WORD: Reading Favourites, with David Hill, Jolisa Gracewood and Paula Morris

I’ve seen Paula Morris chair a few sessions at various writers festivals, and was reminded again today why she’s one of my favourite chairs: funny, engaging, doesn’t talk over her panellists, keeps discussion ticking along in a lively manner.

Today she was chairing Reading Favourites, discussing with David Hill and Jolisa their favourite NZ books and how more reading of NZ books can be generally encouraged. Unfortunately Chris Tse was unable to attend – Morris quipped this was either because he was sick or because Hill had offended him.

As today is National Poetry Day, each panelist started with a poem. Hill read Elizabeth Smither’s ‘Two Adorable Things about Mozart’, commenting that “there are certain lines I’d give an index finger to have written”.

Gracewood (right, on the right, photo by Marti Friedlander) read from a “very subversive poetry anthology” in which the names of the poets are not published on the same page as their poems. She read us ‘Telephone Wires’, which turned out to have been written by a 12yo girl in the 1950s. Morris read ‘Going Outside’ by Bill Manhire. The audience hummed in appreciation.

The panellists had been asked to bring along their two favourite New Zealand books. Gracewood showed us her copy of Wednesday’s Children by Robin Hyde, an ex-library book that had been stamped every week in 1951. She said it’s about a woman who wins Lotto and can live as she pleases – a “really magical book” that rewards rereading. She spoke about how Wednesday’s Children has “deep historical reminiscence … [and] continues to be fresh”.

It’s also out of print – which, as Gracewood pointed out, is a problem we need to discuss. Her other favourite book – The Tricksters by Margaret Mahy – is also out of print, although Gracewood hopes that the upcoming film adaptation of Mahy’s The Changeover (one of my personal favourite YA books of all time) will incite publishers to reprint these works. About The Tricksters, Gracewood said “I love it when a book asks you to take on faith that there are worlds alongside ours”.

Hill’s two favourite books were Kate De Goldi’s The Cutting Room of Barney Kettle and Maurice Gee’s Going West. Of the former, he said “The writing is crystalline … I really wept, put the book down and wept … [and] I smiled with delight.” He said that children’s writing has to suggest a world order in which there is still hope, and noted the wonderful respect for adults shown in The Cutting Room of Barney Kettle.

Hill called Gee “the great chronicler of NZ adult life [and] the least show-off writer I know … [with] restrained craft but also a relentless evisceration of personal relationships.” He said that any book of Gee’s makes him think “Yes, that’s it … He’s so good I come away with no envy whatsoever.” I was thrilled to learn from Harriet Allen in the audience that Gee is publishing a new YA novel next year.

Morris’s two favourite books were The Book of Fame by Lloyd Jones and Māori Boy by Witi Ihimaera: “they’re both ‘our story’ books”. She said Lloyd writes in the communal voice and gives a great insight into colonialism: “it is really a great NZ novel”. Ihimaera writes as “someone resolutely from outside the centre” – his is a “very important book”.

Discussion then turned to the general problem of why Kiwis don’t tend to buy large quantities of NZ fiction. I liked Hill’s idea that we should have billboards with the opening sentences of NZ novels on them. (eds note: NZ Book Council did this in the early 00’s in bus stops.) Audience members suggested that NZ Book Month should be just about NZ books, and that our school curriculum should feature more work by Kiwi writers – although it was pointed out that this can have a downside, in that forced reading of books at school can put readers off, sometimes for life. (Although this tends only to be the case for NZ fiction: reading a book you dislike at school by a US author, for example, does not tend to put people off US fiction.)

Morris mentioned that she too had been in the Canadian Tales session earlier with Elizabeth Hay, who had spoken about the difficulties of persuading Canadian publishers to back specifically Canadian books – so this is not just a problem for us here. Morris said that our children aren’t making the transition from reading NZ children’s books and YA to NZ adult fiction.

Gracewood and Morris spoke about research they have done for the NZ Book Council into Kiwis’ attitudes to NZ literature. For some reason NZ literature has a distinctly negative aura. Whereas Kiwis support NZ sports teams because they’re ours, NZ literature runs up against the spinach effect: people reading it because they feel they should. Gracewood said “we get excited about supporting our cuddly native birds; what would it take to make NZ books that charismatic piece of literary fauna?”

Reading Favourites was a lively session with a full house and a very engaged audience – so maybe there’s hope for NZ literature yet!

Reviewed by Elizabeth Heritage

Reading Favourites, by David Hill, Jolisa Gracewood and Paula Morris

Enemy Camp
by David Hill
Published by PuffinISBN  9780143309123

Tell You What 2
edited by Jolisa Gracewood and Susanna Andrew
Published by AUP
ISBN 9781869408442

On Coming Home
by Paula Morris
BWB Texts
ISBN 9780908321117

Tim Gruar in conversation with Kate De Goldi about ‘The Cutting Room of Barney Kettle’

Kate De Goldi’s novels and picture books really engage you. A winner of numerous awards, including the NZ Post Children’s Book Awards and the Esther Glen Medal, her books have a specific type of sophistication that respects and challenges her readers. Inspired by her own veracious reading appetite when growing up and a love of the new wave of post war children’s fiction, she builds her novels with cinematic layers that are as much about the set and scenery as they are about the plot.

Kate De Goldi signing after her launch at Unity Books. Photo copyright Matt Bialostocki.

As with her previous award winning novel, The 10pm Question, there’s a degree of line-blurring when it comes to defining her target age for her latest book, From the Cutting Room of Barney Kettle. So I have to ask, “Is this book for young adults? Or is this a book that can be read and enjoyed by young and old alike, like the book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime?”  Kate: “Good question. I’d like to say it’s a book that can be read by anyone from 9 – 90, because I think there are some reasonably sophisticated language and ideas at play.”

One of the things that De Goldi says inspired her most recent writing, was the post-war ‘middle range fiction’ that really ‘nourished her insatiable appetite’ as a teenage reader. She says that nowadays the publishing world has been keener to produce age appropriate works, particularly in the young adult space. She wanted to create a book that was less age prescriptive.

In her latest book, From The Cutting Room Of Barney Kettle, we meet filmmaker Barney Kettle, who likes to invent stories, but in this case finds the real oil right under his nose. The book opens with a letter written from a hospital bed by an unnamed man, as he recovers from serious injuries. He introduces his project: a story about Barney Kettle which he writes over many months, as he slowly recovers. He writes to remember the street where he lived, home to a whole raft of strange, weird and interesting people and bizarre, singular shops and curious stories. He writes to remember the last few summer days. Before he was injured; before it all came crashing down; before his world vanished.

“Every filmmaker is a megalomaniac” – the perfect summary of many of the most famous directors – from Fellini to Spielberg to Jackson, all crazy obsessed nutters and brilliant visionaries. Then there’s Barney. “The character of Barney was inspired by my nephew Rowan, who has been making films since he was about 6 years old, corralling his relatives and his whole neighbourhood into whatever project he was up to at the time. His devotion was such that on the day of the first Christchurch earthquake, the day of his first job at a production house, his first instinct wasn’t to dive for cover but to grab the camera and start filming. Which he did. All day! He’s now an animator. Barney is Rowan, but he’s also a bit of me too – as my sisters will attest. He’s someone who’s utterly focused on making something and seeing it all the way through to the end.”

Barbara Larson, Kate’s editor and expert chopper – helping to launch Kate’s book. Photo copyright Matt Bialostocki.

Much of the book revolves around the idea of editing, chopping up, re-arranging, the pieces, all exacerbated by the unexpected but significant event that threatens to take over the story. It’s not hard to find direct links and references to post-2011 Canterbury. Because she grew up there, Christchurch was always destined to be a major character in the book. She actually started writing about Barney and the High Street before the earthquakes but had to stop, “because the coordinates changed. I came back to the High Street that was destroyed. But I couldn’t not include the event, it was a major part of my landscape.”

“I wanted to capture a High Street that was a lively, colourful fantastic place, with layers of history and with its own community. I always wanted to write about children at play in a community is a street like this, the kind that you only get in a city. The kids are kind of parented by the others in the street. They have real relationships with the adults, as well as each other. Anyone with an appetite for eccentric figures will more likely find them here. It doesn’t happen in the gated suburbs, where people are more spread out.”

“This is my, heightened, slightly imagined version of the (Christchurch) High Street,” De Goldi says, “with a slightly personal history too. A couple of my generations have lived in buildings above these shops. We all went to that Basilica for mass. It’s part of my family’s fond, collective history. We remember the shops and people and those days we were there. And now as a Wellingtonian I always go back there for my frame of reference. Even though, now it only exists in memory. Much of the street came down and is rubble now.”

Remains of the McKenzie Willis building, on High Street, Christchurch after the quakes.

Also an important part of the picture, De Goldi says, was to set Barney living over an old school junk shop. “The kind that Christchurch’s High Street were once full of, with discarded fashions, lawnmowers, TVs and appliances and all manner of bric-a-brac.” The ultimate props room for a filmmaker, and a place of constant visual inspiration.

The Cutting Room of Barney Kettle is definitely one of those multi-layered books that will, hopefully, invite many re-reads as its reader gets older. For the younger reader, there’s the opportunity to explore a world lost forever. For older readers, perhaps a chance to remember a world that is still alive in their own imagination.

Interview by Tim Gruar

The Cutting Room of Barney Kettle
by Kate De Goldi
Published by Longacre, Penguin Random House NZ
ISBN 9781775535768