I’m a writer! Or so the tag says. 🙂

I very much enjoyed my day at the Christchurch Writers Festival yesterday, starting the day in my “Why YA” panel with John Boyne and Jane Higgins, doing the Margaret Mahy Memorial Reading of “The Man Whose Mother was A Pirate” later in the day and attending the grand finale session with 5 grand New Zealand poets: Riemke Ensing, Bernadette Hall, Cilla McQueen, Harry Ricketts, and Ian Wedde. A long but great day for a writer—or so the tag says. 😉

To find out more about how the “Why YA” session went, you can read the ZacKids from Christchurch City Libraries’ write up, here. And yes, there’s even a  few photos—thank you, Christchurch City Libraries.

The 1st of the month is my regular guest post day on the Supernatural Underground—and for September 2012 I am delighted to be interviewing Juliet Marillier specifically on her new YA novel, Shadowfell, which is released in North America this month.

In particular, Juliet and I discuss the more romantic aspects of Shadowfell and the new focus on romantic elements in both Fantasy generally and YA Fantasy in particular—or is it so new?

To celebrate the release of Shadowfell, the recent success of The Heir of Night in winning the Gemmell Morningstar Award, and antipodean Fantasy authors generally 😉 — we are also doing a joint Shadowfell / The Heir of Night giveaway, to be drawn from comments on the Supernatural Underground interview.

So without further ado, to read the interview and “comment at will”, click Here.

Daffodil array

Today is 1 September–& that means it is the first day of spring here in New Zealand, and I must admit it’s feeling like it with daffodils, forsythia and wattle all busitn’ out all over and adding their different shadings of yellow to my garden, together with hellebores still doing their winter rose thing and magnolia stellata adding a more refined touch of pearl-shell and blush to the general exuberance.

Forsythia

So here’s a few photos to ‘go with’ the post & share the colour. 🙂

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And just to recap on what’s coming up:

Later today (1 September, US EST) I will be featuring an interview with Juliet Marillier, focusing on her new YA novel Shadowfell, which is released this month in North America-. Plus to celebrate we’ll be doing a joint Shadowfell/The Heir of Night giveaway. So watch this space, here — and also, spread the word!

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Tomorrow (Sunday 2) at 9.30 am I’ll be appearing at the Christchurch Writers Festival on the “Why YA” panel with John Boyne and Jane Higgins, compered by James Norcliffe. We’ll be discussing whether there is a genuine and valid divide between juvenile and adult writing, or whether YA is nothing more than a marketing phenomenon, as well as whether there are different types of YA fiction and what trends can be discerned in writing for the age group.

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Also tomorrow and also as part of the festival, this time at 2.30 pm,  I’ll be doing one of the Margaret Mahy memorial readings — in my case, I shall be reading from The Man Whose Mother Was A Pirate, a personal favourite form the Margaret Mahy canon.

(You can read my personal tribute to Margaret Mahy here.)

The Christchurch Writers’ Festival began yesterday but unfortunately I was not able to get along—& sadly, one event I missed that I really wanted to attend was the launch of the two latest poetry collections from Australia’s Interactive Press: Karen Zelas’s Night’s Glass Table & Sugu Pillay’s Flaubert’s Drum.

Night’s Glass Table was the winner of Interactive Publications 2012 IP Picks Best First Book competition; Flaubert’s Drum was Highly Commended in the same competition.

The exciting news though is that the festival is just one stop in the current nationwide tour for the launch of these books. So if you’re in another centre and couldn’t have been there today anyway, here’s the gigs coming up:

• Porirua: Sunday, 2 September, Metropolitan Café, 7 Lydney Place, 4pm

• Wellington: Monday, 3 September, Wellington Central Library, 5:30 for 6pm

• Auckland: Tuesday, 4 September, Poetry Live, Thirsty Dog, 469 Karangahape Rd, 7:30pm

• Tauranga: Wednesday, 5 September, Tauranga Campus, Waikato University, Durham St, 6pm

And of course there’ll be another book launch at the Christchurch Writers’ Festival at 6.30 pm on Sunday 2, when Kerrin P Sharpe will launch her collection Three Days In A Wishing Well (Victoria University Press.)

And don’t forget the other poetry events at the festival, featured here.

In short: it’s all poetry today and all good! 😉

.L-R: John Boyne, Jane Higgins, Helen Lowe

Why YA?

YA – young adult – is a comparatively recent literary genre.

Once readers moved straight from children’s to adult novels but now there is a rich variety of fiction for teenagers. Is there a genuine and valid divide between juvenile and adult writing or is YA nothing more than a marketing phenomenon? Are there different types of YA fiction? What trends can be discerned in writing for this pivotal, impressionable and techno-savvy age group? These questions and more occupy the attention of three successful YA authors, John Boyne, Jane Higgins and Helen Lowe.

John Boyne is perhaps best known for his 2006 novel for younger readers, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, which was shortlisted for or won a host of international awards, topped the New York Times Bestseller List, has sold more than 5 million copies worldwide and has been made into an award-winning film. Noah Barleywater Runs Away was published in 2010 and The Terrible Thing that Happened to Barnaby Brocket has just been published.

Jane Higgins is a senior researcher at Lincoln University, where she specialises in working with young people in transition from school. The Bridge is her first novel and won the 2010 Text Prize for Young Adult and Children’s Writing and an Honour Award for Young Adult Fiction in the 2012 New Zealand Post Children’s Book Awards. She is currently working on a sequel.

Helen Lowe is a novelist, poet, interviewer and blogger, with three novels published internationally. She has won the Sir Julius Vogel Award three times and Thornspell (2008) was a Storylines Notable Book. The Heir of Night received a Single Titles Reviewer’s Choice Award in the United States in 2010 and won the David Gemmell Morningstar Award for Best Fantasy Debut in 2012. Her new novel is Gathering of the Lost.

Chair: James Norcliffe is a prize-winning poet, fiction writer and educator who has authored several books for young adults.

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Thought you might like to see the “official” programme page for the “Why YA” event—although am not sure 100% agree with the premise that “YA – young adult – is a comparatively recent literary genre.”

Which is good–may have something to discuss come Sunday morning at 9.30 am. 😉

The link to the full festival website is here.

Today SF Signal have posted the third interview in my “Fun With Friends” series in which I interview fellow SFF authors from Australia and New Zealand, with 5 questions focusing on “who they are” and “what they do” in writing terms.

This interview is with friend and fellow NZ speculative fiction author, Tim Jones, right Here.

Please do click through to take a look—and consider leaving a comment to support Tim and the series.

Christchurch Gothic

Summer’s Avon spelt the names of atua in green,
and through trees sun shafts dug at dappled lawns,
as if to unearth a circuit-board of worm-holes,
the universe beneath the labyrinth,
the silent presence of mountain shingle
across the curve of the island’s waist.

Teen racers hummed like bees in a hive,
and late autumn was the harlequin
hurrying past them down Bealey Ave,
towards the rusted, busted, midnight hour,
its sword-and-sorcery pageant of flashing sabres,
its chorus lines of black on moonlit runnelled iron.

They drained the swamp for bodies,
and found a city in a smog overcoat the colour
of mid-winter: a swallowed-up netherland.
Around it, paddock windbreaks rose in ranks,
long shadows falling like guillotines,
as night exhaled its nausea.

Frosted spring melted into this deep carpet,
and from Port Hills rolled the squared-away harvest,
whose matted roots expressed pedigrees of settlement,
a holding pattern of heartbeats, brainwaves, fingerprints
down blind alleys. The city breathed in  —
a hot air balloon sailed above its festoons of bitumen.

© David Eggleton

First published in New Zealand Books, 2009; also published in Time of the Icebergs (Otago University Press) 2010

Reproduced here with permission.

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About the Poem:

I have long been an admirer of David Eggleton’s “more is more” style of poetry and the way he evokes a strongly New Zealand “sense of  place” through his work.  David is also the 2012 Ursula Bethell Writer in Residence at the University of Canterbury for the second half of this year; as the incumbent for the first six months, I felt it would be only in keeping with a spirit of Ursula Bethell collegiality to request permission to feature one of his poems as a Tuesday Poem—and was delighted when he agreed.

Choosing only one poem out of the selection he sent through was tough—but as soon as I read Christchurch Gothic, which evokes my home city as it was before the first major earthquake in 2010, I felt it had to be “the one.” At one level this is because I feel the poem does capture ‘the way we were’; at another I am aware that next Tuesday, September 4, is the two year anniversary of that first earthquake.  But mainly, and I feel most importantly, I simply love the poem. I hope you enjoy it just as much.

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About the Poet:

David Eggleton has had six books of poems and a book of short fiction published, as well as several works of non-fiction, including Ready to Fly: the Story of New Zealand Rock Music,  Into the Light: a History of New Zealand Photography, and Towards Aotearoa: A Short History of Twentieth Century New Zealand Art. He has also released a number of poetry recordings featuring his collaborations with musicians, and been involved in poetry text collaborations with practitioners of a variety of other art forms, from sculpture to fashion design. His first collection of poems, South Pacific Sunrise, was co-winner of the PEN New Zealand Best First Book of Poems Award in 1987.  David’s awards also include the Robert Burns Fellowship 1990, New Zealand Book Reviewer of the Year 1991 and, uniquely among New Zealand poets, the London Time Out‘s Street Entertainer of the Year (Poetry) 1985.

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

Yes, it really is almost here—the Christchurch Writers’ Festival 2012. Only three sleeps now until Thursday and the opening events! (And of course the first two I want to go to are scheduled back to back: how does that work?)

Seriously though, this is a significant milestone for Christchurch and the Writers’ Festival event given that the 2010 festival was cancelled as a result of the September 4, 2010 earthquake and the rescheduled event for April 2011 could not be run becasue of the devastation caused by the February 22nd, 2011 earthquake. So I think we’re all feeling that having a  festival at all, but more, one that is very much the ‘real deal’, is a tremendous achievement.

Acknowledging the hard work put in by the festival organisers, under what are still very difficult conditions, in order to make that happen is therefore right at the top of my agenda as festival week dawns.

I think we are all looking forward to it being a fabulous occasion, both for the audiences, but also the writers gathering from all parts of the country and globe  to mix and interact. Needless to say, I am thrilled to be part of the programme in the “Why YA?” event on Sunday 2, at 9.30 am, with John Boyne and Jane Higgins, compered by James Norcliffe.

To check out “Why YA?” in full, click here.

I also featured the programme of poetry events on Saturday, here.

And the full festival programme is here.

Except on rare occasions, the World Science Fiction and Fantasy Convention is always held in the Northern Hemisphere, most usually in North America—a far step for most Australian and New Zealand speculative fiction authors.

But this year US-based voiceover artist Bob Kuhn has stepped in and set up “Absent Antipodeans” (7.30 pm, Sunday 2 September), a reading event in which he will read from the work of Australian and New Zealand authors who cannot be present themselves. Obviously this is a tremendous opportunity for “absent” authors such as myself and we owe Bob a deeply appreciative vote of thanks.

But if you are one of the lucky people attending Worldon 70 (Chicon 7: August 30-September 3) and are interested in Australian and New Zealand writing,  “Absent Antipodeans” is an event to put on your schedule—in fact, put it on your schedule anyway! 😉

And speaking of schedules, here’s the reading list as it currently stands:

Kim Falconer

Ian Irvine

Helen Lowe

Juliet Marillier

K.J. Taylor

Mary Victoria

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Sarah Douglass Memorial Reading

Bob will also be doing a Sarah Douglass (1957 – 2011) Memorial Reading from 11.30 am-12 noon on Sunday 2 September, as part of the Chicon reading programme.

“Dylan Thomas wrote, ‘I could never have dreamt that there were such goings-on in the world between the covers of books… All of which were words, words, words, and each of which were alive forever…’”

True to the spirit of Dylan Thomas, there is a feast of magical poetry events at this year’s Christchurch Writers’ Festival. Some of those appearing, like Bernadette Hall and Tusiata Avia, are already poets I am privileged to know. Others—like poet laureates past and present Cilla McQueen and Ian Wedde respectively—are those I am looking forward to hearing for the first time.

In case you haven’t already checked them out, here is the lineup of poetry events:

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Five New Zealand Poets
Sunday 2 September 5.00pm, Geo Dome, Hagley Park

    

‘Five New Zealand Poets‘ will end the festival on Sunday and culminate in the presentation of the 2012 Lauris Edmond Award for Poetry. Ian Wedde, the current New Zealand Poet Laureate, former laureate Cilla McQueen and  renowned poets Bernadette Hall, Riemke Ensing and Harry Ricketts will all be reading in what promises to be a powerful festival finale.

Poetry for Lunch
Saturday 1 September, 11.00am, YMCA, Rolleston Avenue

‘Poetry for Lunch: Tasty Morsels‘ will feature two writers who are launching new collections at the festival, Karen Zelas and Kerrin Sharpe, as well as established poets Tusiata Avia, Ben Brown, Doc Drumheller, David Eggleton and Siobhan Harvey.

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Survivor Poetry
Friday 31 August, 8.00pm, Geo Dome, Hagley Park

     

‘Survivor Poetry: Out-Read-Out-Write-Out-Loud‘ will test who can survive a brutal peer-voting system and present poetry responding to spontaneous challenges in front of a live audience.

This event was cancelled with the festival in September 2010, but was subsequently held at, now a distant memory, Al’s Bar. You can read about the last Survivor session here to get a taste for it.

Book Launches by Three Wonderful New Zealand Poets

           

Make sure you don’t miss out on all these wonderful goings-on!

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To Get Your Tickets:

You can book tickets to Five New Zealand Poets and Survivor Poetry  here. (Door sales may also be available on the day.)

Poetry for Lunch is by door entry only ($5) and entry to the book launches is free.