Jhumpa Lahiri Wins the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award

There was a brouhaha in New Zealand recently about the judges in the Montana Book Awards issuing a shortlist of four contenders for the fiction category, rather than the expected five. Now the judges of the 2008 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, for which my short story collection Transported (which you can buy online through Fishpond or New Zealand Books Abroad, or in person at an increasing range of bookshops) was longlisted, have gone one better: they have decided to dispense with the shortlist entirely and award the prize to Jhumpa Lahiri for her collection Unaccustomed Earth. This means that five other writers are denied the opportunity of their books appearing on the shortlist, with the consequent publicity and potential sales this would bring.

The arguments for and against this move are pretty much the same as for the Montana. On the one hand, the judges are appointed to make their decision based on their experience, and that decision should respected; on the other, getting shortlisted for awards can be a lifeline for less well-known authors - this is certainly the case for the Montanas. But, having said that the decision on the Montanas should be left to the judges, I have to be consistent and say that it's their call here as well. If Unaccustomed Earth was so much better than the competition, then it's only fair it should win.

But there's one point on which I do take issue with the judges: according to the Guardian, they said that

With a unanimous winner at this early stage we decided it would be a sham to compose a shortlist and put five other writers through unnecessary stress and suspense.

I have to say, judges: you could have put me through the stress and suspense of being on the shortlist, and I wouldn't have complained one bit. I would have been very grateful!

Coverage and The Season

It's blowing a gale outside. Here are two poems united by the wind. Both were first published in North & South magazine.

Coverage

He went south with the housing market
to a cottage facing the sea,

spent his last pay cheque
on Swannis and draught excluders.

Coverage was minimal.
He called his children

from the top of a nearby hill,
struggling through gorse, matagouri —
the visible teeth of the wind.
He got through at last

and begged until she put them on.
Given the chance, the kids talked

and talked: sports, school, when
they could fly down to see him.

That depends, he said, and then
they were breaking up —

fugitive crackles, then silence
under a polar sky.

Coverage was first published in North & South (May 2007) and is included in Swings and Roundabouts: Poems on Parenthood (Random House, 2008), edited by Emma Neale.

The Season

The mountains reconvene.
An avalanche of voices
thrums the heavy ground.

Precise, confidential,
the wind reports the news
it gleans from pavement tables:

the All Black's private pain,
the public intellectual's
ceaseless quest for vengeance.

The mountains shake their balding heads.
The culture of celebrity
has pushed them to the margins -

there are no peaks on the social pages.
Aspiring no longer, they allow the wind
to hustle away with the clouds.

Eroding, reminiscing, the mountains shake their
heads. Snow falls, forgotten dandruff,
through the ever-warming air.

The Season was first published in North & South (August 2007)

These are not the first poems I've written on the topic! The Weather and Wind Walks the Hand are other examples. Many of them seem to combine the wind with parenting: perhaps that's because, the night my son was born at Wellington Hospital, there was a southerly snap and a power failure. The backup generators came on to power essential services, such as the incubator Gareth was placed in for a day or so. I remember standing by the end of Kay's bed, feeling the cold and watching snowflakes swirl past the window. That sort of thing leaves an impression.

PS: I'll be taking part in Montana Poetry Day events in Upper Hutt on Friday 18 July. The full schedule of events in Upper Hutt is available.

If the Apocalypse Comes, Beep Me

It took me a long time to warm to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It was shown at odd times and on obscure channels on New Zealand television. My wife cottoned on to it a couple of seasons before I did, and kept trying to persuade me to watch it with her — but I resisted. What a stupid title, and wasn’t it some kind of teen romance thing?

Finally, she persuaded me to watch an episode right through; but that didn’t help much, because that episode was Into The Woods (5.10), the one in which Buffy breaks up with her boyfriend Riley. Into the Woods is about as thoroughly “teen romance” as Buffy ever got. Sure, there was a baffling scene where the distraught heroine gets into a fight with emaciated people who kept evaporating in puffs of dust, but I couldn’t really see the point of all that.

Kay persisted, though, and I was sufficiently interested to sit through and enjoy Once More, With Feeling (6.7), the musical episode, even though I generally can’t abide musicals. Before much longer, I was demanding back episodes and plotting to acquire the DVDs.

After seven seasons of brilliant writing, excellent acting, comedy, drama, horror, romance — of scenes that managed to be gut-wrenching, hilarious, scary and thought-provoking all at once — the series came up against the biggest Big Bad of all, the network. Buffy Summers had already died twice (though the first time hardly counted); the third time was the charm, because even the Chosen One had no power against the Hollywood suits. The spin-off series, Angel, ran for one more season.

Then, it seemed, the rest would be silence, despite the fan and academic activity that sprang up to fill the gap (and even some poetry).

But, not so much. Buffy Season 8 has been incarnated in comic form. The “season” is canon – that is to say, official — Buffy. It is supervised, and partly written, by the TV series’ creator, Joss Whedon. It picks up on the climactic events of Season 7, which liberated Buffy from the heavy burden of being The One Girl to save the world, and shows how Buffy and her friends adapt to the new dispensation and some ugly new threats.

The individual comics, in sets of five, are being collected into trade paperbacks. Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8, Volume 1: The Long Way Home was a mixed bag: it was great to enter the lives of the familiar characters again and find out how they were feeling about life (not uniformly happy, which will come as no surprise to those familiar with Joss Whedon’s work), but the storyline was so compressed, and so much new material was introduced, that it was hard even for a Buffy fan to follow what was going on. And then there was the contrast between Jo Chen’s wonderful cover art, with its beautiful and true-to-life (or at least true-to-the-actors) depiction of the characters, and Georges Jeanty’s interior art, which made Buffy looked like Sarah Michelle Gellar one minute, and Anna Kournikova the next.

Coming soon: a review of Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8, Volume 2: No Future for You.

Winter Readings Series 2008 - Wellington, August/September 2008

News from HeadworX

This year's readings celebrate 10 years of HeadworX Publishers in Wellington, and are a tribute to The Beatles' White Album, with Beatles music played at the readings.

We will be announcing this year's winner of the Earl of Seacliff Poetry Prize: Will Leadbeater, who will come down from Auckland to read. This will be a rare chance to see Will Leadbeater read, one of our unsung poets who has been writing away for years.

Wine/juice and books for sale. Venue is the City Gallery Theatre, Civic Square, Wellington.

THE WHITE ALBUM READINGS

AUG 20, Wednesday, 6.30pm-8pm
Reading 1 - Helter Skelter

Mark Pirie
Harry Ricketts
Richard Langston
Rob Hack

Plus launch of Mark Pirie's new books Slips: cricket poems (ESAW) and Bottle of Armour and Trespassing in Dionysia (both Original Books).

MC Niel Wright

AUG 28, Thursday, 6.30pm-8pm
Reading 2 - Revolution

Niel Wright
Helen Rickerby
Evelyn Conlon
Will Leadbeater

MC Harvey Molloy

Plus launch of Helen Rickerby's My Iron Spine (HeadworX)

SEP 3, Wednesday, 6.30pm-8pm
Reading 3 - Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da

Michael O'Leary
Gemma Claire
Marilyn Duckworth
Bill Dacker

MC: Nelson Wattie

Plus launch of Michael O'Leary's Paneta Street (HeadworX)

Nice Photo ... Shame about the Review

After the very positive review by Jessica Le Bas in the Nelson Mail, and several good ones in other papers, most lately the Timaru Herald, Transported has had its first bad review, by Steve Walker in the Listener.

Mind you, it wasn't all bad. He said good things about "Rat Up a Drainpipe", "The Wadestown Shore" and "The New Neighbours", but he seemed to struggle with the shorter stories, and the less realistic stories — and as for the shorter and less realistic stories, they were right out.

Well, there' s a name for this aspect of what I write : it's called interstitial fiction, and it's something I'll be posting more about in future. It's not everybody's cup of tea, but I hope it will be yours.

(Incidentally, Chris Else had an entertaining reaction to a bad review by Steve Walker of one of his books — see the third article down.)

The Listener review is headed by a jumbo-sized version of my author photo. This pleases me, not for egotistical reasons, but because a recent interview with photographer Miriam Berkley points up the importance of author photos in a crowded book market. There's some wonderful author photos accompanying that interview, and it's well worth reading.

Sonali Mukherji, who took my author photo, is an excellent photographer. She took the photo at the Kelburn Croquet Club, next to Victoria University, on a brilliantly sunny day last year. The sun was reflecting off my glasses, so she insisted I take them off: that also took years off my apparent age! It's a bit like The Picture of Dorian Gray; I can grow steadily more decrepit, while my photo continues to twinkle at the world.

No Oil

I’ve posted here previously about our dependence on oil, and how to start addressing it. There’s a story in Transported, "Homestay", which touches on the same theme — though, being fiction, it also includes people with wings flying around rural Southland, which I don’t actually expect to be a prominent feature of post-Peak Oil scenarios.

Here’s my one attempt, so far, to tackle the topic in poetry. “No Oil” was first published in Southern Ocean Review (together with “Replicant”), and is included in All Blacks’ Kitchen Gardens.


No Oil

Bad news from the north
and the queues growing longer.
Late winter, I remember,
when the shipments ceased.

There was still oil for some
which showed
where power intersected with need:
Agriculture.
The rich.
Ministerial limousines.

The rest of us walking,
riding bikes, taking trains,
living
as our grandparents had:
valuing land
for what it can grow.

A Great Leap Forwards
in reverse
our faith now
in the wisdom of the old.

The world to the north
turns to poison
a battle
of each against all.

Here we cling on
in the ruins of a false economy
doing to others
being done unto
looking back with angry eyes
on a century of waste.


(If the “shipments from the north” ceased right now, we could meet about 2/3 of New Zealand’s present oil demand from domestic production — but that’s unusually high at the moment because of the exploitation of the Tui field, and there’s no guarantee that production levels will stay this high for long.)

Where You Can Buy Transported

Online: You can buy Transported from a number of online booksellers, including Fishpond, Whitcoulls and New Zealand Books Abroad (which I recommend for overseas customers). A quick Google search will turn up others.

In person: You can buy Transported from the bookshops listed below. I'm sure there are others - if you find Transported in a bookshop not listed here, please let me know by an email to senjmito@gmail.com. If you go to a bookshop that doesn't have Transported in stock, please encourage them to (re-)order it.

Whitcoulls

The following Whitcoulls stores should stock Transported: Bennetts Pier, Auckland Domestic Airport Terminal [signed copies available], Bennetts on Broadway, Botany Downs, Cashel Street, Centerplace, Chartwell, Corner [not actually sure where this is!], Courtenay Place, Dunedin (George Street), Dunedin (Meridian Centre), Galleria, Henderson, Invercargill, Lambton Quay, Milford, Mt Maunganui, Nelson, New Lynn, New Plymouth, Northlands, Plaza Palmerston, Queensgate (Lower Hutt), Riccarton, St Lukes, Taupo, Wellington Domestic Airport Terminal [signed copies available], Whangarei

Other Bookshops

Auckland: Unity, Borders, Time Out, Daniel's.

Rotorua: McLeods

New Plymouth: Wadsworths

Wellington: Unity [signed copies available], Dymocks [signed copies available], Parsons, Borders, Johnsonville Paper Plus

Nelson: Page & Blackmore

Christchurch: Borders, Madras Cafe Books, Arts Centre Bookshop

Dunedin: University Bookshop

... plus other Paper Plus outlets throughout the country.

Happy hunting!