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Janet Frame’s Towards Another Summer
Feb 6th: I copied the following paragraph onto the whiteboard for my writing class yesterday, offering it as an on-the-button description of what might happen if you don’t ‘look sharply after your...
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Emma Bovary: a false character
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary is a false story, featuring false characters. Flaubert’s genius for description and imagery, for the specific, concrete detail, for evoking the material...
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C K Stead’s memoir
South-West of Eden: A Memoir, 1932-1956 by C.K. Stead I finished this memoir of Stead’s first 24 years and wished that he would immediately publish a second volume. He won’t, though, because the...
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Why is Lolita so often misunderstood?
Humbert H’s narrative is mindbending. He’s writing Lolita (so he claims) from jail before execution, and he’s writing it because ‘I insist the world know how much I loved my Lolita, this Lolita, pale...
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Michael Chabon on writing
After enjoying CK Stead’s memoir I was in the mood for more writing memoir, so was pleased to find Michael Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs on the biography shelves of Cummings Park Library. I took it to...
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Rich reading, and reasons to write
This morning, in time set aside to write, I slunk away from my desk for half an hour and started Hamish Clayton’s Wulf (Penguin Books, 2011: you can read an informative review here). I found myself...
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Franzen: Correction
Back in February, I commented that I had felt ‘consumed by’ Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom and enjoyed the experience less than reading Patrick Evan’s excellent Gifted (a pointless comparison). I used the...
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Where do ideas come from?
Benjamin Franklin's map of the Gulf Stream Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat Pray Love) is of the opinion that ideas and creativity circle the world like gulfstreams, looking for ‘portals’, and if you’re not open...
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Swimming with Books went visiting…
over at the blog of my lovely publisher, Victoria University Press. It’s about the writing process. And things. It starts like this: Can a writer alter the type of story she instinctively writes, or...
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Love drives.
Towards the end of last year I went hunting for some replacement Allen Curnow in the NZ poetry shelves of Arty Bees. An acquaintance who’d borrowed the beautiful, second-hand Curnow I’d found there...
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