NZF Writers & Readers: Charlie Jane Anders – Beautiful Fantasy

Tara Black reviews Charlie Jane Anders – Beautiful Fantasy, and below that – Elizabeth Heritage also reviews it, with lots more words! They both did beautifully!

A small but devoted crowd turned out this morning in the festival tent to hear Christchurch spec fic writer AJ Fitzwater interview Charlie Jane Anders. Anders is a transgender speculative fiction writer and organiser from the US: ‘willing to be a bad influence for a good cause’. It was very pleasing to see two women on stage each with pink hair (I may be a little biased).

Negotiating stereotypes and tropes is a topic that often comes up in conversations about spec fic, and that’s where we started. Anders talked about how the stereotype is that science fiction is masculine, and fantasy is feminine. Often a fantasy character will say to a sci fi character, “this is something you can’t possibly understand” – ‘for a man to say that to a woman just bugs the hell out of me’. In Anders’ novel All the Birds in the Sky, Laurence, the male character who is a computer scientist, ‘cries early and often’. He’s less sexist than many techy guys and ‘that made me like him more – and I really wanted to like him.’

All the Birds in the Sky follows the two central characters from when they are children. Anders said she wanted to honour that teens are often more introspective and noodly than adults. ‘I was much more articulate at the age of 13 than I am now. I talked like a college professor because my parents were college professors. 13 was the age that nearly wiped me off the face of the earth.’

Anders was learning disabled as a child: ‘I couldn’t make words on paper’. She was helped by a teaching assistant with whom she is still friends. https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliejane/how-being-a-special-ed-student-turned-me-into-a-lifelong-wri?utm_term=.wsgWWE3rRB#.kjrJJlDyBZ She said if she writes disabled characters she will always take care to do so mindfully.

Anders and Fitzwater had a great rapport on stage, which always makes a difference: at one point Anders commented ‘these are the best questions ever!’ One of her questions was in relation to the late, great Ursula K. Le Guin – what do we owe Le Guin to do now?

Anders said her next novel that comes out in January 2019 is Le Guin fan-fiction, and she’s sad she’ll never get to show it to her. What we owe Le Guin to do now is to approach gender in books mindfully, and to think about the ways in which societies are not just mechanistic. Cultures are made up of more than just what’s on the surface: historical accidents, folklore, deep history.

Fitzwater asked about Anders’ short story “Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue”, a terrifying dystopian tale of forced de-transition. Anders said: ‘I tweeted out a trigger warning for that story, which I don’t usually do. The story came out of just sheer terror. I wrote it around the time of the [US presidential] inauguration, and I was freaking out. You could already see the wave coming.’ It was published in the Boston Review. Anders said she wanted to get that story into a fancy literary magazine because she wanted nice, well-meaning cis-gender people to face the terror of violent transphobia and have a moment of sitting with that.

‘I wanted to grab cis people by the lapels and make them listen to my fear.’ Trans people are not ‘some monstrous creature from your id coming into your bathroom scaring your kids’. She has had feedback from readers that it has been opening some people’s minds.

Discussion turned to the theme of climate change. Anders said: ‘If you’re writing about the future and you’re not including climate change then you’re shirking your duty.’ She said you have to face up to the scale of the problem without getting defeatist.

‘Environmentalism can get a bit puritanical, like humans are just bad.’ But that isn’t helpful: you need to focus on solutions. ‘How the hell are we going to get rid of cars and bitcoin?’ She recommended that spec fic writers talk to scientists to help get it right.

The City in the Middle of the Night, the sequel to All the Birds in the Sky, comes out in January 2019.

Picture by Tara Black, words by Elizabeth Heritage

NZF Writers & Readers: Patricia Lockwood – Midwest Memoir

Tara Black reviews Patricia Lockwood – Midwest Memoir, chaired by Kim Hill.

‘American writer Patricia Lockwood has been called “the poet laureate of Twitter.” Her memoir Priestdaddy centres on her father’s conversion to Catholicism and priesthood.’

NZF Writers & Readers: Sarah Sentilles – Draw Your Weapons

Tara Black reviews Sarah Sentilles – Draw Your Weapons, with Sarah Sentilles interviewed by Jo Randerson on Sunday, 11 March. All images copyright Tara Black.

‘Every day we are unconsciously being conditioned to accept violence. So says American journalist Sarah Sentilles in Draw Your Weapons.‘

What’s so funny? with James Nokise, Jackie van Beek and Chris Parker

My final session for today was called What’s so funny?, a panel discussion of comedy in Aotearoa with James Nokise, Jackie van Beek and Chris Parker. It was meant to have been chaired by Jo Randerson, but she’d been “sentenced to Hamilton” and was unable to come.

Talking about comedy is a bit of an odd one. Because they’re all professional comedians, and because the topic was comedy, I kept expecting laughs. But, although there was the odd giggle here and there, and although they’re all very personable and are professional entertainers, the session didn’t quite gel. Perhaps it was the absence of the chair. A lot of the discussion was unstructured and was basically them talking about which shows they’d been in and what they were working on now and with whom. This was my first Writer’s Week session where my attention began to wander (admittedly it was my third in a row that afternoon and I was under-caffeinated). The session this morning with Mallory Ortberg talking about her writing had been a lot funnier.

Perhaps I am being unfair: after all, what have I come to a literary festival for if not to discover new artists and hear them talk about their lives and work? Maybe indie comedy just isn’t my scene. Certainly, since the advent of broadband and Netflix, I don’t watch nearly as much NZ TV as I used to, so I missed a lot of the references.

Still, it was interesting to hear about the creative process in all of their various roles: writing, performing, acting, improv, theatre, stand-up, TV, and film. They all spoke about the importance of collaboration, and of writing comedy that you personally feel is funny, rather than trying to pander to the market. Nokise, who does a lot of political comedy, spoke about finding the ridiculousness of serious situations (eg Nick Smith going swimming in the Manawatu).

It was heartening too to hear that people can make a living as professional comedians in Aotearoa these days; a welcome change from days of yore (even a few years ago). There was a funny moment when Parker related how he broke his foot just before the opening of one of his shows. His father told him “Richie McCaw won the rugby world cup with a broken foot, you can finish your gay autobiographical dance show.” Parker described himself as a comedy “addict”: “My tendency is to go for the cheap gag, because I want to be loved by everyone.”

The other thing that was a bit odd about this session was the explicit diversity line-up: the gay one, the Pacific Islander one, the woman. They each spoke to their respective ‘ism’ – and then that thing happened. That thing that so often happens in a room when a woman speaks up about sexism: the men immediately chimed in to prove how sexist they weren’t, by saying how they can’t believe sexism is even still a thing, and then sitting back, job done, unconscious of the power structures that helped them to where they are today. In fact, Parker even interrupted van Beek when she was speaking about sexism, and spoke over her to prove how not-sexist he is by listing lots of female comedians. He seemed completely unaware of his textbook mansplaining. It was even more stark because the equivalent thing didn’t happen when Parker spoke about homophobia or when Nokise spoke about racism.

Van Beek inadvertently summed this session up for me when she said “I can’t think of anything funny”. In essence I think I was the wrong audience – others who were there (including the reviewer for Radio New Zealand) – seemed to enjoy themselves more, and the comedy and theatre people in the audience seemed to get a lot out of it. It did inspire me to check out more home-grown comedy, though, starting with Funny Girls.

Attended and reviewed by Elizabeth Heritage

What’s so funny? with James Nokise, Jackie van Beek and Chris Parker
3.30pm Friday, at Bats Theatre, part of NZ Festival Writer’s Week

 

Comics and Roses – a review of two events, Monday 10 March

Comicsville, featuring Adrian Kinnaird, Dylan Horrocks, Jonathan King and Robyn Kenealy

My first Writers Week event today (Monday) was Comicsville, a panel discussion at the Hannah Playhouse on New Zealand comics. It was chaired by Dylan Horrocks and featured Adrian Kinnaird, Jonathan King and Robyn Kenealy; cartoonists all. I also spotted Alison Bechdel in the audience, and later saw that she had tweeted a drawing she’d done of Horrocks.

As with Sunday’s session with Bechdel, it was slightly strange to have a discussion about comics without having any of them on display, but conversation was lively nonetheless. I was particularly glad to be continuing my trend of discovering interesting female authors: today’s ‘find’ is Kenealy (right). Deeply involved in the fan community, she spoke intelligently and with academic insight about the place of fan-fiction and the nature of self-publishing, very hot topics in the publishing world today. Normally, being drawn to an intriguing new author, I would immediately go and buy the book, but she said very openly that she is not trying to make money from comics and only self-publishes, mostly online. You can find her work here and here.

The book that was available for sale, though, is the new and very colourful From Earth’s End by Kinnaird (left). It’s a history of New Zealand comics and a snapshot of Kiwi cartoonists today. Flicking through my copy, I was immediately struck by the dearth of women: apart from Kenealy, apparently we pretty much just have Sarah Laing, and that’s about it. Surely that can’t be right? What about Li Chen, for example? (Closer study reveals that Chen is mentioned on page 88, but is not one of the thirty cartoonists with their own dedicated chapter.)

Being a word geek, I was particularly interested to learn from Horrocks that ‘graphic’ comes from a word meaning both to draw and to write; and that comics in te reo Maori are pakiwaituhi, which similarly indicates a story both drawn and written. This came up after a very lively discussion of the term ‘graphic novel’, which apparently has become a posh, literary term for comics generally – a rather back-handed compliment, as it implies comics need euphemising.

Overall, I left feeling that New Zealand comics are in an interesting and fruitful state, with digital publishing reaching new audiences unbounded by geography or paper distribution. Lots to look forward to.

A Rosie Glow, featuring Graeme Simsion (with a little bit of Catton comparison)

My third Writers Week event today (Monday) was A Rosie Glow; Lynn Freeman in conversation with Graeme Simsion, author of the New York Times bestselling novel, The Rosie Project. Unlike previous sessions, this felt very much like a standard author talk pitched explicitly towards increasing book sales.

And indeed Simsion admitted that, since publication, his life has become one long publicity tour – full credit to him for still seeming engaged and genuinely pleased to talk to fans. The fact that this was the second time that Freeman had interviewed him on this topic, though, unfortunately intensified the feeling of stale, recycled material.

It was perhaps a rather cruel and unusual act of scheduling to put Simsion’s talk on the Embassy Theatre stage immediately before Eleanor Catton’s extraordinary New Zealand Book Council lecture (entitled “Paradox and change in fiction”). In many ways, Simsion’s and Catton’s lives could be seen as parallel: they are both relatively new Australasian authors who have rapidly become life-changingly famous and, based on the success of one novel, are both now able to be full-time professional writers. But of course they are very different people.

Simsion spoke a lot about his protagonist, Don Tillman, and how he has a Twitter account in which he tweets in Tillman’s voice, and how there is a Tillman sequel planned. Catton didn’t mention The Luminaries or any of her characters at all, and instead spoke with calm but ferocious intelligence about huge ideas, ranging from the way fiction requires both ingenuity and insight in order to succeed, to the nature of space and time in narrative.

Simsion appeared happy to basically keep writing the same book until its popularity ran out – and, indeed, since it obviously ain’t broke, this is a perfectly cromulent strategy. Catton displayed a dizzying intellectual ravenousness that seemed to eat up subjects ranging widely within her chosen field of literature and beyond. When a member of the audience asked when she plans to publish a book of essays, she responded simply “soon”.

Once again I have ended a day of Writers Week events inspired and buzzing. Bring on tomorrow!

by Elizabeth Heritage, on behalf of Booksellers NZ

http://elizabethheritage.co.nz/
https://twitter.com/e_heritage