Last week I had the chance to read YA author Karen Healey’s Guardian of the Dead ahead of both Worldcon and The Press Christchurch Writers’ Festival where Karen and I are going to be in a number of events together. And I have to say that I found Guardian a fun read—an intriguing mix of urban fantasy in not just a New Zealand, but a Christchurch setting, woven together with Maori legends of the patupaiarehe (fairies) and taniwha, as well as the myth of Hine-nui-te-Po, the Goddess of Death.

But I only had a few days to read it, so I had to put aside Emily Maguire’s Smoke in the Room, which I was enjoying—a very different story, it’s contemporary fiction about three troubled individuals trying to make sense of life and themselves. I’m looking forward to getting back into that now.

In terms of books to read on the plane and in downtime (will there be any?) at Worldcon, I also have the Booker longlisted Room, by Emma Donoghue and will be re-reading a poetry collection that I personally feel should have been a finalist for this year’s NZ Post Book Award for Poetry, Michele Leggott’s Mirabile Dictu (Auckland University Press, 2009).

Of course, if I see it I’ll be grabbing a copy of Suzanne Collins’ Mockingjay to read, since The Hunger Games was one of my three top reads for last year.  And maybe, just for something light—and because I’ll be missing my weekly True Blood fix while in Melbourne—I might pick up the latest Charlaine Harris, Dead in the Family.

Then again, I might just be too busy with my Worldcon schedule to do any reading at all!

But how about you? What will you be reading this week?

Last week I blogged about my friend CP Lin, the winemaker at Mountford Estate, our shared love of food and wine, and just how good I think the Mountford Estate wines are.

I never thought I was alone in that opinion, but I have just seen a recent article by Matthew Jukes, in Money Week 30 July 2010, in which he has the following to say about CP Lin’s wines and Mountford Estate:

“This incredible estate is set to rock the palates of the wine cognoscenti … see for yourself just how beautiful and full of vitality and class CP Lin’s wines are … I visited him in Feburary and tasted a massive line up of bottles and every single one was utterly captivating. There are very few wineries which have yet to be ‘discovered’ these days, particularly in the pinot noir field (the most difficult and sensitive of all), but I can say for certain that Mountford is teetering on the edge of superstardom.”

Matthew Jukes is wine correspondent for the Daily Mail and has won The International Wine and Spirit Competition’s Trophy for Communicator of the Year, writes best selling wine guides in the UK and Australia, as well as being a wine buyer and internationally respected wine judge.

What can I say, except: Go, CP!

NZ Post Book of the Year:

Encircled Lands: Te Urewera 1820-1921 (Bridget Williams Books) Judith Binney

Fiction:

As The Earth Turns Silver (Penguin) Alison Wong

Poetry:

Just This (Victoria University Press) Brian Turner

General Non Fiction:

Encircled Lands: Te Urewera 1820-1921 (Bridget Williams Books) Judith Binney

Illustrated Non Fiction:

Go Fish: Recipes and Stories from the New Zealand Coast (Random House), Al Brown

People’s Choice Award:

Go Fish: Recipes and Stories from the New Zealand Coast (Random House), Al Brown

So that’s it—done and dusted for another year! Obviously I am disappointed for Bernie, Michael and Owen (see yesterday’s post), but am looking forward to checking out the winners that I haven’t already read, which in my case are Go Fish and Encircled Lands.

Today is August 27—and that means that tonight the NZ Post Book Awards will be decided at a glittering (well, that’s the word the promo material uses anyway) gala event in Auckland. And to personalise it all, two of my friends, Bernadette Hall and Michael Harlow, are in the running for the NZ Post Book Award for Poetry.

Just to be even handed, I featured first Bernie and then Michael as my Tuesday Poets over the past two weeks. All three finalists, including former Te Mata Estate Poet Laureate, Brian Turner, were also featured on the Tuesday Poem hub on 30 July, NZ National Poetry Day.

Also in the running for the NZ Post Book Award for Fiction is Owen Marshall, for his short fiction collection, Living as a Moon (Vintage).  Owen was my creative writing mentor a few years back, through the NZ Society of Author’s/Creative New Zealand programme, and is often spoken of as NZ’s foremost contemporary short fiction writer. But if Living as a Moon wins tonight it will be the first time Owen has won the fiction award for a short story collection. He has won previously, but for a novel, Harlequin Rex, in 2000.

The other contenders for the Fiction Award are Alison Wong, for As The Moon Turns Silver (Penguin) and Fiona Farrell’s Limestone (Vintage).

To check out the General Non-Fiction finalists, click here. The Illustrated Non-Fiction finalists are here.

And there’s a People’s Choice category as well, with Alison Wong’s As The Moon Turns Silver the popular front runner for this award. (Although she’s also many pundits’ pick for the overall Fiction award as well.)

But we’ll all just have to wait and see what tonight brings, won’t we?

My most recent SF-F interview on Women on Air, Plains 96.9FM was with Mary Victoria, whose debut novel, Tymon’s Flight, was released by HarperCollins Voyager on 14 August—so yes, it should now be in every good bookstore near you!

To listen to the interview and hear Mary Victoria discuss some of the more intriguing ideas in Tymon’s Flight, particularly the “world tree”—and yes, she does read from the book as well; just a snippet but you get the flavour—click here. (Then just click on the “play” icon to listen or download the mp3.)

About Mary Victoria: Mary trained in art and film before working as an animator for 10 years, including with Weta Studios, famous for its involvement with filming of the Lord of the Rings series. She will be attending Worldcon in Melbourne and her events schedule is on her blog.

Cheryl Morgan is a science fiction critic and publisher. She is the owner of Wizard’s Tower Press and editor of Salon Futura. Previously she edited the Hugo Award winning magazine, Emerald City (Best Fanzine, 2004). She also won a Hugo for Best Fan Writer in 2009. Cheryl is a director of San Francisco Science Fiction Conventions Inc., and of the Association for the Recognition of Excellence in SF & F Translation.

—

I first met Cheryl Morgan at last year’s National Science Fiction Convention, ConScription, in Auckland, and I know her as the non-fiction editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, a regular attendee at science fiction conventions around the world, and the winner of last year’s Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer. (Just a hint—the Hugo Awards are like the Oscars of the world science fiction-fantasy community.) Cheryl is back in New Zealand for Au Contraire, this year’s National Science Fiction Convention over 27-29 August—and when I found out she had a new venture on the go as well, I thought it was time to request an interview.

1. Cheryl, you have impressive credentials in the world of science-fiction fandom. As mentioned in my introduction, you travel the world extensively attending scifi-fantasy conventions, are the non fiction editor for Clarkesworld magazine and have won a Hugo Award for “Best Fan Writer.” So when did you first get involved with SFF fandom?

I first attended a convention in 1984. Martin Hoare and Dave Langford encouraged me to attend an Eastercon in Brighton. Martin was my boss at work at the time, and he knew I read SF&F so he figured I would fit right in. He and Dave had been friends at university, so I got in already knowing fannish royalty, so to speak.

However, I didn’t get seriously involved until 1995. I had just started a job in Melbourne, but was in the UK to ferry some stuff out, and I saw that Worldcon was in Glasgow. I thought I might find some Australian fans there, and that might help me make friends in my new home. Of course the Melbourne fans were bidding for a Worldcon at the time, and I got sucked right in.

2. So what’s “true north” for you in the SFF world—is it the conventions, the writing and interviewing, or simply the people?

Can I say “all of it”? I suppose if I had to give up everything else I would still want to be able to read books, but really I wouldn’t want to do without any of it.

3. Being so deeply involved in the SFF world, do you ever get jaded, feel like there’s “nothing new” anymore?

There’s always something new. New writers come along, new fans turn up online or at conventions, the community is always changing. The one thing that doesn’t change is that every time something new comes along someone complains that it will Destroy Fandom because things are Not Like They Used To Be. I get very tired of that.

4. So have you seen many big changes in fandom since 1984, or is more a case of incremental evolution? And what have been some of the more significant changes from your point of view?

I think that there have been two major changes. The first is that the Internet has made it vastly easier for fans to communicate. It used to be that we had to send letters and fanzines to each other by snail mail, and could only see each other at conventions. These days we chat via Twitter on our phones and have video calls on Skype. The main result of this has been that as long as you can afford an Internet connection it doesn’t matter where you live, you can still be part of fandom. People like Lauren Beukes in South Africa, Glenda Larke in Malaysia, Jonathan Dotse in Ghana, Tero Ykspetäjä in Finland, Charles Tan in the Phillipines, or Fábio Fernandes in Brazil, and everyone in New Zealand, can be active members of the world-wide fan community.

The other change is that we really have won the Culture War. Back in 1984 it was still (just about) a Proud and Lonely Thing to be a Fan. But even then us noisy youngsters had grown up on Star Trek and Star Wars. These days the Moon landings are ancient history, most of the top-grossing movies are SF or fantasy, and politicians crack jokes about Kirk and Spock. There might be a few crusty old fools who think that SF is “bought by a special kind of person who has special weird things they go to and meet each other” (to quote one of last year’s Booker Prize judges), but actually almost everyone reads or watches it in some way or another.

5. And what are some of the highlights—the moment you’ll always remember?

I have been lucky enough to have won two Hugo Awards. It doesn’t get any better than that. But for personal reasons I will always have fond memories of the Glasgow Worldcon in 1995. I made lots of new friends there, but in particular I met an American fan called Kevin Standlee who has been a very important part of my life ever since.

6. You have recently embarked on a new project, an e-publishing venture called Wizard’s Tower Press and Kevin is one of your business partners in that, isn’t he? Can you explain what Wizard’s Tower Press is all about?

It is a long story, but for complicated reasons involving travel to the USA I found myself needing to have a real business that involved going to conventions. Publishing seemed to be the obvious route to take, but I had no money to invest so I had to find some way to do it that didn’t involve potentially bankrupting myself. As a result I am getting involved in ebooks. Kevin, as always, is my sounding board, moral support, and detail-oriented nag, but I have many other fine people working for me as well, including Anne Gray who did such a wonderful job of fixing my grammar for Emerald City.

Mostly what we will be doing at Wizard’s Tower is finding books that are long out of print that the big publishers are not interested in, and making them available again as ebooks. I’m not expecting to grow a huge company, or discover the next William Gibson, or anything like that, but I do hope I can help out the many mid-list authors whose careers are stagnating because the publishers and bookstores are increasingly focused on best sellers.

We will do some print books too – mainly specialist anthologies – but they will be few and far between because small press anthologies tend to lose money. My friend Colin Harvey is currently editing an anthology for us called Dark Spires. It will feature stories set in the Wessex region of England, written by authors who live in that region, and we’ll be launching at at the local convention, BristolCon, in November.

Then there will be the magazine …

7. OK, tell me about the magazine …

The magazine is called Salon Futura. Given Wizard’s Tower’s focus, it will be available as an ebook (DRM free; iBooks and Kindle to begin with), but like Clarkesworld it will also be available for free online. It is a literary review magazine, so it will talk a lot about science fiction and fantasy, but it won’t carry fiction.

We are open to submissions, but we won’t do huge numbers of reviews. In the same way that Clarkesworld focuses on a small number of high quality stories, we will focus on a small number of high quality articles about books. However, we will pay for those. I firmly believe that non-fiction writers deserve paying just the same as fiction writers do.

8. How does Salon Futura fit with the rest of the Wizard’s Tower Press project?

Salon Futura will give us an opportunity to remind people that Wizard’s Tower exists. When we bring out new books, we will mention them in the magazine. But along the way I hope to promote a lot of other good books as well. Indeed, once we get our online shop up and running we’ll be happy to sell anyone’s ebooks as long as they are of good quality.

9. And it’s launching at Aussiecon4, the World Science Fiction Convention in Melbourne from 2-6 September, is that right? So what are you planning—a big party or something different?

Sorry, no party I’m afraid. We can’t afford it, and from experience of 1999 I know that trying to run a party in a Melbourne hotel is massively expensive. But the first issue of the magazine should be online during the convention, and hopefully people will talk about it.

10. So the approach is low key—no event at all, but just relying on word of mouth?

You may find me shoving my iPad under people’s noses and saying, “look at this”. Also most of my news reporting will go out via the Salon Futura from then on, so if we can get an Internet connection from the Hugo ceremony the coverage will be Salon Futura branded. That might be something of a virtual party.

11. I’ll be attending the Hugo Awards ceremony in person—for the very first time—but otherwise I would definitely be up for the virtual party! But sticking with Wizard’s Tower Press & Salon Futura, do these new projects mean that you will be quitting your editorial role with Clarkesworld?

I’m definitely staying with Clarkesworld. As I said, Salon Futura is a literary review magazine. The sort of non-fiction I buy for Clarkesworld tends to be very different. Indeed, Clarkesworld has a firm policy of not publishing book reviews at all.

12. Can you tell me more about what being non fiction editor for Clarkesworld involves? For example, you’ve just said that you buy non fiction for the magazine?

That’s right. Clarkesworld is primarily a fiction magazine, but it carries some non-fiction as well. There is a regular series of interviews, conducted by Jeremy L.C. Jones, and then there is the column I manage, which covers a whole range of material. We have done science, history, art, music – basically anything that touches on the science fiction and fantasy field, but is not an interview (that’s Jeremy’s territory) and not a book review or con report (which we don’t publish).

I’m very pleased that Clarkesworld pays the same rates for non-fiction as it does for fiction. You can get 10c/word, up to $250, writing for us. I’m really surprised at how few submissions we get. (Hint, the submission guidelines can be found here.)

13. Another one of your “hats” is as a member of the Association for the Recognition of Excellence in SF & F Translation. I am very interested to know more about the Association’s work and your own part in it?

This all came out of my work with Science Fiction Awards Watch. As you know, we track awards from all around the world, including the Sir Julius Vogel Awards, and also many sets of awards from non-English-speaking countries. I very quickly noticed that in those countries where English was not the first language, be it France, Germany, Japan, Russia, China, or anywhere else, there was always an award category for translated fiction. And that category was almost always won by a work translated from English. But in the entire English-speaking world I could not find a science fiction group anywhere giving awards to translated fiction. This seemed wrong to me, so I decided to do something about it.

Thankfully other people also thought it was a good idea, and the Association is now an official non-profit organization (though we are still waiting on our tax exempt status from the IRS). Gary K. Wolfe of Roosevelt University in Chicago (probably better known to your readers as the lead reviewer for Locus) is our President, and we have two other academic experts: Rob Latham and Melissa Conway, from the University of Riverside in California. Kevin, as usual, is on hand to help with the legal stuff. Our first jury should be announced by the time this interview goes to press, and the first awards will be presented at the Eaton Conference next year.

I’m very pleased about this. There are huge amounts of science fiction and fantasy being published in languages other than English. Some of those writers are undoubtedly superb, but we English-speakers hardly ever get to hear of them. If our Association can do a little bit to change that we will have done a very good thing.

14. Coming back to your visit to NZ, you are here for Au Contraire over this coming weekend—are there any events that will be a particular focus for you in any of your many roles, including the new Wizard’s Tower venture?

Well I will certainly be reporting once more on the Sir Julius Vogel Awards – live if I can get an Internet connection. I have asked been asked to be on a few panels, but the programme hasn’t been finalized yet so I can’t commit to anything there. I may also be rather distracted as I’ll be putting the finishing touches to the first issue of Salon Futura, but I’ll do my best to be available at the convention. If nothing else I shall continue to blog about my travels and introduce the rest of the world to all of the good things that New Zealand has to offer.

I may also pop into Te Papa to get some squid stuff for my fellow cephalopod fans.

Cheryl—thank you very much for doing this interview. I am very impressed by your long contribution to fandom and your many achievements, not least winning not just one—as I first thought—but two Hugo Awards. I wish you all the very best for the new Wizard’s Tower and Salon Futura projects and a successful launch at Worldcon.

‘I am a Tyger’

Despite 10 years
of ‘talking cure’, twice
weekly, such intimate
conversation between strangers,
he remains quite convinced
that he is still, you know,
a tyger

As a child no taller
than a table leg, he always
suspected he was a cat
It was the last of the litter,
Chatterwot, the family favourite,
who taught him, age 11,
to speak ‘cat’

And he did. Not dog
or stag or unicorn, he knows
himself to be a tyger, ‘burning
bright’, in a body made strange
And of course he believes
he was adopted – his true parents
you see, were tygers, too.

© Michael Harlow
from Cassandra’s Daughter (Auckland University Press) 2005

—

Michael Harlow

From Michael:
Most immediately the poem grew out of note in a medical journal, so there are one or two ‘found’ items of language there, translated imaginatively. From early on I’ve been fascinated by the imaginative role animals play in our collective psychic life — and that’s universal.  In all manner of ways we identify with the animal world psychically, that is imaginatively alive in all of us. The ways in which we do this, and why, tell us a great deal about how we survive even ourselves. The extraordinary power of the  imaginative reality ‘I am a Tyger’ that can overwhelm another and actual reality. The spelling of ‘Tyger’ is meant to be a kind of underlying resonance to Blake’s poem.

—

The Tram Conductor's Blue Cap

About Michael:

Michael Harlow was born in the United States but arrived in New Zealand in 1968. In the 1980s, Harlow was an editor of the Caxton Press poetry series and poetry editor of Landfall. His poetry is distinctly European with a whimsical, questioning sensibility. His collaboration as librettist with the New Zealand composer Kit Powell is extensive. A practising Jungian psychotherapist, Harlow was awarded the 1986 Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship and was the 2009 Burns Fellow at the University of Otago.  Michael’s most recent collection, The Tram Conductor’s Blue Cap, (Auckland University Press), 2009, is a finalist for the 2010 NZ Post Book Award for Poetry

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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.

On August 4, I blogged about booking my airfares to attend Worldcon, the World Science Fiction & Fantasy Convention being held in Melbourne from 2-6 September.

As of Friday, the official programme was confirmed and these are the events I’ll be part of:

Fri 3, 1500 : Eowyn and Sam—Underappreciated Heroes in The Lord of the Rings: Everybody talks about Gollum, Gandalf, Frodo and Aragorn – but what about the other characters of The Lord of the Rings? An examination of the underappreciated characters among Tolkien’s extensive cast – why they work, why we love them, and how they are handled both in the books and in Peter Jackson’s film adaptations.
Laurie Mann, Helen Lowe, Rose-Marie Lillian, Alison Croggon

Sat 4, 1500: Myth and Folklore of Australia and New Zealand—with Tehani Wessely and Ian Nichols. Further details to be advised.

Sun 5, 1000: The Eternal Stories: Myths and Legends in YA Spec Fic—Myths and legends resound through much of our finest speculative fiction. In this panel, writers share their influences, thoughts and experiences.
Jenny Blackford, Catherynne M. Valente,  Alison Croggan, Helen  Lowe (chair)

Sun 5, 1300: Fantasy Before Fantasy, Science Fiction Before Science Fiction—The Odyssey, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Frankenstein, Gulliver’s Travels, Journey to the West: A look at classic works of world literature that, while not written as science fiction and fantasy, have been co-opted in the 20th and 21st centuries by speculative fiction readers and used as inspiration by the writers.
Rani Graff, Carol Ryles, Helen Lowe, Ben Chandler

Sun 5, 1500: Reading—with Alan Baxter.

Mon 6, 1000: Writing Strange Lands: Other Cultures in YA Speculative Fiction–-This panel will discuss the impact of dominant cultures in writing YA Speculative Fiction.
Karen Healey, Gillian Polack, Helen Lowe (chair)

Mon 6, 1100: Kaffeeklatsche—with Alison Croggon, Catherynne M Valente, and  Grá Linnaea.

Mon 6, 1300: Signing—(thank you to Mary Victoria for reminding me to add this to the schedule :-))

Hope to see some of you in the throng.

As well as being into books, poetry and story, one of my enduring interests is cooking—all cooking really, but most particularly baking—and also food and wine matches.

There is a wonderful area just north of Christchurch, called Waipara, which has many fine vineyards and one of my favourites is Mountford, a small, boutique winery with—in my humble opinion—outstanding wines. Although in my case there is also a personal connection to Mountford, which is that the winemaker, CP Lin, is an old friend. We first met when I was a very new shodan (first level) black belt and he was trying his arm—as he likes to do—at aikido.

As you will see from CP’s story (when you click on his name) he is blind, which turned out to be a little too challenging for aikido, but which he has never let impede his career as a world-class winemaker. Not surprisingly, CP has strong and particular opinions about wine. He is also a gourmand and bon vivant, so as you may imagine, an invitation to dine with friends at CP’s home and to bring the dessert and wine to match is a matter to give even a keen cook and amateur wine lover a moment’s pause.

Pause I did, but I knew CP had some home-crafted Spanish chorizo—from the proprietor, Javier Garcia, at Christchurch’s The Curator’s House restaurant—for the entree and intended making a beef bourguignon, in the traditional style learned while working grape harvests in Burgundy, as the main course, so that helped narrow the dessert choice. In the end I opted to make a Date and Walnut Torte (from an Australian Vogue Entertaining & Travel from Autumn 2001), which had the added advantage of being both dairy free and very low on gluten (one guest was lactose, another gluten, intolerant.)

But what to match with the torte? I already knew that this cake just doesn’t work with the usual “sticky” dessert wines, and sparkling wines are also touch and go—but that the mix of dates and walnuts should work well with a fortified wine. The trouble was, I just couldn’t find the one I had in mind—and then I saw the Lustau ‘San Emilio’ Pedro Ximenez Sherry at Hemingways Fine Wines, and although I had never actually tasted it, my instinct—and its reputation—persuaded me to ‘give it a go’.

Fortunately for me, it turned out to be the perfect choice—despite the excellence of both the entree and the main preceding (and believe me, they really were excellent!) both torte and sherry disappeared in very short order. A relief, especially when your host has as exacting standards for both food and wine as CP.

But you know, despite the great food and many excellent wines, the flavour highlight of the evening for me may just have been the rose-infused white tea, bought from a specialist tea house in Paris, that CP served ‘to finish’. Normally I would have said that nothing but coffee would do to round off such an evening, but that rose-infused white tea was something “extra special”.

You may recall that last week I was doing a quick re-read of Tymon’s Flight ahead of my interview with Mary Victoria this morning, on Women on Air, Plains 96.9FM. So tune in at 11.20 approximately to listen.

This week I have Emily Maguire’s Smoke in the Room on my desk. Emily is an Australian writer who is going to be appearing at the Christchurch Writers’ Festival early next month and speaking about both her fiction and non fiction writing.  Smoke in the Room is contemporary fiction and looks interesting, about three “unlikely” characters, Kate, Adam and Graeme, who over “one sultry summer … will wrestle with some of life’s most poignant questions: how to live, how to love, and how to be cool when all around you burns …”

Actually, it sounds YA, but I don’t think it is and will look forward to trying it out.  And if you want to hear an interview with Emily talking about her non fiction book, Your Skirt’s Too Short, ahead of the Writers’ Festival, you can click here. (Click on the play icon to listen or download the mp3—it’s free.)

So how about you—what’s on your book list for this weekend?