2 Comments Posted on October 19, 2016October 19, 2016 Art, Celebrations, Creative life, Creative work, Culture, Films, Interviews, Multi arts, Music

2BR02B: the journey of a dystopian film–an interview with Leon Coward

I’ve known the extraordinarily talented young creator Leon Coward since he was a pre-teen reader/reviewer flatteringly enthusiastic about my books. Today, Leon’s love of creating art has led him to work in many different fields–not only literature, but music, visual arts, and now film-making. Involved first as a concept artist for the short film 2BR02B–To Be or Naught to Be, a dystopian work based on one of Kurt Vonnegut’s short stories, Leon went on to take a much greater part in the creation of the film.

The Canadian production, which has already been selected for no less than 15 prestigious short film festivals, has its Australian premiere today, in Sydney. To mark this exciting occasion, I talked with Leon about the creative journey behind the film.

Leon, how did you become involved in the creation of 2BR02B: To be or Naught to Be?

My background is in graphic design and traditional illustration. The producer Artin John is a childhood friend, and he began co-producing the film and asked for me to create a poster… then concept art… then the mural and other artwork. I had no idea how involved I would later become.

The film is based on a Kurt Vonnegut short story which imagines a dystopian world in which babies are only allowed to be born if another life is terminated. What were the particular challenges involved in adapting the story for film?

The tone was a challenge. It’s easy to show too little or be too graphic, be too nonchalant or be too sombre. You can try to be as true to Vonnegut’s material as possible, but at the end of the day also you’re working with the material that you as a team have generated, not just Vonnegut’s, and that’s what you’ve got to make work. There were a few things from the original story that confused our test audiences – in one instance it was putting jazz at the end of the film, and Vonnegut gets away with it because as a reader you don’t hear it, but we realised it just sounded like cinema lounge music and it spoiled the audience’s mulling over of events.

2BR02B has an ensemble cast, so an editing challenge was working out the balance between them. We’d all thought the film would centre on Wehling and his internal conflict, because his dilemma motivates his actions which affect the other characters – the problem was that while we knew what he was thinking and what he’s gearing himself up to do, the audience didn’t. The first edit was melodramatic simply because the audience was asked to feel for a character they didn’t know. So I shook things up and this was hard because I took an edit to the team and, although the story itself hadn’t changed, what was emphasized had changed. For a long time we were also going for an emotional ending, but after test screenings it was clear the audience were frustrated. My grandmother suggested a twist, and I incorporated it and showed the team without warning them – that way they got to experience it as the audience would.

My own big challenges were creating the fictitious ‘Federal Bureau of Termination’ set in Chicago and the Painter’s 16-ft mural. The FBT is represented by Leora, a gas chamber hostess – but other than her and a brief shot of a gas chamber, the FBT doesn’t appear. So to convey the fact that this organization dominated the society, we gave them a brand identity that pervaded everything – corporate signage, posters, banners, badges, tags, earpieces and costume motifs. Vonnegut described a symbolic design for their logo (an ‘eagle perched on a turnstile’), but I approached it as a new branding commission and researched federal seals and local symbols for Chicago. There are a lot of references – the stars and stripes on the US and Chicago flags, the Chicago municipal device (which is a Y for their shaped river), even the wings of their state insect the Monarch butterfly. But there are also a lot of differences to real seals which make it very impersonal, very geometric, skeletal & circuit-like, and no natural symbols.

The mural took 6 months to design and finish. It was digitally painted in Sydney, then printed in Canada. All the characters discuss its symbolism and pose for it – if the mural didn’t come across as a genuine work of art, it’d devalue the acting. Its design was driven by story needs and Vonnegut’s prose. It shows a false utopian garden where nurses and FBT staff, dressed in white and purple, symbolically turn soil, plant seeds, and control life and death. Purple is traditional for sacrificial robes, and Dr. Hitz, who is the architect of population control, is painted as a ‘Zeus-like’ figure. The mural had to be recognizably propaganda and contemporary, so our director Marco instructed me to look at Russian war posters, Art Deco and Cubism. At the same time, I knew the mural had to have religious overtones. I’d experimented with a mix of Expressionism and William Blake-esque styles – trying to avoid the ‘communist cornfield worker’ interpretations I’ve seen in student versions of the film, or any specific garden-type, but I was going too far in that direction. My new layout was Art Deco-inspired, using diagonals and circles – essentially it’s an ‘X’ drawing your eyes to Hitz, and the FBT logo acts like a sun, framing Hitz’s head like a halo. I blended Cubism, Futurism and Brutalism with religious styles. The concrete flats, which also mimic the FBT logo, overpower the barest of gardens and help narrow the viewer’s focus, and the floating flower made it futuristic. The style of plants and their millefleur treatment came from The Lady and the Unicorn tapestry and the religiously-themed The Hunt of the Unicorn tapestry. Sir Edward Burne-Jones’ pilgrimage paintings, and especially his Wedding of Psyche, provided the inspiration for the figures, their poses, compositional distribution and costumes (I also referenced medical scrubs). Hitz needed a recognizable inference of himself as a messiah – so Byzantine iconography provided the inspiration for his hands (which are Christ’s) and the haloed foetus, as well as the mural’s forced perspective. For Hitz’s costume there was also a bit of SS uniform and Nehru jacket, dentist and Jedi, and a more contemporary influence from Gehn in Cyan’s Riven, a character who also sees himself as a god. Everywhere you look the message is there, and it was hard to make the mural function as a finished work of art yet still be visibly ‘in-progress’. The aim was to show a society where there is no respect for religious heritage – God is dead, and the FBT is filling the vacancy – and the mural needed to be created that way. It took months of digitally painting and scanning paint textures and brushstrokes, since the mural had to withstand close-ups. Halfway through, Paul Giamatti had scheduling conflicts, and I had to repaint the face for our Hitz replacement, Mackenzie Gray. The mural was printed in strips of paper which overlapped; clear hard-drying gel was applied to give it a texture, and Ferrero-Rocher wrappers (which have a great canvas texture) were used for the gold highlights.

The project was an international collaboration over 3 years between crew in Australia, Canada, UK, Mexico and the Netherlands. What were the challenges and advantages involved in such a big undertaking over such distances and different time zones? What did you learn from the experience?

We had cast and crew in Vancouver, myself and other crew in Sydney, an artist in the Netherlands, and a VFX school in Mexico which did effects as part of their professional training. Footage was flown to me in Sydney and I began re-editing with James Tarbotton. Then Martin Cantwell, our brilliant sound designer in London, came onboard. The time differences were okay as calls were early morning or late night, so we’d avoid each others’ work hours – which was important since the film was not a paying project. The separation was a technical disadvantage, since exporting and transferring files adds a lot of time. It’s also important to be able to see, at least once, the person you’re communicating with, in person or Skype, because it makes email writing a lot easier. While there were disadvantages, I think the distance for me and my collaborators in Sydney allowed us to approach the project in a way we mightn’t have otherwise – especially in the editing, where we could respond as a fresh audience without preconceptions, or even knowing what the actors were like out of character.

You worked on many different aspects of the film, as art director, composer, film editor and associate producer. How did you navigate all these different roles? Was there one aspect you preferred above all?

In a sense it hasn’t been hard to navigate between the roles because they were prepared for – I had this idea that the Painter would have a gramophone, and that he was listening to Schubert’s “Ave Maria”. When gun-shooting later ensues, the song could provide a macabre serenade. I stuck the gramophone in my concept art, and waited for the idea to take hold – it was influencing the film’s music to some extent without having to be the composer, but ironically I eventually found myself in the role and this wasn’t intentional! There is a some incidental music, but I pushed to have it that the only music was the ‘live’ gramophone so that the music was simply part of the world, and not an ‘invisible’ emotional narrator as film scores often are. The film and the Ave Maria recording were designed and edited around each other: while films are often edited to an existing temp track of unrelated music, this film was edited to a pre-existing recording of Ave Maria, which was later replaced with a tailor-made recording, post editing and sound design. It enabled us to go for a different interpretation too, which would greater contrast the action. We were fortunate to have my sister Imogen Coward, who is both a skilled soprano and conductor, record the version for us that appears in the finished film. We wanted to avoid any artificial stretching or splicing, so we had the unusual challenge of recording in one take, matching the timing of the temp version. We had 2 frames wriggle room, and the edit didn’t have any room to be changed for different timing. It was tiring, but it was worth it because it has a quality that is lost when music, especially singing, is heavily edited.

The film has so far received 5 nominations and 14 international festival selections, including for its Australian premiere at the Sydney Indie Film Festival on October 19. That’s quite an achievement! What do you think are the special qualities of the film which have made it attractive to festival selectors?

While Vonnegut created the story, it’s also the way the cast and crew have interpreted, realized and communicated the story. Derek Ryan, our screenwriter and co-producer, did a good job of cutting away story material that couldn’t be cinematic – so from the start we were all working with a document that concentrated our focus. 2BR02B really takes a cross-section of behaviours in a society where life and death are pushed to absurdities, but there’s no obvious political or moral position in its telling – just the drama of human action, and I think it allows the viewer in on their own terms. I think one of the things that’s helped is how the film feels when you watch it vs what is leaves you thinking about – cinematically it is very static up to a point, and then there’s this burst of drama and the music making it madness, and then just desolation, and that hits the audience. Vonnegut’s narrative was influenced by his experiences as a P.O.W. in Dresden, and even though his story is fiction, the themes are relevant and resonate because the wars have cast such a long shadow. It’s subtle in our film, but the hospital cross is actually a swastika, and the banners flanking the mural are inspired by Nazi banners – Wehling’s cry “It’s only death” was used on our banners, so instead of his line being spontaneous, it becomes him quoting propaganda which the audience saw earlier.

What’s next for you, in terms of films, after this one?

I’m independently developing my own film project – an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince”, and am shifting between generating its music and visual material.

You are also engaged in doing a PhD on aspects of film design. Can you tell us a bit about that?

It essentially provides an analytical process which teases apart a film’s design (if it has one) – whether the story, visuals, acting, music, sound or all their combination. The method is quite straightforward, but its theoretical justification and demonstration is very demanding. The method has had encouraging support from many industry practitioners.

As a multi-talented creator and performer, you are also involved in music, visual arts and literature. Tell us about some of your projects in those fields.

My sister Imogen is director of the chamber orchestra Camerata Academica of the Antipodes, which was founded by my siblings and a group of our young musician friends who we’ve played music together with since childhood. Our concert profits go towards helping support the Don Spencer’s Australian Children’s Music Foundation. Our orchestra has just celebrated its second anniversary and second regional tour in Australia. It’s been a very exciting time for the group. We love playing Baroque music – Vivaldi, Handel and Corelli – but our concerts also include music from a wide range of eras and styles, from the 1500s to today, and the orchestra has premiered some of my music that was written specially for the members. A lot of my own solo projects are on hold until after the PhD, including fine art prints and two picture books, written and illustrated by me, one which has been endorsed by Quentin Blake (Roald Dahl’s illustrator).

I know that you come from a family where the arts are highly valued, and your siblings are both also working in the arts. Can you tell us a bit about how you grew up, and what effect you feel it had on your adult career?

We’ve each ended up musicians – my sister violin, viola, cello and voice, and she has her PhD in music. My brother has focused on violin, voice and guitar, and he’s also doing his PhD on music and magic performance (he’s been performing illusions for 10 years now). Our parents homeschooled us to university level, and were very keyed in to expanding our interests, skills and activities, but they didn’t try to turn us out as one thing or another and weren’t discouraging. My grandmother recently found some drawings from when I was 5, and I couldn’t draw for nuts. But I meet a lot of parents and kids who restrict activities because there’s no immediate interest or sign of potential. I think the effect it has had for my siblings and me is that we’re not afraid to venture beyond our immediate interests and skills, and that’s allowed us to develop the set of skills we have.

Leon Coward is a published artist and writer, and performed composer and choreographer. He performs on violin, viola, piano and voice with the chamber orchestra Camerata Academica of the Antipodes, and was recently art director, composer, editor and associate producer for the 2016 film adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s “2BR02B: To Be or Naught to Be”. He is undertaking a PhD at the University of New England, Australia, and has presented his creative work and research throughout Australasia and internationally, including for the TATE Liverpool UK. Since 2007 Leon has edited and designed the e-zine “The Online Book Group”. In 2009 Leon illustrated “Vietnam Reflections”, by award-winning author Libby Hathorn. In 2011 he was awarded a mentorship by the Australian Society of Authors.

3 Comments Posted on October 17, 2016October 12, 2016 Authors, Book talk, Creative life, Interviews, Readers, Reviews

Writers reviewing books–an interview with Linda Newbery, Celia Rees and Adele Geras

Book reviewing is a real art, and one that in the last ten years or so has undergone many changes. In the past, most book reviews were published in print—in newspapers and magazines, as well as, occasionally on radio and TV. But today, as space in newspapers and magazines has shrunk, most book reviews are published online, on specialised sites, online publications, and blogs.

Today I’m interviewing three distinguished UK authors, Linda Newbery, Celia Rees and Adele Geras, who together have created a great new book review blog, called WritersReview. I was asked to be a guest reviewer on the blog recently, was intrigued by the concept, and wanted to know more!

Left to right: Linda, Celia and Adele

Can you tell me about how and why you started WritersReview?

Linda: Recently I added a blog to my own website. I’d never had a blog before but I liked the idea of using mine for reviews, with maybe a post of two about my own work in progress or backlist titles, and contributions from writer friends. When I mentioned this to Celia, she came up with the better idea of a joint review blog. This appealed at once, as I knew that a joint blog would reach more readers and attract more contributors than I’d achieve on my own. Next time Celia and I met, we talked about how to organise the blog and decided to invite Adele to join us, knowing that she reads widely and enjoys reviewing.

All three of us have published widely for children and young adults but are now writing adult fiction, and our reviewing here is a way of extending our range. Collectively we have a great many contacts, which should make it easy to keep things turning over.

Celia: Linda and I don’t live too far from each other and we meet up every now again for a writerly chat. During one of our talks. We started talking about reviewing, specifically online reviewing. We both agreed that good reviewing sites were few and far between and that much of the reviewing was poor and unfair. We were both taken with the possibility of setting up a review site where writers could review other writers. Writers tend to be keen readers and are often experienced reviewers and would offer fairer, more balanced and better informed reviews than many to be found online. Linda went away and came back with some ideas for the review site. She suggested we invite Adele to join us as she’s an avid and omnivorous reader and highly respected reviewer. We would each invite other authors to make guest posts, to add variety, keep the posts current and gradually build the site. Adele and I are both History Girls and are familiar with Blogger, so that was the site we chose to use. Linda did the hard work, designing and setting up the site, sorting out teething problems and posting the first reviews.

Adele: It was really Linda’s brainchild and when she asked me to join in, and mentioned that she was asking no Celia too, I was really delighted. I’ve long felt that there were too few outlets for people’s opinions about books. Newspaper reviews and much that’s online concentrates on the eye catching, the best-selling, the obvious. Linda made her offer seem attractive by telling us we can write about what enthuses us, whatever it might be.

Another of her good ideas was to give us a chance to invite other writers to contribute as well. She did all the heavy lifting, setting up the site and making sure it looks as good as it does.

What is your vision for the site? And how do you think it might develop?

Linda: I’d like it to be wide-ranging and friendly. We, and our guests, can choose anything we like to review – anything, that is, other than children’s books (not because we have anything against them but because there are plenty of other sites that specialise in children’s). I’d like to include biography, nature writing and other non-fiction, possibly poetry – whatever we or our guests want to write about. And the books don’t have to be newly-published – part of the point is for writers to share their own enthusiasms and draw attention to books that have inspired or influenced them, or deserve to be read more widely.

I hope, as we go on, that we’ll build up a list of regular guests and that maybe people will even approach us, wanting to contribute. I hope, too, that readers will comment on our reviews and add their own opinions.

I’d love it if our blog became known and respected and if we saw our reviews quoted in publicity releases!

Adele: I’m hoping it’s the sort of site readers might go to a) to see what we’d enjoyed b) to get ideas about what they might enjoy c) to be able to comment freely about what they saw there.

Celia: From the first, we decided to review books for adults, rather than children’s or YA. That was the only rule. I guess we hope that the site will attract people who are interested in what we have to say about the books we review and to counterbalance some of the ill-informed and occasionally malicious reviews to be found in other places online. I would like to see Writers Review become a site that readers can trust and use as a guide to books that they might want to read.

How do you choose books for review? Are there types or genres of books you particularly want to concentrate on?

Linda: Many of the books won’t be chosen by us, but by our guests. We won’t, on the whole, allocate titles to reviewers, though there may be some exceptions. I hope contemporary fiction will be well to the fore, but we’ll see how things develop without our intervention.

Celia: Other than the books have to be for adults, we can review what we like, any genre, fiction or non-fiction. The books can be newly published or old favourites. There is no pressure to review current books. Our choices are made on our own preferences, what we might be reading at the time, work we admire, books that we have enjoyed and think other readers might like, too.

Adele: It’s about sharing enthusiasms. Fiction or non-fiction, but books for adults. We are known mainly as children’s or YA writers, but wanted to go outside our perceived boundaries.

What do you think of the current situation for book reviewing today, against the background of the contemporary publishing climate?

Celia: I think that there has been a marked falling away in the standard of reviewing. The broadsheet newspapers remain the gold standard but book review space continues to be squeezed. The plethora of online reviewing sites is patchy at best and can be downright destructive and malicious. Real reviewing appears to be a dying art. Too few reviewers understand that a good review is more than an exhaustive synopsis and a few subjective opinions, or arbitrary judgements based on personal preferences, or trivial concerns like print quality or length. We have all seen shocking examples of books condemned, their star rating brought down for the most irrelevant and trivial of reasons and behind that is always the lurking spectre of sock puppetry. I’m also uneasy about the possible influence of the big publishing houses through the blandishments of their publicity departments, particularly on book bloggers. We might be swimming against a tsunami but I don’t think readers like to feel manipulated (I certainly don’t) and I hope that a site like ours might be trusted and valued by readers and publishers alike.

Adele: I think it’s very patchy. I’m not 100% sure how much reviews contribute to the success of a given book, but am sorrowfully concluding: not very much! How otherwise to account for so many LOW LOW sales for extremely well-reviewed books?

Linda: It seems that publishers have come to value review blogs, with space for print reviews so much in demand, and that online reviewing can be quite influential in passing on word-of-mouth recommendations. In the press, some books are widely reviewed while others get no coverage at all, and might as well be invisible. The ‘blog tour’ for a new book is now quite common, even for high-profile authors. So a blog like ours is likely to be appreciated by authors as well as by publishers.

Leave a comment Posted on October 14, 2016October 14, 2016 Uncategorized

Established writers and creative writing doctorates/PHDs

I’m delighted to announce that my academic research paper, Breaking the pattern: established writers undertaking creative writing doctorates in Australia, has just been published in the latest(October) issue of the prestigious journal TEXT. Here’s the abstract:

The focus of this article is an examination of the experiences of established writers who have recently completed, or are currently undertaking, a creative writing doctorate, against a background of change within the publishing industry. Is it primarily financial/career or creative control concerns that are influencing established writers to undertake creative doctorates in recent times? And how do these writers fare within the degree program? To explore these issues through individual stories, interviews were conducted, by email and phone, with six established professional writers who had recently completed, or were still undertaking, a creative doctorate as well as with four established creative writing academics, most of whom are authors themselves. Questions of motivation and experience, as well as outcome, are canvassed in this piece of original research, which provides an interesting snapshot of the current situation for established writers in Australia undertaking creative writing doctorates.

The full paper is available for reading here.

1 Comment Posted on October 14, 2016October 12, 2016 Authors, Book talk, Interviews, novels

Interview with Kristel Thornell, author of On The Blue Train

In December 1926, Agatha Christie, already the famous author of several detective novels, disappeared for eleven days. The press and the public were agog as a massive investigation employing more than a thousand police officers was mounted, and after her car was found abandoned, great fears were held for her safety. As titillating details emerged about the traumatic events surrounding her disappearance–her husband’s demand for a divorce on top of his infidelity, and her beloved mother’s death–the public joined in the hunt, with hundreds of amateur detectives combing for clues. Even other mystery writers joined in the hunt, including Arthur Conan Doyle and Dorothy L.Sayers! Eleven days after she first went missing, Agatha was discovered in a spa hotel in Harrogate in Yorkshire, where she was staying under the name of Teresa Neele–poignantly, the surname of her husband’s mistress.

There have been many speculations, then as now, as to what really happened. Agatha herself never explained those missing eleven days. An intensely private, even shy woman, the trauma of the time when she was in the full glare of remorseless publicity never left her, even though she went on to become a mega-selling ‘Queen of Crime’. Even today she is the most best-selling novelist of all time, with literally billions of books sold.

Now young Australian author Kristel Thornell has written a novel which, with great deftness and sensitivity, imagines what those eleven days might have been like. Foregrounding both Agatha herself and the fictional character of Australian Harry McKenna, similarly bruised by life, she draws a convincing portrait of heartbreak, the beginning of healing, and the challenges and consolations of creativity. It’s a wonderful novel which is also a touching tribute to Agatha’s unique creative gift, informed by a great deal of research. And so today I’m delighted to bring readers a fascinating interview with Kristel Thornell, in which she talks about the creation of her novel, On the Blue Train (Allen and Unwin, out now).

How did you first come up with the idea for the novel?

I heard a fragment of a radio program that mentioned Christie’s “disappearance” and I was very taken with the idea of a young writer living under a pseudonym for eleven days. Perhaps because writing itself can resemble living under a pseudonym, and this parallel intrigued me. I was particularly interested in the tension suggested between public and private selves. I found myself vividly picturing a troubled, resourceful woman arriving at a hotel in the north of England in an unusual state of consciousness. I thought it could be an interesting challenge to try to give fictional depth to such an experience, exploring the combination of disorientation and freedom she might have felt. I was attracted to writing a sort of psychological mystery. One that, without being a detective novel, would salute what I most enjoy in that genre – transporting atmosphere, a hypnotic flow, the heightened awareness of details, moments, and buried impulses.

What research did you do, and what were the challenges in researching such a famous, but also mysterious episode in Agatha Christie’s life?

I began with the biographies of Christie by Janet Morgan and Laura Thompson, Christie’s autobiography, and her early novels. In the UK, I read newspapers covering her disappearance and the archive of her papers at the University of Exeter. A central part of the process was spending time in Torquay, where she grew up and loved to return, Newlands Corner, the area from which she “disappeared”, and Harrogate, where she lived for those days as Teresa Neele. In Harrogate, I stayed at the hotel she stayed at (which still exists), for the same period of time she was there, absorbing the ambience and learning to inhabit my character.

Agatha Christie in 1926

The blanks in the official record gave me a certain sense of being at liberty to invent, but it was a challenge to avoid preconceived ideas and put aside, as it were, Christie the icon, Christie the phenomenon. I had to avoid anachronistically projecting all of that symbolic weight onto my vision of a young writer. It also felt crucial to allow myself to freely imagine within the biographical contours, and to approach the biographical material itself in my own way.

You have deftly mixed your own imaginings with what’s known about what happened. How did you negotiate the intersection between fact and fiction?

This was somewhat more straightforward with “On the Blue Train” than it was with my previous novel (inspired by the Australian landscape painter Clarice Beckett). With the earlier novel, I worked with biographical facts quite loosely, sometimes purposely altering them. With “On the Blue Train”, I aimed to incorporate the known facts of Christie’s disappearance and life up until that time into the imaginary world of the novel. I didn’t consciously change anything factual that appeared significant to me. Though I was aware, of course, that simply to fictionalize a fact is to reimagine it. To shape it with language, frame and illuminate it in particular ways, give it a tone. So that even the biographical becomes semi-biographical, novelistic.

There have been many theories concerning Christie’s disappearance, ranging from amnesiac fugue to a cynical publicity stunt mixed with revenge against her unfaithful husband. In your version, Agatha is aware that she is not who she is telling the world she is, yet she cannot cope with the fact of who she is and what has happened–a syndrome perhaps like post traumatic shock. How difficult was it to portray the state Agatha is in?

Finding a voice to convey that state was the key to the whole project. Laura Thompson, who wrote the 2007 biography of Christie, sees her mental state during that episode as semi-rational, somehow poetic, and this rang true to me. Such a condition plausibly fit the omission in Christie’s autobiography. I saw the fictional Agatha/Teresa as fluctuating between extreme sensitivity and numbness, and, increasingly, a sort of playful, creative spirit, a reawakening sensuality. She was both guiding herself and drifting. I wanted the novel’s voice to reflect these complexities: to be hypnotic, slightly hallucinatory, and inflected, indeed, with shock, grief, shame, and anxiety. The voice actually came quite intuitively. I identified with it deeply.

The pain of what Agatha is going through as she struggles with the realisation that her world has come crashing down is exacerbated by her inability to write a word of the book she was planning–which of course ended up being Murder on the Blue Train. Was this episode in Agatha’s life a turning point in terms of her art as much as her personal life, and if so in what way?

Yes, it would appear so. It was at around this time that she came to see herself as a professional author. She had already been working in a determined, focused way, aware that her work could earn money. Earlier in 1926, she had published “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd”, which had done very well. However, in her autobiography she describes the experience of having to force herself to finish “The Mystery of the Blue Train” (which she was finally able to largely complete in 1928 in Tenerife) as transitional. This was the crossing over into the life of a true working writer, one who writes whether or not she feels like it. And there is the sense that she made something of a fortress of this new role, keeping her private self guarded within it. It was fascinating to me that her intense vulnerability and isolation during that time might ultimately have galvanized her, confirmed her independence and vocation.

The hounding of celebrities, the curiosity of the media and its readers in intimate details of their lives, is very much an element of your book, and also of contemporary relevance. How do you think a similar episode would play out today in the media?

Yes, that aspect of the story struck me as extremely fresh and current. I imagine that such attention could feel even more traumatically claustrophobic today. It would certainly be amplified by recent technologies, and quickly become so much more international. And there appears to be an ever-stronger requirement for writers to be public figures. The Elena Ferrante phenomenon is interesting in this light: the novelty of her “hidden” identity, the emphasis on this and speculation over her “true” identity becoming a lucrative part of her brand, and the recent “unmasking”.

In France, Agatha Christie is regarded by critics as a popular fiction genius, with a succint elegance of style, a deftness of characterisation and an extraordinary mastery of plot. Yet in English-speaking countries she is too often dismissed as a mere purveyor of puzzles. I wrote about this disconnect myself some years ago: http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2006/07/writers_choice__2.html

What do you think? Does the disconnect still exist? And why?

I’ve been curious about that discrepancy, too, and I enjoyed Houellebecq’s response to Christie. It does still seem to exist and I would agree with your impression that in English-speaking countries she can be seen to represent an outmoded fairytale Englishness – one that is more attractive and soothing to foreigners. No doubt this involves some discomfort surrounding her perceived conservative upper-middle-class viewpoint. Could it be the case, also, that when a cultural product is such a powerfully popular national symbol, it can provoke a certain embarrassment?

Incidentally, I’ve read several of her novels in French and Italian, as well as in English, to see if I could come at the “essence” of them. Reading her in translation, I found it interesting that the streamlined quality of her prose – the minimally evoked settings, the emphasis on concise, bouncy dialogue, the light movement, and so on – seemed to translate very well, very smoothly.

Has writing the novel made you think of Agatha Christie, and her work, differently to before you started?

It has made me wonder at the intricacies of her inner life, and admire her strength, self-discipline, self-confidence, and forceful creative drive. I often think now of how hugely sustaining writing must have been for her.

What are your favourite Christie novels?

First edition, 1926

I think I remember most fondly “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd” and “The Mystery of the Blue Train”. The first has a wonderfully fluid, clean elegance, and an intriguing, chilling mood lightly balanced between clinical and intimate. I am attached to “The Mystery of the Blue Train” partly, perhaps, because it was a triumph for her to finish it, after having struggled with it at that very difficult time. It represents a sort of survival-through-creativity for me. Despite all

First edition, 1928

she was going through, she managed to pull off a novel that is amusingly theatrical, evocative, and sprightly.

Kristel Thornell’s debut work of fiction, Night Street, was the co-winner of the Vogel’s award in 2009 and was much acclaimed when published in 2010. On the Blue Train is her second novel.

More about On the Blue Train:

What did happen to Agatha Christie during her mysterious eleven-day disappearance just as she was on the cusp of fame? Mixing fact and fantasy On the Blue Train is an entrancing novel of creativity and grief from a winner of the Vogel Literary Award

Yes, she said, finally. Breaks are important. There are times when it’s wiser to get away. From it all.

It was the work of a moment, on 4 December 1926, Agatha Christie became Teresa Neele, resident of the spa hotel, the Harrogate Hydro. With her wedding ring left behind her, and her minimal belongings unpacked, Agatha’s lost days begin.

Lying to her fellow guests about the death of a husband and child, Teresa settles in to the anonymity she so fiercely desires. Until Harry McKenna, bruised from the end of his own marriage, asks her to dance.

Thornell says, “We are drawn to the iconic aura of Agatha Christie, as well as to a sense of her tireless imagination and drive. We continue to find her blend of cozy comforting order and hidden dark forces tantalizing and highly addictive. Her “disappearance” – a brief escape from her public identity – seems such a unique act, unusually creative and psychologically fascinating.”

With verve and sensitivity, Thornell imagines what Christie could not write.

Leave a comment Posted on October 12, 2016October 12, 2016 Art, Book talk, Creative life, Creative work, Illustrators, Interviews

Across the Tasman 6: Sarah Davis

Today in my New Zealand series, I’m delighted to be publishing an interview with the wonderful illustrator Sarah Davis. Sarah began illustrating picture books in 2008, and is now, as she puts it, ‘ruined for any other career.’ She has an honours degree in literature, and her love of language and narrative underpins her illustration work – as a self-taught artist, she is constantly experimenting with new ways to tell stories visually. She has illustrated more than 37 books with major publishers and been shortlisted for about the same number of awards in Australia and New Zealand. Sarah is an ambassador for Room to Read, and the Illustrator Coordinator for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (Australia East/NZ) Sarah is represented by the Gallt Zacker Agency in the USA and Frances Plumpton Literary Agency in New Zealand.

Sarah, you’ve said you are now spoiled for any other career other than illustration! Can you tell us about how that career started? What first drew you to illustration? And who were your main artistic influences?

I think I’ve always been heading towards illustration, actually, but I got temporarily derailed by Life. I actually majored in English literature and creative writing at uni, and haven’t had much art training, and had my son when I was only 20, so went into teaching English at secondary school because it was something i felt passionate about and the hours were also good to fit around being a sole parent. I’d always drawn for fun and wanted to do more with it, but couldn’t really find the time. I started dabbling in art a bit more seriously when I was about 26, but had our two lovely daughters in 2001 and 2003, and was still working part time, so it was hard to fit it in! When we moved to Sydney in 2004, I took time off work and that’s when illustration started to take off for me. I decided I’d go with the “fake it till you make it!’ philosophy, and set up a profile on some online freelancing sites, and got a bunch of jobs that way which taught me how it all worked and helped me start to build a portfolio. Then I decided to have a go at picture book illustration. I applied to the Stylefile with some truly horrible art samples, and they very sensibly and very kindly rejected me. Their rejection was accompanied by an A4 page of incredibly constructive criticism, and I took all their advice on board and built a much better portfolio, which i took to a critique at a SCBWI conference, and it all took off from there, thanks in a large part to my fairy godmother Susanne Gervay, who was incredibly kind and supportive and enthusiastically made connections and opportunities appear for me.

What draws me to illustration is the opportunity it provides for narrative – I’m a sucker for story. My artistic influences are pretty varied, I think – I spend a lot of time online gazing at the awe-inspiring work of superior beings. I don’t think I really have a style, and seem to shift my approach based on the demands of the text, which I suppose is why the people whose work I admire also cover a broad spectrum of styles and periods.

You’ve become one of NZ’s busiest illustrators, with many books published, and lots more on the go. How do you manage your time with all the different projects?

Very badly! I call my system “surfing the tidal wave” – that feeling where you’re performing a very tricky balancing act, only just staying afloat, and there’s a weight of thundering chaos surging at your heels waiting to crash down on you. So far I haven’t totally wiped out and I’m still juuuust ahead of the wave. I’ve illustrated 37 trade picture and chapter books since 2008, as well as taking on commercial projects, books for educational publishers such as Cengage, and speaking at between 20-40 schools a year. Balancing that and family time has been very hectic – we’ve got three kids and 6 months ago we acquired a lovely extra teenager. There were quite a few occasions over the last few years when I had a deadline looming and I didn’t sleep at all for days in a row. I wouldn’t recommend it! I’m much better at achieving work/life balance now. I’m being very selective about what I take on, and trying to be much more disciplined with planning ahead. My son actually introduced me to bullet journalling this year, which is actually a wonderful way to be mindful and deliberate about how you spend your days. (http://bulletjournal.com/)

What ‘sells’ you into agreeing to illustrating a text? What sorts of things do you look for? And do you have contact with authors at any stage during the process of creating the illustrations?

The text has to come to life in my head and make me feel something – it has to make me laugh or cry. I like texts that feel unusual and a little unhinged, or that feel as though they haven’t been done before. Vivid, evocative language and appealing characters. To be honest, a lot of the books I’ve done have been sequels – so I’ve initially signed on for one book, and then ended up locked in to doing 3 or 4, which is a brilliant problem to have, but also a little frustrating. I feel like it’s forced me to mark time a bit and cover old ground, when I really want to be moving on and trying something new. But I think I’m just coming to the end of that now!

I usually don’t have a lot of contact with the authors through the process – the publisher usually liases with them, shows them the roughs, processes any feedback for me. It’s a bit odd, because that’s how it works even with authors I know quite well! Me and Juliette MacIver are a bit naughty though and we often have quite long consultations in which the publishers aren’t included, usually involving bottles of wine and ukeleles. (actually, we should include the publishers – they’re all great people and good fun and can probably also drink wine and play the ukelele.)

You’ve illustrated both picture books and chapter books. What do you prefer doing? And how does the process differ between the two styles of books?

I much prefer picture books – there’s a lot more leeway for the illustrator to tell a story. Illustrating for chapter books is quite prescribed and proscribed – you basically get told what to draw and given a space in which to draw it on each page. It feels a lot more like you’re just decorating the text. When you’re illustrating a picture book text you really have a huge interpretive role, and you have to bring the characters to life, draw out and enhance the themes of the text, work out how the action of the plot will play out visually. It’s much more challenging and fun. You can also subvert the text, add unexpected twists and turns and layers – then it becomes a wonderful sort of alchemy where the contributions of two creators meet and mix and create a new level of meaning.

You are published both in New Zealand and Australia, and your books have won awards in both countries. Do you see any differences between the two countries in terms of reception of books, and reader responses?

I’m not sure, really! To be honest, I try not to think too much about how my books are being received, because it scares me! Best to keep my head down and just get on with it. Obviously, awards are always lovely – my favourite kind of award to get are the Children’s Choice awards. Kids are very wise and also really tough judges. As far as differences between the 2 countries go… um…. The Marmaduke Duck series became a really big hit in New Zealand and is a bit of a household name over there, but never really took off here. The quirky kiwi sense of humour might have something to do with that. I mean, it’s an entire 4 book series about a duck who makes jam! Doesn’t get much weirder than that…

Does being a New Zealander impact on or influence your work? If so, in what way?

Well, I think it must, in the way that everyone’s childhood influences their work! I moved from England to Aotearoa when I was 6, and grew up mainly in Christchurch. The land had a huge effect on me. The mountains and bush and sea of Aotearoa have an really powerful presence – this brooding sense that the land is living, and aware of you.

I think for a little country it really punches above its weight creatively, and as a kid I remember there being a lot of emphasis in school on art and creative writing. I read voraciously, and a lot of my favourite authors were NZ writers. Gavin Bishop actually came to visit my school when I was about 9 or 10, and I remember he was working on Mrs McGinty’s Bizarre Plant, and showed us all his rough sketches – I was transfixed! (I actually wrote a blog post about it: http://sarah-davis.org/blog/2015/7/20/l0ef49s6lr8u1vcxogmnuqer1ommrd)

I should also mention my fabulous NZ publishers: Gecko Press and Scholastic NZ. Both extraordinary powerhouses of creativity and absolutely delightful to work with, and tireless in promoting their books and trying to get them out into the wider world, which is a necessity for NZ publishers since the local market is so small. An extra shout out must go to Julia Marshall at Gecko, who has built the company from the ground up and really does produce the most extraordinarily beautiful books.

What are you working on now?

I’m working on a sequel to Be Brave Pink Piglet, published by Hachette, and a super-secret (and exciting!) project for Penguin, which is due in January. I also have a couple of educational titles on the go so that I can pay the bills. I’m working on a couple of series of paintings, too, and hoping to have an exhibition next year. But what I’m most excited about is that I’ve finally finished writing a picture book of my own, and am also going to be illustrating another that my son wrote. They’re both with a publisher now, going to acquisitions soon I hope!

Leave a comment Posted on October 6, 2016October 4, 2016 Uncategorized

Third Night published in Swinburne University journal

A creative non-fiction piece of mine, Third Night, which I presented as a reading at the Australasian Association of Writing Programs’ conference last year, has just been published, along with other conference presenters’ pieces, in a special edition, ‘Hauntings’, of Swinburne University’s journal, Bukker Tillibul. I’m reproducing Third Night below, but you can also read it and all the other pieces here.

Third Night

By Sophie Masson

The first night, far from home, and a dream: a woman writing, at a desk in an old weatherboard cottage. The screen door creaks, and something hurtles into the room. A glimpse of a face, vivid in its sheer ferocity: a tiny thing, but deadly. The dreamer awakes in fright, to silence and friendly darkness, thinks on the dream, but does not understand.

Now it’s the second night, another dream. Two travellers, a woman and a man, arrive at a lakeshore. The man strips, goes into the lake, and as he does so, the water turns his skin to bronze, he is becoming alien but doesn’t seem to notice, while his companion cries out in fear. The dreamer wakes, heart pounding, into the friendly darkness, and still does not understand.

It is the third night, in a Sydney suburb this time. The dreamer is asleep. All at once, dogs bark. The staccato sound that tells you their hackles are rising, that something unexpected is out there. It is this that wakes the dreamer and gets her up to look out the window.

Outside, in the vacant lot next door, there is a man, standing in the moonlight, hair of black and silver, dressed in plain pale clothes—but exactly what colour are they? He looks quite solid, there is no translucence about him, and yet..He has one hand on his hip, the other held out with fingers parted, a silent message. Otherwise, he is still, more still than ever any human can be: and his glance—what a cold, direct gaze!—is fixed at the wide-awake dreamer, standing transfixed at the window.

There is no fear. Don’t think that. Only an eternal moment, suspended, the cold direct gaze, the silver glimmer, the silent calling.

Now the waking mind is rebelling, seeking to explain. There is an intruder! Something must be done. The dreamer rouses the household which stands there in its pyjamas staring bleary-eyed out at the night. The household shouts at the dogs, hoping to chase away the intruder. Then rubs its eyes, says, ‘But he’s not there! Look..’ And in the place where the man stood in the vacant lot, the dreamer sees…a tree. A small, stunted grey eucalypt. The dogs have stopped barking. The household goes back to bed, shrugging.

But the dreamer stands at the window and stares out at the tree. I’ve heard the dogs barking before, gone to the window to shout at them, and seen that tree. But not this night. The dogs barked, and I saw something else, which the first two nights had prepared me for. Not a dream.

For yes, this was my own story. What happened was real: but I may never be able to understand it. It does not matter. For all of us move in the world’s mystery as fish swim in water, because it is our natural element. Yet often without understanding, for fish are the last to know they live in water.

Leave a comment Posted on October 4, 2016October 4, 2016 Art, Authors, Book talk, Celebrations, Illustrators, New books

Cover reveal for Two Rainbows!

Drum-roll: very happy to be able to reveal the gorgeous cover of Two Rainbows, the second of my two picture books to appear next year with Little Hare. With strikingly atmospheric pictures by fantastic new illustrator Michael McMahon, it’s an exploration of colour and the very different ways it’s found in city and country life, seen through the eyes of a little girl.The book comes out in July 2017.

Leave a comment Posted on October 3, 2016October 4, 2016 Authors, Book talk, Fiction, Interviews

Across the Tasman 5: Brian Falkner

INSPIRE_Author and Writing coach Brian Faulkner pictured here at St Peter’s Lutheran School in Brisbane today 17/2/2016. Pictures: Jack Tran

Born and raised in Auckland, best-selling, award-winning writer Brian Falkner began college intending to study computers, but along the way he decided to shift his focus to something more creative. After gaining a diploma of journalism, he worked as a reporter and advertising copywriter.
Other jobs helped pay the bills and also expand the first-hand experiences that would later enrich his fiction, among them stints as a motorcycle courier, radio announcer, graphic designer, and Internet developer.
His first children’s book, Henry and the Flea, was published in 2003, and since then he has had fourteen novels published internationally. He currently lives on the Gold Coast in Queensland.

Today, I’m talking to Brian about his extraordinary YA alternative history duology, the Battlesaurus series ( Rampage at Waterloo and Clash of Empires), which reimagines the Napoleonic wars with the French Emperor victorious at Waterloo, thanks to his secret weapon–huge carnivorous dinosaurs! It might sound like a strange, even an offputting, concept–but take my word for it, it really works! Beautifully written and grippingly told, with no talking down to the reader at all and with fabulous characters and settings, it had echoes for me, in some ways, of the great sweeping adventure novels I loved as a young reader: such as books by Robert Louis Stevenson, Alexandre Dumas, Jules Verne, Rosemary Sutcliff and Henry Treece.. Grand storytelling, in other words, spiced with that very contemporary boldness of concept! And it’s been a very successful combination, with the first book, Battlesaurus: Rampage at Waterloo, winning the Young Adult category in the New Zealand Children’s Book Awards this year.

Read on to learn more!

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Dinosaurs and Napoleon: what an amazing and unexpected combination! How did you come up with the concept?

The original concept was inspired by a book by Michael Gerard Bauer called ‘Dinosaur Knight’. While my book is very different to Michael’s, a seed was planted. What if dinosaurs had somehow survived the ‘extinction event’ 65 million years ago. If we shared our world with dinosaurs, in what way might that have changed historical events. That led to a lot of thinking about historical wars. I wanted something fairly recent (not medieval) but in the 20th Century weapons were invented that would make dinosaurs useless as a weapon. The Napoleonic wars seemed a good fit, and I have always been fascinated by the Battle of Waterloo.

The world of your book is richly depicted and very real in feel. How did you go about creating it?

I did a terrific amount of research. Not only into the period, but into the locations and into dinosaurs. The more I researched the more interesting facts I turned up that seemed to fit together in strange and unusual ways.

There aren’t just terrifying carnivorous dinosaurs in your story, but also a whole range, including the very touching little microsaurs (who wouldn’t want one as a pet!) In each case, there’s a relationship with humans–both good and bad. How did you go about developing those relationships?

Once I had decided on which dinosaurs would exist in the modern world (and with one exception they are based on real dinosaurs) I tried to come up with personalities for those dinosaurs. That enabled me to develop the relationship with humans.

Why do you think Napoleon still fascinates people today? And how did you go about adapting Napoleonic history to fit your own alternative history?

Napoleon was a polarising figure. He was a common man, during the fall of the French monarchy, who went on to led the country. He was a military genius, and almost succeeded in conquering all of Europe. I think we admire his strength and are fascinated by his failings. I changed very little in the history of the world, right up to the point where the dinosaurs charge out of the forest during the battle of Waterloo. Up to that point my book is historically very accurate (except for the existence of the ‘saurs’.) After that point of the book, of course, history is radically changed.

Though the story is mainly seen through the eyes of Willem/Pieter, the main character, there is a large cast of vivid characters–Belgians, French, English, both young and not so young. How did you go about interweaving their stories?

I realised early in developing this story that it was bigger than one person’s point of view. That led me to developing the characters of Jack Sullivan and Lieutenant Frost. They see things from the British point of view. One as an office, the other as a common soldier. I wanted also to show the French side of things, so included scenes from my main villain’s point of view.

The first Battlesaurus book has been very well-reviewed and has won a major award in New Zealand. What reactions have you had from readers as well?

It is interesting. There seems to be a disconnect between the title/cover and the story. The cover and title seem to imply ‘350 pages of non-stop rampaging dino action’ whereas the book is not like that at all. I have a concern that some people who would really enjoy the book are put off by the cover and title. Whereas those who are looking for ‘non-stop dino action’ will find the book is not what they were expecting. I think the judges in New Zealand and Australia book awards have recognised the quality of the writing and the story, as have most reviewers. However it is a common theme of reviews that the book is not what they were expecting from the cover.

What are you working on now?

I am writing a novel set during the first world war. It is called 1917: Machines of War and it examines the technology that came to change the face of war. Aircraft and tanks. This time the technology is real!

Leave a comment Posted on September 30, 2016September 26, 2016 Art, Authors, Book talk, Creative life, fairy tales, Illustrators, Interviews, Literary world, myths, Travel

Across the Tasman 4: Gavin Bishop

Photo of Gavin Bishop by Shar Devine.

Author-illustrator Gavin Bishop’s long and very successful career has made him one of New Zealand’s most well-known creators of children’s books, both nationally and internationally. He has published more than 70 books, been translated into eight languages and won many awards. Yet he has also stayed close to his New Zealand roots, with a double Maori and European heritage which continues to inspire him. In this fascinating interview, he talks about how he started, his influences, process–and leaves us with an intriguing mystery about what he might be publishing next!

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Gavin, you are one of New Zealand’s most prominent author-illustrators, winning many awards both in your home country and internationally. Can you tell us something about how you started? Who were your influences, in terms of both illustration and writing?

In 1978, I met someone who asked if I had ever thought of writing and illustrating a book for children. She had heard that Oxford University Press, in Wellington at that time, was intending to establish a children’s book list with a strong NZ flavour. A big bright light switched on in my head. It felt right. It was something I should do. So that very night I sat down and started to write BIDIBIDI a book about a South Island high country sheep who wanted more from life. I had no idea what I was doing. I thought I was writing a picture book but I ended up with far too much text. After quite a lot of time I sent my efforts to OUP and to cut a long story short, they liked it. It was in need of a lot of work and that is where Wendy Harrex came in. She had

Bidibidi in English and Maori editions

recently returned from England and she became my editor. After a lot of rewriting and false starts the book was finally published in 1982 after another book of mine, MRS McGINTY AND THE BIZARRE PLANT had already been published.

What impact does being a New Zealander have on your work? Do you think there is a distinctively New Zealand literary/artistic atmosphere?

Being a New Zealander and living here is everything to me. It entirely shapes who I am and the work I produce. Knowing both my Maori and European whakapapa (Sophie’s note: this is a Maori term meaning genealogy, family history) and the attached family stories is a constant source of inspiration. I believe I have an obligation as a writer for children in this country, to mirror what I see and know of this place. NZ children reading a NZ book should be able to recognize landscapes, places and our stories that they can relate to and feel are important.

You have illustrated other authors’ texts as well as creating and illustrating your own. How do you go about each process? Which do you enjoy most?

Ultimately, writing your own story to illustrate is the most important thing you can do as a picture book creator. You are in complete control then; you can speak to your readers through the text as well as the pictures. It is a challenge to come up with original material more than it is to illustrate someone else’s text or to retell an existing story.

Many of your books have been based around traditional stories–Maori myths, European fairy tales, nursery rhymes. Why do you find them inspirational? And how important do you think they are in terms of children’s reading?

As a child I read a lot fairy stories and folk tales. As I grew older, as an adolescent, I graduated to horror stories and horror movies which are of course firmly rooted in fairy stories. I think it is very important for children to be familiar with nursery rhymes and fairy stories from an early age because they provide examples of traditional story structures and archetypal characters. I would include Bible stories here as well for no other reason than a knowledge of these is needed to understand and appreciate a huge amount of European literature, art and music throughout history.

Nursery rhymes introduce us to language and ideas that can often be mysterious yet intriguing. I love the way a small child will often listen to a nursery rhyme with no idea of what it means. The rhythm and the succinctness of the words is enough, and they never forget them. A couple of hearings and a child has that rhyme for life.

Our children should also be familiar with the stories told for centuries by Maori. Too few New Zealanders realise that the huge collection of Maori myths and legends are as complex, subtle and as encompassing as any of the Greek myths and legends that many of us were brought up on.

I was fascinated to read that you’ve also been commissioned to write and design several successful ballets for the Royal New Zealand Ballet Company. Can you tell us more about that?

In 1985 I was commissioned by the Artistic Director, Harry Haythorne, of the Royal NZ Ballet Company to produce an original story and designs for a children’s ballet for their schools’ programme. They were interested in a story that reflected NZ. I thought about it, then remembered the time I ran away from home when I was two. I was going to a park to see an aviary of birds some blocks away from my grandmother’s house in Invercargill. I used this incident as the basis of the story of TERRIBLE TOM and later when the ballet was performed it was a great thrill to see dancers like Sir Jon Trimmer dancing out the story of my life. I learned a lot too. It was a bit of shock to realise that I couldn’t use any dialogue and the stage had to be empty so the dancers could dance. A second ballet was commissioned because the success of the first. I called it, TE MAIA AND THE SEA DEVIL. Set on the West Coast, it told of a brave young Maori girl who went to the bottom of the sea to save her mother who had been turned into a sea horse by Taipo, a sea devil.

These ballets were produced from scratch. While I did the libretto and designs, Philip Norman wrote the music and Russell Kerr did the choreography. They were the first original ballets produced for children in NZ.

You are also prominent in advancing the profile of New Zealand authors and illustrators for children, such as being involved in curating the marvellous exhibition of New Zealand illustration at the recent IBBY (International Board of Books for Young People) Conference in Auckland, which showcased NZ illustrators to an international audience. How important do you think it is for creators to be involved in the promotion of a literary culture? And how do you see the situation for authors and illustrators in New Zealand today?

I have been involved in the promotion of children’s literature from the early 1980s. I’ve attended hundreds of literary events here and overseas. Through the NZ Book Council’s Writers in Schools Scheme I have visited thousands of schools throughout NZ. It is an important part of being a children’s writer.

Children’s literature is misunderstood by many, and especially by other writers who write for adults. Writing for children is critically discriminated against. And illustration is, in particular, regarded with scorn. I come from a time when at the School of Fine Arts in the 1960s, the word “illustration” was used like a swear word. Again, I think it is through a big misunderstanding of the role of illustration. I see it as a storytelling process and in a way, a form of writing.

In 2006, a group of like-minded enthusiasts in Christchurch, and I was one of them, established the TE TAI TAMARIKI Charitable NZ Children’s Literature Preservation Trust. That was a bit of mouthful to say, so we now have a work-a-day name, PAINTED STORIES. Originally we set out to collect original illustrations and manuscripts of New Zealand children’s books to create a resource for research, exhibitions and events. The earthquakes of 2010 and 2011 demonstrated that this was not going to be easy. Our small gallery and display space in Victoria Street was demolished as a result of the 22nd February 2011 quake and on another occasion in another exhibition venue, a borrowed illustration fell from the wall and was damaged. So we decided to concentrate for the time being, on setting up national exhibitions of original art from NZ books.

Bruiser, by Gavin Bishop: Taiwanese edition

We have been doing that for 10 years. In the recent 3 shows we have used digital prints on watercolour paper instead of original art. This reduces insurance costs and lighting and conservation issues. It also helps us to emphasise that our main aim is to show how illustration is part of a story telling process and individual illustrations are part of a suite of images that all go together to help make a book. It takes away the expectation that an illustration needs to be considered as a serious piece of art.

Our trust is funded entirely by donations and goodwill and the generosity of the Original Children’s Bookshop in Christchurch and the Millennium Gallery in Blenheim. We have never charged illustrators to be part of our exhibitions. Once our current funds have been exhausted though, we will have to seriously look at fundraising. Follow us on Facebook.

What are you working on now?

I am working on a big project at the moment, one of the biggest things I have ever done. It will be published next year. That is all I can say.

Leave a comment Posted on September 28, 2016September 22, 2016 Authors, Book talk, Creative life, Culture, Interviews, Literary world, Publishing business, Travel

Across the Tasman 3: Kyle Mewburn

I first met Kyle Mewburn, one of New Zealand’s most prominent writers for children, a few years ago in my capacity back then as Chair of the Australian Society of Authors, and Kyle’s as President of the New Zealand Society of Authors. Well, Kyle is still NZSA President, and very active in advancing the cause of writers and illustrators in NZ, against a not very positive background of change and difficulties in the industry there. And in this very interesting interview, he looks frankly at some of those issues, as well as his own literary work.

Kyle, your recent picture book, illustrated by Sarah Davis, The House on the Hill, recently won the Hell Children’s Choice Awards–love that award name by the way 🙂 in the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults. Can you tell us something about the book, and how you and Sarah created it? And how have young readers responded to the book?

The idea for the story had been simmering away in the back of my mind for several years (as they do), though ‘idea’ is possibly too grandiose a term for what was, in effect, simply a refrain – “the house on the hill”. But that’s often how my stories start – with just a phrase that won’t go away. I knew there was going to be a journey of some sort, but had no idea who, or what, was going to make the journey. It wasn’t until I was Writer-in-residence at Otago University in 2011, that the story started coming to life, infused with an unexpected Edgar Allan Poe-ish vibe.

It took three weeks of solid, focussed writing for the story to come together. At the end of each day I’d go home exhausted, but satfisfied, despite having completed one stanza or less. I sent the story off to Scholastic and got a reply within an hour – “We love it.” Excellent, I thought. But over the next few months a sense of trepidation started filtering through, as the publishing team started second-guessing themselves. Was the story perhaps too scary? Fortunately, Diana Murray (publisher at the time) had a chat to the head buyer at a major bookstore chain whose verdict came as somewhat of a relief – “Embrace the darkness.” Having strived to make the story as scary as possible, having confidence in my young readers’ willingness, and enthusiasm, to have their pants scared off in a caring, controlled kind of way, I would have been hugely reluctant to water the scares down.

The next question was, of course, who should illustrate? I seldom get asked this question, but I jumped at the opportunity to put Sarah’s name forward. I’d always admired her work, not only for her undoubted technical ability, but also the fact she’s such an eclectic illustrator. Each work is unique with its own distinct style, and she was, I believed, the kind of illustrator who would push the boundaries and come up with a style to perfectly complement my story. Unfortunately, she was rather busy, so I was faced with a choice – wait 2+ years or choose someone else. I didn’t hesitate. Sarah it was.

One interesting, and unusual, aspect of working with Sarah was the unexpected rigour with which she addressed the text. Ultimately there were several stanzas which required re-writing and another which was dropped simply because it didn’t advance the story sufficiently. I really had no input into the illustrations, so can’t comment on that. Apart from saying they’re brilliant throughout and genius in numerous places, especially with their use of perspective. The art of illustration at its finest.

The response to the story has been phenomenal. Despite several parents, teachers and even reviewers initially worrying about the scariness level, the reality is that kids enjoy a good, safe scare and are happy to embrace the ‘game’. As one 6 year-old pointed out when his mum questioned whether or not he was scared – “No. I knew they weren’t real ghosts because there was a cat. Cats don’t like ghosts.” Winning the kids’ choice award is, I think, the ultimate accolade.

Though you are especially known for your picture books, you have also written chapter books and early readers. What are your favourite types of books to write, and what are the main differences between creating texts for all those different formats?

Picture books are my first passion. Almost a vice. My ideas are almost instinctively for picture books, and they seem to be the genre that most suits my thought processes and my writing voice. They’re also the biggest challenge and I get a lot of pleasure pursuing picture book ideas. (Also a lot of angst and anguish, but that’s another story…) Chapter books and junior fiction require a more measured approach. It’s more about building upon a concept than simply chasing an idea. For me, junior fiction (especially for so-called ‘reluctant readers’ or transitional readers) really has to begin with a strong character, ideally a child character. Once I have my hero sorted (whether that’s the first evolved boy in a Neanderthal tribe, or a shape-shifting dragon boy who wants to go to Knight School) I can view their world from their own unique perspective. It’s all about building relationships and interactions. Then, additionally, I add extra details and levels of meaning which encourage and reward re-reading.

All my writing is child-centric. It’s all about creating stories which reflect their lives, or more specifically, some critical aspect of it. Generally my stories are about making or maintaining friendships. I guess the biggest difference between writing picture books and junior fiction is the former is a distillation process – reducing grand themes to its essence; while the latter is more a process of accretion – adding layers and details to a simple idea.

What are you working on now?

Currently I’m experiencing a bit of mid-career-itis, so not quite sure what I’m working on. The house on the hill was the last picture book I sold, so the drought has dragged on a bit. I’m not 100% sure why my picture books don’t seem to be hitting the mark any more. Possibly it’s me. Having never settled on a single style of story, I’ve generally always pursued whatever ideas tickled my fancy. And after writing over 25 picture books I’m reluctant to rework old ground. So I’ve been experimenting with different styles and approaches to writing, just to keep myself amused and challenged. Maybe that’s not what the market wants at the current time.

In the meantime I’m developing a new junior fiction series and tinkering with re-writing some of my early adult novels. A musical friend and I are also playing around with a script for a musical. It’s all good fun, but as the main breadwinner I can’t afford to spend too much time on non-profitable diversions, no matter how inspiring. So we’ll see what happens.

Born and brought up in Australia but living in New Zealand for a long time now, you are one of New Zealand’s most prominent authors of children’s books, and you are also President of the New Zealand Society of Authors. In both capacities you’ve had a good deal of contact with the Australian literary world as well. How do you see the similarities and differences between literary New Zealand and literary Australia, both in terms of the kinds of books that get published, and also the literary scene–both in the children’s/YA and adult fields?

There are enormous similarities between the two countries’ literary worlds and I’m rather perplexed by the fact there still seems to be a huge wall with respect to the sharing of books and writers. The key differences, I think, stem largely from the smallness of the local literary community and market. Despite the size of the population (think Melbourne) there are very strong cliques and factions which are more based around protecting funding turf than anything else. Which means local writers are very reluctant to criticise anyone or anything for fear of offending the wrong person. You could all-too-easily end up on the outer with no chance of funding or reviews. I’m sure every country has the same rivalries and divisions, but here, because of the population, it is much more distilled and rather potent.

The small market also makes it difficult to make a living. Print runs are often only 1500 and you can make the bestseller list by selling 100+ copies in a given week. I’ve been fortunate insofar as many of my stories have had some longevity (several are still being reprinted 10+ years later), and have had numerous titles published into international markets. Sadly New Zealand publishers are increasingly acting like imprints of their international parents, insofar as they have become much more focussed on publishing stories with local flavour. In the picture book market there has always been a demand for kiwi stories (literally stories about the bird) but this has become massively more so over recent years. No wonder when many bookshops report most people are buying picture books to send overseas to relatives or take away as souvenirs. There has also been a huge growth in stories translated into Te Reo (ie Maori language). While all this might be worthy and understandable from a business model point of view, it has not only made it that much harder to make a living as a writer, it has also created an unfortunate quandary – ie write for this market and accept your income is severely ring-fenced, or you don’t, and stack the odds against being published at all.

With respect to making a living as a CYA writer, I think Australia has massive advantages with respect to creating a secondary income stream from school visits and festival appearances. However it is a lot more cut-throat. In New Zealand school visits are arranged mostly through the Book Council, while in Australia it’s all done through agencies. So in Australia it’s much more a case of the more popular you are and the better your presentations, the more visits you get. Here it’s a bit more communal with visits shared around. On the negative side, we earn half as much for a visit as you do in Australia. It’s still very difficult to convince the majority of schools there is much value in author visits… as opposed to visits by sportspeople… or magicians… or the local fireman…

As President of NZSA, you have been involved in helping to organise the first ever National Writers Forum in New Zealand, which has just been held. What are you expecting from the forum? And what are the issues that are most preoccupying authors and illustrators in New Zealand today?

The National Writers Forum was a huge success. The feedback has been extraordinary. The main goals were, firstly, to offer some serious professional development opportunities through masterclasses and expert panels. Secondly, it was about creating opportunities to discuss the business aspects of a writer’s life at every stage of their career. There’s plenty of information out there but seldom do writers get an opportunity to ask specific questions pertaining to their own, specific careers directly to a panel of experts. Finally, and for me most importantly, it was an opportunity for writers to assemble at the national level in a collegial and congenial environment. There are way too many divisions within the literary community, and this doesn’t help the literary cause in the wider context. The only way to break down barriers and cliques is to strengthen personal relationships by talking to each other directly rather than shouting at each other over the parapets.

As in most countries, the biggest issues preoccupying us in New Zealand centre on the increasing difficulties of making a living. New Zealand books are expensive in comparison to international titles available on-line, so there has been a concerted effort to exclude books from GST. Wishful thinking under the current government. We already have parallel importing, so have long ago come to terms with the long-term (all negative) consequences. As with writers everywhere we’re also concerned about the push to change (ie water down) copyright laws.

A very recent research report published by the New Zealand Book Council contained the rather disappointing finding that New Zealand readers were biased against NZ fiction, saying that they rarely read it–but also could not name any NZ authors–and that only 3-5 percent of fiction bought in the nation was by NZ authors. What are your thoughts on this? Is it a matter of cultural cringe? Do you think it could be turned around? If so, how?

Cultural cringe with two capital Cs. In many ways it reminds me of Australia in the 80s when I was at high school – nobody admitted to reading OzLit. When I arrived in New Zealand in 1990 there was a huge push to make NZ Music cool. The government pumped in $5million per year and introduced a radio quota. And (surprise!) within a generation NZ Music became cool. There was an attempt to do the same with books but with a budget of $100,000 and divisions within the industry, it gained little traction and soon disappeared. In the last 10 years, NZ has become a massively flag-waving country. Kiwis are enormously proud of their sportspeople, their music, their films (well, Peter Jackson and Weta Workshop, anyway), but there remains a total reluctance to wave the NZ flag when it comes to books and writers, despite local writers garnering increasing international awards and respect.

I suspect the cost of local books has something to do with it. It also doesn’t help that NZ “literature” is still discussed in such reverent tones while genre and/or popular fiction hardly gets a look in. It fosters the impression that local literature is rather intellectual and elitist. We have many world-class, internationally best-selling writers across all genres. It would help enormously if these were celebrated a bit more.

Last year NZSA instigated a grassroots NZ Book Week with a very limited budget. Hopefully it will continue to grow and, over time, leach into the psyche. But generally I feel it requires a much greater level of government action and investment. It also is a long-term project. I’m constantly frustrated by the lack of commitment to involving local writers/titles in literacy programmes. The “as long as they’re reading something” approach does little to improve literacy, in my opinion. The only way to grow literacy is to promote local authors and stories and instill some pride in local literature. Imagine how few kids would be playing rugby if the All Blacks were considered also-rans, nobodies, rather than superstars. Pride – whether in rugby, music or literature – begins with aspirational role models. We need to start kids on NZLit from the get-go.

Kyle Mewburn is one of New Zealand’s finest, and most eclectic, picture book writers. His titles have been published in a dozen countries and won numerous awards including Children’s Book of the Year (Old Hu-hu), Picture book of the Year (Kiss!Kiss! Yuck!Yuck!),two Children’s Choice awards (Kiss!Kiss! Yuck!Yuck! andMelu) and a Flicker Tale award in North Dakota (Kiss!Kiss! Yuck!Yuck!). His stories are noted for being multi-layered, funny and linguistically creative.

He has been a frequent Finalist at the New Zealand Children’s Book Awards and many of his titles have been included on Notable Books Lists in both New Zealand and Australia.

As well as picture books, he has published numerous School Readers and junior fiction titles, including his popular Dinosaur Rescue series which has been published in over 20 countries. He was the Children’s Writer in Residence at Otago University in 2011 and is currently President of the New Zealand Society of Authors.

Originally from Brisbane, Kyle lives with his wife, Marion, a well-known potter, in a house with a grass roof in Millers Flat. When he’s not writing, Kyle’s free time is almost wholly consumed trying to maintain a semi-self-sufficient lifestyle … or watching the endlessly entertaining drama of chickens trying to get to bed under the watchful eyes of two teasing cats.

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