This book is irritatingly mediocre with a side of sexism
Book review: Home: New Writing edited by Thom Conroy
Book review: Frantumaglia - A Writer's Journey by Elena Ferrante
Ferrante’s new book about writing is a journey through the fragments of experience.
Two big things happened while I was reading this book: the US elections and the Kaikoura earthquakes. They bashed my reading sideways. Suddenly, everything – even an esoteric discussion about the nature of literature, translated from Italian – was about politics and disaster.
Lecretia's Choice: A Story of Love, Death and the Law, by Matt Vickers
A Last-Ditch Calligraphy
Landfall Online – three reviews
Read my reviews of In the Supplementary Garden by Diana Bridge (Cold Hub Press, 2016), Fish Stories by Mary Cresswell (Canterbury University Press, 2015), Anatomize by Natasha Dennerstein (Norfolk Press, 2015).
WORD: Work / Sex, with Kate Holden, Leigh Hopkinson, Jodi Sh. Doff and Julie Hill
Review of Work / Sex, with Kate Holden, Leigh Hopkinson, Jodi Sh. Doff and Julie Hill, from WORD Christchurch, 2016
If Ivan E. Coyote did one of the best things a literary festival can do – broke my heart and then put it back together again made better – this session did another: forced me to examine my own unconscious bias and realise I was wrong.
WORD: Ask a Mortician: Caitlin Doughty interviewed by Marcus Elliott
Review of Marcus Elliott's interview with mortician and author Caitlin Doughty at WORD Christchurch, 2016
Death is an odd thing to be chipper about. LA-based mortician, ‘death positive’ advocate and YouTube star Caitlin Doughty is definitely chipper, though: she has that extreme chirpiness that I’m going to assume is compulsory for anyone living in Los Angeles.
WORD: Speaking Out – Tara Moss interviewed by Joanna Norris
Review of Joanna Norris' interview with Tara Moss at WORD Christchurch 2016
At the 2050 session yesterday about climate chaos, panellists spoke about the danger of going from denial to despair. I was thinking about that a lot as I watched author and feminist activist Tara Moss give a presentation on sexism in the media, politics and society.
WORD: Busted – feminism and Pop Culture, with Debbie Stoller and Charlotte Graham
WORD: Reading Favourites, with David Hill, Jolisa Gracewood and Paula Morris
Book review: Smoke, by Dan Vyleta
The Unravelling: Emma Sky at #AWF16
Strangely Human: Michel Faber at #AWF16
For me, literary festivals are a massive intellectual high. I like to pour myself into them and demand stimulation. They fizz me up; I start bouncing around, talking very quickly, and gesticulating as energetically as I can (given that I am usually holding a bag, a laptop, a coffee and several books). I arrived at the Strangely Human session in a state of high excitement, keen to hear Paula Morris interview Michel Faber. And then something happened.
The Diversity Debate: Victor Rodger, Marlon James & Stephanie Johnson at #AWF16
An Evening with Gloria Steinem at #AWF16
Bletchley Park, Gran, and Mac
Bletchley Park – and the stories of the women who worked there during World War Two – is of keen personal interest to me. My Gran, Irene, was one of those women. She took the Official Secrets Act very seriously, and never told me much about it. So I jumped at the chance to read Tessa Dunlop’s book The Bletchley Girls and learn more.
Characters from the past, Elizabeth Heritage
The Margaret Mahy Lecture, by Elizabeth Knox – WORD Festival, Sun 31 August
The Virgin and the Whale: A love story, by Carl Nixon
I get it: books don’t just happen. A novel is a collection of words actively written by a person, it is a writer’s deliberate construction of images and tales, places and emotions. Plot, world-building, style and characterisation are the results of thousands of decisions made by an author, decisions that are weighed up with an editor and often revised before being stilled in print.
I know this, but I don’t want to be reminded. I want the act of reading to take me to an exclusive truth the author has created; I want to be lulled and excited by thoughts that my brain hasn’t experienced before. I want to be able to fall into the book’s world without seeing the scaffolding – the discarded false starts, the second thoughts, the mutterings of the author’s voice. As a publisher, I understand that those things all happen; as a reader, I want them to be cleared away before I arrive; I want the world of the novel to be fresh and whole.
