I had a great day in Wellington, at the launch of New Zealand Book Month. Since I am, by nature, a sociophobic hermit, what I wanted to do at first was snatch my
Six Pack cheque, thank everyone and run away to the airport. But hermits need to be dragged out – it’s good for them. I ended up enjoying myself very much.
There was a nice welcome onto the Te Papa marae (although too much praying – I am allergic to being asked to thank God in any language. I swore many years ago, after a few deathly occasions, never to return to my mother-in-law’s Anglican church, and find Maori prayers as rebellion-inducing as any other.) Then the Minister’s speech and a panel discussion, followed by signings of
The Six Pack Two. I enjoyed meeting the other Six Pack writers, had an interesting exchange with Dave Armstrong about Woody Allen – he warned me off buying WA’s book of short stories – and various talks with other people, all of which left me wanting more. Once out, the hermit discovers that talking to other people is good.
Fiona Kidman told me that she’d read one of the stories in my collection
Opportunity and wished one character had taken revenge on the other. I was interested in this, but didn’t get the chance to hear more. ‘Perhaps I’ll write a sequel,’ I said, before we had to move on. What I should have told her, I thought afterwards, is that I have actually written a sequel to the title story,
Opportunity – the one about revenge. (So, in the unlikely event that you stray into this blog, Fiona, I’m telling you now.) Some day I hope to publish
Opportunity II, Beyond Revenge. Or,
The Revenge Continues. Or,
What Goes Around Comes Around, Again. But seriously, the story of Reid is not finished, nor are some of my other Opportunity stories. I don’t feel like leaving the characters behind. I’ve always loved Balzac’s grand idea of
The Human Comedy – all those novels and stories linked together in one vast project.
After the day in Wellington I got up early and taxied in to TVNZ to
appear on Breakfast (scroll down and click on NZ Book Month link on middle panel) and talk about
The Six Pack with Phil Twyford. My taxi driver was a Maori woman with that brand of humour that’s so characteristically Maori and so funny. She was all floaty and surreal after driving her cab the whole night and she told me a series of stories (which I stored away) about her night and her husband and her dogs, all the while imitating people, especially her husband.
We laughed a lot and parted fondly, and I made my way towards the golden inner sanctum of Paul Henry and Pippa Wetzl. But first I was whisked into the makeup room, where two women plied me with so much slap that I ended up resembling a voodoo priestess. (Looking at my heavily shaded eyelids I was also reminded of Martin Amis’s description of Salman Rushdie angry: ‘like a falcon looking through a venetian blind’). While one makeup person painted me and the other ran a comb (ironically, without much hope) through my limp hair, they talked through the logistics of their next night out. Prosaic discussion overlaid with a kind of studied world-weariness that said: You may be a media pro or a nervous civilian – either way, we’ve been here for a hundred years, and we don’t give a ***.
I’ve only been in TVNZ a couple of times, and so found it all diverting – the languid, blasé operatives, the terrified interviewees, the strangeness of seeing screen-people, cartoon-people, rendered three dimensional. In the shining air of the studio I felt rather stunned and vague… But Phil Twyford seemed to have his wits about him. I think – hope – I managed to say how pleased I am to have won a place in the Six Pack.
Somewhere here might lie the answer to the question whether New Zealand is boring to write about. In just the past few days I’ve acquired some excellent new data. The skill is in giving it shape, meaning, impact – in turning it into fiction. Talent is required to do that successfully, and one might fail of course. But there’s no shortage of raw material. The ingredients are all there.
Charlotte Grimshaw