more details here
Programme out April 5th here
As in previous years, the 2019 Featherston Booktown Festival will feature a stellar range of New Zealand writing talent. Special guest authors include novelists Lloyd Jones, Dame Fiona Kidman, Greg McGee and Catherine Robertson, children’s book writer and illustrator Gavin Bishop, blogger and writer Emily Writes, and poets Ashleigh Young, Tayi Tibble, Te Kahu Rolleston and Kate Camp.
Camp
Do you remember how birds
would wait until we woke up
so they could be feed?
Do you remember
the time you saved me
from falling in the trap we built?
I wish I could carry that smell of burnt twigs
and the mixed smell of leaves and rice
with me forever.
Every night I would lay by the bright,
warm flame that accompanied
the smell of rice pudding.
I remember I would pick
the rough leaves as I daydreamed
about what would happen if we were lost.
If only life could give us another chance to go back.
Mo’ui Niupalavu
Mo’ui’s poem was inspired by Lauris Edmond’s poem ‘Camping‘, picked for the blog by Kate Camp a few weeks ago.
Hello, my name is Mo’ui. I am from St Bernard’s College in Lower Hutt and I am a proud Tongan. I have a brother who is 7 years and a father; my mother passed away when I was 13, I am now 14 years and in Year 10. I love music and English. I want to pursue music when I am older because I love to compose songs and write lyrics.
Here we are read us Women, disability and writing ed Trish Harris (Wellington: Crip the Lit, 2019)
In 2016 Robyn Hunt and Trish Harris established Crip the Lit ‘to celebrate and foster the work of Deaf and disabled writers’. Trish explained further in an email to me:
We chose ‘There is no such thing as a disabled writer. We are all just writers’ for our debate topic at LitCrawl (2018) because we wanted a moot that could be argued–in an entertaining and feisty way–either way. And that’s what we got! We want to open up those kinds of conversations but Crip the Lit also makes a stand saying there’s an important voice under represented in mainstream New Zealand writing and that is the voice of writers who have an impairment/disability–people who can write about this topic from the inside of the experience.
Crip the Lit has produced a slender pocket book, Here we are read us, that showcases eight writers who all live with disability. The writers include memoirists, novelists, poets, essayists, playwrights and bloggers from across New Zealand/ Aotearoa. Most of them seem to do poetry in some form or another!
Illustrator, Adele Jackson has done a portrait of each writer housed within personalised frames that include a writer-selected symbol. The writers are: Tusiata Avia, Steff Green, Michele Leggott, Helen Vivienne Fletcher, Charlotte Simmonds, Trish Harris, Te Awhina Arahanga and Robin Hyde. The disabilities include blindness, autism and epilepsy.
Each writer has written about their chosen symbol, living with the experience of disability and their writing choices.
There is a section where each writer responds to the question: Why do you write?
This is how Tusiata answers the question:
I write because there’s an itch or a spangle and when I give it attention and space it expands to something full blown. It teaches me something. I write because sometimes the spirits are whispering and if I put pen to paper they will speak.
The pocket book is also available as large print format, an audio book, an e-book, individual social media files on each writer, in Braille and DAISY audio.
I love this pocket book because it brings disability out into the open – it took Tusiata awhile, for example, to expose her epilepsy in poetry beyond hints and traces. The pocket-book writings not only open out the daily challenges that each writer faces but confirm the notion that the ways and hows and whys of writing are utterly diverse.
Huge admiration to the editors for bringing this uplifting project to realisation. It is a gift.
Order copies and get downloadable files here.
Mangere Arts Centre – Ngā Tohu o Uenuku
Ginny’s Garden
(for Ginny Sullivan, 1950-2017)
Magpies quardle-oodle in the high firs.
Down here, under the overhang, it’s hot,
looking out over the lawn Karen says she cut
two weeks ago, and already thick, clumpy,
to the paddock where Friendly, the seven-year-old ewe
that you couldn’t bear to send to the butcher,
baas by the fence for kale and attention.
The veggies you planted have gone mad:
tomatoes big as butternuts; huge, shiny aubergines;
giant marrows; cabbage whites all over the basil.
In the Pears’ Soap poster in the bathroom,
two small girls still stare at large bubbles.
Harry Ricketts
Harry Ricketts teaches English literature and creative writing at Victoria University of Wellington. His latest collection, Winter Eyes, has been longlisted for this year’s Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
essa may ranapiri has added a zinging new zine to their collection. You can order a hard copy or read it (and others) online.
Award Winning Writer of Poetry, Drama and Fiction. 2018 Creative New Zealand Berlin Writing Resident.
Vivienne Plumb recently held the 2018 Creative New Zealand Berlin Writing Residency, and lived in Berlin for almost a year while researching and working on her new creative nonfiction book.
She is based in Wellington and writes poetry, drama and fiction. She has published twenty books in these three fields of writing.
She has held many writing residences, including the 2016 University of Auckland/Michael King Writing Residency and a University of Iowa residency; and has been the recipient of many awards including the Bruce Mason Playwrighting Award, the Hubert Church First Best Book Award, the Sargeson Fellowship, and an Australian post-graduate scholarship. She has acted as a judge for numerous poetry competitions and for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
Her plays have been produced all over New Zealand and translated and published in Poland and Italy.
She is a member of the Academy of New Zealand Literature.
Her most recent book, a compilation of her past-published readers’ favourites, As Much Gold as an Ass Could Carry, has been translated into Italian and published in Italy.
Vivienne’s North Island reading tour is supported by the New Zealand Book Council.
This is a day of reflection
This is a day of coming together
This is a day of baking sour dough bread
This is a day of breaking the bread and sharing
29.3.19
NZ Poetry Shelf 