Firstly, I’ve got some exciting stuff coming here on the blog over the next week, including:

• Tomorrow I’ll be posting a review of Kim Stanley Robinson’s “2312” by guest reviewer Andrew Robins. I am quite excited about this as it is the first every guest review on my blog; so, a milestone.

• Next Monday, I will have a guest post by SFF author Rowena Cory Daniells on “Fantasy, The Poor Cousin of Science Fiction” featured—am fascinated by the topic and can’t wait to see what she has to say!

• And some time in the intervening days I’ll also be posting a wrap up on my six month stint as Writer-in-Residence at the University of Canterbury…

Otherwise I think the main event coming up is the Christchurch Writers’ Festival at the end of the month where I’ll be on the “Why YA?” panel with John Boyne and Jane Higgins, compered by James Norcliffe.

And just in case you missed it, you can still check out my “Fun With Friends” interview with Juliet Marillier on SF Signal, right here.

Desert Bloom

a desert blooms in you
sands the colour of rust
run through the surgeon’s hands

there are no more
thorns in your garden
but moisture has no place to go

you open your floodgates
but all that comes to your
cupped hands, tumbling
like dry petals from your strange,
unlooked-for rose

pot-pourri tears
little pieces of paper with the words

“cancer”

…………………….“fear”

…………………………………….“pain”

a desert bloom, in you

sands the colour of rust
etch roses in your hourglass

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© Ciarán Fox

Reproduced here with permission.

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About the Poem: The Poet’s Note

Before I started writing Desert Bloom a central image of a garden in a desert and a desert in a garden was clear in my mind. I found myself looking at the page like it was a block of stone with a poem inside it, if only I could carve it out.  It’s unusual for me to have such a strong, complete idea of the poem at the outset and I was terrified I would shatter it with ham-fisted chiselling.  I wanted to address the very unwelcome family elephant of cancer which was once again making its presence felt in my immediate family and I wanted to do it without making it feel like ‘made for TV’ disease-of-the-week fodder.  The particular form of this cancer was requiring a total hysterectomy and was happening so far away, amidst the red sands on the far side of Australia.  I felt helpless to offer real support but needed to express that the implications of such a fundamental change for a woman was not lost on me as I was expecting the birth of my first child.

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About the Poet:

Ciarán Fox is a poet, writer, photographer and film maker, co-editor of Catalyst literary arts journal and well known Christchurch MC — and in the latter capacity will be hosting “Survivor Poetry” at the forthcoming Christchurch Writers’ Festival. Ciarán lives in Lyttelton with his family and has a background in youth health, community development and the arts.

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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.

It’s been a while since I’ve read some non-fiction history so I was very pleased to be able to pick up “Queen Anne, The Politics of Passion” (Harper Press), Anne Somerset’s biography of Queen Anne (Life: 1665 – 1714; Reign: 1702-1714.)

So far I am about a third of the way through and really enjoying it. This is serious biography so not a light read, but Somerset writes well, incorporating detailed research into a highly readable account of the life and times of Queen Anne, the last Stuart monarch of the United Kingdom. (And in fact Union between Scotland and England was, I believe, achieved during her reign—although I haven’t got to that bit yet.)

A tribute to Somerset may be that although Anne herself is not a terribly dynamic personality, the biographer still manages to imbue her story with interest—and the period is certainly fascinating. So far the work is charting the emergence of political parties in national politics (in this case the “Whigs” and the “Tories”), the War of the Spanish Succession in Europe and the genius of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, as well as the cultural strength of the period with writers such as Swift and Defoe making their mark.

Anyway, on the strength of what I’ve read so far, I recommend it if you like biography and or non fiction history. But here are links to a couple of  more official views:

Telegraph Review

The Literary Review

And how about you, dear readers: what are you reading right now?

How’s your French? Passable?

If so, you might like to check out these two reviews for L’Héritière de la Nuit, the French edition of The Heir of Night.

The first is from Place To Be: Provocateur D’Envie, here

and the second from Romance, Charmes & Sortilèges – Bit-Lit.com, here

And from what my own French will permit me to glean, I think they’re both good! Handsprings and happiness. 🙂

Today SF Signal have posted the second 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.

My second interview is with the very well known author, Juliet Marillier, right HERE.

Amongst other matters Juliet discusses her new YA novel, Shadowfell, so even if you know her work well, I hope you’ll find something ‘new’ in there.

Aus/NZ cover

Shadowfell is just out in Australia/New Zealand and will be released in the USA in September.

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

Today is National Poetry Day — and I’m reading!

Where: University Bookshop, University of Canterbury

When: Event begins, 12.30 pm

The bookshop will be announcing the result of its National Poetry Day competition, with the winners reading their work, together with guest poets Jeffrey Paparoa Holman and Ben Brown, as well as myself.

And of course there are lots of other National Poetry Day events taking place around the country — you can check them out here.

For even more poetry goodness, check out all the poems featured as part of the National Poetry Day celebration on Frankfurt Book Fair: An Aoteraoa Affair blog, here. (And scroll down: it’s a tremendous blog roll of poetry — also with my poem, The Wayfarer, featured here.

Haarth; map design by Peter Fitzpatrick

Last Saturday I posted about the magic of winter worlds in SFF, here — and one of the aspects I have always loved about Fantasy-Science Fiction (F-SF) is the door it opens into fantastic worlds. Science Fiction offers worlds such as Arrakis in Frank Herbert’s Dune and the Union/Alliance space of CJ Cherryh’s Downbelow Station, while Fantasy gives us Middle-Earth (Tolkien), Earthsea (Le Guin) and Bas-Lag (Miéville), to name only a very few. So it is perhaps not surprising that in The Wall of Night series  I have introduced my own world of Haarth.

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In the first book, The Heir of Night, much of the wider Haarth world is only alluded to. The dominant landscape  is the twilit and wind-blasted Wall of Night, a mountainous barrier range garrisoned by the alien and warlike Derai. The Derai keeps are also worlds in themselves, which open, like puzzle boxes, to other realms: the abandoned layers of the Old Keep and the Gate of Dreams—a place of forests and wreathing mist which may—or may not—only be accessed through the Old Keep’s secret heart …

Yet even on the Wall of Night there is knowledge and limited contact with the wider world of those the Derai term “outsiders”—although readers do get to visit in in more detail in the second book in the series, The Gathering of the Lost.

UK/AU/NZ mass market paperback

The Earl of Night’s minstrel hails from the great city of “Ij the Golden, the queen of the River”—the River being a loose federation of city states. The heralds of the Guild, whom the Derai believe function in some “form of symbiosis” also hail from the River, in their case the Guild House in the city of Terebanth. Other realms lie further south, including Emer, which is famous for its armoured knights; Aralorn and Jhaine, of which little is known;  and Ishnapur, the last but still great remnant of the Old Empire. The Empire fell apart in the long-ago calamity known as the Cataclysm, but once stretched from Ishnapur in the south to Jaransor in the north—Jaransor, that line of green forbidden hills that it is whispered can drive the Derai mad …

Beyond that again there is  the Winter Country, with its hunters and shamans, where a day might be “bright-as-diamond … between blizzards, with the sky pale blue crystal and the snow stretching away forever, white and gleaming.”

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And then, of course, there’s what lies on the other side of the Wall of Night …

So where did the world of Haarth come from? Ursula Le Guin, in her book on writing titled Steering the Craft, talks about pulling ideas out of the air—and ideas do often seem to spring from the aether. Influences I am aware of, that may help shape my access to that marvellous air include:  a love of myth and legend and fairytale; “what-if” sparks from other stories and events in the real world; the resonance of music, which strongly influences atmosphere and mood; considerable and wide ranging reading of historical non fiction (for fun, you know); and experience of landscape.

As part of one post in the intermittent “influences on story” series on my blog, here, I have specifically discussed the influence of my time living in Stockholm, and winter journeys to the north of Sweden, as well as to Finland and Russia, on the Winter Country.

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Few influences on story and world building are so direct though, in my experience. I have had the vision of a twilit world and beleaguered keeps from a very early age, although the windswept crags and bitter peaks of the Wall of Night emerged from the air a long time after that. The concept of Jaransor, and land that may itself be conscious, is also one that had been “lurking” for some time before I began writing the book. Conversely, the southern kingdoms and the romance of the road that stretches “from Ij to Ishnapur” evolved as much from their introduction into the story as from any prior consideration.

And just in case you wonder whether there really is power in a name, take it from me that characteristics, backstory, and function within the tale, whether for characters or realms, can and do change, sometimes quite dramatically, when a name gets changed. It’s dangerous territory—but that is a blog post for another day. Today is about the world of Haarth—and for now, I shall leave you on its borders.

Margaret Mahy

The passing of the great Children’s and Young Adult author, Margaret Mahy, has garnered significant attention both here and overseas, for example with the tremendous contributions on Beatties Bookblog, here, and tributes in the NZ Herald and The Guardian, here — all as it should, given her stature.

And I, too, albeit in a considerably more modest way, feel it is important to mark her passing and her tremendous contribution to children’s literature.

My first Margaret Mahy as a reader was also one of her first publications: “A Lion In The Meadow.” Subsequent favourites included “The Man Whose Mother Was A Pirate” and of course the Junior and YA stories respectively, The Haunting and The Changeover. 

More recently I have bought my nephews her picture books A Summery Saturday Morning, Down The Back of the Chair and Bubble Trouble.

The thing that struck me when I read them, just as it does whenever I pick up A Lion in the Meadow and The Man Whose Mother Was A Pirate again, was the way in which her stories, although written for a very young audience, can still be enjoyed by adults. I think it’s because there is a timelessness to them, and defintely a joie de vivre, but perhaps most importantly of all, her stories never talk down to the reader.

When I look at her body of work, I can only think what a great taonga (prized treasure) she has left us all, not just New Zealand, but all the reading world.

Helen Heath; credit Kate MacPherson

As my Tuesday Poem feature today, I am linking to my recent Women on Air interview with poet Helen Heath, author of the poetry collection “Graft.”

Helen Heath won the inaugural ScienceTeller Poetry Award in 2011 for her poem ‘Making Tea in the Universe’ and is currently undertaking a PhD in Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington; her research explores how science is represented in poetry. Widely published in New Zealand, Australia, the UK and the US, Graft is Helen’s debut poetry collection, with themes that include science, family connection, and fairytales.

To listen to the interview — and hear Helen reading ‘Making Tea in the Universe’ and ‘Holding water’ — click Here.

Then either click on the ‘Play’ button, or download the MP3

In addition, you can read my “What I’m Reading” post on Graft here.

And my Tuesday Poem feature of Helen’s poem Fairytale v: O Brother, published in Graft, is here.

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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.

Rowena Cory Daniells

Shortly after winning the Gemmell Morningstar Award, fellow SFF author and Australian writer, Rowena Cory Daniells, approached me to discuss an interview, both to celebrate the award and as part of her “Fantastic Female Fantasy Authors” & “Interesting People In The Speculative Fiction World” interview series.

Of course (coughs!) I like to think that I’m both, so immediately said “yes” — and shortly thereafter Rowena sent through a great list of questions.

To see the questions — and my answers! — click Here.

But there is more!

UK/AU/NZ mass market paperback

Because the interview was sparked by The Heir of Night winning the Gemmell Morningstar Award, I am giving away a copy of the book as part of the interview — but to be in the draw you’ll have to answer the Giveaway Question. Again, to see what it is you’ll just have to go read the interview. 😉

Even if you already have a copy of HEIR though, still feel free to comment—I’d love to hear your replies. 🙂