Sometimes, to borrow from Kate Atkinson’s novel of the same name, the only question seems to be: “When Will There Be Good News?”

But then one day, the good news comes.

And there’s been a little rush of it lately amongst my friends.

Victoria Broome, whose poetry manuscript, The Big Red Engine, was shortlisted for the prestigious Kathleen Grattan Award, found out that she was one of the two runners up—and that Otago University Press are considering The Big Red Engine for publication.  And believe me, all my fingers are crossed for the happiest of outcomes!

I featured Victoria’s poem The Foreign Office, from Flap: The Chook Book 2 as my Tuesday poem selection on November 9.

The Kathleen Grattan Award was won by Jennifer Compton for This City. One of Jennifer’s poems, The First Drummer Boy of Xmas featured as the Tuesday Poem on Helen Heath’s blog this week. And Tim Jones featured her poem, Inheritance, last week.

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Poet and editor Siobhan Harvey, has just learned that her poem Tooth, which was published in the American magazine, Asheville Poetry Review this year has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize. The award honours the best of poetry and fiction published in small presses in the US during the year. Great news—and again with the fingers crossed!

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A US friend, Beth Anne Miller’s debut novel Into the Scottish Mists is being released by The Wild Rose Press on February 4 next year—not many sleeps now—and although you can find Beth at http://www.facebook.com/bethannemiller17 she has also been a guest on Laura Treacy Bentley’s blog–with the Into the Scottish Mists cover featured. Beth Anne’s also going to be my guest on the Supernatural Underground on 1 February, so look out for that post!

Yesterday, New Zealand marked two minutes silence for the 29 men who died in the Pike River mine explosion, at the commencement of a memorial service on the West Coast.

Songs from the Sea was written in memory of Rod Thornton, who also lived on the West Coast and died, aged 27, in a fall while mountain climbing. Given yesterday’s sense of loss and elegy, and the strength of the West Coast environment in the poem, it felt like the “right” post for today.

Songs from the Sea

Songs from the sea sighing
in beneath the spindrift to the land’s
curve, lying long beneath green bush
where the nikau palms stand sentinel
all along that shining margin
between sea and land, where the wind
goes walking through the wild grasses
and sea birds glide, sailing the currents
of the air above shifting saltwater
tides, plaintive, melancholy, crying
to the wide and empty skies.

All their songs are sung for you,
sough of the wind and sigh of the sea
are your lullaby and your requiem
where you now lie, in the green earth
of this country you loved so well
that in your passion to embrace it
you leapt too high, like Icarus flying
into the heart of fire, into the sun –
and so fell, back into emptiness
beneath the sky, where quiet now
in earth you lie.

(c) Helen Lowe

Published in Yellow Moon 17 (Australia) 2005.

Recently I sent fellow author Mary Victoria a copy of my novel Thornspell (Knopf, 2008) and she was kind enough to write back (amongst other things): “Thank you for giving me the opportunity to share a corner of your lively, lucid and rambunctious imagination!”

Lively, lucid and rambunctious—I definitely like that! And although every book is a work of imagination, I do think that Thornspell fits Mary Victoria’s  “bill” (or should that be “billing”?) The basic premise of the story is a retelling of Sleeping Beauty, but it’s from the perspective of the prince: from his childhood growing up beside the vast tangled forest and hearing all sorts of stories; and then hearing the story—and finding out it is not ancient history, old and dead mouldering beneath tree roots, but very much a clear and present danger to him, in his everyday world. The tale that follows is the kind of adventurous fantasy that I loved as a kid, where sword fights and hunts are as much a part of the story as the magic that stalks through dreams and can reveal both beauty and terror …

A few people have asked me whether Thornspell is “like” The Heir of Night—and I think the answer, like those given by Tolkien’s elves, is “both yes and no.”  Yes, they’re both Fantasy and both “crossover” reads, although Thornspell is aimed at the 11-14 year old readership, whereas Heir is more for adults. And yes, they’re both stories where adventure is a large part of the action, but the magic has a strong element of mystery deriving from dreamscapes and parallel dimensions.

I think the biggest differences are that Thornspell, although a fairytale retelling, is very much of this world (albeit in that country ‘far away’), with one central protagonist and a small group of key supporting characters. The Heir of Night, on the other hand, is set in an alternate world, with two central protgonists but five or six other important point of view characters as well.  Finally, Thornspell is a standalone novel, whereas The Heir of Night is the first part of a quartet.

But I like to think that they’re both lively, lucid and rambunctious works of imagination.;-) (Thank you, Mary Victoria!)

Last week, in this article on Beatties Bookblog, the Bookman added a footnote on his reading habits and asked readers to contibute a comment on theirs. I was one of those who did so, confessing—amongst other reading habits—to keeping up with my necessary book consumption, as a writer, by reading (standing up) at the kitchen bench with my lunch time cup of coffee. Why stand up—because if I sit down with a book I may end up parked for the rest of the afternoon while my own writing is neglected. But I do get through a lot of books in a year by chipping away with that lunch time reading.

So what am I chipping away at, at present?

This past week I’ve had two novels on the go. I’m re-reading Alison Wong’s As the Earth Turns Silver (Penguin), which won this year’s New Zealand Post Book Award for Fiction. I loved Wong’s poetry collection The Cup (Steele Roberts) which came out in 2006 and she brings the same spare lyricism to the novel. As the Earth Turns Silver is interesting from an historical perspective as well, since it concerns Chinese immigration to New Zealand in the late 19th, early 20th century whch is rarely addressed in NZ fiction. (I have a feeling that it is under-represented in non fiction as well, but hesitate to state that as fact without further research.)

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The second book I have on the go is Birth of the Firebringer by Meredith Ann Pierce, a Junior Fantasy first published in 1985 and reprinted by Firebird in 2003 (so it shoud be in libraries). A friend loaned me this a while back and I have only just gotten round to reading it—and it is good. It’s unusual in this era of urban fantasy to find a story with non-human (and non-supernatural) protagonists, but Pierce carries it off well in Firebringer. The story has complexity, too, and I think will be enjoyed by kids who’ve previously liked the Narnia books or Erin Hunter’s Warriors series.

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So how about you? What are you reading right now? Alternatively, what do you have in your TBR pile?

Blue

In the first week
the sea is the dark blue of the mountains
between the blooming heather and the first snowfall.

In the second week
the sea is the greyish blue of her Sunday best sateen
which she wore when they first met.

In the fifth week
there are storms. White waves crash on the deck.
Through her porthole she sees a sea as green-blue as his eyes
that caught her gaze when he asked for her hand in marriage.

In the eighth week
her child sickens.
they are becalmed in the turquoise blue of the bracelet
on her sister’s arm, waving at the dockside.

In the ninth week
the days grow shorter. At twilight
the sea is the inky blue of the words in her diary,
recording births, deaths and distance travelled.

In the last week
they bury her child. The ship is enclosed by sea and sky
the blue of the eggshell she found on the path to the byre.
Nearby an unfledged chick with staring eyes,
covered in flies.

The next week she unpacks seeds brought from home,
plants cabbages and carrots,
marigolds, poppies and nasturtiums.
The cornflower seed, she sets aside.
In summer the garden is aflame
with red, orange and yellow
but no blue
not any scrap of blue.

(c) Catherine Fitchett

Published in Flap: The Chook Book 2, (The Hen House) 2010

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About the Poem:

This is another Tuesday Poem selection from the recently released Flap: The Chook Book 2 by Christchurch poets Victoria Broome, Catherine Fitchett, Barbara McCartney and Christina Stachurski. Blue is from Catherine’s section of the anthology: as strong as eggshells. I am a great admirer of Catherine’s poetry and have liked Blue since Catherine frst read it at a Canterbury Poets’ Collective reading at Madras Cafe Bookshop a few years back.

About Catherine:

Catherine Fitchett grew up in Wellington, where she did some writing in high school but studied chemistry at university. She has had several careers as a forensic scientist/toxicologist, full time mother of five, and currently works in the accounting field. Catherine’s varied interests have included quiltmaking and genealogy as well as poetry, which she returned to writing after attending a Canterbury University summer school course with Bernadette Hall in 1999.  She is now a member of the small poetry group, The Poetry Chooks, which formed shortly after. The group have two collections published, The Chook Book, and the recently released Flap, The Chook Book 2.

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To read the featured poem on the Tuesday Poem Blog—and link to other Tuesday Poets posting around NZ and the world—either click here or on the Quill icon in the sidebar.

On November 18 I discussed whether steampunk was the next genre wave and Joff’s comment included a link to a blogpost by Charles Stross, critiquing the subgenre.

Leviathan author Scott Westerfeld riposted with the following post (interestingly titled “Genre Cooties!”):

” … But then I come home to discover that the internet got stupid while I was gone. And not just regular internet stupid about cats or politics, but stupid about steampunk!

Perhaps the prime example is this post from the normally incisive Charles Stross, surely the most banal thing he’s ever typed. I mean, pointing out that the Victorian era was imperialistic? Racist? Sexist? Had lousy labor laws and no class mobility? Like no one in the steampunk world was considering this?

News flash: the online world of steampunk is constantly engaged in exactly those issues …”

The rest of Westerfeld’s post is here.

So what do you think? Are you in Camp Stross or Camp Westerfeld? For steampunk or against? Or bivouacked somewhere in no-man’s-land?

Thursday 25 was Thanksgiving Day in the US, but the long weekend continues through until today, Sunday 28. Thanksgiving isn’t a festival that we celebrate in NZ at all and I know there’s also a strong historical context for the holiday in the US, around the early pilgrim settlers and the food they received from the North American Indian people which helped them survive.

So, a particularly American story—but I do think the idea of a festival around “taking stock” and celebrating just “being here” is a really good idea. In many ways that process is part of New Year, but an aspect that gets a little lost in the “big party” celebration that has become our tradition—at least here in New Zealand. And of course, because our New Year falls in the middle of summer, rather than winter, the weather encourages the big party as opposed to reflection and drawing close around a fire with family and friends.

Like many people in NZ this week, the Pike River mining tragedy has put me more into that reflective frame of mind—not just thinking about how terrible this time must be for the families and friends of the 29 men who died, but also making me more appreciative of my own “fortunate life”, even if some of that good fortune sometimes seems very everyday and easily overlooked.

Very simple things: like sunshine; the intense green of leaves and the way the sun edges them with light, and the blue of the sky; taking a few moments to sit on the back step with my little cat buddy, who has various names but has been a buddy for 18 years now; having a back step to sit on that is more or less intact, following the September 4 Christchurch earthquake and its aftermath; not just having enough to eat, every day—which so many people in the world don’t—but food that I enjoy as well; music to listen to; books to read … And always the big stuff: partner, family, friends—and the rare and wonderful privilege of being able to string words into poems and stories, some of which have found their way into the world as books.

Big things; little things—but all well worth that moment of appreciation, of consciously giving thanks.

It’s not the end of the year yet, but reading Christchurch City Libraries’ top picks yesterday made me think about the books that have been standout reads for me so far this year. I read a huge number of books so to qualify a book really needs to standout in retrospect as well as being something I enjoy while reading. (That’s a much bigger list and needless to say there’s some very good books on it.) So here’s my top 6 picks so far, in alphabetical order by author:

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi — medium-future dystopian scifi that really hooked me in from the opening sequence

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Tigers at Awhitu by Sarah Broom — this accomplished and moving debut poetry collection made a great reading start to my year.

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Room by Emma Donoghue — a Booker shortlisted novel I didn’t expect to enjoy from the back cover, but by the end of Chapter 2 I didn’t want to put it down.

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The Treekeeper’s Tale by Pascale Petit — powerful poetry from celebrated UK poet, Pascale Petit, covering themes of nature and archaeology.

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Immortal Beloved by Cate Tiernan — a YA paranormal urban fantasy that is not about vampires (despite the title.) I really enjoyed the characters  and Tiernan’s use of (real) history in the backstory.

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Tymon’s Flight by Mary Victoria — I love the concept of the “world tree” and the steampunk overtones with dirigibles and  flying machines.

AU/NZ Cover

Fellow SpecFicNZ-er Wen Baragrey drew the following link to my attention yesterday, i.e.  that Christchurch City Libraries‘ staff have recently published their “Top Reads” for 2010 and Megan has included The Heir of Night amongst the picks, here. (Scroll down to see “Megan’s Top Three”.)

Re Megan’s “can’t wait” for the rest of the quartet (thank you, Megan!) I can put my hand on my heart and undertake that I am working very hard to get Book Two out there as soon as may be! 🙂

PS Check out the library blog today as well: for Simply the Best!

Yesterday 29 men were confirmed dead in the explosion that occurred at Pike River underground mine on the West Coast, in what is being described as New Zealand’s worst peacetime loss of life since an Air New Zealand DC10 crashed on Mt Erebus in Antarctica, in 1979.

Although both a novelist and a poet, at times like these I feel there are no words that can readily and respectfully encompass the grief and loss of the families and friends of the men who have died, or the blow to the community. But I do wish to acknowledge the magnitude of the disaster that has occured and extend my very deep sympathy to the families and to the Greymouth and West Coast communities.