Event Review: Chessie Henry in conversation with Emily Perkins for We Can Make a Life

Posted on August 22, 2018 by booksellersnz

We Can Make a Life
by Chessie Henry
Published by VUP
ISBN 9781776561940

Book Review: The Fuse Box – Essays on Writing, edited by Emily Perkins and Chris Price

Posted on September 20, 2017 by booksellersnz

What a fascinating collection this is. Poets, novelists, playwrights, tutors all write about their experience of writing. Their stories are remarkably different – Elizabeth Knox says she learned stories first as spoken narrative (her old sister Sara told her stories all the time) and later to read independently. That’s not so unusual, most kids hear narrative first – but few have the same talented sister to spin the tales, and even fewer find their creative voice as successfully as Elizabeth Knox has.

James Brown discovered at some point that reading could make him laugh and cry, and that it is not necessarily so for everyone. His piece is an alphabetic framework of his experience of writing and what the intending / aspirational writer should keep in mind. It’s well done and ranges from discovery through flarf (look it up!), intervention and shit detection to zing. It’s a clever idea and it works really well.

Lloyd Jones writes ‘to unlock something I don’t know exists. It’s in me somewhere and I’m in search of it’.

Damien Wilkins sheds light on Dennis McEldowney, among others. Stella Duffy views writing from a mid-point in life, with ideas to assist new writers. As she says, you can ignore all her points except this one: do the work. You have to do the work.

She also says that writing is not hard work. ‘Being a miner is hard work. Working twelve hours a day in a textile sweatshop is hard work………Writing…is not hard work…. but you have to work hard at it’

Patricia Grace is interviewed by her playwright daughter-in-law Briar Grace-Smith in a wonderfully interesting set of questions and answers. Much to be learned here.

For Victor Rodger writing is a political act, and for Nina Nawalowalo, necessity is the mother of her invention – there are stories which need to be told. As Tina Makereti quotes at the beginning of her essay, ‘Beautiful writing alone is not enough. Not now – look around you.’

There is a wealth more in this small book – it’s a really excellent insight into how many of our best writers write, teach, learn and create. If you want to write and don’t know how to begin, most of the experience in this book seems to say “just do it” and then see where it goes. That is really great advice. I think this is a great addition to our New Zealand literary canon, and I just have to end with the most wonderful quote from the last piece in this book, a poem by Hera Lindsay Bird where she says:

‘You start to wonder about the future and the great untitled project of your life

It keeps you up at night, like a big fluorescent sadness’

Maybe the solution to that is simply to start writing.

Reviewed by Sue Esterman

The Fuse Box: essays on writing from Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters
Edited by Emily Perkins and Chris Price
Published by VUP
ISBN 9781776561650

The Rehearsal, directed by Alison Maclean

Posted on September 5, 2016 by booksellersnz

The Rehearsal is released nationwide on 18 September

The Rehearsal is guaranteed to bring back all of your awkward teenage memories. And it is one of the best coming-of-age films I have seen in a long time.

Set in a drama school simply called ‘The Institute’, The Rehearsal tracks the life of Stanley (James Rolleston) as he becomes part of the churning-out-actors system, led by head tutor Hannah (Kerry Fox). Her focus is on getting the young actors to forget themselves, and open themselves up to being vulnerable.

Stanley meets a 15-year-old girl, then re-meets her by chance while role-playing one day, and tentatively starts a relationship with her. At the same time, we learn of a scandal at a local tennis club, where a coach has been carrying on with one of his students – as it happens, Stanley’s girlfriend’s old sister is the student. Stanley’s group has to create an end-of-year project, and as they have independently learned more than most about the scandal, they decide to create the play about this.

The script is spare, letting the young actors meet the challenge in a natural, off-the-cuff way. While I haven’t read the book (ok I admit it) I understand from the friend I attended with that the movie is different, and that this is a good thing. The use of a tennis club to open up the settings seemed an excellent way of bringing light into the movie, and contrasted well with some of the grimier spaces the movie lurks in.

The thing I enjoyed most about the movie was the humour. It wasn’t all drama students ranting and raging across the stage, and memorialising their darkest hours. From being a drama-type student at High School, mid-production things did get a little dark, and this was reflected accurately. But it was genuinely funny, though I noticed sometimes I was the only one laughing…

The final set-piece was superbly done, and served as a chance for some of the actors to look straight at the camera in farewell. I highly recommend going along and seeing this when it comes to a cinema near you when it comes out on general release on 18 September.

Reviewed by Sarah Forster

The Rehearsal
Directed by Alison Maclean
Script by Emily Perkins and Alison Maclean
based on the novel by Eleanor Catton (VUP 2008, ISBN 9780864735812)

Dunedin Writers and Readers Festival: A Shock to the System

Posted on May 11, 2015 by booksellersnz

‘Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I’m always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it’s very shocking to the system.’

So wrote the American writer and genius Flannery O’Connor many decades ago. In the Fullwood Room today, contemporary New Zealand fiction writers Laurence Fearnley, Emily Perkins and Jackie Ballantyne were asked by Fiona Farrell what drives, pulls and pains them about the novel writing process.

After listening to the generous, lengthy and true introductions to their work and selves, and before responding to Farrell’s catalogue of excellent questions, each author read from her latest novel. Perkins read first, with a page from The Forrests. Aside from the quality of the prose (this is a classy novel), what was very evident was the life brought to scenes read aloud by the person responsible for their existence, a point also commented on by Farrell. This was true for the excerpts from Ballantyne’s The Silver Gaucho, which focused on the enigmatic and observant ‘one-eyed man’ of Patagonia’s Paso de los Indios, and Fearnley’s Reach, during which she described a diver’s experience of submersion, concluding with the serenely grave line, “He could not imagine being separated from the sea.”

Farrell asked the authors why they wrote novels, and these novels in particular.
Perkins: “I was turning forty, I was thinking about the passing of time, the decades.” Emily Perkins speaks with her hands, her conductor’s fingers making metaphysical pizza dough.

Ballantyne: “This novel just came. I had not planned to write about a gaucho.” (The Silver Gaucho is a popular television programme in Argentina, where she had been travelling.) And, “Writing a novel teaches me more about self than anything else I do.”

Fearnley: “I was desperate to write a novel while I was nearing the end of a PhD. I wrote it in ten months. I had no specific plot in mind. I had the image of sediment, wanting to layer it heavier and heavier. I wanted to throw a stick into a fast-moving river.”

pp_laurence_fearnleydd The writers spoke of the difference between reality and believability, of needing to trust what they were writing, to not have cracks in their faith that would allow the weaknesses to come through. Fearnley (right) compared this self-belief to that shown by that famed creator of the urinal ready-made (Duchamp). He had to believe it was art and not a urinal so that everybody would believe it. Fearnley is very funny, during this session careful to offset serious talk of art and faith with self-deprecation (“I look at the crowded shelves in libraries and bookstores, and think, ‘Why the fuck do I bother?'”) Audiences love it when a writer swears.

“What keeps you writing?” asked an audience member, “Rituals, a certain word count, a nine o’clock start?” “Deadlines,” said Perkins. “I need to be terrified.” Terror and desperation had come up several times during different talks at the Festival, reminding me of something that James K. Baxter once said, something like God shifts people with a gun to the head. “I’m a binge writer and a binge reader,” said Ballantyne (left). “When it’s on, it’s on.”

Then, just as my hand began to rise, our time in the Fullwood Room was up. The writers had considered the issues with vigour and wit, warmth and honesty. Their written work stands alone but their voices and views had added value. I left though, descending the thousand stairs to Harrop Street, with the idea still sitting in my head: Haruki Murakami said that for him fiction writing is an unhealthy occupation, requiring the writer to deal with mental toxins as he distils cultural and psychological darkness’s. Murakami deals with it by keeping a strict routine of early rises, running or biking for an hour every day, listening to jazz. Was this the experience of Perkins, Ballantyne or Fearnley? If so, how did they deal with the shock to the system? Walking the dogs up Signal Hill? A quiet pint at Chick’s hotel? Toning down the close attention, the electric pulse of consciousness?

The question would need to wait. Two of the writers live in Dunedin and the third will probably move here, intoxicated by the autumn and the architecture, so the opportunity should arise. Meanwhile, the festival was over and reality waited at home in the form of undone dishes, unwashed clothes, unfed children. Focus on the positives: only fifty-one weeks until the next Dunedin Writers and Readers Festival.

Reviewed by Aaron Blaker

‘A Shock to the System’ featured Emily Perkins, Jackie Ballantyne and Laurence Fearnley in discussion with Fiona Farrell.

Fearnley will appear in panels at the Auckland Writer’s Festival

Book Review: The Forrests, by Emily Perkins

Posted on August 20, 2013 by booksellersnz

This book is in bookstores now, and is a finalist in the Fiction category of the New Zealand Post Book Awards.

Reading this book some time after its release and well after the first reviews, I feel privileged to not be influenced by other comments. I have few expectations. Seeing comments like ‘sad, pointless lives’ and ‘nothing happens’ made me wonder, did they really read THIS book? Of course others (more like me it seems) said it was ‘exquisite, carefully crafted and entrancing’. And it was all of that and more.

The Forrests are an almost normal family that move their family halfway across the world from an affluent New York lifestyle to what ends up being a challenging lifestyle in New Zealand. Emily Perkins is a master of observation and detail. The snippets of the family’s life that are revealed are believable and delicious. My book is dog-eared from all of the times I read a sentence that I wanted to treasure. For example, when describing the first view of the decrepit house where their estranged father was living,
‘The no-colour paint on the windowsills and door frame was crackled…‘
and, ‘Evelyn unpeeled her sandwich and tweezed out the alfalfa sprouts with her fingertips and dropped them into the sea.‘
and, when making a cake,
‘In the bowl they created a separated viscous swirl with the creamed-butter mixture, the yolk trailing through the pale butter, the transparent whites floating jellyfishy around the surface.‘

Emily Perkins is observant beyond belief, and her descriptions based on these observations, are absorbing. Utterly so. I loved this book that led me through this family’s seemingly ordinary life in a subtle and engrossing way. The reader is drawn into family and invited to fill in the blank between the episodic narrative. This family is neither boring, nor ordinary, but it could be yours or mine. The ending is sad, but so is the ending of most lives. Dot, the mainly main character leaves these pages in a slightly confused way, but I suspect that, too, is the way in which many lives come to the final end.

Reviewed by Gillian Torckler

The Forrests
by Emily Perkins
Published by Bloomsbury
ISBN 9781408831496