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NZ Poetry Day: Zoetropes, by Bill Manhire

Zoetropes

A starting. Words which begin
with Z alarm the heart:
the eye cuts down at once

then drifts across the page
to other disappointments.

*

Zenana: the women’s
      apartments
in Indian or Persian houses.
Zero is nought, nothing,

nil – the quiet starting point
of any scale of measurement.

*

The land itself is only
smoke at anchor, drifting above
Antarctica’s white flower,

tied by a thin red line
(5000 miles) to Valparaiso.

London 29.4.81

Reproduced by kind permission of the author, Bill Manhire.

Tim says: This poem captures better than any other I know both the sense of isolation which so many New Zealanders feel, and the sudden, irrational pride in reading any mention of our little country, no matter how trivial or fleeting, in the world’s media. Here we are, floating somewhere between Chile and Antarctica, hoping someone will notice us…

Bill Manhire is one of New Zealand’s best-known poets. “Zoetropes” was published as the title poem of Zoetropes: Poems 1972-82, and republished in Collected Poems (2001), available in New Zealand and internationally from Victoria University Press, and in the UK from Carcanet.

You can buy books by Tim Jones online! Voyagers: SF Poetry from NZ from Amazon.Transported (short story collection) from Fishpond or New Zealand Books Abroad.

An Interview With Kathleen Jones

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.

You can buy books by Tim Jones online! Voyagers: SF Poetry from NZ from Amazon.Transported (short story collection) from Fishpond or New Zealand Books Abroad.

Success

Mom was surprised and pleased with The Plump Pig. What can I say? I’m feeling rock-star-ish about my ability to bring the right book together with the right person. Bookworms, you probably want me as your good friend, right?

Buy Buy July

I’m so glad that I was able to hold myself down to 3 books during June because I was a biblio-monster during July.

33.

It could have been worse. I didn’t go back to that absolutely kicken Barnes and Noble in St. Louis this year. Furthermore, I didn’t go to Iowa City’s absolutely sublime Prairie Lights Bookstore although I was a measly 27 miles away in the yuppified tourist trap of Amana, Iowa. Yeah, given access to those two places, I could’ve easily doubled the number of July’s buys. I’m happy with what I got, though:

1. Flashman – George MacDonald Fraser. A CRACKED SPINZ book club pick. Get ready for a rave review!

2. The Fixer – Bernard Malamud. One for the Pulitzer shelf.

3. The Killer Inside Me – Jim Thompson. Another CRACKED SPINZ book club pick. We’re on a hot streak!

4. A Bell For Adano – John Hersey. Pulitzer pile.

5. The Truth About Poop – Susan E. Goodman. For $3.99 at Hastings, I couldn’t resist this juvenile nonfiction. Ralph Lewin’s Merde for the peanut gallery.

6. Jubal Sackett – Louis L’Amour. One of my obsessions this summer was to collect the entire Sackett series. Success! Done and done. Would it make sense if I admitted that I’m slightly disappointed that it was so easy?

7. Ride The River - Louis L’Amour. They’re all first-person by some member of the Sackett family, but this is the only one by a female member, 16-year-old Echo Sackett.

8. Sackett’s Land – Louis L’Amour. I found items 6-8 at Wal-Mart for $4.99 each. This is the order that they come in the series, so happily I got in on a fresh reissue.

9. To The Far Blue Mountains – Louis L’Amour. I went out for a haircut and somehow ended up in Trade-A-Book, conveniently located in the next block over. Then there was a huge storm in which cupfuls of rain poured from the sky. I had to protect my new haircut, right? What better time to scout for the rest of the series? This is the first book, which details who the progenitor of the clan, Barnabas Sackett, got to America. Looks like fun — a sea tale and a western all in one.

10. The Warrior’s Path – Louis L’Amour. I already read this one — got a copy from the Bybee-ary — but my Tough & Cool Completist Inner Bookworm said that leaving it out would be like having a bad gap in your front row of teeth.

11. Sackett- Louis L’Amour. I was the only one in the bookstore, so the owner, a lean gal with a no-nonsense attitude, joined me in tearing into that westerns shelf with determination and perhaps a sliver of glee.

12. The Daybreakers – Louis L’Amour.

13. The Lonely Men – Louis L’Amour.

14. Lonely On The Mountain – Louis L’Amour.

15. The Man From The Broken Hills – Louis L’ Amour.

16. Lando- Louis L’Amour. I’m looking forward to this one; I think there’s some boxing in it.

17. Galloway – Louis L’Amour.

18. Ride The Dark Trail – Louis L’Amour.

19. Mustang Man – Louis L’ Amour. I can’t help thinking about the car.

20. Treasure Mountain – Louis L’Amour. Trade-A-Book didn’t have the whole series, but there were multiple copies of many of the novels so I had a choice. I picked the ones that looked lightly read but I guess I couldve saved myself a few bucks by getting some read-hard copies. Still, I think I did OK getting out of there with items 9-20 costing a grand total of $29.14. I told the owner I’d see her again around Christmastime. Will I have an obsession then? Better to ask: What will it be?

21. Blockade Billy – Stephen King. King’s novella about a stellar rookie catcher who is a little strange seemed like perfect summer reading.

22. Dead Street – Mickey Spillane. Only $1.00 at the Dollar Tree.

23. Why I Love Baseball – Larry King. Ditto.

24. English – Wang Gang. Ditto the ditto. How could i resist the story of a young kid growing up during the Cultural Revolution in China, whose life is changed by his English teacher?

25. The Old Ball Game – Frank DeFord. A nonfiction book about baseball back in the days of John McGraw and Christy Mathewson (around the turn of the 20th century).

26. My Sister, My Love – Joyce Carol Oates. Oates’ fictionalized take on the JonBenet Ramsey case.

27. Men At Work – George Will. Another book about baseball. I only like George Will when he’s talking baseball.

28. The Sky-Liners – Louis L’Amour.

29. Mojave Crossing – Louis L’Amour.

30. The Sackett Brand – Louis L’Amour. Finding these last three ended my Sackett series quest. Luckily, all of these are mass-market paperbacks and gathering them all up didn’t hurt my wallet too much.

31. Lichtenstein – Janis Hendrickson. A brief overview of the artist, a gift for my son.

32. Nurse Nancy – Kathryn Jackson, Corinne Malvern. My preschool favorite. It still comes with colored band-aids inside!

33. Royal Flash – George MacDonald Fraser. I hope to read the whole series. Whoop, there it is! That’s my new obsession.

Laughing at Fate

Spend just a few precious moments with the daily newspaper and suddenly it becomes clear. We’re doomed.

Page One starts out OK: It’s opening day at the fair. But then we have Growing fears US may face deflation, Study sees mass migration to the US. No wonder people skip the morning paper in favor of Facebook.

British Petroleum has exiled their CEO to Siberia. McCartney plays the White House. The Austrian Governor of Cally-Fornia issues a budget warning. San Diego bans offshore boozing on personal flotation devices. No more Floatopias.

This morning I received an emotional letter from Lafayette Books in the East Bay. Owner Dave Simpson wrote, “Dear Friends, It’s Monday and I’m in the bookstore, it being the last Monday we’ll exist in the traditional ‘brick-and-mortar’ sense. We’re very excited about our new life on BIG BLUE, but for many of us – staff, friends, family, and customers alike – it’s a time of extraordinary poignancy.”

Rent was raised, sales fell past break-even and Simpson was forced to shrink his excellent store to fit inside a renovated bookmobile. A sadly familiar story in recent years, except for the bookmobile.

Simpson writes “Since 1963, the Lafayette Book Store has been a center of literary activity and a community center where people come to browse books, ask for recommendations, meet their neighbors, and cultivate relationships with our charming, intelligent staff… with the closing of the brick-and-mortar I worry that the talisman will be lost and the community that’s gathered around the bookstore will dissolve.”

Simpson adds, “Together we can prevent this from happening! … the VERY best way to keep this sense of community is to join us on Facebook.  We have a Lafayette Book Store page and also The Bay Area Bookmobile page.”

Really? When your local bookstore goes down, you save the situation by friending it on FaceBook?

“We’ll be active there with our schedule of appearances, announcements of author signings and events, and as always, our book recommendations (and you can offer your own!). Come join the conversation!”

Dave, I feel for you and for the community you’ve served so well. I’m happy I can still find you online and in your new bus. That’s all good, but tell me how is Facebook any kind substitute for what we’re losing here?

Pretty much every US bookstore is already on Facebook, whether they are “real” or just an address. Those real life readers, the brick and mortar ones who supported you with their time, dollars, and love. Now… well, maybe they’ll friend you on Facebook.

I have trouble imagining that as any kind of good news.

In June the small town of Willits in Mendocino County lost its favorite bookstore, Leaves of Grass. Their web site forlornly announces they’re open Monday through Saturday 10-6, Sundays 12 – 5. But the phone is disconnected, the books are gone, and owner Rani Saijo has moved on.

Back in May she wrote, “Changing times have made it impossible for us to keep going. Thank you to all our friends & supporters for these wonderful years!”

However, we do have a birth to celebrate. This summer KZYX’s own Loretta and WDan Houck opened a bookstore in Boonville, named Laughing Dog Books. “Come! Sit! Read!” Congratulations!

I’m sick of bookstore obituaries. Let’s cut it out, people. Support your local independent bookstore today, and tomorrow, and again next month, too. I still prefer to find my bad news in the daily newspaper, where most of it isn’t so personally painful.

NOTES:

Lafayette Book Store, 3569 Mt Diablo Blvd Ste E (next to Postino Restaurant)
925-284-1233   mail@lafayettebookstore.com  

Laughing Dog Books

LDB on Facebook

Think of a Number

Before I get to my review of Think of a Number by John Verdon, I would like to talk a little about my early reading habits. At a fairly young age, probably before I even understood that Donna Parker was “in Love” with the blonde sitting across the booth from her at the soda shop, I read all of the Donna Parker books. Then I moved on to Nancy Drew mysteries – all of them in rapid succession. I hope that some of you remember these series, if not, check them out! They were great!

Then my mother started collecting the Perry Mason mysteries by Earle Stanley Gardner. I read them all…for years. I developed a selective memory, forgetting who the murderer was, so that I could read them all again. The story lines were very formulaic. Mr. Mason, Paul Drake the detective, and Della Street the secretary always worked out the crime – usually when Mr. Mason was interrogating the witness on the stand. I loved them. Four children and a lifetime or two later, Think of a Number is the first murder mystery that I have read in quite some time. And. I. Loved. It!

Dave Guerney and his wife Madeline are trying to adjust to two things – the first is that Dave has just retired from the NYPD as a star homicide detective and the second is grief surrounding the death of their son years ago. But something interrupts the quiet life they are seeking. Mark, a college acquaintance of Dave’s, contacts him about strange letters he has received. The first letter suggested that the writer knew Mark well enough to know what number between 1-1000 he would select – and he did know. The letter writer wanted money, then sent more letters:

TITLE: Think of a Number
AUTHOR: John Verdon
COPYRIGHT: 2010
PAGES: 418
TYPE: fiction, mystery
RECOMMEND: I must admit that after years of not reading a good mystery, I really enjoyed this book.

US Vs. UK: Claire de Lune Covers

I’m torn this week: I really like both covers. When I first saw the UK one, I wasn’t keen, but it’s grown on me. I think the red and black is very striking, and it uses the Zephyr font used for The Twilight Saga. Instant win in my opinion!

The US cover image is also eye-catching, and there’s no way I’d walk past it in a shop. I’m not sure that either of them really scream werewolf though, at least not to me anyway. (Is that just me? Would you see these and automatically think “Ah yes, werewolves”?)

Do you have a preference?

Waiting On Wednesday: Confessions of the Sullivan Sisters

Waiting on Wednesday idea from Jill at Breaking the Spine.

—–

Confessions of the Sullivan Sisters by Natalie Standiford

* Published by: Scholastic Press (US)
* Format: Hardcover (US)
* Release Date: September 1st, 2010 (US)
* On Amazon: here

Amazon summary:

The Sullivan sisters have a big problem. On Christmas Day their rich and imperious grandmother gathers the family and announces that she will soon die . . .and has cut the entire family out of her will. Since she is the source of almost all their income, this means they will soon be penniless.

Someone in the family has offended her deeply. If that person comes forward with a confession of her (or his) crime, submitted in writing to her lawyer by New Year’s Day, she will reinstate the family in her will. Or at least consider it.

And so the confessions begin….

I LOVED Natalie’s last book, How to Say Goodbye in Robot, so I can’t wait for this one. She has awesome writing and characters, and Confessions of the Sullivan Sisters sounds like it will be just as good. I wonder what their secrets/confessions are? I don’t know about you, but I’m intrigued!

Reader Review: Paulet Smart, Austin, Texas

Paulet Smart of The Write Club posted this sweet review of Sisters, Strangers, and Starting Over on The Write Club blog. Check it out here.

I have a couple of other reader reviews to post, too. Forgive me. I’m still catching up after the knee surgery. Today, I discovered an entire page of emails I hadn’t even opened the last week of June! Which just proves what I’ve always suspected: I do pretty well with pain, but anesthesia and painkillers—forget it! They make me completely, and utterly useless!

Be well!