Dunedin Writers and Readers Festival 2014: The Children's Room Storytime Train to Port Chalmers

The original article from the Dunedin Writers and Readers Festival 2014 can be found here: 

https://booksellersnz.wordpress.com/2014/05/11/the-childrens-room-storytime-train-to-port-chalmers/ 

After a 5am start ('can we go on the train yet?') and a muttered It’s-not-light-yet-go-back-to-sleep, Esme and I moved around the house with a quiet determination NOT to miss the Children’s Room Story-time Train to Port Chalmers this morning. As we arrived at one-of-the-most-photographed-railway-stations-in-the-world (who measures that, and how? But yes, it is gorgeous), passengers were treated to trainside performances of song and dance from Kat Anna Fiddle and furry costumed characters. As both the crowd and anticipation grew, this risky but rewarding event got under way with a call of ‘all aboard!’ and a collective squeal from the under 7’s. Children over this age smiled lots. As did parents, it must be noted. As one myself, it was just so nice to have an event for younger folk – an acknowledgement that writers and readers are of all ages, not just us older bookish types.



 Why risky? Well, an event that has approximately 100 excited children on a train (and then in a small community library) can be described as many things, and risky is certainly one of them. Whilst wonderfully contained on the train, walking from where the train stopped to the library entailed rigorous traffic control and constant reminders to the children that, yes, cars do travel on the road at Port Chalmers. It was great that organisers had put these safety measures in place.

Additionally, any attempt to organise post-train adrenalized children in a small space could easily be described as herding cats, and those in charge really rose to the challenge, with the youngest children downstairs and the older upstairs, and a swap halfway through the time to share the wonderful authors with all ages. Diana Noonan and Robyn Belton were pitch perfect for the littlies, and Kyle Mewburn’s maniacal manner created a wonderfully controlled chaos in his young audience. Mewburn has a glint in his eye and a way with words.


And rewarding? Definitely. Whatever your age, trains are cool. Books are cool. So trains and books together? Ultra cool. And Esme was pretty impressed with the snack pack and gift from the amazing people at UBS and the end of the experience. Thanks Dunedin Writers and Readers festival for including all ages in this celebration of the written word. It’s just so cool to spread that love of words.

Event reviewed by Lara Liesbeth on behalf of Booksellers NZ

Dunedin Writers and Readers Festival 2015: Dalloway

The Dunedin Writers and Readers Festival was on in May; I wrote some reviews on events.  I'm putting these up here now. If you would like to read the original articles, you can access this one at: 

https://booksellersnz.wordpress.com/2015/05/09/dunedin-writers-festival-dalloway-friday-8-may/ 


‘How can one person remember all those lines?’ asked the stranger sitting next to me after the show Dalloway, at the Dunedin Readers and Writers Festival. Rebecca Vaughan, moving from character to character in Virginia Woolf’s famous story of Clarissa Dalloway and post-WW1 London, has utterly mastered and embodied each distinct personality on the stage. She is so immersed in the storytelling that, in fact, the question becomes more: how would she not know what was to be said next? She is working with genius, though; both in Woolf and Elton Townend Jones, the writer and director who has built a physical world from the pages of one of the most beloved of Woolf’s works – Mrs Dalloway.
 
The show begins with a version of the famous opening line of the book – ‘Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself’, but immediately moves to give breath and life to Vaughan’s characterisation of Clarissa with personal pronouns replacing that third person narrative style found in novels. It is satisfying that this fluctuates throughout and is as dynamic as the actor herself; the action moves from character to narrator to character to character – nearly all of Woolf’s imagined figures are given life on stage. Septimus Smith’s battle with post-traumatic stress syndrome, or ‘shell shock’ is just heartbreaking. Vaughan is so skilled in her craft that one forgets it is her giving life to each nuanced figure, both female and male. From Smith’s Italian wife to old suitor Peter Walsh; Vaughan quite simply gives each character the gift of life.

The ‘mermaid’s dress’ of green was immaculately cut and complemented the action. Ingenious pockets allowed Vaughan to become the masculine – Walsh in particular, as he paced the park and mused on Clarissa’s positive attributes.

If you are in Dunedin this weekend or Auckland at the upcoming 2015 Auckland Writers Festival, then this is a gem worth seeing. The words are gorgeous and the acting is incredible.
Dalloway
Fortune Theatre
8 May 2015

Reviewed by Lara Liesbeth

Dunedin Writers and Readers Festival 2015: An ancient guide to Modern Life, with Natalie Haynes

The Dunedin Writers and Readers Festival was on in May; I wrote some reviews on events.  I'm putting these up here now. If you would like to read the original articles, you can access this one at: 

https://booksellersnz.wordpress.com/2015/05/10/dunedin-writers-and-readers-festival-natalie-haynes/ 

Natalie Haynes is funny. Like, she’s-a-comedian funny. Which is not really surprising, considering that was her job for 12 years or so.  Apparently she retired in 2009 to spend more time writing, which is, of course, excellent for the Dunedin Readers and Writers Festival. What Haynes brought to the festival was priceless: an icing on top of a proverbial cake; an extra limb to an already heavily-weighted tree. She not only managed to share – nay, revel in sharing – her written work, but did so in the format of a stand-up comedy show.  Brilliant.
 

From the first joke cracked about pacing being habitual and also imperative for preventing the horizontal lecture that would otherwise eventuate thanks to jetlag, to the improvised banter around stage-creak ( with apologies for staying away from one side of the audience), Haynes held the floor like a pro. Winning the audience over quickly and kindly with comparisons of our fair Dunedin city to LA (‘bring all your coats and jackets, they said!’ – the weather has been unseasonably generous this festival), Haynes proceeded to form her talk around topics chosen by the audience.

Women, politics, religion and philosophy were chosen from the eight or nine offered up, but even more impressively, Haynes went one step further by deciding to ‘mix it up’. She talked about ‘Women and Politics’, and ‘Religion and Philosophy’ as two distinct categories.  And she so knows her stuff.  From Medea and Eastenders to Lysistrata in Kenya, Haynes seamlessly articulated ways in which the classical world is still highly relevant to today’s society. Surely this woman drinks coffee; her mind and mouth were moving at a furious pace. Or maybe Haynes is just blessed with the so-called gift of the gab. Either way, her energy is infectious.

Haynes finished her show by reading the first few pages from her recent novel The Amber Fury.  It would have been great to have another hour with her addressing this text, as what she shared was both evocative and provocative.  Many in the audience rushed for the queue to buy the book, and the line was long for signings after the show. It’s great to see the festival branching out like this (with theatre, too, in Dalloway), although I guess they always have, with events such as the Story Train and Poetry in the Pub already established during the inaugural festival. Haynes’ show felt like a hidden gem amongst gems, and I feel lucky to have been part of an intimate audience who basked in the sunny company of a consummate professional.

Reviewed by Lara Liesbeth

Book review: The Glorious Heresies by Lisa McInerney

https://booksellersnz.wordpress.com/2015/09/02/book-review-the-glorious-heresies-by-lisa-mcinerney/

It starts with a murder, but that murder is kind of weird.  A guy dies - he’s been hit over the head with religion (literally; it’s an icon).  The killer?  Not your run-of-the-mill criminal, but Maureen - mother of Jimmy, a crime lord in the town of Cork where this gritty story is set.  Maureen is reluctantly put up in a building of Jimmy’s when she needs a place to stay; the victim is a previous ‘tenant’ returned. Thus fate is cast.

Running alongside this is the story of Tony (one of Jimmy’s henchmen) and his son Ryan, who seems to be resisting following in his father’s footsteps.  Initially, anyway.  Ryan is in love with Karine, and the relationship is a sweet one.  Part of McInerney’s skill as a writer has to be how she creates a sense of horror in the reader as we watch Jimmy - prodigal, talented son - succumb to drug dealing and crime.  ‘His lot’, some might argue.  In this, the case for ‘nurture’ rather than ‘nature’ seems depressingly accurate.

Georgie the prostitute is the final protagonist - poor Georgie who doesn’t have much luck in life, and yet makes the most of what she’s got - she is the murder victim’s girlfriend. These narratives work side-by-side until, as with great stories, they come together.

McInerney uses local dialect in her text, which means the reader really feels part of place.  Whether you’ve been to Ireland or not, the words and accents as rendered here are as familiar as St Patrick’s Day.  If that makes it sound lightweight, it’s not.  The characters are well-written, and I found myself particularly taken with Ryan’s story - he who starts out as a boy and ends up a hardened man.  It felt sad but inevitable, what with him being the son of Tony (poor Tony) who tries to leave crime, but can’t.  His relationship with girlfriend Karine seemed so full of hope at the start and it’s testament to McInerney’s writing that one wishes it would stay that way.

Bleak, yes, but also funny, yes.  It’s been described as a meditation on sex and family in ‘the arse end of Ireland’, which also happens to be the name of McInerney’s popular Irish blog. There’s a bit of a ‘Tarantino’ feel to parts of the book - especially the murder at the start and the unusual circumstances that surround it.  If you, like me, enjoy vicarious living, this might be the book for you. I know one thing - I certainly wouldn’t want to live any of these lives for real!

Lara Liesbeth

Book review: The Bright Side of my Condition by Charlotte Randall

The Bright Side of my Condition was a finalist in the Fiction category of the 2014 New Zealand Post Book Awards.

https://booksellersnz.wordpress.com/2014/08/06/book-reviewbook-review-the-bright-side-of-my-condition-by-charlotte-randall/ 

“Maybe next time I get it right.  Forget special.  Next time I come back as a whalefish breathing steady in the lovely deeps.”  So speaks Bloodworth, convict-narrator of Charlotte Randall’s The Bright Side of my Condition.  And Randall indeed seems to be grappling with just that - what is the point of our brief human lives?  When we eventually shuffle off this mortal coil, should we be remembered for, or remember ourselves as ‘special’, or should our successes instead be measured by the twin metric of beauty and enjoyment?  As Bloodworth muses, the penguins know:

... their useless stumpy wings that don’t fly, their duck feet that don’t walk, their bodies jes a starchy morning suit, but look how they contrive to free their selfs from their limits and enjoy their lives.

Look how they grin, he says.  

Randall writes her first person narrative as the man of the time would speak.  The opening sections bloom with ‘I dint say a word’ and ‘I’m Bloodworth.  It aint a name I ever heared of before it were thrust upon me.’  This jars, to begin with.  But as the story progresses, it quickly becomes a an obviously strong narrative voice.  Bloodworth is hard to like, but he must have grown on me - the surreal change of form at the end of the book left me caring for his fate, and I was surprised by this.  He is not really a likeable character, but is richly imagined.  More importantly, his experience is an allegorical tale that explores issues of existentialism, freedom and choice. “And yer have to ask,” says Bloodworth, “... what even were I brung here for?  Jes to walk alone across these cliffs?”

In three parts, the novel addresses ‘The Early Years’, ‘The Middle Years’, and ‘Eternity’ of the experiences of four convicts who escaped from Norfolk Island onto a sealing ship.  The ship did not have enough food to feed the crew and the convicts, and so they were discharged onto one of The Snares, a group of subantarctic islands 200 kilometres from the South Island of New Zealand.  The collective area of these islands equate to 3.5 kilometres squared.  If it sounds foreboding and harsh, it is.  The experiences of the four men are of the environment, each other and the self, for that is all there really is.  Seals are murdered for their skins, and these skins hid away and counted as a measure of time passing.  Interactions between Bloodworth, Gargantua, Toper and Slangam are brutal and bitchy.  Imagine being stuck on an inhospitable island with three other law-breakers; a sack of potatoes, rice and rum the only provisions; the promise of rescue at least a year away.  There is little to hope for except rescue.  At least in a prison, your sentence, you would presume, would end.  Here, on the island, the reader already knows that rescue is actually a decade away. And then what?

Gargantua believes he will be delivered as a hero to the literary circles of England, and that the story he has to tell of the experience will define him as ‘special’.  Toper seems a bit stupid - his religion and natural inclination to follow rather than lead make him a prime candidate for manipulation.  Slangam sees himself as boss, and so it is.  Bloodworth eventually sours of interaction and heads out alone to a cave, rejecting company for penguin and albatross watching, and internal philosophising.  ‘The Early Years’ and ‘The Middle Years’ follow these internal and external journeys.

It is in ‘Eternity’ that things dramatically change.  We still have our narrator, but he has been thrown off a cliff and is slowly falling to his death. This is the smallest section of the book - 30 pages - but the most interesting as far as form goes.  Randall has said that the idea of someone slowly falling to death is what prompted her writing The Bright Side of my Condition, and that this fitted well with the true historical story of the four Norfolk Island convicts. It is a surprising turn to what is, up to that point, a comfortable and fairly straightforward narrative.  Bloodworth’s ‘eternal death’ seems to, perversely, happen quickly.  He narrates the arrival of Captain Coffin and the rescue of the remaining three men.  Things end as they start - the bickering and bitching continues, with all three trying to convince Coffin of the necessity of Bloodworth’s death.

And what of Bloodworth?  As he falls and dies, he continues to grapple with the exquisite pain of living.  At one point he asks: “But were there more of a plan for me? … Were I made special for a special life?”  Randall’s response comes through words that swell from Bloodworth’s pre-convict life: “Living do the making.”  We are as we choose to live, so choose to live wisely.

Dunedin Writers and Readers Festival 2015: H is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald with Damien Barr

The Dunedin Writers and Readers Festival was on in May; I wrote some reviews on events.  I'm putting these up here now. If you would like to read the original articles, you can access this one at: 

https://booksellersnz.wordpress.com/2015/05/09/dunedin-writers-and-readers-festival-h-is-for-hawk-helen-mcdonald-with-damien-barr/

Damien Barr has the most delightful Scottish accent, and so it was rather pleasant listening to him ask questions of Helen Macdonald  (right) , who recently won the Costa Prize for her memoir on falconry and grief, H is for Hawk. Goshawks and grief – an unusual combination, perhaps, but one which, when explained by Macdonald, made perfect sense. Her belief is that, whilst turning to nature can be healing, it is also a reflection of ourselves – we project needs, wants, morals, and, in Macdonald’s case, grief, out into the wild. That’s a lot of pressure on nature. But not really, because that, in and of itself, insinuates that nature can be pressured.

Macdonald talked about the distance needed to write the book after her father’s death. She noted that some writers can write whilst immersed in grief, but for her, the distance was not only necessary but also essential and fundamental. It’s hard to imagine a wild-haired Macdonald hiding behind couches to avoid human contact, feeling as if she were as wild a thing as a goshawk. Hard because Macdonald appears so utterly human – warm, friendly and funny – but also because imagining a fellow human suffering such grief is a hard thing.

Toitu is a fitting venue for an event like this. The open spaces above and the floor-to-ceiling glass windows offer warmth and quiet that complement reflection – they are the perfect surroundings for contemplating the many ways in which we find our way back to humanity when it feels like we might be lost in the dark.

Reviewed by Lara Liesbeth

Presentation on MLE to staff 12 October 2015

My notes:

Slide 2: 
Provocation!  I was running yesterday and listening to this podcast and thought this sat pretty well with what I’m presenting to you today. What do you think?

Slide 3:

These are some photos I took of the school.  It was completed in 2013.  It’s a PPP (public private partnership) which means that the company that built it is responsible for maintenance and ensuring it does what they said it will do.  Maurie Abraham, principal of the Secondary School, therefore spends his time on aspects of teaching and learning rather than capital concerns. Hobsonville Point Primary School was built at the same time and is 100 metres down the road.  The two schools work together and have one Board of Trustees.  More information at: http://www.beehive.govt.nz/sites/all/files/Hobsonville%20School%20Public%20Private%20Partnership%20Q%20and%20A.pdf

Slide 4:

This is the main entrance and cafe. Pretty cool!

Slide 7: 
The physical space is seductive, I have to admit. It’s very new and shiny.  But the message is very clear: it’s not about the new space (although it’s lovely).

Slide 8: 
The discussion is more around the way we view student agency.  Should we have bells? Why? Should we stay in classrooms (cells) all day? Why? Why only an hour per ‘learning activity’ (or whatever you want to call it).

Slide 10: 
Maurie Abraham talked a lot about the ‘silo’ing of subjects.  At HPSS, teachers are teamed up across curriculum areas and team teach.  Steve Mouldey, a learning leader at HPSS, has blogged about this: https://stevemouldey.wordpress.com/2015/05/07/developing-coteaching-hpss-style/

Slide 11: 
Term 1 timetable 2014.

Slide 18:

I was really limited by the confines of the conference (BYOD) and couldn’t/didn’t ask many questions around these things.  What it did do for me was start a whole heap of questions about education which I explored and continue to explore in my own time online.

One thing about the learning hubs - as much time spent in these as a conventional class (nearly 4 hours a week by the latest timetable).  A commitment to 15 students MAXIMUM.

Slide 20:

So why do I care and why do I think we should all care?  The ERO Wellbeing Report focuses in on the huge pressures and expectations of the current system (some might say ‘of assessment’).

I think Maurie is right - we need to be worried about the recent ERO report on student wellbeing.  And that’s without even considering teacher wellbeing!

Slide 22: 
But Hobsonville is not the only one attempting change.  Here’s an example from another school.  Again, there’s that theme of it NOT being about the physical environment.

Slide 23:
Even more ‘modern’!  Or sensible? Or radical? Or wonderful? Or ridiculous?  There is power in the adjective! One thing is for sure: all questions should start with ‘why’.