel have had the most influence on your own work?

Keats truly floored me when I was 14 – not only was I going to be a poet, I was sure I too would die at 25. A year or so later, it was Hopkins who had me giddy on words and rhythm. Then, in my MA year, Joan Stevens introduced us to Philip Larkin and if I had to single out one poet whose work has almost surely influenced mine, it would be him; but then, behind Larkin as it were, is Wordsworth whose attraction for me grew slowly but surely. On the other hand, the poet on whose work I intended to do my doctoral dissertation (something I never quite got round to!) was the Orkney poet, Edwin Muir. Of course there are all the other poets whom I have at one time or another ‘discovered’ – Edward Thomas, Dickinson, Auden, Herbert – not to mention New Zealand poets from Bethell to Bill Manhire. I’d find it hard to say though whether or not they’ve influenced my own work in a particular way.

Has having a book published changed how you feel about the role of poetry in your life?

Not really. Though I’d like to think I might become more disciplined in setting aside time to write and more diligent in sending work off for publication. I remember Elizabeth Smither at a workshop some years ago advising us to ‘Send Something Somewhere’ every month – I wish I did.

Now that Leaving The Tableland has been published, do you have another collection, or some other writing project, under way?

Well, I’m probably at least a third of the way towards having enough poems for a second collection – very few of the poems in Leaving the Tableland were written after 2005 and they’ve slowly been accumulating since then. Also, because I left it so long to get out a book, there were a number of other poems I’d like to have included but couldn’t. I recall Roger Steele saying that a volume the size I’d had in mind was “a little immodest for a first collection”. I’m sure he was right. (He was kind enough to suggest I could save some of them for next time!)

Book Availability

Kerry’s collection Leaving the Tableland is published by Steele Roberts (2010) and available from the publisher or in selected bookshops for $19.99 (RRP).

A poem from Leaving the Tableland, Take me back to the Bay, was my Tuesday Poem this week.

An Interview With Renee Liang

Posted on September 9, 2010

Renee Liang likes to call herself a ‘writer’ as the best description for her disparate activities, which so far include poetry, plays, fiction and non fiction, blogs (for The Big Idea and The Tuesday Poets), librettos and recently, screenplays. She has been part of the Auckland poetry community for a number of years, serving from 2005-9 as a Poetry Live MC. She also organises other arts initiatives focussing on community building and collaborations.

Renee, what impresses me most about your writing – in addition to its quality – is its range. You’re a poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, and most recently, I gather, a librettist, in the sense that poems from your chapbook Banana have been set to music. How do you organise your life to be able to fit all these things in?

I’m still in a phase of exploration! I’m in love with words and fascinated by stories, and find it very difficult to switch my writing brain ‘off’ (probably a familiar feeling to most writers). I’m always sniffing around, absorbing whatever stories I find and wondering how to best to express them.

I naturally like to experiment with a wide range of writing genres. I think of them as ‘tools’ – much like differently shaped sculptural tools, each genre will bring out a different aspect of story, and each story will have its ideal tool. For example, poetry is perfect to express a concentrated feeling or a single concept, but to explore a longer narrative showing how a character fights with her emotions, I might choose theatre. I’ve found that learning skills in one genre often helps me improve in other genres too.

It’s not that unusual among NZ writers to explore multiple genres over the course of a writing career (or even to change art forms entirely) and the community is small, so it’s easy for poets to meet composers and playwrights to meet filmmakers. People seem willing to share their experiences and secrets and teachers, mentors and collaborators are all very accessible. I’m a huge fan of ‘learning by doing’ and am not too shy about approaching people whose work I admire, so that helps a lot.

And as for how I fit it in timewise… well we all make time for the important things! I find my work as a part-time doctor and researcher fits in well with my urge to write stories. I don’t watch TV if I can help it and unfortunately I don’t have much time for music these days, as I prefer to work in silence, with a clear head. Unfortunately I have an increasing addiction to the Internet so I’ll have to deal with that one somehow.

If some dictator said “You must devote yourself to only one of these forms of writing”, which would it be – or is that an impossible demand to meet?

Pretty much impossible – as I’d want to be free to choose the ‘form’ that I think serves the story best. But poetry is my first love, I find it calms me, and it’s the thing I do most easily.

Banana, which I very much enjoyed, was your third poetry chapbook. Do you plan to keep publishing your poetry in chapbooks, or do you intend to publish collections as well?

I’d love to publish a collection! In fact I put together a manuscript for a poetry collection a few years ago and showed it to someone whose opinion mattered to me and he said (as kindly as he could) that I needed to do quite a bit more work. So while I sharpen my skills, chapbooks are a fun and rewarding way to ‘test’ my work without risking too much!

The next one due out soon is “Toward the Cyclone” – it’s a cycle of sonnets inspired by a study tour to Fiji with a group of other young Pacific leaders, where we met lots of locals, toured industries and villages, and talked with senior leaders.

In the title poem of Banana, you directly address the use of that term as an insult to mean “Yellow on the outside/white on the inside” – and you’ve called your blog Chinglish. Does your being a Chinese New Zealander mean that you are forced to confront these issues of racism and identity whether you want to or not, or did you make a deliberate decision to address them in your writing?

There’s too little time to invest in stories that you don’t care about, and identity is something I find important. Also, I believe that writing grounded in personal reality has power. Being a Chinese New Zealander means that I wear at least one of my identities on my face. Quite often in my daily life I am reminded that I am ‘different’ and it does mean some confrontation – for me if not for my often blithely unaware antagonist! And conflict is good drama, and audiences suck up emotion (and can also tell when it’s not real). So for all those reasons, I’ve found that writing about identity is worthwhile.

Once I started doing that, I found that people identified with my characters – and not just other Chinese Kiwis, but lots of others. It’s a case of the personal becoming universal I guess. Human experience has a lot more similarity than we like to think.

On your blog, you say that one of your top priorities in 2010 will be working on the third draft of your novel. Do you expect this to be the final draft, and what process of revision do you use?

Well, you never know whether it’s your last draft until you are nearly done! That being said, each of my ‘drafts’ so far has contained a significant reworking, often a major structural change or revision of character. I’m still learning what process of revision and rewriting works best for me. I find I tend to micromanage, which affects my progress – so at the moment I am trying to step back and get the larger arcs and themes right before I go for the detail. I’m very lucky to have a wonderful mentor, Siobhan Harvey, who is doing a combination of gentle coaxing and kicking me into action, and gives very valuable feedback.

You are heavily involved in the Auckland arts scene, not least as MC of Poetry Live. In many areas, Auckland seems big enough to be largely self-contained: events unfold there without much reference to the rest of the country. Is this my Wellingtonian viewpoint showing through, or is there some truth in this?

We Aucklanders like to think (and Wellingtonians will be unsurprised at this) that we have the most lively arts scene in the country. This is partly due to size which is in turn partly due to economic reasons – for example, there are lots of actors in Auckland because the TV and film industry is centred here, and so it’s very easy to find people to make new theatre work. But there are also lots of poets, and filmmakers, and musicians… and we are always organising things and meeting each other and talking and hatching new work.

As an example, Poetry Live is an amazing incubator of work, not just poetry, but for music, visual arts, theatre, film, and cross genre. On any night of the week in Auckland it’s possible to find interesting performances or events, and quite a lot of it is free or koha, so it’s a particularly vibrant time to be around. We’re lucky to have great access to venues too – city council and local businesses take the time to build a good relationship with artists, in line with the idea of a ‘creative city’ which Auckland aspires to be.

As for whether we are self contained: Auckland is a bit of a train station. A lot of visiting artists come through from south of the Bombays or overseas, and quite often they perform – for example when I was at Poetry Live we tried to include out-of-town guest poets in our lineup whenever we heard they were in town. Similarly many Aucklanders like going to other centres to show off their work. I usually seek out local poets to meet wherever I travel.

You’ve said that you enjoy working collaboratively, and you did a great job of putting this into practice when you brought your play Lantern to Wellington and got local poets to write poems on paper lanterns which were hung in Bats Theatre’s Pit Bar during the run of the play. Why is working collaboratively important to you?

I find in a good collaboration the whole is much more than the sum of its parts – when you put together two people from different artistic backgrounds but with the same passion and commitment, the project just fires! It’s also good because now there’s more than one ‘driver’ and you can push each other through the rough patches, and also keep one another to deadline (very important in my case).

I also love the way that collaboration opens up whole new avenues of artistic exploration – I gain access to skills I might never acquire for myself, or get pushed into exploring something I might never have done on my own. Generosity and respect are important in a collaboration – the contribution doesn’t have to be equal (although it’s great when it is), but both artists should end up with something they are proud of.

Which authors, playwrights and poets have had the most influence on your writing, or are among your personal favourites?

I’m always discovering new heroes, so my answer to this question is likely to change depending on what I’m reading! That being said, I really look up to Hone Tuwhare as a poet. He seemed to have a knack for finding the emotional heart of things in a playful, unpretentious way – a real joy with words. I’m also a great fan of Chekhov’s plays – they are good, old fashioned, meaty plays, back when playwrights didn’t have to pander to the short attention span of audiences and there was time to really explore the subtleties of character. Of course I’m secretly proud that he was also a writer-physician.

Do you have a plan for how your writing career will unfold? If so, and if it isn’t a secret, where do you see yourself and your writing in five years’ time?

I guess I have the same ambitions as most writers – I’d like to write something which changes the way people think and which lingers in the mind long after. I don’t have a five year plan for achieving this though! I figure that if I listen to my own passions, I’m more likely to write something that I like, and what I find compelling others might also find compelling.

I have no idea what ‘form’ my masterpiece will take either – it could be any genre, or maybe a hybrid! The distinctions between art forms are getting less and less these days. If I’m enjoying myself and feeling stimulated, then I see that as a good sign.

An Interview With Kathleen Jones

Posted on July 28, 2010

Kathleen Jones is a biographer, poet and journalist based in the English Lake District. Her partner is a sculptor working in Italy, and several members of her family live in New Zealand, so she spends quite a lot of time travelling.

Kathleen started writing as a teenager, contributing to local papers and teenage magazines. She wrote a lot of bad poetry, married very young and went to live in the Middle East where she started working for the Qatar Broadcasting Corporation as a presenter and script-writer. When she came back to England she freelanced for the BBC and this led to her first biography. She’s now written about 11 books including poetry as well as journalism and short stories. Kathleen also tutors creative writing and is currently a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Lancaster University.

You are known for your biographies of woman writers, including Margaret Cavendish, Christina Rossetti and Catherine Cookson. August 2010 sees the publication of The Storyteller, your new biography of Katherine Mansfield. What drew you to Katherine Mansfield as the subject for a biography?

I’ve loved her work and been fascinated by her life story since I was a teenager. I found the John Middleton Murry edition of her Journal in a second hand book bin when I was 17, and I’ve carried it around everywhere even though it’s in pieces now.

Even then I was aware that there was a lot of myth-making, and everything I read about her just made me more determined to find out what really happened. There were mysteries, and Katherine herself was portrayed as either a rather waspish good-time girl, or a sentimental heroine wasting away like someone in a Victorian novel. I wanted to know what she was really like.

As one might expect of such a major figure in the New Zealand literary scene, Katherine Mansfield has been the subject of a lot of biographies and other non-fiction books. If someone asked “why should I read your Katherine Mansfield biography rather than one of the others?”, how would you answer?

I would say “Read mine because it’s the only biography to be written since all the documents relating to Katherine and her husband John Murry became available in the public domain. Katherine’s letters and notebooks have all been transcribed and printed and the diaries and letters of John Murry are now also in the Alexander Turnbull Library. Additionally I’ve had the help of the family who still have quite a lot of material relating to both Mansfield and Murry. There’s a lot of new information. It’s significant that most of the leading figures in the story are now dead, so information is less likely to be withheld to protect people.”

I’ve also tried to write a book that’s good to read. I want my characters to live in the mind of the reader and come off the page as vividly as they would in a novel.

The Storyteller is being published by Penguin New Zealand. I know of many New Zealand writers who have been published in the UK, but this is the first time I’ve heard of the publishing process going in the opposite direction. How have you found that process of being published half a world away, and what promotion will you be doing for the book while you’re in New Zealand?

Yes, it does seem strange. Initially it was a partnership between a UK publisher and Penguin NZ but the ‘publishing crash’ has had a huge impact over here and literary biographies have been dropped like hot cakes – rather than selling like them. Fortunately, Geoff Walker at Penguin has been hugely enthusiastic about the book and was very happy to go ahead. I’ve got great editors and the whole thing has been a lovely experience. It’s amazing how much can be done by email!

I’m arriving in New Zealand on the 5th August and there are several events lined up – there’s a talk and discussion with Sarah Sandley at the Women’s Bookshop in Auckland on the 10th August at 6pm, in Wellington Thursday 19th for a New Zealand Book Council event, and then I’m at Christchurch Literature Festival for two events: Friday 10 September, 11.00am–12.00pm, Past Lives Session with Jeffrey Paparoa Holman & Paul Millar, and Sunday 12 September, 12.30-1.30pm, a session on Katherine Mansfield (with Harry Ricketts).

I’m also available for talks, discussions, readings and workshops and if there’s anyone out there who wants to organise a small event, I’d be happy to be involved.

Of your previous biography subjects, I suspect that Margaret Cavendish will be least known to my readers, just as she was least known to me. I was fascinated to read about the scope of her achievements, and also that she had written an early science fiction/utopian novel, antedating Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. How did you find out about Margaret Cavendish, and what was the lasting impression she left on you?

Margaret Cavendish was one of the earliest women (1641) to publish her work at a time when it was considered immoral for women even to write! I found a quotation by her when I was researching a programme for the BBC. She basically said that it was no wonder men didn’t consider women to be their equals because women were so ignorant and silly. The cure, she said, was education and while women continued to be educated at home by their mothers or governesses it would never change; ‘Women breeding up women – one fool breeding up another’.

I was so intrigued by her unique voice, I tried to find out more. It was a detective trail that ended with the biography. She was a shy, difficult, rather neurotic person, living at a time when women had very little freedom, but her courage was immense and I’ll always remember how she endured mockery and abuse with dignity, for saying that women ought to have equality.

More generally, why do you like writing biographies?

I’m fascinated by people’s lives. You could say that biography is a kind of up-market Hello! magazine – there’s an element of voyeurism, literary lace-curtain twitching about it however scholarly you are. But nothing beats the buzz you get, sitting in an archive, reading a love letter – perhaps Wordsworth to his wife – or turning the pages of Katherine Mansfield’s journals. You’re touching the same paper they touched, reading the words they inked on the page all those years ago.

According to Wikipedia, you “escaped to London as a teenager in order to become a writer”. Why was this necessary, and what led you to return from London to the North?

I was brought up on a small farm in a remote part of the United Kingdom – many of the local people had never been more than 30 miles away from home in their entire lives. Apart from breeding sheep, nothing much else went on. I loved the landscape and the isolation, so it was difficult to leave, but I knew I had to go in order to become a writer. You need contact with other writers – Katherine Mansfield had to leave New Zealand to do it.

Once I’d become a writer and established myself, it was easier to return home, but I still have to go to London regularly because that’s where it all happens.

I imagine that both environments: London, and Cumbria where you now live, provide benefits to writers. If you were a young writer growing up in Cumbria, or indeed any comparatively remote rural location, today, would you advise them to head to London to start their writing career?

Yes, I would. I think you need to get away to get some perspective on your own life. You also need ‘input’. If you stay in a small community there’s always a danger that you become a big fish in a little pond and never really achieve what you’re capable of. And you need to find your way around the world of books so that people know who you are.

The days when you could write and keep a low profile, relying on publishers and bookshops to sell the product are over – publishers expect you to go out and network to publicise your books. We have to learn to be ambassadors for our own work. The shy, reclusive author is at a disadvantage.

You write poetry and fiction as well as non-fiction. What place does each of these have in your writing?

I like all the different genres, though I’d probably have been more successful if I’d stuck to only one. It depends on the idea – some ideas are only suitable for a poem, other will stretch to a short story, non-fiction projects demand a much greater investment in time and research and have to be chosen quite carefully. If you’re going to write a biography you have to like someone enough to spend a couple of years in their company.

Which writers have been most influential on your own writing, and which are your personal favourites? Are there any writers who haven’t received the publicity they deserve that you’d like to recommend?

Apart from Katherine Mansfield’s Journal, I also read Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea as a teenager and it taught me a lot about getting away from traditional narrative. The other really influential book was Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller… and for the same reason. They taught me a lot about multiple narrative threads and parallel texts. If you put two – or more – stories together in the right way they can double up on the meaning in the same way that poetry does.

It will sound a bit weird, but the other book that influenced me was Chaos, by James Gleick, because it demolished the traditional way we thought about the universe and how it’s ordered. I suddenly realised that everything – absolutely everything – is made out of beautiful numerical patterns that keep evolving and changing because they are Imperfect and Incomplete.

It seemed to offer ideas about the patterning of words in poetry and prose – and it reinforced the conviction that a narrative or a poem has to be open ended with a sense of evolving, not rounded off and complete in a dead-end sort of way that offers the reader no way of carrying the story on. It taught me that creativity comes out of chaos. Does this make any sense?

There are hundreds of good authors out there who never get the readers they deserve. I know you’ve got lots in New Zealand who never make it across the ocean. It is such a pity. Marketing is everything these days. One really good author I’ve come across recently is Amy Sackville, whose first novel The Still Point is utterly ravishing.

Do you have a plan for how your writing career will continue to unfold? If so, and if it isn’t a secret, where do you see yourself and your writing in five years’ time?

The Mansfield biography has been very hard work – so I’m taking a rest and concentrating on fiction for a while. I would like to publish more fiction – it’s too easy to become ‘pigeon-holed’ in a particular genre. Just now I’ve got a couple of plots burning away at the back of my head and I need to see if I can get either of them to work.

An Interview With Chris Bell

Posted on July 14, 2010

In 1976 Chris Bell was the youngest poet to have been published in Norman Hidden’s British small press magazine ‘Workshop New Poetry’, which later championed British Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, among others. His short stories have appeared in ‘The Third Alternative’ (UK); ‘Grotesque’ (Ireland); ‘The Heidelberg Review’ (Germany); ‘Transversions’ (Canada); ‘Not One of Us’; ‘Zahir’ (US) and ‘Takahe’ (New Zealand), as well as on the internet. ‘The Cruel Countess’ was anthologised in The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror (10th Annual Edition), published by St Martin’s Griffin Books, in which his collection The Bumper Book of Lies received a couple of Honourable Mentions.

His short-short story ‘www.sadbastard.co.nz’ appeared in the 2005 Random House New Zealand anthology Home. Liquidambar, his first novel, was the winner of the 2004 UKAuthors and PADB’s ‘In Search of A Great Read’ novel-writing competition. His story ‘Shem-el-Nessim’ was anthologised in the PS Publishing anthology This Is The Summer of Love and received an honourable mention in Ellen Datlow’s anthology The Best Horror of The Year (Datlow’s choice of honourable mentions was described by Amanda Spedding of the Innsmouth Free Press as “an extraordinarily strong collection”) and it’s about to appear in the Constable & Robinson-published anthology The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. It isn’t a horror story.

After finishing Liquidambar, Bell wrote the first draft of a novella, ‘Saccade’, completion of which has been interrupted since the birth of his son Frank (named after Zappa), now two and a half years old.

To start at the end, you say on your website that your most recent short story, ‘Iniquity’, which you’ve made available on the site, is “perhaps the last short story I will ever write”. Why, and what comes next?

“I began submitting short stories to small press magazines in the 1980s. Before that, in the 1970s, I’d suffered the multiple blunt head trauma of rejection and disappointment from submissions to countless small press poetry magazines. While I acknowledge the value of rejection for writers (no irony intended), it’s become increasingly common and I don’t feel that’s a comment on any dwindling in the quality of my writing.

“Over the years, publishers have become increasingly slow to react and less likely to accept unsolicited work. Where once I was able to sell a story to multiple small press markets simultaneously, these days publishers increasingly demand exclusivity in return for not very much. As a full-time father, writing became a luxury I can rarely afford or find time for. I’ve decided it’s too difficult to fully explore my material. I may at some point finish my novella, and it would of course be tempting fate to claim ‘Iniquity’ is definitely my last short story, but I’ve succumbed to the law of diminishing returns.”

Your short story ‘Shem-el-Nessim’ has just been accepted for the forthcoming edition of The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, edited by Stephen Jones. I see that ‘Shem-el-Nessim’ was first published in 2006. What was the path from first publication to anthology selection?

“I decided to serialise the publication of ‘Shem-el-Nessim’ on the group blog NZBC in order to speed its completion. Prior to that I’d been working on it for about a year. It’s an homage to 1920s ghost stories and so was a tricky one to get right. It had previously taken me a weekend at most to finish a raw, first draft of a story. I then began submitting ‘Shem’ to the usual suspects: small press magazines around the world. After the customary half-dozen rejections it was accepted by Pete Crowther at PostScripts and Sheryl Tempchin at ‘Zahir’ magazine in the US. I can only assume Stephen Jones saw it in the PostScripts anthology, This Is The Summer of Love, as his contract arrived out of the blue. A rare and pleasant surprise.

“It hasn’t been a universally well-liked story, though; for some inexplicable reason the British Science Fiction Association took exception to it. Although why they even bothered reading it let alone commenting on it when it isn’t science fiction I’m not sure.”

You’ve had another notable success in getting into a major anthology, too. How did that come about?

“The St Martin’s Griffin Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror in 1996 occurred after my story ‘The Cruel Countess’ appeared in ‘The Third Alternative’ (now Black Static magazine) and several other places. It was chosen by speculative fiction mavens Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling and its selection was helped by a favourable review of my collected stories, The Bumper Book of Lies by Paul di Filippo in ‘Asimov’s Science Fiction’ magazine. Paul has subsequently supported more of my writing and offered his advice.”

How did you get your start in writing, and in getting work published?

“My first ever published story, ‘On Formosa Street’ (which is also the first real story I completed, and the first in my mainly chronological collection The Bumper Book of Lies) was published by Isa Moynihan in the New Zealand magazine Takahe long before I considered migrating here.

“While I was still in primary school in Wales, one teacher would let me work alone in the school library. He’d give me a photograph that had been cut out of a magazine (I vividly remember one of a Viking with a burning village in the background) and let me write something about the picture while the rest of the class was working on maths or something boring. That was a formative influence. Another great teacher and mentor was my secondary school English teacher Ken Walsh, who read to us from Alan Sillitoe’s ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner’ and various Ted Hughes and R.S. Thomas poems in class.

“I’ve always loved books, but it was almost certainly discovering Russell Hoban’s extraordinary books in the early 1980s that convinced me I wanted to be a writer.”

What is it that so impresses you about Hoban’s writing?

“He speaks to me on a frequency I’m tuned into. What he’s said about the ‘limited reality consensus’ we all live by, whether unconsciously or consciously, rings true — the sheer strangeness of existence we deny in order to pay the rent and get mundane things done. The fact that you and I are in different places having a ‘conversation’ about this right now is deeply and inarguably odd.

“It takes you all your life to learn what you’ve learned about great art. And one of the innumerable things Russ’s writing has taught me is that it’s impossible to imitate art. What I mean by that is that, even if you can figure out how to mimic someone’s phrasing and style, it’ll always be second-rate because it wasn’t your idea. You can’t deliver it with the totality and completeness of the creator.

“This applies to writers as much as it does to musicians. I’ve almost made a life’s study of Jaco Pastorius’ basslines. Even dissecting them and playing them back at the same pitch but half speed — which every learning musician can now do, thanks to digital technology — there’s an almost imperceptible ‘invisible’ quality between the notes, under the moment, something about the way he constructed and executed his lines that makes it impossible to impersonate every phrase exactly or write it down. Musicians who’ve studied Miles’ playing or Bird or Coltrane will know what I mean. To be brutal, it means only other musicians or writers can appreciate their peers at this level, and it distances artists from the average listener. As a writer, your ear is everything.

“I’ve always learned by absorption. Either that, or what skill I have was in my genetic code from the start.”

What adage do you aspire to live by?

“A couple spring to mind: ‘Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work’. Gustave Flaubert said that, and it applies equally to the work of both Frank Zappa and Russell Hoban. Just the other day, thanks to a member of the group of Hoban fans known as The Kraken, I stumbled on this from The Life and Work of Martha Graham:

‘There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open … No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.’

“I’d dearly love to have the courage to live by that adage.”

You’re a musician as well as a writer. Is it difficult to find the time and energy to do both, or do you find the two complementary?

“These days I treat playing music purely as a hobby and a therapeutic form of relaxation in an Oliver Sachs way, rather than a profession, which it was back in the 1980s. I find the two complementary in the sense that almost all of my stories have either been inspired by music or were written while there was music playing. ‘Shem-el-Nessim’ was the exception, but you’ll see that every story in The Bumper Book of Lies has a recommended soundtrack, suitable for listening to while reading it.

“In the 1980s I was fortunate enough to play bass in a couple of bands in front of audiences at the original Marquee Club on Wardour Street, the Hippodrome in Charing Cross Road and the Camden Palace. I’d played the working-man’s club circuit in the Northeast of England before that, for my sins, sometimes going on before the strippers stripped and the hot pies were served.

“Then, later, I had a job as entertainment relations manager for Gibson Guitars and met and did endorsement work with musicians I remembered from my childhood and adolescence, such as the jazz guitarists Joe Pass and Larry Coryell. Joe was a legend I remembered from his many appearances on the Michael Parkinson chat show while I was growing up. I got to spend quite a bit of time with Joe at the Frankfurt Music Fair, and at the Gibson showroom in Hamburg I was able to present him with an Epiphone Emperor guitar. He was cantankerous, temperamental and brilliant and liked a good cigar — especially a free one.”

What would you like to tell those potential readers who may not be familiar with your work about your short story collection The Bumper Book of Lies and your novel Liquidambar?

“Visit my website, then buy and read them. My writing won’t appeal to every reader, but if you’re willing to let me take you on a journey you might enjoy where we get to at the other end — especially if you enjoy reading Mervyn Peake, Russell Hoban, Martin Amis, Franz Kafka and George Orwell while listening to Frank Zappa and Robert Johnson. A cursory knowledge of US artist Edward Hopper’s paintings wouldn’t go amiss.

“There are recurring themes and influences in my work. Liquidambar was not only inspired by the works of Hopper, it takes its chapter titles from 12 of his most famous paintings. I connected characters who looked like the subjects of other paintings in order to make a surreal, Chandleresque detective story, in which a washed-up journalist, Typo Blod, becomes an unwilling and unlikely ‘shamus’ and falls in love with the subject of Hopper’s painting ‘Summertime’.

“I’m proud of many of the stories in The Bumper Book of Lies. It’s a mix of genres, from the surreal to fantasy and science fiction, and they date from 1983 to around 1995. Most have been published somewhere in the world.”

You moved from England to New Zealand . Do you now feel yourself to be part of the (or at least of a) New Zealand literary scene? If not, is that a concern to you?

“I’d lived in Hamburg, Germany for around 12 years before I emigrated here. In spite of having worked for two years as contract editor of the New Zealand Society of Authors’ bi-monthly print publication ‘The Author’, I feel utterly disconnected from the New Zealand literary scene. The sole example I can give you of any kind of networking with the Kiwi literati is that I follow Emily Perkins and Chad Taylor on Twitter and vice versa. But I’ve never belonged to or felt the need to belong to any kind of scene in any country.”

Which writers or other artists have been the major influences on you, and which writers do you especially enjoy reading now?

“Russell Hoban, Mervyn Peake, Richard Brautigan, Sam Shepard for his short fiction, Kurt Vonnegut, Franz Kafka, Billy Collins. I’ve been enjoying re-reading George Orwell lately, Keep The Aspidistra Flying, as well as the non-fiction works such as Down and Out In Paris and London, Homage to Catalonia and The Road To Wigan Pier. I also admire Martin Amis, especially London Fields, and Alain de Botton’s writing on philosophy.”

Which writing-related project are you especially proud of?

“To coincide with London-based and US-born writer Russell Hoban’s 80th birthday in 2005, I edited and contributed to the commemorative book 80!, which was published by Bloomsbury in the UK and supported by Liz Calder. The book and most of the accompanying merchandise were designed by my girlfriend Elisa, and the entire project was a joy from start to finish (apart from a scary interlude during which we lost all our page layouts in a hard drive crash and didn’t have a backup).

This project culminated in Hoban fans from around the world — brought together almost entirely by goodwill and the galvanising force of the internet — travelling to London for a weekend of Hoban-related festivities; including a coach trip to Canterbury, scene of some of the action in his novel Riddley Walker, and a very moving reading from the book in the cathedral’s crypt, by Eli Bishop, who maintains the Riddley Walker annotations website.

I encourage everyone who’s interested in discovering a life-changing body of work to read Hoban’s Kleinzeit, followed by Riddley Walker and what I consider to be his masterpiece, Pilgermann. Expect to be changed.”

What are you listening to at the moment?

“A perennial in my iTunes library is Scottish songwriter and former Doll By Doll frontman Jackie Leven, an inspiration to the writer Ian Rankin in his book Jackie Leven Said. There’s something about Scottish music, apparently: I also love The Blue Nile, and I’m currently overdosing on Justin Currie, the former Del Amitri frontman, who has just released another solo album, The Great War. What else can I tell you? Jaco-era Weather Report, John Martyn, Van Morrison, The Strawbs… I could go on, as you can tell.”

Book availablity

The Bumper Book of Lies is available from Chris Bell’s website.

Liquidambar is available from Chris Bell’s website, from Amazon UK, and from Amazon US.

Chris says: My blog posts appear here (although the site is currently down, as our director-general was too miserly to pay the hosting fee!): www.NZBC.net.nz