It’s good to get out of the house sometimes – spend too much time at home and you can go mad without noticing. Before I went to Tasmania, everyone told me that it was just like New Zealand. Well, they were right – but still it was refreshing to be plucked out of the morass of daily life in Wellington and set down in a cottage of my own for a month, with nothing to do but write.
Number 1 Kelly Street (bushranger or songwriter, the name seems auspicious) is an old whaler’s cottage overlooking the row of dockside warehouses that have been converted into the
Salamanca Arts Centre. A large sunny kitchen has a writing desk in one corner and a view across a small backyard to the city and Mt Wellington (enough of a mountain to have snow on the summit). Just over the back fence are the Peacock Theatre, a thriving collection of galleries and craft shops, a courtyard with free live music every Friday night, a square full of cafés and a quality independent bookshop. Every Saturday Salamanca Place hosts a great craft and food market – oh, and there’s a fine bakery/café on the corner of Kelly Street. It’s a short stroll to the port if you want to take a cruise, and the city is in easy reach on foot, as manageable as Wellington. Aside from Saturday nights, when the revellers pass to and from the bars of Salamanca Place just feet from your bedroom window, it’s quiet in the cottage. All in all, the ideal location for a writer in residence.
It’s also refreshing to be dropped like a pebble into the pond of another culture’s preoccupations for a while – just following the evening news is a novel form of entertainment and education when you’re a spectator, rather than a fully immersed citizen. It reminded me of some of the benefits of living in a larger culture – newspapers that can afford to treat the reader as an intelligent being, a deeper and more wide-ranging arts landscape – even the Australians’ more colourful line in crime and corruption has its fascinations. There’s Ramona Koval’s hour-long books programme each morning to tempt you away from your day’s work, an ad-free digital jazz channel courtesy of SBS for entertainment.... With all these distractions, it might be easy to let the writing slide – but dedicated writing time is too precious to waste.
In his Sydney Writers’ Festival event Eliot Weinberger remarked that his writing method resembles the digestive process of the sea cucumber, which takes in a large quantity of mud in order to extract a very small amount of nourishment. Somehow I seem to have fallen into this way of working, and as a consequence lugged several kilos worth of books and papers I’d been hoarding for a year or more across the Tasman and back in order to feed the digestive tract.
Unlike, say, researching and writing a historical novel or a biography, the business of extracting poems from ‘information’ is a chancy affair that relies on association, patience and time – it’s no use trying to write something before you’ve processed the raw materials, and you can never predict what’s going to emerge at the end of it. Often, very little trace remains of the information you started with.
If you’re lucky the poem will develop a mind of its own about where it wants to go. Or you’ll write something you had no plans for at all – one morning in Hobart an essay announced itself, and soon began (as these things do) to drag all manner of things into its force field.
Kate Grenville says that some people become writers because they don’t think quickly on their feet. I’m one of those, so an essay offers me the luxury of puzzling something through at leisure and in private, where I can set down and erase at least some of my more foolish and clumsy thoughts before inflicting them on the world. It’s also light relief from the more erratic art of the poem, which seems to owe more – in its early stages, at least – to good fortune than good judgement (although that needs to be applied later).
The Tasmanian Writers’ Centre is run by Australians so enlightened that they let New Zealanders apply for their residencies. I hope one day New Zealand might be in a position to reciprocate, perhaps through the Michael King Writers’ Centre. It really is good to get out of the house – and home looks better after some time away, too.
Details of the Tasmanian Writers’ Centre, including its Island of Residencies programme, can be found here. Applications for the 2008 residencies close on 31 November.