Journalese

The Burns Fellowship has turned up some unexpected requests lately. One was from a woman I’d never met who wanted advice on how to read an ee cummings poem at her brother’s wedding: the request was passed on to me by admin staff in the English Department. The poem was “[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]” – a link is given in an earlier post here.

It was an odd experience, reading cummings aloud down the phone to a complete stranger, and feeling the electricity of someone else’s desire crackle across the decades. There was the momentary sensation that I was wooing the invisible listener … which only felt reinforced by the silence from her for several beats afterwards, before she said a stunned thank you. My nine-year-old was eavesdropping at the time: he asked me who wrote the poem. “Was it a man? Is he famous?” he said. “Because he should be.” That was as giddy as reading the poem itself: to witness cummings reaching out way down the generations, and stirring something nascent in this child who hasn’t, he tells me, duh, really been in love yet.

Another request was from Thomas McLean in the English Department at Otago, who asked me to talk about poetry to his group of medical elective students. After touching briefly on how the physician and the writer share a professional interest in empathy, and how both need to be conscientious, alert listeners, I read some poems that I hoped might cross over into the students’ disciplines.

After I read ‘Exposure’, one very skeptical, serious looking young man wanted to ask a question. I braced myself for something dismissive. He was sitting in a languid, long-legged, stretched-out posture, semi-slumped in his chair; the pose that seems to say whatever you’ve presented hasn’t even been worth sitting up for. (It’s about as far from a standing ovation as you can get while still actually in a chair, not horizontal, asleep.) Then he said that when he’d read the poem earlier, on his own, he’d felt so sad, that it made him wonder how I could bear to write it. “Does writing this kind of thing really get you down?” It seemed to tweak and reverse the usual questions about how closely the poems trace the life: although I suppose that the initial manual-like register of the poem might be one reason the question was asked in this way. So we discussed how form can be like protective gloves, that help a writer to handle otherwise scalding or painful material: the way both established forms, and the search for new structures, can help to shape and hone experience, and provide some distance, and even some internal alteration. I’d guess that the notion of having to balance at least three elements — a certain detachment, inner composure, and intense feelings or correspondence with others — is something that both the writer and the medical professional constantly have to work at.

I’ll include ‘Exposure’ here. It’s appeared in Sport and in the collection Spark (Wellington: Steele Roberts, 2008).

Exposure

Specific Fear: Spiders

1. Look at a picture of a spider.
2. Touch the picture.
3. Look at a spider in a jar.
4. Handle a rubber spider.
5. Touch a jar containing a live spider.
6. Imagine how it feels to touch a live spider.
7. Briefly touch a live spider.
8. Allow a spider to remain in the palm of your hand.

Specific Fear: Heights

1. Look out your bedroom window, alone.
2. Look out a second storey window, with company.
3. Look out a second storey window, alone.
4. Look out a third storey window, with company.
5. Continue ascending until you can turn
(a spinning top, arms flung wide as a weathercock’s)
in a high, open, wild space
alone.

Specific fear: Loss

1. Tap the outside of a rinsed, clean glass. Catch the hollow note.
2. Look at a photo of someone walking out of shot.
3. Touch the photo of someone walking out of shot.
4. Look at pictures of places where someone you love is not. (Pay close attention to doorframe, park bench, fountain edge.)
5. Touching the loved one, imagine how it feels not to touch the loved one.
6. Momentarily stop holding the loved one.
7. Allow the absence to remain in the palms of your hands.

 
In a serendipitous bit of timing, I’d heard just before talking to these prospective doctors that a new poem, ‘An Inward Sun’ has won the inaugural Poems in the Waiting Room competition. It’s due out in the winter issue of the leaflets distributed around doctors’ surgeries and hospitals by poet and editor Ruth Arnison and her volunteers. I’d seen the entry fee as way of supporting an excellent cause: a no-lose situation, I reckoned. When I’ve somehow left the house without a good book to read (disaster!!! Almost as bad as losing the house keys!!) I’ve read the poetry leaflets with relief that there was more on offer than celebrity thighs/cleavage/facelift shots that seem like a kind of live taxidermy. (This is what a startled greater primate in denial looked like in 2012! Caitlin Moran is so totally right – this is not how to be a woman, nor a human!!)

Some happy news: Fosterling has been shortlisted in the Youth Fiction category of the Sir Julius Vogel Awards for Science Fiction and Fantasy. I still feel an oddly maternal protectiveness for Bu, and want him to find his way in the world, want him to find his niche. I hope he meets some more keen readers willing to take him into their homes and give him a warm, dry place to stay…

Some crabby news: the equation that says creative work is 99% sweat, 1% inspiration, is out. When you’re struggling with a first draft, and the words are only inching along the page, it’s more like 100% sweat and sulk. Even surprise news about previous work doesn’t dispel the nibbling rats of dissatisfaction. But I guess, when you are lucky enough to have a fellowship, you can say, hey, the self-doubt’s on salary this year…

[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in] by E. E. Cummings : The Poetry Foundation

[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in] by E. E. Cummings : The Poetry Foundation.

Thank-tatic, grate-elated, a-whelmed!

Parenthood, house-selling, trying to write shapely poems and a poem-sequence (or is it a novel, or is it a cross-breed, a povel, a book of noetry?) and another novel (or is it a poor failed misconception that will never reach full term?) mean that regular entries here are often deferred.

Part of my intention in starting a blog was to publish things like launch speeches, footnotes related to my books, MC notes, and maybe reviews, so that I had an archive of otherwise fleeting material. As it happens, the lifey sphere (house, children, money-work) has almost completely taken over the literary sphere for the past, oooohhhhhh, is it six months? A year?

Until this month. When I can at last say that I’ve hit some kind of rhythm in the great gift of a writing fellowship. (Of course, now it’s only two weeks until the school holidays, so … I’ll lose the beat again.)

But in the hope that I don’t completely fall behind the rest of the orchestra (all the other writers I imagine out there being endlessly productive, wise, balanced, calm, turning manuscripts, completed books, blog entries, and signed contracts in their hands as apparently-effortlessly as the young juggler we saw twirling translucent globes at the Dunedin Fringe Festival recently)… I thought I’d pin up a brief, recent speech here.  

For the first time in the history of the University of Otago arts fellow welcomes, apparently, the fellows this year were asked to respond at their reception, which was held at the Hocken Library last Thursday. Robbie Ellis, Nick Austin, James Norcliffe and I were all greeted eloquently and warmly by university staff.

This was my reply:

Professor Hayne, Professor Moloughney, Ms Susan Dell, Professor Lyn Tribble, fellow fellows, and most patient audience….

I just wanted to say that one of the uses to which I’ve already put the generosity of the Robert Burns Fellowship, is to educate myself in how few entries for ‘thank you’ there are in Roget’s Thesaurus.

I was hoping I’d come across some fizz-bang, whirly-gig, lesser known ways of expressing gratitude, acknowledgement, indebtedness, the overflow of happily beholden obligation, offering recognition, praise, requital, and singing to my lucky stars. And preferably something less histrionic than falling to my knees. I wanted a word to spring out of Roget’s with the trigger for a poem, so I could read it tonight and tender a quick return on the Burns committee’s time and investment.

But the synonyms in Roget’s first entry under ‘retrospective sympathetic affection’ were rather sparse. I’ve used them all already. Apparently this thin state of the language is getting worse. An alarmingly lurid pop-up ad from an online dictionary I used, alongside my old paperback thesaurus, gave me a visual bawling out this week, warning that the English language is closing down. “Words are dying!” it said. Statisticians have crunched numbers to reveal English is losing words every day and at a greater rate than ever before. If the research is at all valid, I suppose that writers’ fellowships and universities will have to act as etymological eco-sanctuaries — or mainland islands, in New Zealand idiom — re-foresting, re-birding, re-blossoming the language.

Nothing for it, then, but to follow my nine-year-old’s example. He’s coined his own word for occasions like tonight, when he’s brimming with nervous apprehension, mixed with happy expectation. Nix-cited. Similar hybrids seem like the best way to describe the privilege of holding the Burns. I’m thank-tatic, grate-elated, over-mazed, a-whelmed, jubilesque, happ-lirious, dumb-less, speech-founded, non-discombobulated: nimble-sticking and harvesting moon-clover all the way. Thank you!

Poetry Reading

Last night I took on the role of compere for a poetry reading initiated by Professor Barbara Brookes from the History Department at the University of Otago. The reading was held to showcase Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, who is in Dunedin to give the Michael King Memorial Lecture at the University of Otago (6 October, 6pm, Burns 2 Lecture Theatre). His support cast of co-readers last night included Diane Brown, David Eggleton, Fiona Farrell, David Howard, and Sue Wootton. Circadian Rhythm Café was the host venue again – famous for its rhyming cuppas, its veritable villanelles of vegan and vegetarian food. There was a fantastic turn out; warm sponsorship from the Literary Society at the university; and typically irresistible desserts.

This post is an edited version of the MC notes.

Diane Brown
Diane is a poet, a novelist and memoirist, and the co-ordinator and tutor for the (currently threatened) Aoraki Polytechnic Creative Writing Course in Dunedin. As Diane expressed it last night, the projected funding cuts seem to be aimed at ‘courses that teach people how to think, not what to think’. Her publications include two collections of poetry, including Before The Divorce We Go To Disneyland, winner of the NZSA Best First Book of Poetry at the Montana Awards in 1997; two novels, one of which, Eight Stages of Grace was the first verse novel written by a New Zealander, and a finalist in the Montana Book Awards 2003. She’s also written two travel memoirs and is currently writing a novel, which she says may or may not be called Hooked.

It’s a title which could equally well apply to her poems: sharp, sometimes barbed, they pull you in quickly. They’re compelling, addictive. Their apparently casual, conversational surfaces are actually impeccably timed and cadenced. Although they carry themselves lightly, often with a sly and dry wit, they mine deeply into human entanglements of all kinds.
Diane’s poetry always makes me starkly aware of the human heart’s deceptions, vulnerabilities, its incorrigible hopes. Her poems catch the moments of illumination and correspondence, of dissonance, betrayal, and of petty yet piercing cruelty in all possible combinations of a couple: be it two friends, parent and child, or lovers. Again and again, her work reminds us not how foolish, but how brave it is, to love.

David Eggleton
David Eggleton is so well-known to Dunedin audiences that it might seem redundant to introduce him. But then we’d be in danger of taking a local living treasure for granted. He is of course a poet, but also an art reviewer, a non-fiction author, an historian of popular culture, and the current editor of Landfall. He’s a much-sought-after live performer; the transformation that takes place when the apparently diffident, quiet-mannered Eggleton takes the stage makes me think both of old notions of the alter-ego – he changes from mild on-looking Clark Kent to wild SuperBard – and of possession. Sometimes it seems the creative force picks David up and broadcasts through him as its vessel. His theatrical energy is infectious. His poems can achieve either a frantic pitch and pace or a subdued lyricism; it’s socially satirical; it captures New Zealand in all its class and racial variety and divisions. Its use of rhythm, rhyme, and all the other musical tools of the poet’s trade can carry an acerbic comic lilt for the disaffected, cerebral adult listener. He could almost be the time and genre-warping love child of Jonathon Swift and Margaret Mahy; perhaps raised by punk poet John Cooper Clark and a gentle taniwha. Prepare to feel super-caffeinated.

Fiona Farrell
While I was pulling together notes for tonight’s reading I had to also pull myself together several times, as I realised afresh what a stunning line up we have. Preparing to write up Fiona Farrell’s background was one of those get-a-grip moments.
Fiona is one of New Zealand’s leading writers; she has published prize-winning novels, short fiction, poetry and memoir. Her short fiction has been anthologised alongside writers like Alice Munro, William Boyd and Nadine Gordimer. She has held several prestigious residencies, awards, and has spoken at festivals around the world.
I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this blog that I was lucky enough to hear Fiona at the Auckland Writers’ and Readers’ Festival earlier this year. There, she talked about her experiences in the Christchurch earthquakes, and the sort of iron-willed tenderness people showed each other during the crisis. Fiona tells a story as if it’s a spontaneous force – yet what she says has shapeliness and echoing refrains, so artistry sews it all together. Her poetry is a similarly deft fusion of the apparently instantaneous and the profoundly contemplated. Her most recent collection, The Pop-up Book of Invasions, calls on Irish history, myth, anecdote, family history, and her experiences of living in Ireland. The work in it is both direct and sly; plangent yet tough; deeply aware of literary and mythic tradition, yet grounded in fresh, contemporary idiom and post-colonial perspectives. It was a somewhat tremulous privilege to ask Fiona up to the mike.

David Howard
Our next poet is David Howard; whose other career, as a pyro-technician and special effects supervisor makes metaphors of dazzlement, fiery iconoclast, and scorching insight impossible to resist. I’m always half hoping he’ll bring sparklers and silver rain cascades along to a reading, but the thing about David is that he insists on the words and the audience working in concentrated tandem: no flashy distractions from the words themselves.
David, the founding editor of literary magazine Takahe, has collaborated with international visual and musical artists, and his poetry has been translated into at least 5 languages. His new collection, The In-complete Poems, is due out from Cold Hub Press this month.

David’s work is lyrical, tender; it can be poignantly and strategically elliptical; it can leap from work riddled with loss, to work that cherishes sensuous memory; it embraces the fine arts, ranges over historical incident, teases out the complexities of fatherhood. It plays with white space on the page as if it’s a sculptural and expressive presence; it believes in the reader’s intelligence.

Sue Wootton

Sue Wootton, named at the edge of the alphabet, had to take the role of penultimate wordsmith last night. Sue herself has been a warm and generous co-organiser of several poetry readings in Dunedin; and she’s quickly gained a reputation as an inspiring speaker for young or novice writers. She has written prize-winning short fiction for adults, as well as Cloudcatcher, an illustrated book for children; and her two collections of poetry, Hourglass and Magnetic South are soon to be joined by a third, titled By Birdlight.

Sue’s poems follow the implications in the title of her first collection: Hourglass. They’re shapely, self-contained, have a precise, clear sense of timing, and they often offer sprightly inversions of the expectations they seem to set up. One of her many strengths is poetry that talks about the complex elations and deflations of love – be it parental or sexual – poems that undercut the romantic even as they describe the ache of desire. She also writes beautifully about the natural world: there’s a clarity and crispness here that make readers feel their own connection to the south more strongly.

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman

Jeffrey, our feature guest on this occasion, is another poly-scribe. He dances across a number of genres – poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. I decided to break my own rules, and give Jeffrey the special guest treatment by being specific about some of the awards he has garnered. His first full poetry collection, called As Big as a Father (2002) was long-listed for the Poetry Category of the 2003 Montana New Zealand Book Awards.

 In 2007, he won the Copyright Licensing Limited Award, which led to his work Best of Both Worlds: The Story of Elsdon Best and Tutakangahau. This book has gone on to be shortlisted for the University of Melbourne Ernest Scott History Prize this year. Usually Jeffrey works as a Senior Adjunct Fellow in Humanities at the University of Canterbury, but this year, he is the writer in residence at Waikato University. There he is working on a collection of earthquake poems, and a memoir about his father’s war in the Pacific, and the Japanese Kamikaze pilots who died in an attack intended for his father’s naval ship.

Jeffrey’s two recent collections of poetry are Autumn Waiata (Cold Hub Press) and Fly Boy (Steele Roberts). His work is embedded in te manawa, the heart; te whenua, the land. It slides effortlessly from dreamlike lyrics to mordant puns and a sober contemplation of mortality; from ee Cummings-like linguistic and typographical warnings to rollicking, ballad-like poems; from the voice of a lost child, to that of the wry, wise, yet still bereft adult man. His work digs down deep into both personal and public history; it is lit and glistening with roimata tangata; yet alongside its elegiac moments it can be jaunty, blues-y, crooning, even mischievous.

If we were in Nicaragua, these poets would have filled a stadium. Anyone got sponsorship for poets to read at the Giant Dunedin Glasshouse?

The Press of Language

Even when experiencing writer’s block, I get a kind of electrical tingle, a sliding warmth, or even a centeredness out of the look and sound of certain words. It’s not exactly synesthesia, but it makes me wonder if there is another sense we haven’t yet named. Some words seem to peel free of their immediate context for a moment. They bring a feeling of ease, satisfaction, amusement, or animation, that doesn’t always fit with the meaning of the word itself. There are words I want to pick up off the page, or out of the air, and gaze at, or listen to again more closely, as if tuning an instrument. I want to turn them over, feel whether they’re rough or smooth, put them on the kitchen windowsill to see how they catch the light, and whether they’ll throw it back into the room as prismatic spill, blue coin on the floor, or a bobbing, lemon jack o’ the wall. Or whether some word might sprout: buds, leaves.

I like the idea of a sidewalk chalkboard in the kitchen, with a word of the day written there, sending out its something-like-a-scent, its something-like-a-light, its something-like-a-texture, its something-like-a-coolness: its very what’s-the-word-for-it-ness.

Catch-cry. Slub-silk. Fanfare. Funfair. All the fun of the fanfare. Famble. Enkindle. Nunky. Pinguid. Swizz. Is a cocktail stick called a swizzle stick because people tend to take to drink when they’ve been betrayed? There they sit, morose, stirring their gloom into their Manhattans… Missing a lover’s dulciloquy, perhaps. Net a certain word, and a new trail of associations seems to open up in the bristling confusion of the day: a trail to take you through to a precious moment of clarity, or a refinement of memory.

Byways, paper roads, the tracks words leave… One of the pleasures of the old-fashioned, printed dictionary is the way you can chance across the unexpected term, or the little used, the quirky, the words you’d forgotten, the words you never knew, the words you thought you knew because you’ve lived with them for so long, but here’s a whole history you’d never been privy to. I’m not so keen on electronic dictionaries. With a digital version, yes, you can click to the word you want instantaneously, which cuts to the chase: but as with action films, sometimes nothing but chase means non-stop monotonous. A bit of talky, meandering dreaminess can be far more engaging.

I love the way, with my battered old Shorter Oxford English Dictionary – a gift from my parents when I was a teenager – I can plunge in, riffling through to look for, say, ciborium (which proves my lack of formal religious instruction), and get waylaid by clingstone, clinchpoop, clergess, churr-worm, chumship. By that sweetly circuitous route I taste peach; make company laugh as we toss the insult about; imagine another life as a mediaeval scholar; hear crickets creak, and feel the presence of my paternal grandfather, Hamish, whose nickname was Chum. A printed dictionary brings about happy little shocks of happenstance: words feel like happenings, events. It’s like walking around a corner, to see an empty music stand set in the middle of someone’s front garden, and a tui perched on it, singing, ‘without notes’. Or in the bustle of the marketplace at the end of winter, turning your head to catch sight of a young woman who has cleared a small space to dance, the competition ribbons pinned to her suitcase fluttering as if they’ve barely overcome stage fright themselves; and as you glance away, you see three Buddhist monks walk past, in companionable, silent single file, alms bowls clutched under their arms, so on the page in your mind, you see arms bowls…

Words and world dance in a ring: first one leads, then the other.

Rhys Brookbanks Memorial Reading

Last night I had the very difficult privilege of helping to co-compere, with Jacob Edmond, a memorial poetry reading for the writer Rhys Brookbanks. Rhys was a victim of the February 2011 earthquake in Christchurch: a young poet and cultural commentator at the very start of his career. A 2008 English and History graduate of the University of Otago, and, after this, of the Canterbury University journalism course, he was in his first weeks as a CTV reporter when the quake struck. As a rookie journalist, he had already begun to publish articles and reviews on a wide number of topics – from book clubs to whale watching; from historical fiction to Pasifika poetry and contemporary theatre. He had published only a handful of poems: but he already had the focus and enthusiasm that suggested the vital role poetry would have had in his future.

Last night, the Dunedin poetry and academic communities pulled together and showed up in robust numbers. Rhys’s parents, Alan and Fran, flew down from Auckland to attend, and Circadian Rhythm cafe hosted, also offering refreshments at no cost. The line-up of poets either reading, or sending messages of support, was rich and diverse. (Sue Wootton, Carolyn McCurdie, Cy Mathews, Jenny Powell, Cilla McQueen, David Eggleton, Tusiata Avia, Poppy Haynes, David Howard, Diane Brown, among others.) All of this is a clear measure of what a vivid impression Rhys made in his short time here in Dunedin. As Rhys’s father, Alan, said: the night was bittersweet. That one word carries such a large freight.

Jacob Edmond reminded us all of how intensely active Rhys was in mounting readings, interviewing writers, and inviting them to speak on campus; Poppy Haynes spoke about their friendship and their ‘double act’ as editors, LitSoc organisers, and first readers of each other’s work. Jacob, Poppy and I all read poems by Rhys himself: these ranged from elegy to literary parody, found poems/satirical squibs, and political broadsides inspired by the likes of Gil Scott Herons’s ‘The Revolution will Not Be Televised’.

I want to reproduce here some of a note written for the online poetry journal, Ka Mate Ka Ora, part of which has also appeared in the Otago Daily Times.

I first met Rhys in 2006, when he was my student on the second-year creative writing paper offered at the University of Otago. He was a quiet yet noticeably dedicated student, whose gently-framed yet perceptive feedback helped other course participants considerably, and whose portfolio submissions strengthened over the course of the one semester paper. Rhys’s enthusiasm for poetry carried him on to the shared role of poetry editor at Critic (which he held alongside Poppy Haynes) and into active organisational roles in the Otago Literary Society, as well as for the free public readings at Circadian Rhythm. He took part in readings for Montana Poetry Day; he also had work published in Deep South (of which he was also editor in 2008), the Otago Daily Times, and in Takahe.

One of Rhys’s last messages to me was an out-of-the blue, ebullient recollection, along with a declaration about the song ‘Trapeze Swinger’, by singer-songwriter Samuel Bean:

Just for fun – I would like to take back all the poems and songs I brought in when you asked us to bring in one of our favourite poems (I think I brought along about six because I couldn’t decide) and replace them all with this one by my favourite singer/songwriter. His band is called Iron & Wine. I like to think of him as what Robert Frost would sound like if he picked up a guitar [...] the music has the same simplicity of structure but with a deeper overall impact [as Frost's poetry].

Witnessing a student’s joy in his or her work is one of a teacher’s greatest prizes. In this sense, Rhys was one of the most rewarding students I’ve ever taught. In an unpublished poem, ‘The Space Between’, written for his fiancee, Esther Jones, and which he asked me to critque in November 2009, Rhys quotes Rainer Maria Rilke:

But granted the consciousness that even between the closest people there persist infinite distances, a wonderful living side by side can arise for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of seeing one another in whole shape and before a great sky!

The intimate love lyric that grows from that quotation reveals a thoughtfulness, openness and tenderness that seem to be the fingerprint of his personality, as well as much of his writing. Rhys leaves all of us who knew him feeling the ache of that infinite distance.

Spook Service? Auckland Readers’ and Writers’ Festival 2011

I’ve come back from the Auckland Readers’ and Writers’ Festival knowing a little bit more about the Taliban; about Pakistan and its refugee camps; the African Masai and drinking cow’s blood (which AA Gill says tastes, logically, of steak). I know a little more about the middle-aged mind and its own newborn brain cells; how to fake a college transcript in the US; and the apparently small, yet Tardis-sized kindnesses people show each other in a crisis like the Christchurch earthquake. (Fiona Farrell, who talked about this, was a brilliant speaker. She tells a story as if it’s a spontaneous, unstoppable force, something seizing her in the moment – yet what she says has shapeliness and echoing refrains, so artistry sews it all together.) I’ve bought books and books and books, after swearing I’d already spent enough on the bedside tower for one year. I’ve had an hour or two to replenish energy while reading quietly in a hotel room; or to swim alone out under the stars and moon, feeling as free and elated as the young Beethoven in the one good scene from Immortal Beloved.

Like many writers, I’ve had a behind-the-festival festival, of coffees with writer friends; taxi-rides with poets and publishers; lobby conversations with novelists; walks through central Auckland with genial, clever film critics; of wines that marry silk and cheekiness (not to mention citrus and cynicism) with writers, publishers, festival organisers and volunteers. I’ve sat in green rooms backstage with other panelists, in that heightened, shimmering, surreal, anxious space of the minutes before a public performance. In these moments I’ve longed for a costume, grease-paint, wig, props: all the ceremonial trappings of a stage show that help an actor get into character. I’ve longed for a script, with lines. (Hence poetry readings can feel less stressful than discussions.) Waiting backstage at a writers’ festival is something more like waiting for a job interview: where you know you are going to have to perform a version of yourself, but the lines haven’t been written yet, because readers’ curiosity can come spinning round all sorts of unexpected corners.

Before the panel talk with Carol Beu, Charlotte Randall and Laurence Fearnley, I’d crammed in a bit of breathless ‘I’m going to fail the exam!’ revision of a lot of my non-fiction research so that I could answer questions about everything from the Forbidden Experiment, feral children, hypertrichosis, gigantism, acromegaly and selective or traumatic mutism. I should have written it all up on my trouser cuffs, and done what they tell you to do in exams: which is to twist what you have learned to suit the question. Because when I was asked about where Bu’s character came from, instead of talking about the way he grew from a number of influences, rumours, sources, known phenomena, fantastic possibilities, I found myself calling on personal anecdotes. They told the truth: but they told it slant, and it was a different slant from the one I’d meant to take. Sometimes writers even hide from themselves. There is something in this, perhaps, of Bu’s own elusiveness – and the fact that the contact he makes with people is fleeting, restless; that he yearns for, yet can’t achieve genuine intimacy. He’s like a paper boat constantly pushed off course, slowed and entangled by the sticks and stones and water-weed it nudges into.

I’ve felt very unsettled back home after the stimulus and freedom of the festival. A wise woman I know – also a writer, and a mother – mine actually – says this odd little inner whirlpool isn’t surprising – that “one of the jobs of a festival is to remind writers about writing and creativity”. Feeling at odds with all one’s other commitments and duties after a festival is a good sign, she counsels: it means the artistic impulses are there, waiting for the moment.

Of course, it could be nothing to do with the psychology of creativity. It might just be that I was swapped at birth and really I’m the daughter of a hotel magnate. I loved all the classy, decadent silliness of staying at the Langham. A chandelier larger than my living room! Newspapers delivered in gold monogrammed bags in the morning! Rooms marked Nirvana and Serenity! A turn-down service at night! I told Bill Manhire that I thought he’d like that phrasing: but that maybe it was the sort of service publishers would like more than writers. He laughed, dutifully. Still, I’m keeping my eye out for it in one of his poems. Of course, it could also be a very useful service for anyone pursued by just too, too many suitors or fans. Though if the turn-down service involved Langham-style chocolates on the pillow, sheets laid open, and a fresh pair of slippers by the bed, the pursuers could be forgiven for saying, “Mixed messages. Can I call you?”

Ah, the Auckland Readers’ and Writers’ Festival. Ah, the Langham. Tonight, as I was cleaning up toddler sick, a flood of hot soapy water, and the shattered pieces of the broken green bucket that re-spewed all the toddler spew all over the laundry walls, window, floor, my jeans, my face, and my hair, it was all too easy to see why some writers become festival junkies, and grow afraid of their desks at home. But there is some comfort in the thought that if we got too used to someone else dealing with the abject, someone else cleaning up after all our real, small and large agonies, soon we’d be hiring not just room service, but keyboard service too. We’d have to hang one of two little signs on the door: Please Do Disturb Me (Need Material) or Please Ghost Write my Next Book.