The Fox

The fox is a single red stroke that cuts across
the clearing. The colour seems to hang like smoke,
you can almost see where she has come from.
Her musk (though you can smell nothing)
is specific like a thumbprint on the air.
It isn’t raining but there’s a kind of wet
on your face, a stickiness of insect juices dropped.
The fox is rusty-dull, discreet, not radiant or hot
or pulsing. Not agitated. Not randy.
She is completely dream and intelligence
sliding through the wet grass, the stinging nettles,
the little brittle helmets of dry seed,
a flower or two, relics of the drizzly, petalled summer.
The lyric fox goes down to the creek
where dark and dankness will mask her scent
and the lovely rosette of her face.
She’ll be able to pause there, for a while, sip water
while the dogs swirl and bell in front of the Big House.

(c) Bernadette Hall

from The Lustre Jug (VUP) 2009

The Fox is a Best New Zealand Poem 2009

To listen to my recent radio interview with Bernadette on Women on Air, Plains 96.9 FM, click here. (Click on the “play” icon to listen or on mp3 to download—it’s free mp3.)

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From Bernadette:

The Rathcoola Estate, where I lived for six months in 2007, is situated in Donoughmore, a rural area in Co. Cork, about twenty five minutes drive from Blarney. Among the wonders there were the blue jays that came down to steal apples from the 200 year old apple trees in the orchard. And the foxes. I’ve long been fond of them, from Brer Fox to the silver foxes of the Arctic. I was desperate to see one.
One day when I was standing under huge oak and sycamores trees just beyond the stone walls that enclosed the orchard and not far from the creek, I saw the fox. She was surprisingly close. And I did experience a kind of deepening stillness, the words clearly in my memory from Ted Hughes’ ‘The Thought Fox’ which I had taught to so many classes over the years. Ireland had this way of offering me ‘for real’ many things which literature had already embedded in my imagination.
This fox was completely unfazed by my presence in her space. She had already judged me as being of good will, or at least harmless. I was relieved to see her. That same morning the hunt had gone through the estate, tracking along the creek with a great hullabaloo, the dogs and the men all in a frenzy. I identified with her somehow. I admired the way she kept on calmly going about her own business.  I wished her long life, good health and a safe journey.
In his poem ‘On Originality’ (1977) Bill Manhire wrote of poetry ‘This is my nest of weapons./ This is my lyrical foliage.’ In his essay, ‘Catholic with a small c’ published in ‘The Source of the Song’ (VUP 1995), Andrew Johnston wrote ‘A lyric poem occupies a space that has somehow been charged with meaning (or at least a sense of meaningfulness) as if a vacuum had been crossed by a spark.’ So, a ‘lyric fox’ crosses a glade and it seems that all along she’s been talking to me about poetry.

About Bernadette:

Bernadette Hall is recognised as one of New Zealand’s more distinctive poetic voices. She was the 1996 Burns Fellow at Otago University and an Artists in Antarctica Fellow in 2004. The author of nine poetry collections, her work has been published in a range of national and international anthologies. Hall was the 2006 Victoria University Writer in Residence and in 2007 held the Rathcoola Residency in Donoughmore, Ireland. Bernadette’s most recent collection, The Lustre Jug, (Victoria University Press), 2009, is a finalist for the 2010 NZ Post Book Award for Poetry

To see 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.

Christchurch Writers' Festival Programme

I have just realised that in a month from now the Christchurch Writers’ Festival will all be over! The festival is a much anticipated biennial event where people come from far and wide to meet and listen to an array of international and New Zealand writers.

This year’s programme is focused around non-fiction, with writers such as Jake Adelstein of Tokyo Vice fame and Clive Hamilton with his latest work Requiem for a Species being just two of the writers featured. Women on Air and Plains 96.9 FM, the station where I do my interviews, are also sponsoring a session on where women are at in the 21st century (I imagine the responses could well depend on which part of the world one lives in) with Emily Maguire and Marilyn Waring, titled “Your Skirt’s Too Short: Women in the 21st Century.”

Actually, given the seriousness of the women’s rights issues around the world, from the  risk of being stoned to death in some regions, to trafficking of girls and women in a global sex slavery trade, to the fact that even in the most “equal” western countries women are consistently paid significantly less than men for the same work (isn’t the average wage gap between men and women doing the same job around 20% here in NZ?) one has to ask whether a title like “Your Skirt’s Too Short” doesn’t seriously trivialise the topic—but maybe that’s the point?

OK, off the soapbox and back to the festival—where the programme’s tide isn’t entirely out for fiction. Barbara Trapido, author of Sex and Stravinsky, is probably the main international ficiton writer on the programme, but we also have local authors Rachael King—her latest is Magpie Hall—and Alison Wong, whose debut novel, As the Earth Turns Silver is a finalist for this year’s NZ Post Book Award for Fiction.

"The Heir of Night"

And I am appearing in the “Hot Off the Press” event on 10 September, where I’ll be reading from my new novel, The Heir of Night (The Wall of Night Series, Book One). I’ll be sharing the podium with Karen Healey from Australia, author of Guardian of the Dead; another Christchurch-based author, Karen Zelas, with Past Perfect, a novel set between contemporary NZ and the 1840s, and between Akaroa and France; and Craig Cliff with his first collection of short stories (A Man Melting.)

There’s also a wide range of poetry on offer, with Ireland’s Iggy McGovern and Cilla McQueen, NZ”s current poet laureate among the featured guests.

But fiction or non fiction, poetry or prose, the Christchurch Writers’ Festival will be on for just four days from September 9-12—and then it will all be over for another two years. So if you’re able to be in Christchurch for those days, grab yourself a programme or go to the website and book yourself into some events. And if you happen to make it to Hot Off the Press do make yourself known to me afterward!

At the moment I am reading Kerry Popplewell’s Leaving the Tableland, a new poetry collection from Steele Roberts. The poems embody a keen observation of nature with strong elegaic themes and I am going to be interviewing Kerry soon for Women on Air, Plains 96.9 FM.

I am also quickly re-reading Mary Victoria’s Tymon’s Flight—ahead of our radio interview for next Saturday—which you may recall I first enjoyed a while back. Tymon’s Flight is new out from HarperCollins Voyager, so new in fact that Mary just celebrated her launch yesterday at the Weta Cave (yup, she’s a Wellywood, Weta Digital gal)—and Tymon’s Flight has already had a great review from Rebecca Fisher on FantasyLit.com

So how about you—what are you reading this weekend? Is it spinning your wheels and rocking your world? Or not so much?

Australia author, Marianne de Pierres, is running a series of introductory blog posts from Orbit authors attending Worldcon and mine is up today—do check it out here!

The Sir Julius Vogel Awards are awarded annually by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Association of New Zealand (SFFANZ) and members of the National Science Fiction Convention—which this year is Au Contraire, to be held in Wellington over the weekend of 27-29 August (i.e. not many sleeps now.)

Sir Julius Vogel Award Trophy

The Sir Julius Vogel Awards are given “to recognise excellence in science fiction and fantasy by New Zealanders and New Zealand residents” and include both professional and fan categories. Recipients of the awards receive a trophy with their name, the year and the award type, designed by Weta Workshop.

This year’s list includes an impressive range of known authors in the professional categories, such as Juliet Marillier, Nalini Singh and Russell Kirkpatrick, for Best Novel: Adult, as well as Ella West, Mandy Hager, Brian Falkner and James Norcliffe for Best Novel: Young Adult. (And, of course, Thornspell won this award last year. 🙂 )

But there are also a range of newer names, particularly in the short fiction and novella categories, including Ripley Patton, whom I recently interviewed for Women on Air, Plains 96.9 FM—I posted a link to the podcast here yesterday.

And let’s not forget Voyagers Science Fiction Poetry of New Zealand, which I have already mentioned a couple of times on this blog, which is up for Best Collected Work.

You can see the full list of finalists for yourself here.

Although final voting closes at the convention for attending members, the closing date for those not attending is 20 August—so if you are keen to support a particular author or work, you need to think about voting now.

I now have two more radio interviews on podcast.

The first is poet Bernadette Hall, talking about poetry her collection The Lustre Jug, which is a finalist for this year’s NZ Post National Poetry Award.

The second is Christchurch-based speculative fiction author, Ripley Patton, discussing her writing and the founding of SpecFiCNZ, the first professional organisation for NZ writers of science fiction, fantasy and horror.

Click on the interviewee’s name—and then either press the “play” icon to listen or download the mp3 (it’s free!)

The final instalment of my 3-part blog series on reading for the Hugo Awards is now up on the Out of this Eos blog. Feel free to read and comment, as well as to pass the word along.

I would love to hear from you, especially if you have been reading some of the finalists yourself and would like to share your view on what you loved–or didn’t–and why, as well as who should get the ‘gongs’ on 5 September–especially in the fiction categories.

Jabberwocky

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! and through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

by Lewis Carroll

from Through the Looking Glass

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I could pretend to all sorts of serious reasons for selecting Jabberwocky as my Tuesday Poem: for example, that it is regarded as one of the finest nonsense poems in the English language, in particular for its use of portmanteaux; or that some of the nonsense words, such as “chortled”, have subsequently entered main stream usage.

But in fact, I have chosen it because it was one of my favourite poems as a child and one of the first I was intrigued enough to learn, of my own volition, to memorise right through. I loved the rhythm and rhyme and nonsense of it that yet managed to tell a thoroughly—and satisfyingly—comprehensible story.

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To see 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.

As you know, I am off to Worldcon in Melbourne early next month and my Australia/New Zealand publisher for The Heir of Night (and Wall of Night series), Orbit, have just released this poster celebrating their attending authors.  Cool, huh?!

I love the look and—ok, I’m human—the company my name is keeping! 🙂

Today is really wet—that grey old rain keeps coming down and lying in deep puddles throughout the garden which makes it a decidedly indoors sort of Sunday. There’s a lot of stuff to catch up on, too, besides reading those books mentioned yesterday; pretty much everything that I don’t want to put off until tomorrow otherwise it will cut into writing time.   And given that the last fews weeks have been crazily busy with other stuff intruding on that precious time, that’s something I really don’t want to do.

So what’s on today’s list? I have already signed and parcelled up 4 x copies of Thornspell to send out to the blog posters who won giveaways earlier in the week, plus another 1 to a reviewer in Finland (you may recall I talked about Finland a few weeks back in my second “Influences on Story” post); also 1 for fellow writer, Tracey O’Hara, in Australia.

Tracey is another Supernatural Underground blogger  and a while back she asked for Supe authors to donate books for  a Pink Ribbon Breast Cancer giveaway and also for a Romance Writers of Australia Convention workshop she will be running 12-14 August. But Tracey was so taken with the two giveaways of  Thornspell I sent over that I had to volunteer to send another for her very own—so as not to shortchange either of these very worthy giveaway causes—and of course I will be getting a couple of Tracey’s debut novel, Love’s Cold Kiss, to use as giveaways in return. (So watch this space, those of you who love paranormal urban fantasy!)

At any rate, there was a lot of bubble wrap, brown paper and string being expended in our household this morning. And then paper and printer ink as I also wrote and signed cover letters for Kate Nintzel, my Eos editor, to send out with AREs of The Heir of Night to North American bookblog reviewers (ones I have had contact with re Thornspell, hence the personalized covers from me) over the coming weeks. Yes, you’re right, that R-word does make me nervous. But it is also inevitable when a book gets published, i.e. that does mean the book being sent out into the world and folk out there are not only going to have opinions about it, they’re going to express ’em, too. Although I remind myself that the first responses have been positive, both getting the cover quote from the wonderful Robin Hobb, but also an enthusiastic report from Joanna Preston.

So that was my morning. After I’ve finished writing this post I will be turning my attention to voting for the Sir Julius Vogel Awards, which are given for achievement in Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror by SFFANZ. As I can’t attend Au Contraire, the national science fiction-fantasy convention being held at the end of the month, that means I have to get my postal or electronic vote in by August 20—and I still have a few short fiction finalists left to read.

Hugo Award 2009

Once that’s done and dusted I then have to write my final post on reading for the Hugo Awards—other, of course, than attending the actual awards ceremony in Melbourne next month—which should be posted on the Out of this Eos blog early next week. So I need to get that done today as well—and also start putting together the questions for a blog interview with the winner of last year’s Hugo Award for “Best Fan Writer”, Cheryl Morgan. Cheryl is the non-fiction editor for Clarkesworld and has recently commenced a new venture, Wizard’s Tower Press, a new small press publisher specializing in science fiction, fantasy and related literature. She will be attending both Au Contraire and Worldcon, so I look forward to talking with her about both her SF-F travels and the new venture.