Pip has posted Part One of her podcast about the Roadwords Tour on her blog Better Off Read!
“In this the first part of a two part Roadwords Special Pip shares some of the highlights of the tour. This episode includes a song by Grant Ramsay performing as Swampy. Part 2 of the Roadwords Special is a full recording of the event in Wanaka and will be available on Sunday 18 November.”
Click through for more…
We Storified our Roadwords tour on the road tweets, so you can see them all here: https://storify.com/Roadword/roadwords-tour
Enjoy! It was a great time, and it’s great to have a record of all the places we went. Thanks especially to the audience members who tweeted about the tour. And I guess that’s us. (Competition Winner announced on Competition page).
When I opened up my fresh new copy of Laurence Fearnley’s latest book, Reach, I did what I do with every new book I get. I looked at the first few pages, read the first few lines, then turned to the acknowledgements section at the back. I don’t know why I always read the acknowledgements first, but I started doing so long before I knew any actual writers myself. At some point during my evolution as a reader, reading the acknowledgements was something I did while I was reading the book, rather than once it was finished. I began to read them earlier and earlier until eventually it became the first thing I did. Maybe it’s the amateur anthropologist in me, but I find myself as interested in the writer of the book and her/his influences as I am in the book itself. So the more extensive the acknowledgements, the more pleasurable the text. I used to do the same thing with LPs (yes, LPs!) and CDs.
Reading Laurence’s acknowledgements, I was surprised to see my name there. What the heck had I contributed to this book? I hadn’t read any drafts, or offered any feedback. But Lorry (Lawrence Patchett, who did read drafts and offer feedback) pointed out that Laurence had acknowledged the ‘conversations’ she’d had with many people, including me. The reason I’m writing about that here is that I’ve been thinking a lot about this tour and how it was born out of friendships we formed during our PhD study. Something indefinable happens in some workshop situations, and here I want to say something about the whole being greater than its various parts. There were indefinable advantages for our writing in the development of our friendships with each other, and maybe it is these that Laurence acknowledges (or maybe not; I haven’t asked her. If I did, she might say, ‘Rubbish. Remember that time you told me about a dog* that got hit by a car? That’s what you contributed to the book’).
When I started studying writing, I was just as interested in finding a community of creative people I could relate to as I was in learning to write. Not all of us are like this. I’ve just always been a bit obsessed with community, and always found it difficult to place myself in any (#2 reason for Acknowledgements obsession). The truth is the writing came first, but if I could come out of my study with a community of like-mindeds, I’d be very happy. And I was. I was twice blessed in that I moved straight from the MA to the PhD, and therefore got to know two groups of writers, the second lasting nearly four years and welcoming new members as time went on.
So this is how Laurence, Pip, Lorry and I know each other: Pip & Lorry were in the same MA workshop and same studio space before the PhD; Laurence was an established writer who didn’t know any of us but was looking for a way to stimulate her writing again through contact with other writers; I didn’t know any of them either but had just finished the MA, had a fairly lofty idea for a novel, and was keen to maintain some connection with the writing environment at the IIML. There were eight or so others in the group too who became really good friends. We all wrote differently, had different ideas, different processes and different histories. But the amount of generosity and support from the other writers was always pretty extraordinary. Sometimes that generosity came in the form of really strong critique. The best kind.
So what did we do? Well, we wrote our books, and analysed our analyses, but every six weeks we got together and read someone’s work and gave them some feedback. That was it. Sometimes it sounds so ridiculously simple it is very difficult to express how helpful this process is, but anyone who has ever done a workshop will know.
Except that wasn’t entirely it.
Last year I attended a conference in which ‘the writers’ workshop’ came under pretty heavy critique. I don’t think the workshop process is perfect, but I was surprised by some of the comments I heard. Obviously, the workshop wasn’t working well for everyone, even in the PhD course I’d just left. What was going on?
‘It’s hard to respond to someone’s work when you don’t really know them or their project that well,’ a friend told me, ‘it’s different to the MA where you see each other every week and form a really strong cohort. We only see each other every six weeks.’
But, I asked, didn’t they spend time together outside of that? Did they ever have coffee and talk in between bouts of intense reading and scribbling or typing away? It became apparent that because many lived out of town or had family commitments, the answer was no, not so much. I thought this was a terrible shame, but I also knew from what I’d heard that day that not everyone would agree with my sudden brilliant hypothesis: that friendship was a crucial factor in the development of a successful workshop environment.
This feels like stating the obvious, but apparently it isn’t, and in teaching a writing workshop at any level, the convener can’t say ‘Hey guys, this’ll work so much better if you become good mates.’ Where’s the empirical evidence? What if you don’t like each other? Can the workshop be successful without the sticky stuff of relationship filling the gaps? Of course it can, but I’ve begun to suspect it won’t be as successful. And how do you facilitate, or talk about, something as amorphous as friendship as a crucial factor in doctoral study?
I don’t want to dwell too much on the academics of it. What happened was: we had lunch once every week or two. I seem to remember Pip was particularly good at rounding us up. Sometimes other writing friends came along. It was a sweet relief from the isolation of office hours (though it also helped that we all shared offices on the same floor). Every six weeks, before our workshop, we had a really big lunch with all the out of towners. Eventually we started going out for a drink after class too. At those lunches, especially early on, I remember a great deal of discussion about our projects as we tried to figure out what everyone was doing. We’d swap seats or start new conversations just to get to know people and their work.
As we got closer, sometime into the second year of study, I began to notice the workshop strengthen. I found myself arguing more intensely for or against particular aspects of a project, because I cared even more than I had before. This was not a professional exchange, but a personal interest in seeing a friend develop the full potential of their project. After someone offered a particularly passionate critique of my own work, I felt pleased rather than bruised. I knew the reviewer was fully invested in my writing and where it might go.
I continue to be surprised by the generosity of the friendships we formed during our years of study. I shouldn’t be. Writers are a pretty friendly bunch (even the awkward ones), and invariably generous (even the grumpy ones). Example: I get to tag along on the Roadwords Tour. I think we’ve all missed each others’ company and talking about the various ways we write. On the tour we’ll get to ask each other questions about our books. It’s funny, but even after so many discussions about writing, there are still many things we don’t know. Like, the subject of Pip’s new novel and her future podcasts, if Lorry finds writing about the future similar to writing about the past, whether Laurence likes climbing mountains or writing about climbing mountains better, and if anyone else has the weird habit of reading the acknowledgements section first…**
*or something else I don’t remember saying.
**may have to stop doing this now that I’ve admitted it.
My mum and dad are both from Invercargill. My dad was in a rock and roll band called The Drifters when he was young and my mum was a founding day pupil at James Hargest College. My grandmother is from Winton. I grew up in Auckland and we visited only rarely. So, until I returned, the South Island was always the place of my family’s stories. A magical, extreme place caught in promise and frustration, laughter and despair. When I finally got to live in Christchurch and then Dunedin, I got to experience my own version of the South Island and make my own stories, but these were always overlaid with the stories my family tell about hard frosts, turning the Zephyr round on Tay Street and skies that open out to breaking.
I write prose in our house in Aro Valley now, usually with my dog close by. I’ve had two books published by Victoria University Press, a collection of short stories Everything We Hoped For and a novel which was published last year, I’m Working on a Building. I’m really looking forward to traveling with Laurence, Tina and Lawrence through the South Island.
Pip Adam at Arts Foundation
http://www.thearts.co.nz/artist_page.php&aid=140&type=bio
Pip Adam on Twitter
https://twitter.com/PipAdam
Pip Adam on Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/PipAdam
Pip Adam’s Tumblr toward her new work Tragedy of the Commons
http://pipadam.tumblr.com/
Recently I was sent a story I’d forgotten about. It starts like this.
There was a king in Wales called King Ryan who owned twelve kings, and he made them shear their beards and he put them on his cloak. King Ryan found out about King Arthur. He sent a messenger to tell King Arthur that he would be one of his own kings too, and to shear his beard – “And if you don’t I’ll get my biggest army and my best army to come over and kill you.”
It’s called ‘How Sir Balin came to be the Best Knight of the Round Table’, and it was written at the tiny rural school at Hook. It’s quite a hoot. There’s King Ryan’s preoccupation with shearing beards. There’s also an alarming body count. Seven nobles lose their heads in nine hundred words, including a ‘wee lady’ who, despite seeming innocuous enough, turns out to be the Lady of the Lake and ‘cruel and nasty’ to boot. Here’s what happens next:
Sir Balin crept up behind her like a cat catching a mouse, just ready to catch it, and slashed off her head with his sword.
King Arthur said, ‘Oh, why’d you do that?’
‘I know she’s a witch. I knew it.’
Sir Balin gets exiled for that, and so the adventure begins. It’s the strangest story I’ve written, and the funniest.
It’s easy to miss Hook School. It’s down a quiet road in South Canterbury, and there’s no town or village there, just the old school and the teacher’s house, and the hall opposite. The school closed a long time ago and now the sports field is planted in spuds. Even in the mid-eighties there were just twenty-odd kids, but somehow it was—for me, at least—a place firing with imagination and stories and books.
I suppose the teachers had a lot to do with that. The one I remember best took us kids and his hang-glider up a hill paddock and ran down it, trying to take off. He wrote a school play that I think featured Sir Lancelot. I also remember him showing me how after using a sword a knight had to wipe it clean on the grass. These are things I remember anyway; I suppose for other kids it was different.
It was that teacher who sent me ‘Sir Balin’ recently, perhaps discerning a link with the stories of I Got His Blood on Me. Certainly there is one story it makes me think of. It’s ‘My Brothers Blood’, in which Edward, a member of an animist cult, journeys towards conflict in Fiordland. Both stories have the same drive towards a violent showdown. Both central characters have a difficult relationship with the people at the top: Sir Balin because he decapitates that lady without getting the King’s say-so first, Edward because he is too divided to commit to the activist life.
And in both stories brother relationships are important. Sir Balin’s brother saves him by helping slay six kings, enabling him to pierce King Ryan’s heart with a sword (a thrust that doesn’t kill him, but does cause him to fall off his horse). In real life it can be hard to be brave without such a person there beside you. Someone like a brother. And even then it’s complicated. It’s questions like these that ‘My Brother’s Blood’ explores as well.
But discussing these stories in this way is much too serious. Really, both were written for the same reasons—for school assignments, and for fun. For the enjoyment of starting an adventure story and filling it with epic journeys and weapons and fighting. For the fun of starting with ‘Imagine if …’
And King Arthur said, ‘Aha, do you want to be the boss of all these kings do you?’
King Ryan said, in a dying kind of voice, ‘Oh no, I don’t want to.’
So King Arthur said, ‘All right, you can be one of my servants.’ So he was made one of Arthur’s servants, and all King Ryan’s servants were made his servants too.
And Sir Balin was one of the best knights of the Round Table. When he sat in the chair his name appeared on the back, and he had the highest chair of all the Round Table.
Roadwords Ahead profiles a different Roadwords author every second week.
Writing for me right now consists mainly of reading. When people ask me how I’m doing I tell them that most days I berate myself for how much I’m not doing. I’m trying to keep notes on what I read so that it doesn’t feel too much like a hobby, which is how a family member accurately described what I’m up to last week! Reading, as Eleanor Catton pointed out recently, is an important part of being a writer, but it’s hard to quantify how much you’re doing when you’re not producing words. When I’m actually writing, I try to produce at least 1000 words a day. If I do that, I don’t hate myself. I generally like to pretend that hate is not a useful emotion but the truth is I’m not sure how much I’d get done if there weren’t a smidgen of self-loathing involved.
I am very lucky that right now I get to do my reading in the front room of an historical cottage that is decorated with furniture and art from the era I am writing about. 19th century Wellington is all around me, even in the timbers below my feet that were prised from dismantled ships. I have a reading chair in the style of the era, and tomorrow I will spend most of my day sitting in it reading about 19th century London, my characters (who are based on real people), and exhibition halls (pre-Museum era buildings that housed everything from curious collections to stuffed animals to freak shows). I start every day wanting to read all of it, at once. I finish every day wishing I’d read more. I think it was Zadie Smith who said to be a writer is to never be satisfied again.
Some of my favourite reading days are spent at the Alexander Turnbull Library. The most magnificent thing I have read is an 1847 edition of George French Angas’ The New Zealander’s Illustrated, which is the size of a small coffee table. The full-colour lithographs were sent to subscribers ten at a time for 18 guineas a section. When complete, the buyers had their collections bound. Alexander Turnbull bought his copy for 1800 pounds at the turn of the last century. Original subscribers included royalty, governors and prominent colonists. Portraits include many prominant chiefs who signed the Treaty of Waitangi. Angas included his own ethnographic observations in the text, and even through the filter of his Eurocentric point of view, the New Zealand he encountered is fascinating.
I’m looking forward to reading on the road south. I tell my students that we should read the world around us just as much as we read words on pages. I’m looking forward to the stories the south will tell.
Photo: Robert Cross
Tina’s website
A favourite review on Paula Green’s NZ Poetry Shelf
Some Radio: Te Ahi Kaa & Standing Room Only
Dompost profile: Finding identity
I write best in sheds. My regular shed is a concrete box in Raumati, next to a busy roundabout. You have to wear earmuffs to block out the traffic. The desk is a door and sawhorses from the dump. If you stand up, you can just make out a slope of kohekohe forest on the escarpment. And there’s always damp, because much of Raumati is reclaimed swamp.
Another favourite place to write is on the train to work. From the window you can see raupō poking through paddocks, pūkeko flicking about. Everywhere the wetland wants to come back. From here it’s easy to see my characters navigating the returned swamps of the future, the altered climate that is ahead of us. In that way Raumati is like the South Island places where we grew up—small farms prone to peatiness and swamp near Springston and Hook.
Most of our family lived in the South Island. I remember trips to the Hunter Hills, Te Anau, through Central and the lakes. Lots of my favourite books are from there too—The Divided World, Butler’s Ringlet, The Lazy Boys. I’m keen to get back.
Links
Read ‘My Brother’s Blood’ from Sport 40 http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-Ba40Spo-t1-body1-d51.html
Listener interview http://www.listener.co.nz/culture/books/interview-lawrence-patchett/
More info at Lawrence’s website www.lawrencepatchett.com
Lawrence on craft www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/culture/6222050/Bright-literary-sparks-on-the-rise
Lawrence interviewed by Craig Cliff: http://thecraigcliff.blogspot.co.nz/2012/06/all-that-lofty-stuff-chat-with-lawrence.html
A RNZ interview: http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/artsonsunday/audio/2519377/lawrence-patchett
I’ve spent the last couple of weeks recording episodes of a podcast I’m launching in September called Better off Read. This means, I’ve spent a lot of time lately giving the majority of my attention to the voice, experiencing people through my ears rather than my eyes. I’ve become quite intrigued by how people sound and the noises around us.
So, I’ve recorded my post rather than writing it, to sort of launch myself voice first into the tour, which I’m really looking forward to.
Also, here’s a link to Sneaky Feelings’ ‘Husband House’, a beautiful song with a video that shows a lot of my favourite Dunedin places. I can’t wait to walk up George Street. Thank NZ On Screen.
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