Sir Julius Vogel Awards on display; Photo, Wei Li

Last Saturday, the Christchurch writing and reading community came together to celebrate our Sir Julius Vogel Award finalists and winners.

I posted my keynote speech on Sunday, and an initial write up, with photos, on Monday.

I also posted the two Award winners’ speeches, Rebecca Fisher for Best Fan Writer, and A.J. Fitzwater for Best New Talent, during the course of the week.

Keynote speech, with Sir Julius Vogel Award-ers; Photo Wei Li

And because we all had such a great time, I thought I’d wrap up the week with some more pics from our “small, but mighty” event — focusing more on the gathering before and after, rather than the ceremony itself.

Lining up the crew…  Photo, Wei Li

Enjoy!

Featuring our Award-ers; Photo Wei Li

Gifts for the finalists & winners; Photo Wei Li

Of course, no event is complete without refreshments…

Photo, Wei Li

Those behind the table…

Photo, P Fitzpatrick

…and those who come to enjoy

Photo, P Fitzpatrick

I think I mentioned smiling faces earlier in the week:

Photo, P Fitzpatrick

…

Smile ‘and’ flowers!; Photo Wei Li

And more:

Photo, Wei Li

Plus plenty of talking that good books’n’writing talk:

Photo, Wei Li

Photo Wei Li

Photo, P Fitzpatrick

Credit: Wei Li

The events are rolling in Christchurch right now — and next off the blocks is Flash In The Pan, a celebration of National Flash Fiction Day on Monday 22nd June.

As you can see from the poster, there’s a whole heap of happenings scheduled during the course of the evening.

One of the much anticipated highlights is the announcement of the winner and place-getters in this year’s National Flash Fiction competition. The announcement will be made by one of this year’s two judges, celebrated short fiction author, Owen Marshall.

Also much anticipated, Norton’s Flash Fiction International: Very Short Stories From Around the World, ed. James Thomas, Robert Shapard, Christopher Merrill, will be launched in New Zealand.

The SIWA (South Island Writers’ Assn) flash fiction competition results will also be announced, plus there will be  a gallery of writing luminaries reading from their work, as well as spot prizes.

Moreover,  the event is free—so head on down to the Twisted Hop & Flash In The Pan next Monday evening (if you’re in Christchurch, of course.)

All other details on the poster, below:

Amanda on the podium; photo Wei Li

Yesterday, I posted Rebecca Fisher’s  speech from Saturday’s event to celebrate Christchurch’s Sir Julius Vogel Award finalists and winners.

Today I’d like to share A.J. (Amanda) Fitzwater’s speech, speaking to her award for Best New Talent.

Amanda may also be cross-posting on her blog today, so I hope you’ll head on over and check out “her place” and her work.

—

A. J. (Amanda) Fitzwater: Best New Talent (2014)

“Best NEW talent is a very odd thing to wrap my head around, least of all it being my very first award win as a science fiction and fantasy writer. It doesn’t FEEL new to me. I started this writing journey five years ago now, and that seems a long time considering all that’s happened, and no time at all considering I’m just starting to “break in” to the industry now.

Photo, P Fitzpatrick

In late 2009, a few perfect storms collided to set me on the journey I’m writing now. I had one of those existential “oh heck, what will I have to show for myself when I hit 40!” crises, I was starting to be around creative people who were prodding me to expand my creative horizons, and I was asking myself that age old question: what do I want to be when I grow up.

Science fiction and fantasy has been a big part of my life since I was a teenager, and I was always a capable writer. But I’d never given myself the opportunity to find out if I was a GOOD one.

Part of my journey has been retraining myself to understand success comes in many forms, and at ANY time in your life. There are many great authors who started and came to success later in life

At that time 5 years ago I was also contemplating what I wanted to SAY. My reading and influences and life were shifting. I wanted to write what I hadn’t had the chance to read, whether by its absence, lack of availability, or through the history of women and LGBT authors who had been invisibilized. I actually had to spend a lot of those early times reframing and relearning the history of women, and feminism and it’s intersections in science fiction and fantasy.

Photo, P Fitzpatrick

I discovered the cleansing, creative anger of Joanna Russ. The gender bending, and gender breaking, work and history of James Tiptree Junior. I’ll always be grateful that one of the first science fiction authors put in my hands was Anne McCaffrey. And I wouldn’t be where I am today without the sublime works and encouragement of a diverse range of women and genderqueer authors and editors. Having Catherynne Valente and Nora Jemisin voice their belief in my abilities was an uplifting experience.

I learned it was time to raise my voice. And that’s what I implore of all authors and readers moving in from the margins: raise your voice in whatever way feels comfortable. Engage. Enjoy. We all have stories we’re looking for, stories to tell. Story telling is not a finite resource.

Words can be swords and silk, and they can be life and world changing. They can also make “puppies” sad – if they’re yelling at you, or about your “kind”, you know you’re doing something right. And to that end – be safe. Be ready to stand tall, and if you can’t, there’s always someone else that has your back.

Thank you all for coming today, and your support of local speculative fiction. We are small, but mighty.”

—
.

About Amanda:

The following bio is drawn from Amanda’s Sir Julius Vogel Award citation:

“A.J. (Amanda) Fitzwater is a Christchurch based writer whose short fiction has been widely published, including in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Crossed Genres Magazine, and Wily Writers. Her acceptance into the US-based Clarion workshop in 2014—one of only 18 successful applicants from 114 applications—speaks to both the quality of Amanda’s writing and her potential, as well as her dedication to her writing career. Amanda is a writer who continually pushes herself with new ideas, challenging techniques, and including characters from traditionally under-represented groups. Her writing draws on both her own experience and location, and a diverse range of literary influences, particularly speculative fiction written by women, and she is skillful in both acknowledges these but also using them as a jumping off point for genuinely original work.”

A full list of Amanda’s publications, including links to online work, is set out in her Bibliography.

You can also read a short excerpt via her profile, featured here last week.

Rebecca delivering her speech; Photo, P Fitzpatrick

Rebecca is taking a short midwinter recess from Big Worlds On Small Screens, but —

Of course, she was one of our “gallery of stars” at the event on Saturday to celebrate Christchurch’s Sir Julius Vogel Award finalists and winners.

So today seemed the perfect opportunity to feature her speech from the Saturday event, a witty and entertaining insight into her experience of fandom and fan writing.

I hope you may enjoy it as much as we did on Saturday.

—

.

Rebecca Fisher: Best Fan Writer (2014)

“When I was eighteen years old, I wrote my first book review for Amazon.com, and I’ve been blogging and reviewing ever since. The reason for this is simple: I really, really enjoy talking about books and films. For that reason, it seemed strange to me that I had won an award simply for having a hobby – especially since that hobby is writing about other people’s writing.

Photo: Wei Li

This pastime known as “fan writing” involves being a part of on-line fandom, that strange virtual world of forums and fan-sites where people from all over the world gather to discuss television shows, comic books, Hollywood films or Broadway musicals. It’s not difficult to see what brings these people together, and that’s a love of stories.

As both a participant and an observer to on-line fan writing, I’ve reached two conclusions. The first is that every hobby – from golf to stamp collecting – appears a little strange from the outside looking in. The second is that hobbies are nevertheless taken very seriously by those involved. Sometimes too seriously.

Back in 2009 the science-fiction show Torchwood, a spin-off of Doctor Who, decided to kill off one of its most popular characters. The negative reaction to this was so intense that fans ended up constructing a memorial shrine to the dead character at one of the show’s filming locations. It was so large and so convincing that the city council of Cardiff had to add an explanatory plaque informing pedestrians that no real person had actually died there.

But this incident is not without precedent. In 1893, when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle sent Sherlock Holmes plummeting to his death over the Reichenbach Falls, fans took to wearing black armbands of mourning in the street, beginning a public backlash so great that Doyle was eventually forced to resurrect his famous detective.

Photo: P Fitzpatrick

Though it’s easy to laugh at this sort of behaviour, it’s also a striking reminder of how deeply invested we can become in the stories we are told. If a story is doing its job right, it’s engaging reader or viewer on an emotional level. And the natural response to an engaging story is the impulse to share it with others.

As such there are millions of individuals out there who share my hobby, using their social media platforms to discuss, critique or recommend stories in whatever form they may take. Fan writing results in all kinds of things: obtaining further insight into a work of fiction, honing your own writing skills by examining someone else’s, or being exposed to new material that you might not have otherwise discovered.

As we’ve seen, it’s a hobby that’s not without its oddities. Alongside discourse on representation and diversity and social issues in our fiction, is equally impassioned debate on who shot first: Han or Greedo. Fan writing involves the serious sitting right next to the silly; where emotional investment can easily tip into openly grieving for the deaths of fictional characters.

But fan writing is prolific, it’s fun, and it’s a hobby more and more people are getting involved in. And just recently I learned it’s taken seriously enough that awards are given out for it, so for that I say thank you very much.”

—

About Rebecca:

Rebecca is a Christchurch-based reader, viewer, and reviewer of speculative fiction. A graduate of the University of Canterbury, she has  a Masters degree in English Literature — mainly, she claims, because she was able to get away with writing her thesis on C.S. Lewis and Philip Pullman. Rebecca has been a reviewer for FantasyLiterature.com, an international  website that specializes in fantasy and science-fiction novels, as well as posting reviews to Amazon.com where she is a Top 1000 reviewer. She has been penning the Big Worlds On Small Screens column (on SFF film and television) here for two years now and also reviews (predominantly) SFF television on her They’re All Fictional blog.

You can also check out Rebecca’s profile, featured here last week, which includes a sample of her award-winning work.

Out of the blue

On a morning when I stare
at small things

like the curve of a spoon
or light on a white rimmed plate

you ring, breathless
with talk of wild pigs,

how they swept down
from the Aorere Hills

on a moonlit night
to ravage your garden –

the winter cabbages
pale roots upended

like ghostly masts.

Once our mother buried
broken china in the ground

blue willow    blue willow

now you pick shards from the mud
the lovers, you say, still wave

from the arching bridge.
.

© Frankie McMillan
from Dressing for the Cannibals (Sudden Valley Press) 2009

Re-published here with permission of the poet.

—

About The Poem:

I am currently engaged  in the process of re-posting poets who have had multiple poems featured here on “…Anything, Really” , or by me on the Tuesday Poem Hub, since I joined the Tuesday Poem community in June 2010.

Today I am delighted to reintroduce the wonderful Frankie McMillan. When I first featured Out of the blue, way awa’ back in 2010, I observed that:

“I have known Frankie, and her poetry, for a number of years and elements of her work that I particularly enjoy include her subversive humour, keen observation of the world, and acute but compassionate eye for the foibles of human nature. Out of the blue is a vignette that describes a small moment in time, but at the same time captures something much larger, the paradox of life’s impermanence and continuity caught in the same poem.”

Out of the blue remains one of my favourites among Frankie’s poems.

—

About The Poet:

Frankie McMillan is the author of The Bag Lady’s Picnic and other stories, and a poetry collection, Dressing for the Cannibals. In 2005 she was awarded the Creative NZ Todd Bursary. In 2008 and 2009 her work was selected for the Best NZ Fiction anthologies. Other awards include winner of the New Zealand Poetry Society International Competition (2009) and the NZ National Flash Fiction award (2013). In 2014 she held an Ursula Bethell writing residency at Canterbury University. Her second book of poetry, There Are No Horses in Heaven was published by Canterbury University Press in March, 2015.

—

To read the featured poem on the Tuesday Poem Hub and other great poems from fellow Tuesday poets from around the world, click here.

Beaulah Pragg greets a full audience

On Saturday afternoon, the Christchurch writing and reading community turned out in numbers for an event, jointly hosted by SpecFicNZ and Fendalton Library, to celebrate our Sir Julius Vogel Award finalists and winners.

The event was very ably compered by Beaulah Pragg of SpecFicNZ, who also works at Fendalton library.

A SpecFic thumbs-up from Beaulah

And also included a wonderful display focusing on the finalists and winners that was curated by graphic designer, Peter Fitzpatrick.

The display

I was honoured to be asked to give the keynote address, which I posted yesterday.

Giving the keynote address

Our “Stars’ Gallery”: (l-r) Tim, Shelley, Rebecca & Amanda

The two finalists and two winners in the limelight were:

• Shelley Chappell (Finalist: Best Novella, Best Collected Work, Best New Talent)
• Tim Stead (Finalist: Best Novel, Best New Talent)
• Rebecca Fisher (Winner: Best Fan Writing)
• A.J. Fitzwater (Winner: Best New Talent)

The achievements of all four were recognized in the event. Immediately below, Shelley & Tim with the mic:

Shelley Chappell

Tim Stead

.

The two Award winners, Rebecca Fisher (Best Fan Writing) and A.J. (Amanda) Fitzwater (Best New Talent) also  gave a speech. I hope to post both their speeches here for you, later in the week (with more photos of them both.)

Rebecca (above) & Amanda (right) address the room

Chris Yee; credit, Wei Li

Chris Yee of SpecFicNZ helped wrap things up with a formal vote of thanks.

As the keynote speaker, I thought it was wonderful to see a crowded room full of attentive and interested faces throughout; to be part of an event in which the spotlight was shone on writing and storytelling; and to enjoy the warmth that comes from a community coming together to support its new and emerging voices.

Perhaps most importantly of all, everyone was smiling and people lingered afterward to talk what we all love: in short, fun appeared to be had by all.

Photo Credit: Wei Li

The event was made possible by Christchurch City Libraries—who provided the venue and were unfailingly professional, enthusiastic, and helpful in liaison with the event organisers—and also  SpecFicNZ who both hosted the event and supported it financially. The event was also made possible through the financial and logistical support of the Thornspell Trust.

So a big thank you to all involved, not least the team of volunteers who ensured everything ran smoothly on the day.

—

All photos: P Fitzpatrick (unless otherwise noted)

Yesterday, I was honoured to deliver the keynote address at an event celebrating Christchurch’s Sir Julius Vogel Award Winners.

I’ll be reporting more fully on the event tomorrow, but for now, I’ll share the address:
.

“I am delighted and honoured to be part of today’s event – for several reasons. The first is that I believe taking time to appreciate what we do, in this case writing and books, and achievement in what we do, is really important. It is about affirming, not only that creativity matters but that we matter, both as individuals and as a community of writers and readers. As writing can be a lonely occupation – what I like to refer to as “the loneliness of the long distance writer” – coming together at all, but particularly to celebrate success, is doubly worthwhile.

I also believe that the importance of community, and supporting and celebrating each other, is a lesson that the last four years of earthquakes and aftermath have underscored for everyone in Christchurch and the surrounding regions. So I am glad we have the opportunity today to celebrate Christchurch writing success and support Christchurch writers.

Today’s celebration is also timely because it comes at a period when sponsorship for NZ literary awards and events is at extremely low ebb. In particular, I note that there will be no National Book Awards this year, that NZ Book Month has been indefinitely postponed, and that the Bank of New Zealand has pulled its long-time sponsorship of the Katherine Mansfield Short Story Competition.

So although the record attendance at the recent Auckland Writers’ Festival suggests that the hunger for writing and literary events is very much part of NZ society, I still believe that an essential step in sustaining a literary culture in which NZ books and authors are valued is through first celebrating ourselves.

Today, we are particularly honouring NZ speculative literature, perhaps better known through its main sub-categories of Fantasy, Science Fiction, and Horror – a grand tradition that—as Beaulah has pointed out—goes back to an early premier, Sir Julius Vogel, who added writing fiction to his many talents.

Although in reality, speculative literature goes back a great deal further than the late 19^th century. As the great Ursula Le Guin, winner of the 2014 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, recently observed:

Fantasy is probably the oldest literary device for talking about reality. ‘Surface elements’…[i.e. magical or fantastic beings and constituent parts]…which occur in certain works of great literary merit such as Beowulf, the Morte d’Arthur, and The Lord of the Rings, are also much imitated…[but]…Their presence or absence is not what constitutes a fantasy. Literary fantasy is the result of a vivid, powerful, coherent imagination drawing plausible impossibilities together into a vivid, powerful and coherent story, such as those comprised in The Odyssey, or Alice in Wonderland.

Like Ms. Le Guin, I also look back to works as enduring as The Odyssey and the Aeneid, through The Faerie Queene and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, to contemporary works such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Ms. Le Guin’s The Left Hand Of Darkness, and Haruki Murakami’s The Windup Bird Chronicle – all of which exemplify “…a vivid, powerful, coherent imagination drawing plausible impossibilities together into a vivid, powerful and coherent story.”

NZ also has its exemplars, from the use of supernatural elements and magical realism in Patricia Grace’s Mutuwhenua or Keri Hulme’s The Bone People, to a host of outstanding YA works, not least Elizabeth Knox’s “Dream” duology and the many classic works by Margaret Mahy and Maurice Gee. Today, we are joined in our celebration by several more of those award-winning YA authors: James Norcliffe, Jane Higgins, Rachael King, and Joanna Orwin.

In short, the great literary tradition of speculative fiction is very much alive, well – and living right here in New Zealand. We are all here today – I believe and hope – to celebrate that fact, but also to “awhi” and support the four new talents who have recently been recognized through the Sir Julius Vogel Awards. As you can see from the posters, these are intended to recognize excellence in works of New Zealand Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror.

Before we all turn our attention to their particular achievements, I would like to reflect briefly on the importance and place of awards, a question that was put to me several times in interviews after I won the Gemmell Morningstar Award, and again when I was a finalist for the Legend Award in 2013. Arguably, at one level awards don’t matter at all since the reason I write – and I imagine it’s pretty much the same for other authors – is because of the delight of storytelling, and because the stories are just there “in the air” and demand to be told. But because writing is a very solitary occupation, being shortlisted, let alone winning, an award is a tremendous affirmation that you are, through those solitary endeavours, connecting with a world of reader, most of whom you have never met.

Also, to paraphrase US author Brad Beaulieu from a recent SF Signal discussion on this very topic:

“Awards make us strive to be better. They push our fiction to achieve more…”

In the same discussion, reviewer and critic Karen Burnham observed that

“When we give an award to a person or a piece of work, we’re saying “Yes, this! Please write more awesome stuff like this!”

In terms of the “ awesome stuff” we are here to celebrate today, I consider it significant that we had finalists and winners in two important but distinct areas of literary endeavor. The first is creation of the works of literature themselves – in this case comprised in the three distinct literary forms of novel, novella, and short story.

The importance of this field is unquestionable and well-recognized: so much so that the Sir Julius Vogel Awards have individual categories for the Novel, for which Tim Stead was a finalist, and for the Novella and Short Story respectively – and Shelley Chappell was a finalist in both these latter categories, as well as for Best Collected Work.

In addition, Tim Stead, Shelley Chappell and A.J. – Amanda – Fitzwater were all shortlisted for the prestigious Best New Talent Award. I believe it is a significant achievement that three of the six finalist spots were gained by Christchurch writers. And of course we’re all delighted that Amanda brought the award home to the “city that shakes” – in this case with foot-stamping applause!

The second, very important area of literary endeavour lies in what the Sir Julius Vogel Awards term “Fan Writing.” We are not, however, talking about the phenomenon known as fan fiction, but the complementary field of review, criticism, interviews, essays and reflection—an area in which our Christchurch finalist, and ultimately Award winner, Rebecca Fisher has established an international as well as a local track record.

I hope you will all agree with me in concluding that as a community of writers and readers, we have a great deal to celebrate today—and will join me in warmly congratulating Amanda and Rebecca, Tim and Shelley.”

~ Helen Lowe, 13 June 2015

My guest series on “Fantasy Heroines That Rock My World” on SF Signal posted again this week—and this time the featured heroine is Pania of the Reef from Tina Makereti’s short story, Shapeshifter.

It’s  a hat-trick really: a genuine Kiwi heroine from one fair dunkum Kiwi author, featured by another. 😉

Anyway, I love Pania and Shapeshifter, so I hope you’ll take  a little time to read the post and  find out why:

Helen Lowe On Fantasy Heroines That Rock Her World: Pania Of The Reef from Tina Makereti’s “Shapeshifter”

You may recall that the last feature post in the series, on the fabulous Dianora from Guy Gavriel Kay’s Tigana, was one of SF Signal’s Top 25 posts for last month, which was very exciting news.

A.J. Fitzwater: Sir Julius Vogel Award For “Best New Talent”

The following is drawn from Amanda’s Sir Julius Vogel Award citation:

“A.J. (Amanda) Fitzwater is a Christchurch based writer whose short fiction has been widely published, including in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Crossed Genres Magazine, and Wily Writers. Her acceptance into the US-based Clarion workshop in 2014—one of only 18 successful applicants from 114 applications—speaks to both the quality of Amanda’s writing and her potential, as well as her dedication to her writing career. Amanda is a writer who continually pushes herself with new ideas, challenging techniques, and including characters from traditionally under-represented groups. Her writing draws on both her own experience and location, and a diverse range of literary influences, particularly speculative fiction written by women, and she is skillful in both acknowledges these but also using them as a jumping off point for genuinely original work.

Three stories have appeared in Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) listed professional venues:
Blood, Stone, Water in Beneath Ceaseless Skies
Reprinted in Lethe Press: “Heiresses of Russ 2014: The Year’s Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction”
Second Skin in Crossed Genres Magazine
The Mary-Jane Effect in Wily Writers.”

Excerpt from Amanda’s Work:

“Having escaped the fourth evening banquet and dance, Tau watched the almost-moon’s sliver shiver on the horizon. Her nightly observations were an in-held breath, shared with like-minds. This close to moon-rise, many were torn between their duties to their sisters and their gazing; for this moment she had the beach to herself. The moment the moon breached its ocean womb–surely only two or three nights away, Tau had calculated by celestial angles–someone would die.”

From © Blood, Stone, Water — in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Issue 118, April 2013

This coming Saturday, I’ll be giving the keynote address at an event to celebrate Christchurch’s Sir Julius Vogel Award finalists and winners.

Today, I’d like to shine the spotlight on Award winner, Rebecca Fisher.

—

Rebecca Fisher: Sir Julius Vogel Award For “Best Fan Writing”

Rebecca is a Christchurch-based reader, viewer, and reviewer of speculative fiction. A graduate of the University of Canterbury, she has  a Masters degree in English Literature — mainly, she claims, because she was able to get away with writing her thesis on C.S. Lewis and Philip Pullman. Rebecca has been a reviewer for FantasyLiterature.com, an international  website that specializes in fantasy and science-fiction novels, as well as posting reviews to Amazon.com where she is a Top 1000 reviewer. She has been penning the Big Worlds On Small Screens column (on SFF film and television) here for two years now and also reviews (predominantly) SFF television on her They’re All Fictional blog—but also includes posts on topics such as “Margaret Mahy and the Precious Mundane: The Supernatural Threat.”

Excerpt from Rebecca’s Work:

“Reading a book by Catherynne Valente is like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates: you never know what you’re going to get. It could be glass forests with shape-shifting reindeer that used to live on the moon, or blue kangaroos that mine the underground for memories encased within precious gems, or families living in giant Samovars that serve teas called the Elephant’s Fiery Heart … This is not the Fairyland of Enid Blyton…but the Fairyland of older, darker tales … To continue with the chocolate box analogy – it’s important not to eat too many at once. Pace yourself, and savour things as they come.”

From FantasyLit.com, 2015: Review of The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland by Catherynne M Valente