Conversations about reading and books

WORD Festival

At WORD, poet Josiah Morgan (Kāi Tahu, Ngāti Maniapoto), novelist Rachel Paris and I made up the panel at the popular reading soiree, expertly chaired by Tom Sainsbury. His probing of our respective reading lives was both thoughtful and funny, and brought forth a list of book titles.

I chaired a discussion on the essay form with Kate Camp, Tina Makereti (Te Ātiawa, Ngatī Tūhwaretoa, Ngāti Rangatahi-Matakore, Pākehā), and Una Cruickshank. The cumulative power of their three very different essay collections made for one of the most absorbing reading experiences I’ve had over the last year. (Read more about these in the booklist.)

I also chaired a conversation on Central Otago Couture: The Eden Hore Collection, a book by dress historians Jane Malthus and Claire Regnault about the Central Otago farmer and his fascinating collection of 1960s and 70s high-fashion women’s clothing. The book is sumptuously illustrated with photographs by Derek Henderson featuring the clothing collection modelled against the backdrop of the glorious Central Otago landscape. Jane and Claire’s succinct history of influential NZ designers, dress retailers, textile producers, spinners, weavers, leather workers and, not least, fashion competitions of the period, is fascinating reading — and prompted me to look for other books by Claire Regnault about the history of fashion in Aotearoa.

Books to inspire teens

WORD’s Secondary Schools Day at UC is always a buzz: keen students and teachers, and eight writers across two sessions, each in a kind of speed date (12 minutes) with the audience.

It was a treat to hear one’s co-presenters’ (Conan O’Brien arguing persuasively for the continued importance of journalism in our contemporary world; debut author, Anthony Elworthy, beguiling all of us with his terrific illustrations and animations; the 13th New Zealand Poet Laureate, Chris Tse, speaking with great warmth and clarity about poetry, sexuality, and other things).

I thought the best way to engage a young audience in my Awhi Rito kaupapa, ‘thriving as a nation of readers’, was to let books make their own powerful case. I selected titles I would love to have read in my teen years — an emotionally high-octane time, when the limber teenage mind begins to grapple with increasing complexity, when new ideas hit hard, and reading can be greedy, promiscuous, and heady. I wanted to suggest that these years are not only about young adult books, but a chance to stretch out and experiment with and explore adult books, while returning sometimes to the pleasures of illustrated story and language.

My list included adult fiction, journalism, essays, a YA novel, a picture book, and a poem. I gave ruthlessly distilled descriptions of each book and sometimes read an opening paragraph so the audience could experience the writer’s voice making its opening bid for their attention.

‘Inspiring Minds’ book list

Sydney Bridge Upside Down by David Ballantyne; Text Classics, Australia (NZ fiction)

The setting is ‘up the coast’ — probably Hick’s Bay on the East Coast of Aotearoa — mid-1960s. It is the summer holidays. Our narrator is young Harry, and his story begins thus:

‘There was an old man who lived on the edge of the world and he had a horse called Sydney Bridge Upside Down. He was a scar-faced man and his horse was a slow-moving bag of bones, and I start with this man and his horse because they were there for all the terrible happenings up the coast that summer, always somewhere around …’

This is a gothic thriller, heavy with hot weather and menace. A disconsolate Dad, an irritating little brother, a competitive friend, a sly and watchful girl neighbour, and cousin Caroline, substitute mother for the holidays, though her behaviour is not at all maternal but unsettling and secretive. Meanwhile, extremely disturbing things are going on at the abandoned meat works …

I read this book every five years or so and, each time, I am surprised and disturbed by it all over again. It’s a first cousin — an older, more complex and savage relative — of Ronald Hugh Morrieson’s celebrated titles The Scarecrow and Predicament — also well worth reading.

Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe; William Collins, UK (non-fiction)

The setting is Belfast, Northern Ireland, during The Troubles (the civil conflict fought between 1969 and 1998). In 1971, the Price sisters, Delours (21) and Marian (17), become Irish Republican Army soldiers. In 1972, Jean McConville, a widow with ten children, is kidnapped from her home and ‘disappeared’ by IRA operatives. Say Nothing is the story of these three women, and the entwining of their fates, a narrative of tragic proportions, exploring youthful political zeal, sectarian fury, a culture turned against itself, bloody choices and their consequences down the years, grief, shame, and guilt.

Patrick Radden Keefe is a tenacious journalist and a vivid writer. The book is at once thrilling and deeply dismaying. I’ve read it twice now, and each time have been haunted by thoughts of just what I might have chosen under similar circumstances.

The White Darkness by Geraldine McCaughrean; Oxford, UK (fiction)

‘I have been in love with Titus Oates for quite a while now — which is ridiculous, since he’s been dead for ninety years. But look at it this way. In ninety years I’ll be dead, too, and then the age difference won’t matter.’

So begins Symone — Sym’s — extraordinary adventure into the white darkness. Lawrence ‘Titus’ Oates is one of the explorers in Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed 1910–13 Terra Nova Expedition, who in a famous act of self-sacrifice to relieve his comrades from the burden of his failing health, left camp and walked out into a blizzard he knew would kill him. His last words (recorded in Scott’s diary) were, ‘I am just going outside and may be some time.’

Is Sym’s intense connection with a dead man nuts?

‘He isn’t dead inside my head. We talk about all kinds of things. From whether hair colour can change spontaneously to whether friends are better than family, and the best age for marrying: 14 or 25.’

Or is this Sym’s elaborate escape from a difficult emotional life?

There’s another man in Sym’s life, too: Uncle Victor.

‘Uncle Victor is marvellous: he’s done so much for us — for Mum and me, I mean. And anyway, he’s just so clever. Uncle Victor knows a fantastic amount. He knows at what temperature glass turns to liquid and where Communism went wrong and how Clifton Suspension Bridge was built and just what the Government ought to be doing: you can’t fault him. He’s read books about everything …’

But Uncle Victor is not what he seems. And neither is his suggestion of a weekend in Paris … In short order, Sym and her uncle are bound for Puntas Arenas, en route to Antarctica. Not to worry, Sym tells herself, Titus is with her, soul mate, protector. What could possibly go wrong?

Both a nightmare adventure in a beautiful, ferocious landscape and an engrossing psychological study of a burdened young woman, this is one of McCaughrean’s most captivating and disturbing novels. She has a long backlist of stupendous fiction. You could go from White Darkness to The Positively Last Performance, a story set in an old seaside theatre, with an ending that completely upends the preceding narrative.

Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel; Pan Macmillan, UK (fiction)

Available through National Library's school lending service: Station Eleven.

This novel opens in a Toronto theatre where a performance of King Lear is in progress. The actor playing Lear collapses on stage and dies. We meet several people who witness the event, including Kirsten, a child actor. It is the last night on Earth as we know it. Within a month, a vicious influenza pandemic will have wiped out most of the world’s population.

Twenty-five years later, we are with the Travelling Symphony, a Shakespeare theatre group who travel to wherever they can find new settlements and audiences in this brutally reconfigured world. The Symphony offers story, music, poetry, and art to provide solace, lift hearts, and suggest a possible future. Kirsten is now an actress with the Symphony; she has a home, she has hope. But this new world is dangerous. Hunters, marauders, people bent on revenge, prowl the countryside. As the Symphony moves across the continent, others from the past are remaking the world too, according to their own needs and drives … Connections are made, revelations occur … Slowly, thrillingly, the author moves us to a denouement at a one-time international airport terminal where people have gathered over the decades.

I read this novel all through one night in a hotel room (before COVID). Then I immediately read it again. It is heart-stopping and haunting, brutal and beautiful.

The Chthonic Cycle by Una Cruickshank; THWUP, NZ (non-fiction)

This is a book of essays, but not essays as you might generally understand them in the context of school or university. This is creative non-fiction at its best, which is to say, it’s ‘true’ stories about Earth and the intersection of animal, mineral, and human across multiple life-cycles, driven by the author’s delightful curiosity, alertness, her capacity to connect, and her sharp, artful writing.

Cruickshank is a poet and interested in science, too — in particular, the way everything on Earth perishes and is remade.

‘Even mountains die and are recycled.’

Chthonic (pronounced either thon-ik or k-thon-ik) means ‘relating to the underworld’, and here Una digs for several of the essays, bringing to the surface elements that fascinate her: amber, jet, coral, pearls, describing their evolution, then reporting the eye-popping ways they have been fetishised and refashioned as luxury goods across history. Death and decay stalk all the essays — the first relates to the Night of the Apocalypse in July 1951, when 280 people in the small city of Point-Saint-Esprit, France, became sick with food poisoning.

‘Their doctors observed the usual gastric upset, but also a few uncommon symptoms: enlarged pupils, slow pulse, low body temperature. The sickest patients smelled like urine and dead mice.

After 48 hours, most people seemed a lot better. True, nobody had slept in two days, but they felt wonderfully vigorous and alert. “You know,” said one woman, “I think this illness — whatever it is — has done me a lot of good. I’ve never had so much energy in my life.”

Then the hallucinations began.’

This poet is a vivid storyteller too.

But before death comes life, and this book fair hums with it. We travel below the earth, across history, and into the worlds of inventors and scientists. There is an electric chapter on The Great Exhibition of 1851, a guided tour through the innovative, the fantastical, the grotesque, and the domestic wonders inside the Crystal Palace.

Beneath this cavalcade of earthly fascinations is the author’s concern for Earth’s very survival, in the face of human apathy.

‘If our planet becomes hostile to us, we too will rapidly flicker out of the fossil record. It will be the world’s first stupid [my emphasis] mass extinction.’

These essays are propelled by a desire to make the reader sit up and be stunned by Earth’s astonishments. ‘We should be chastened and scared by our world,’ Cruickshank writes in her introduction.

‘— its mindbending age, the complexity of the interlocking systems that keep everything running, the violent upheavals and mass extinctions, but it’s critically important, even revolutionary, to also be amazed by it. I don’t think we have a chance of overcoming our exhaustion and bone-deep inertia without awe [my bold].’

I wish I’d had this book as a young adult. It’s thrilling and galvanising. I came out of it feeling smarter than when I went in. It’s calling powerfully to us: be astonished, it says. And care.

You Probably Think This Song Is About You by Kate Camp; THWUP, NZ (non-fiction)

Another poet (seven collections), another marvellous collection of essays which make up an absorbing, droll, often painful memoir. The memoir’s title (a quote from Carly Simon’s famous 1972 song, ‘You’re so vain.’) is capable of several readings, as one might expect from a poet who relishes language’s tricky footwork and tones; it also alerts the reader to Camp’s cocktail of playfulness and wry sadness.

Among much else — crisp, lucid prose, shapely story arc, a building sorrow across the essays, a rigorous lack of sentimentality — Kate is a piercingly exact recorder of the aesthetics and accessories of her growing years across the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. The period’s colours, textures, sounds, smells, costumes, music are rich with resonances and footholds for the reader; and these accruing details build a kind of shimmering stage set against which the complicated lived experience of childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood unfolds.

The essays are full of recognisable — though also unique — childhood and young adult pleasures and puzzlements, but suffused too with successive longings: for a ‘prettier’ self when young, for proper cherishing by lovers, for an addiction-free self, for a clear road map out of stasis, and later, for the possibility of parenting. Behind the narrative is a gimlet-eyed, dauntless writer who resists cliche and the operatics of trauma narrative, and faces sadness straight up. There is something rinsed and bracing, something admirable and very moving about this long, hard look at disappointment and the gravelled road to understanding.

Check out Kate’s most recent collection of poetry too: How to Be Happy though Human: New and Selected Poems — a perfect companion to the memoir. Fellow poet, David Eggleton, says it best about this collection:

‘… bemused, ruminative, wistful, wise … The smouldering slow burn, the curdled idealism, the salvation army assembly of humorous perceptions … Each poem’s like a bumper ride in a fairground, crashing into obstacles, at once jarring and exhilarating.’

Highway 13 by Fiona McFarlane; A & U, Australia (fiction)

Fiona McFarlane is a celebrated Australian writer, who never writes the same thing twice. This, her most recent fiction, is a series of unsettling stories that explore the reverberations of a serial killer’s crimes in the lives of quite ordinary people: siblings, co-workers, friends, students, parents, neighbours, glancing acquaintances in Australian suburbs, towns, and across continents.

The serial killer in question, Joe Biga (modelled on the Australian killer Ivan Milat), is barely in the book. In a direct rejection of the contemporary preoccupation with true crime, available now on every media platform imaginable — and which invariably centres on the killers’ motivations, methods, and psychology while largely ignoring victims and those connected to them — McFarlane instead focuses on the little and large ways these other ‘victims’ are affected across lifetimes.

She works backwards and forward, some stories occurring before the crimes, some subsequently, but all hum with anxiety about which character will later be predated or affected. The different life trajectories, personality tics, interrupted relationships, echoing anxieties particular to the characters, unfold with great originality, tonal variation, changing settings and ambiences. You read with alternating tension and relief. One story is a sharp take-down of true crime podcast hosting, told completely in dialogue. The presenters are chatty and flip, trading in habitual true-crime tropes, a little breathless, morally blunted. Another follows the thoughts of a politician at an Australia Day event, as he helps cook democracy sausages. He shares Biga’s surname (though they’re no relation) and is troubled by the connection, abashedly concerned about the political ramifications; the story deftly weaves queasy humour and pathos.

Each story is fascinating, the book’s snowballing effect powerful and sobering.

Fiona McFarlane’s previous novel The Sun Walks Down is set in the late 19th century and orbits around the search for a young boy missing in the Flinders ranges. That’s terrific too.

This Compulsion in Us by Tina Makereti; THWUP, NZ (non-fiction)

Available through National Library's school lending service: This Compulsion In Us.

Tina is the author of three celebrated novels of Aotearoa: Where the Rekohu Bone Sings, The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke, and, most recently, The Mires.

She has also been writing articles, speeches, and essays for more than a decade, and these are gathered here, interspersed with, and connected by, small, potent pieces of memoir. The ‘compulsion’ in her title refers to the urge to write, which for her, as for many, is the necessary way in which she can make sense of herself, her immediate world, and the gifts and burdens of living in 21st century Aotearoa New Zealand.

The bulk of these non-fictions are episodes in the author’s autobiography — a fraught childhood with a troubled father; a pale redhead’s journey towards her te ao Māori legacy and whakapapa; the importance of other wāhine to her personal and intellectual growth; alone, poor, and responsible for two little children in Canada; dealing with breast cancer. In other essays, she is more explicitly ‘thinking in ink’ about the ongoing complexities and inequities caused by colonisation; the true history of Māori literature, how to create a properly bicultural nation; the joy of connection and communion with indigenous people in other countries.

The essays are immersive, thought-provoking, and often challenging — which is to say they’re doing exactly what essays have done since the 16th century French writer Michel de Montaigne first characterised the essay as ‘a trial’ or ‘an attempt’ to explore an idea or clarify emerging thoughts. Tina is an open-hearted, generous thinker and writer, searching always for a bridge between differences, the fruitful way ahead, while not shrinking from hard truths. The closing pages of the collection consider the paradox of living her life in opposition to her father yet knowing that ‘my life would not exist as it is — the writing, the beauty, the love of culture, the politics – without him’. The final striking paragraph exemplifies the author’s commitment to moving beyond destructive emotions and seeking some kind of reconciliation.

‘Somehow in writing these essays, I moved past indifference and learned how to connect with my father again. And it’s better for us if we can love all the people inside us, all the ones who make up who we are, even if they are difficult, or ridiculous or just plain mean and shameful. But sometimes that’s not possible, and none of us should be judged if we have to estrange ourselves from those who have hurt us. Dad hurt me most days, but still there are some boundaries he did not cross, and I’m grateful for that. He wasn’t a bad person, not in a conscious way. On a lot of his days on this planet, he tried. I think he wanted other things. He was damaged. He was ill. It could have been worse. It could have been better.’

Shackleton’s Journey by William Grill; Flying Eye Books, USA (non-fiction picture book)

This astonishing account of Ernest Shackleton’s beleaguered 1914 journey to the South Pole is a picture book/graphic non-fiction originally published for young readers; in the ten years since its publication, though, the book has gathered a global audience of all ages.

The text is wonderfully compressed, factual but poetic, and the book’s superb design melds text and illustration masterfully, and without distracting flourish. It is the accompanying artwork, though, that almost steals the show — a dazzling mix of portraits, pictorial taxonomies, comic frames, aerial landscapes, all in beautifully rendered, evocative coloured pencil artwork. Each page-turn is a thrill, new perspectives inviting lengthy immersion. Grill’s palette has echoes of mid-century British artists like Eric Ravillious and Edward Bawden, but is uniquely his own. His double page spreads are bravura art and design — a stark picture of pack ice, bled off the page and pulling the eye to a vanishing point; a near total white spread with just a long, thin, muted line of crew, dogs, and sleds, stretching diagonally from bottom left to the top right; a hellish blizzard depicted as a maelstrom of blue, black, and white, sucking the viewer inexorably into the centre of the storm.

This is, all in all, a masterpiece of narrative through art and language — and an innovative, inspirational model for young artists and storytellers.

Grill's more recent books include The Wolves of Currumpaw, based on the true story of a hunt for the leader of a savage wolf pack in New Mexico; and Bandoola: The Great Elephant Rescue, another historical story of the relationship between humans and animals, set in the mountains and jungle of Myanmar (Burma) during WWII.

‘Whispers to the Wall’ by Rebecca Kai Dotlich; from A Kick in the Head ed. Paul Janeczko, illus. Chris Raschka; Candlewick, USA (poetry)

This ‘poem of address’ speaks to the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington DC, two adjoining polished, black granite walls, each 75 metres long, on which are carved the names of more than 58,000 men (and eight women), killed, missing, or taken prisoner during the long war between 1955 and 1975.

The poem begins:

You are him, from Maine,
him from Montana,
and every him from sea
to sea and back.

The poet notes that these men were workers — fishermen, pilots, for example — and often students, then describes their names etched over the walls’ panels:

The brave ones spill
across your face;
an indelible trace
of young sons

At the end comes a question:

On silent nights, do they tell you,
of boyhoods and Beatles,
bruised knees and hearts,
birthdays missed …

It’s a simple, accessible poem, unshowy but artful. The poet uses subtle alliteration, assonance, allusion, metaphor, repetition, the pattern of threes to heighten the poem’s effect. It has a gentle rhythm and propulsion; the short lines and the poem’s elongation cause the reader to move slowly, almost reverently, down the page, lingering on the sounds.

Above all, the poet’s plain but potent statements and questions powerfully suggest the appalling losses the wall represents. And most poignantly, the poet characterises the wall now as the substitute parent to the lost ‘young sons’.

You know their favourite dish,
Their first romance.

I love this poem for several reasons. When I read it aloud to students, it never fails to make the skin across my back and neck prickle in the way of sudden, deep, recalled emotion. I love its buried allusions and paradoxes (the word ‘spill’ implying the unnamed bloodshed; every him from sea to sea echoing the line ‘from sea to shining sea’ in the anthem ‘America the Beautiful’; or, on silent nights — a chiming with the famous Christmas carol that celebrates the birth of a boy, though the poem mourns the deaths of young men in their thousands).

Most of all, I admire the way the poet speaks of something enormous and dreadful, without once using emotive, often overused and arid words like ‘war’, ‘death’, ‘wounds’, ‘blood’, ‘disappeared’, ‘violent’, ‘loss’. Instead, the loss is implied through lists of simple boyhood pastimes; by the suggestion that these young men came from all across the American continent; by the acknowledgement that they were all somebody’s son, though perhaps not yet partners or parents, and will miss all the birthdays a long life brings. And by the one-word final line: kissed? — a killer question mark. This is a poem of war made more wrenching by the poet’s act of displacement — talking to and questioning the wall that now serves as mother and father to the immortal dead.

The poem in full can be read in the excellent collection A Kick in the Head: An Everyday Guide to Poetic Forms, edited by poet and premier anthologist of poetry for young people, Paul Janeczko, with washi paper-influenced, collage art by Chris Rashka. There are many poetry gems between the covers of that collection.

Rebecca Kai Dotlich is interviewed on the delightful The Miss Rumphius Effect blog, a resource for teachers interested in ‘math(s), science, poetry, children’s literature and issues related to teaching children’.

The blog title references the enchanting picture book Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney, an American classic.

But that’s a treat for another day and another blog …