For full details see here
David Eggleton is off to Nelson to perform
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Category Archives: NZ author
A new writers festival like no other: Ruapehu Writers Festival, Ōhakune, 17–20 March 2016
Tickets are on sale now for the country’s newest, and quirkiest, writers festival, to be held in Ōhakune in March. And even if you can’t make it, you can still be involved by donating to its crowdfunding campaign.
A pony ride with a popular children’s author, a literary waterfall walk, poets on bikes and a venue like something out of Twin Peaks: this doesn’t sound like the average writers festival. But then the first ever Ruapehu Writers Festival, which will be held in Ōhakune on 17–20 March, is not an average writers festival.
Locals and visitors alike will be able to enjoy a long weekend of events – including readings, panel discussions, workshops, sessions for children and a poetry slam – featuring 40 New Zealand writers, from the well-known to the up-and-coming. Tickets and season passes are on sale now, and a Boosted crowdfunding campaign to support the festival is running until the end of February.
Festival sessions include a Friday night lecture by award-winning novelist Elizabeth Knox, a fiction-writing workshop with Auckland writer Sue Orr and the pony ride with Stacy Gregg, the author of the popular Pony Club Secrets series. The setting will be acknowledged in a session about local history with leading non-fiction writer Martin Edmond, who grew up in Ōhakune, and local historian Merrilyn George, and another on the Desert Road.
Other well-known writers who can be heard at the festival include novelists Emily Perkins, Fiona Farrell, Nicky Pellegrino, Jenny Pattrick and Fiona Kidman and poets Paula Green, Harry Ricketts, Tusiata Avia and James Brown. Local writers are also being included, such as novelist and Taumarunui High School teacher Antony Millen, and editors from four of New Zealand’s literary presses will talk about what they look for in new writing. The complete programme is available on the festival website.
The festival is the brainchild of poet, lecturer in English literature at Victoria University, and 2016 Katherine Mansfield Fellow Anna Jackson . She and her husband Simon Edmonds, owner of Tuatua café, have a house at Rangataua, next door to Ōhakune. “We realised that Ōhakune, half way between Auckland and Wellington, is the perfect place to hold a writers festival. While many people visit during winter for skiing, it’s at its most beautiful in summer. And the local community has been so enthusiastic about having this event in their town.”
Joining Jackson and Edmonds on the organising committee is poet and Seraph Press publisher Helen Rickerby. She says, “This is going to be an informal and fun festival, and I think the fact that it’s being organised by writers has given it a different approach.” Jackson says she expects readers and writers involved to come out of the session still talking about some of the ideas and books discussed. Readers and writers will also have chances to meet each other and keep talking about ideas on the waterfall walk – free for anyone to come along.
The festival will be based at the Powderhorn Chateau, right next to the Ōkahune railway station. “It is a fantastic venue, with large spaces and two decks to relax on in between sessions. Being in an alpine forestry town, the hotel has log walls, which reminds me of the hotel in Twin Peaks – but less creepy,” Rickerby laughs.
Tickets are on sale now, with earlybird season passes at just $90 (until 6 February) and individual sessions at $14, with concessions also available.
Edmonds says, “It was important for us to keep prices low, so as many people as possible could afford to come. We have some funding from Creative NZ, but we hope people will support our crowdfunding campaign so we can pay for accommodation and travel for the guest writers, who are generously donating their time.” Because Boosted contributions are eligible for a tax credit, donors will get 33 cents back from every dollar they donate.
- Donate to the Boosted crowdfunding campaign.
- Find out more about the Ruapehu Writers Festival and buy tickets here.
Media:
- For more information contact Chris Wilson on 04-463 9498, 021 0525 300 or chris.wilson@vuw.ac.nz, or Anna Jackson at anna.jackson@vuw.ac.nz.
- To interview the organisers or any of the participating writers, email anna.jackson@vuw.ac.nz.
- Profiles and photos of participating writers are available on the festival website.
- A media kit, including downloadable logos and images, is available the festival website.
Lynley Edmeades kick starts Dunedin’s Octagon Collective/Dog with Two Tails Poetry Readings as MC this year
I am looking forward to this book!
Poetry Shelf: Invitation Interviews – Mary McCallum interviews Jamie Trower
Mary McCallum of Mākaro Press interviews debut poet Jamie Trower about his collection Anatomy, which they published under their Submarine imprint in 2015.
(for my review of the book see here)
Mary McCallum: As a new poetry publisher we get a lot of emails from people wanting to submit their collections of poetry. Some of those emails are like explosive devices — as soon as you open them you know you’re in danger. All the tiny words on the screen shimmer with the excitement of being written by someone for whom words are not simply tools or exciting ways to evoke the world of experience or imagination, but tiny rockets that have changed or saved a life.
This was the case when I opened an email from Aucklander Jamie Trower – a young man in his early twenties who had only just discovered poetry, but who had nonetheless crafted a whole collection that he wanted me to read. A collection of poems that charted his recovery from a terrible childhood brain injury that could have killed him.
What a ride. It felt to me reading Anatomy for the first time – and I continue to feel this – that Jamie had given himself permission to write how he wanted to write, and discover what he wanted to discover using words in a way that he’d never thought possible. With obvious delight he raged on the page, and laughed at and interrogated it. Words came and he connected them and lit the fuse. Which is not to say Jamie wasn’t open to editing. He was. He loved the whole process … more of a chance to play with words, more connections to fire. We published it, dear reader, and this week I talked to Jamie about the book so close to his heart – how he wrote it and why, and where to now.
M: What made you start to write poetry?
J: In the months of rehab after I sustained a severe brain injury as a nine-year-old, I learned to use a typewriter. I wrote sporadic, jumbled notes of how I was feeling and the changes I noticed in my wheelchair-bound body. I really started writing poetry after taking a creative writing course at the University of Auckland two years ago. It was then that I went back to the notes that I wrote in rehab and found myself expanding and stretching the words into poetry.
M: What do you like about it?
J: The beauty and ease of poetry. How a single moment can be expanded on, heightened, strengthened, transformed, stretched, redefined and moulded in a couple of lines. How a writer can adapt a thought, a feeling or an event so easily through compressed, rhythmic language.
M: Who are your poetry heroes? Are there any poets you try and emulate?
J: I am in awe of Sam Hunt, Paul Muldoon, Ben Okri – the list goes on! I think their writings are compelling and eloquently formed. I draw on their poetry quite a bit – how they use simple thoughts and words to create a big impact.
M: Your poetry collection feels like one long narrative poem about what you went through when you had a brain injury as a child – rather than lots of separate poems – do you see it that way?
J: Anatomy is definitely narrative in its structure: a start, middle and end. I tried to separate the poetic canvas by titling the poems – making it feel like more of a collection rather than a narrative – and pairing it with a traditional form of storytelling. I decided in the editing process to parallel poetry with prose to guide the reader, and to allow the emotion I felt to show through more.
M: In Anatomy you indicate the typewriter was an important tool in your rehab – is poetry also important as a form of therapy in getting over what happened to you?
J: Poetry will always be my rehab, my therapy, my hospital, my home. This use of self-expression and self-examination helped me (and still does) realise that I needed to take control of my own body, my own disability. I hope to continue to use the lessons that poetry has taught me for many years to come.
M: What are you writing now?
J: I’m writing my next poetry collection, and I’m brainstorming a novel on the side. I’m excited to see what comes of it!
M: Who are you reading?
J: Right now I’m reading Michele Leggott’s Heartland (for the tenth time, it feels). She very kindly came to the launch of Anatomy, which was very, very cool.
Mākaro Press page
You are invited to the launch of Gregory Kan’s This Paper Boat
Auckland University Press and Gregory Kan warmly invite you to the launch of
This Paper Boat
6pm, Thursday 25 February
Time Out Bookstore
432 Mount Eden Road
Mount Eden Village
Auckland
My mother used to make up stories in the darkness that no one knew the endings to. It was a kind of permission to have imperfect and beautiful plans.
Please join us in celebrating the publication of Gregory Kan’s debut poetry collection, launched by award-winning poet Michele Leggott.
6pm, Thursday 25 February 2016
Time Out Bookstore
432 Mount Eden Road
Mount Eden Village
Auckland, 1024
RSVP not essential but helpful for catering
Phone 09-373-7528 or email pressmarketing@auckland.ac.nz
Poetry Shelf review: Jamie Trower’s Anatomy – it is poetry as reboot
Jamie Trower Anatomy Mākaro Press 2015
At the age of nine, Jamie Trower suffered a traumatic head injury when skiing on the slopes of Ruapehu. After months in a coma, he spent two years at the Wilson Centre in Auckland. Jamie is currently based in Auckland where he is studying English and Drama at the University of Auckland. Anatomy is his debut poetry collection.
Anatomy rebuilds anatomy. The word ‘disability’ (disabled, disable, disablement) is like a shadow protagonist that Jamie pitches against and from. It felt like a physical presence, an entity to interrogate as Jamie navigates his recovery paths. To read our way into and out of ‘disability’ is to thwart ‘unable’ and latch upon ‘enable.’ It is to follow Jamie from the accident and rocks to his cloud nine.
I felt a little nervous opening the book, as in the middle of my PhD, I smashed into a glass door and suffered the effects of post-concussion syndrome for about a year. Everything was thrown in the air as I struggled to make sense of the world let alone my academic research. My ability to speak and write and c0mprehend (and hang out the washing, cook dinner) was utterly compromised. Once I started reading Anatomy, the twitchiness at revisiting the memory of my vulnerable head faded.
This book is poetry as record, it is poetry as reboot and poetry as rehabilitation. Writing becomes a way of refurbishing self and moving through. You are carried along by the fluency of the line, so lyrically, yet there is the white space of hiccup. Some words are stretched out as though we say them slowly ( d i s a b i l i t y, t h i n g). Some words drop down the page like a teetering step ladder to cloud nine or back down to earth. The poetic choices heighten the struggle to recover, and to face what recovery means.
This is a poetry collection that moves and elevates you, that records a devastating experience at the most personal of levels, and that plays with what words can do (from the first clacks and clatters on the old typewriter he was given by his teacher). Wonderful!
from ‘( m a y b e , t o m o r r o w )’
m i g h t
hybridize
from teenage boy
in
n a p p y & pacifier,
to a mighty sea bird –
to a juvenile juggernaut
– dancing
in the wild …
to whistle
in rainbows
of thistles,
(ocean spray) …
Mākaro Press page
Poetry Shelf review: Holly Painter’s Excerpts from a Natural History – This book is a tonic for me as a reader
Excerpts from a Natural History Holly Painter Titus Books 2015
This book is a tonic for me as a reader and a boost in the blood for poetry. I adore it.
John Newton’s endorsement on the back is perfect: ‘Holly Painter is a trickster poet, you never know where she is going next. Sometimes she wants to lick your ear. Over the page she might chew your ear off.’
The launch pad for the collection: ‘When the British natural philosophers of the 17th century founded modern natural history, they proposed finding a poet to compile a poetic account of everything that existed in nature, very broadly defined. Four hundred years later, the work is ongoing, made modern and rigorous with rules and style-guides, managers and research-poets.’
The notion of a research-poet sidetracked me into other poet roles that have existed or might exist: speculative-poet, domestic-poet, Sunday-poet, global-village-poet, experience-poet, travel-poet, theory-poet, heart-poet.
The collection is made up of the submissions of a researcher-poet but made infinitely more interesting by the tracked comments of her supervisor and the myriad ideas and relations that proliferate.
The poet-researcher is set assignments that demand inventories and lists of things that include the natural world (regenerating starfish, the kakapo) but veer wildly into a material world (buttons for sale, ‘Tubular Bells’) and curious things between (flower motifs for teenage courtship).
The supervisor demands the voice of reason, clarity, facts, comprehensive lists, specificity, neutrality and rebuffs anecdotes, adverbs, poetic licence, personal confession.
Sometimes the submissions are laugh out loud as in the light of the recovery work of ‘Tubular Bells’ or the counting of buttons (how long did it take?).
The tracking comments form editorial advice but also trace the relationship between supervisor and researcher-poet(this label keeps slipping in my hands!). The reaction of the supervisor to relations beyond editorial choices is explicit in the tracked comments; the reaction of the latter is buried in the poetry submissions. Love hijacks the cool calculation of inventories. The very guts of ‘natural history’ and what that might embody is reinvented.
Holly employs a range of styles, tones, rhymes, layouts, silences, musicalities as though the heart cannot be penned (excuse the pun!) within a style-guide. The collection is dexterous on its tip toes as it gets you thinking about categories and categorisations, hierarchies and dichotomies, and the way love cannot resist (avoid) anecdote, confession, adverbs.
The book is beautiful. The paper gorgeous to the hand, while the cover’s marigolds almost fill the room with a nostalgic scent.
I highly recommend this book.
Holly is an MFA graduate from the University of Canterbury. Her poetry has been included in Sport, Landfall, the NZ Listener and JAAM. She lives in Singapore with her wife and son.
Titus Books here
Holly Painter’s web site
Poetry Highlights at Wellington’s Writer’s Week in March
For the full programme see here but this is the poetry on offer.
I would love to go to the Laureate Circle but can’t make it at this stage (might just fly down on a whim!). I would really like to post pieces on any of the poetry events at the festival. Any takers?
Friday March 11th 7pm A Circle of Laureates
Friday March 11th 5pm Anis Mojgani and Marty Smith
Thursday March 10th 1.45pm Anis Mojgani
Sunday 13th March 2.30 pm Anis Mojgani with Mark Amery
Saturday 12th March 3.30 pm Five Poets and a Prize
Tastes of Ika 3 – Ika 4, a few days left for submissions
Ika 3 looks cool. It is the literature and arts journal from Manukau Institute of Technology and is edited by Anne Kennedy. Anne is a poet and novelist and she is about to head to Victoria University where she will be the 2016 Writer in Residence.
The internal design is fresh. The issue looks like it is wrapped in brown paper. It feels slightly rough to the hand. It features prose, poetry and art from students and staff, and stretches out to include work by well known writers from both here and overseas.
The mix is eclectic. There are appealing grades/gradients of lyricism and subject matter, but what makes this issue pop out from others is the political elbow that juts out, the raw angles, the Pacific Island presence. Compared with this journal, others seemed saturated in white. To have such diverse reading lines in to brown skinned voices makes this newish journal a vital presence within our writing/reading options.
A bundle of poets made me snap to attention. I love the playfulness of Tusiata Avia’s ‘We are the diaspora of us all’ where play becomes play with a potent bite. I love the way Chris Tse’s ‘This house’ is inventive, detail rich, personal, kinetic and catches both heart and mind. Faith Wilson’s ‘Echo (bootleg remix)’ is a poem bisected in two and the interplay of dual voices is sharp, hard, heart hitting. You need to read again to find different paths. Donovan Kūhiō Colleps wraps place and moment so acutely in ‘Muscular Dreams,’ and I love the way lines coil and repeat. J A Vili’s ‘Mother’s Rope’ is spare, just a handful of words on the page, but it is the white hot core of the issue. Sophie Van Waarden’s ‘Water Girl’ confirms that this young poet writes with linguistic grace, verve and surprise and is an emerging poet to watch.
There is much more. See some treats below in the photos, including Anna Jackson’s surprising ‘Leaving the hotel room.’ This journal is worth a subscription! The art is mind catching as well as eye-catching. Again I come back to the words fresh and vital.
Work is about to start on the next issue. Submissions for Ika 4 are due by February 1st.
Submit here.
Submission details:
We invite submissions across Moananui for Ika 4 from emerging to established practitioners in the fields of writing (poetry, prose fiction, non-fiction), performance, and visual art.
Ika 4 will be published in print and accompanied by a website for moving image and performance, to be launched as part of the Auckland Writers Festival in May 2016.
Electronic documents are preferred, but printouts together with a self-addressed envelope may be mailed to: Ika Journal, Faculty of Creative Arts, Manukau Institute of Technology, Private Bag, 9400, South Auckland Mail Centre 224, New Zealand.
Video works must be in the form of mp4 files and can be submitted via private Vimeo / Youtube links.
The submission limits are: eight poems, eight images, three video/performances, 7,000 words of prose.
Inquiries to: ikajournal@gmail.com
Editor: Anne Kennedy
Arts Editor: Richard Orjis
A blessing for my poem made into a sculpture: My Whangarei Sculpture Walkway photos
Whangarei Sculpture Walkway (by carpark of Te Matau o Pohe, Port Road, Whangarei
Yesterday Michael and I drove up to Whangarei with our dog Molly for the blessing of a sculpture. Thanks to Creative Northland, my poem, ‘Drift’,’ has been transformed into a steel sculpture by Miriam Von Mulert and the local firm, Culham Engineering.
It was such a lovely occasion. A small group of people gathered to contribute the blessing including my step sister, Kerry.
Andre Hemara from Whangarei District Council blessed the piece and made his mihi nui.
The Mayor, Sheryl Mai, and Deputy Mayor, Sharon Morgan spoke. When I think of Mayors I picture a legacy of men in suits at a distance (Bob Harvey a different case altogether) but to see these two women in cotton dresses speaking with such warmth and empathy I elt like it was West Auckland before the Super City.
I spoke and Miriam spoke and the very lovely Hinu from Creative Northland spoke.
We then shared water, tea and heavenly Christmas mince pies.
I loved the poetic possibilities of the work. The way it folded to seem like the empty page or a billowing sail or a blank canvas, The way it was both anchored and ready to drift like the young girl who left Whangarei at eighteen. When I first left school, having failed to some degree, and with no idea how to be or where to be in the world, I enrolled in night school and learnt Te Reo. I learnt to acknowledge my mountain and my river. When I set sail into the unknown of the world, I took this anchor with me. The poem became my mihi from the seventeen year old to the present me. There is a strong line tethering us.
Andre blessing the piece.
The Mayor and Deputy Mayor made beautiful speeches. The Mayor said she would like to see more poetry on the walkway.
Miriam
With Kerry.
The Mayor holds me up.
Andre sampling the excellent mince pies.
Hinu and Michael
Miriam and I
The engineer
A warm thank you to everyone who made this possible.
NZ Poetry Shelf 