Welcome to the Glorious Summer of 2009
Blog Number Ten: 10 January, 2009
It’s Friday night. And hot. The TV news contains the usual holiday news: murders, road accidents, giant jellyfish, drownings, and yesterday, the most bizarre incident, two young brothers killed by the collapse of a massive ice overhang at Fox Glacier.
New Zealand people (and tourists) seem to throw caution to the winds during the summer holidays. Talkback radio ran hot on how stupid people are to forget life jackets, to be beneath an ice shelf, to go hiking alone, to get drunk and fall into rivers, to go out to sea on a jet ski, to roar along rivers in jet boats, to drink a bottle of whisky and get stuck up on a ledge in a remote bush area… it goes on and on.
There is a puritanical streak in the New Zealand psyche that loves to denigrate any individual who comes to a sticky end. For example, there has been a spate of fatal house fires, the latest killing four children. The cause of the fire was a chip pan that was left unattended. I could hardly believe my ears when people rang a local talkback radio with various comments on the tragedy that ranged from claiming that the parents were drunk (not true) to bad mouthing the parents for allowing their brood to eat cheap filling foods like chips instead of healthy snacks like avocado and brie and smoked salmon. (Words fail me). After rubbishing the victims, the callers quite often called for further legislation or an enquiry into the particular Government Department that ‘should have’ prevented the accident in the first place. The cultural reaction to tragedy is a fascinating topic and one that writers have often mined. The New Zealand attitude (and I confess I am sometimes guilty of this) claims that everyone else (except me) is a bloody idiot, and why doesn’t the government DO something about it?
This week, Peter Wells and I began to teach the summer school on Creative Writing at the University of Waikato. We were surprised and somewhat disconcerted when fifty students turned up on the first day. The room was crowded and hot and some of the students had to wait until some extra chairs could be found. But the students seemed to be a good humoured mob and keen to learn. The in-class exercise on creating a character devised by Peter went well.
Forty-three students came to the second session. We had a larger room this time and just enough chairs. This class is much bigger than the one we ran last year and I think this will change the interaction between us and the students. There may be less time to give the students the individual help that we were able to provide last year. However, my impression so far is that there are a greater number of students this year who have already had some exposure to creative writing.
I began the lecture by covering some of the technical aspects of writing the short story using the wonderful story by Tolstoy, How Much Land Does a Man Need? I followed this with discussion and analysis of a few New Zealand stories including the recently published story Closer by Peter Wells and My Beautiful Balloon by Carl Nixon.
Peter Wells finished off the class by talking about the book On Chesil Beach written by Ian McEwan. This was to give the students some guidance to the format and style of the book reviews that they will be presenting to the class starting from next week.
Saturday, 10 January, 2009
I feel somewhat saturated with fiction today so after finishing this blog I had planned to read the first few chapters of the book my sister Alison lent me. She called it a ‘must read’. It’s called Climate Wars, and is written by Gwynne Dyer. I’ve just flicked through the first page of the introduction. Dyer, a respected commentator on international conflict and socio-political change, goes way beyond giving us a run down of the science of climate change. He points out that political realities will override most attempts to co-ordinate the measures required to heal the wounds that we have inflicted upon the planet. He predicts a rise in the use of violence in the food wars, the water wars, and the civil wars that are to come.
Oh hell. Come back fiction; all is forgiven.
So sorry not to be able to post the next episode of The Black Stones of Hannalore this week. No, this is not a case of writer’s block. The reason is the course on Creative Writing and the extra work and energy it has required to get it off the ground. I will try to behave myself this coming week and work harder to write the next fragment. This is more for my benefit than the readers. I know from bitter experience that once you leave characters stuck in a particular place they sometimes wander off and do things that contradict their back story and the sense of character that you are trying to convey.