Last week, I mentioned that Joanna Preston’s second poetry collection, Tumble—which recently won the Ockham NZ Book Award for Poetry—had just arrived on the To Be Read table.

I also mentioned that I am a huge admirer of Joanna’s poetry.

In fact, I’ve shared Joanna’s poems here on the blog more than once — with her permission, of course! When guest editor on The Tuesday Poem blog, I also featured Joanna as a guest poet.

Here’s the list of those posts so you, too, may share in the goodness and either discover or rediscover one of NZ’s foremost contemporary poets:

The Tuesday Poem Blog:

• Lucifer In Los Vegas

…on Anything, Really Blog

• I Wish You Angels
• Female Nude
• Lijssenthoek — A Haibun
• A Host Of Sparrows
• Cowarral Sequence ii—The Orange Tree
• Cowarral Sequence iii—A Summer Storm

How can it be June already? Welp, it is — and on the plus side, although it means we’re racing through the year, it also means I have a new post on Supernatural Underground.

Moreover, it’s post #4 in the What Makes A Hero (In Fantasy) series, and this month’s theme is Courage.

Essential to the making of a hero? Well, I think so…

Katniss Everdeen: courage personnified

In the way of such things, here’s a snippet to get you started:

“…today’s post is zeroing in on Courage. 

Because in order to be a hero, it’s not enough to just turn up for the regular nine-to-five of fantasy adventure, or even to go above and beyond the norms of everyday duty. The action or deed required of the protagonist has to really matter, and the risk in terms of following through has to be considerable, if not extreme.”

Sam Gamgee: demonstrating there are many forms of courage…

But I do hope you’ll click on over and read the rest:

What Makes A Hero? #4 — Courage

Feel free to leave a comment too, if the spirit moves you. I’ll watch for them—and you!* 😀

—

“Watch for Me” is the nephilim catchcry in T Frohock’s Los Nefilim series. It’s set during the Spanish Civil War and WW2, so plenty of call for courage.

Two weeks ago, I posted a personal tribute to the great Patricia McKillip, who recently passed away.

In that tribute I mentioned her powerful gifts of storytelling and language, worldbuilding and characterization—but as I continued to revisit her books over the intervening period, I realized that I had left out something really important.

You’ll know from the title that it’s something to do with magic. Specifically, I realized that Patrica McKillip’s ability to create worlds where magic is not only possible but real, and not only real but part of the essential warp and weft of life, while simultaneously creating a sense of the possibility and reality of magic in the reader, may just be her most significant attribute as a Fantasy author.

Magic breathes from every page, beginning with the opening lines in The Forgotten Beasts of Eld:

“The wizard Heald coupled with a poor woman once, in the king’s city of Mondor, and she bore a son with one green eye and one black eye. Heald, who had two eyes black as the black marshes of Fyrbolg, came and went like a wind out of the woman’s life, but the child Myk stayed…There was a streak of wizardry in him, like the streak of fire in damp, smoldering wood.”

To the opening pages of Ombria in Shadow…

“A shadow city rose behind Ombria, a wondrous confection of shadow that towered even over the palace. … [Lydea’s] … voice became dreamy, entwined in the tale. “The shadow city of Ombria is as old as Ombria. Some say it is a different city completely, existing side by side with Ombria in a time so close to us that there are places — streets, gates, old houses — where one time fades into the other, one city becomes the other. Others say both cities exist in one time, this moment,  and you walk through both of them each day, just as, walking down a street, you pass through light and shadow and light …”

…and those of The Changeling Sea:

“Her mother was enchanted, Peri decided. Enchanted by the sea.

She knew the word because the old woman whose house she stayed in had told her tales of marvels and magic, and had taught her what to do with mirrors, and bowls of milk, bent willow twigs buried by moonlight, different kinds of knots, sea water sprinkled at the tideline into the path of the wind. The old woman’s enchantments never seemed to work; neither did Peri’s. But for some odd reason they fascinated Peri, as if by tying a knot in a piece of string she was bending one stray piece of life to another, bridging by magic the confusing distances between things.”

On balance, I think failing to mention Patricia McKillip’s power to weave an inextricable magic through her stories, and create believable magical worlds, must count as a glaring omission.

In fact, I’m going to nail my colours to the mast and say that when it comes to making magic real, yet keeping the sense of magical possibility fresh and new through successive books, Patricia McKillip is the master.

“We are so small between the stars, so large against the sky.”

~ from Stories of the Street, Leonard Cohen, 1934 – 2016

~*~

I love this quote, from the closing lines of Stories of the Street, on Leonard Cohen’s debut album, Songs of Leonard Cohen (Colombia Records, 1967.). The balance of the lines is so perfect and encapsulates the ache of our human existence so well.

No surprises there, of course—because this is Leonard Cohen with his lifetime of contributing amazing and gorgeous words.

I just felt like celebrating this one today, and by extension, the man and his genius.

Very recently (11 May), Australian-born but Canterbury-based poet, Joanna Preston, won the Ockham NZ Book Awards’ Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry, 2022.

The Award was for Tumble (Otago University Press, 2021), which is Joanna’s second collection. Her first, The Summer King, was also published by Otago University Press (2009) and won both the inaugural Kathleen Grattan Award (2008) and Australia’s Mary Gilmore Poetry Prize (2010.)

I love The Summer King and am a huge admirer of Joanna’s poetry generally, and have been privileged to feature a number of her poems on this blog. So I was always going to buy a copy of Tumble—but the Ockhams NZ win definitely spurred me along. Needless to say, I’m looking forward to reading it very much.

Just to whet your poetic appetites, here’s what the back-cover matter has to say:

“In tumble, Joanna Preston’s bold and original voice swoops the reader from the ocean depths to the roof of the world, from nascent saints, Viking raids and fallen angels to talking cameras and an astronaut in space.

This beautifully crafted collection traverses the lyric, free verse and traditional forms. It’s earthy and embodied, while at the same time woven through with myth and magical realism. Always, the human heartbeat is at stake, as Preston explores love, loss, longing and lust – how we stumble, how we soar.”

I note that one of the poems in Tumble, titled Earthrise, was selected for Best New Zealand Poems 2014. I’ll leave you with the opening stanzas, by way of a promise for more on Tumble, in due course:

“Tethered by a thought, as much
as by the slender umbilical
— half a metre for every year of her life —

she hangs in space above
the slow-turning planet,
tiny as a moth, orbiting …”

from Earthwise, (c) Joanna Preston, Tumble, Otago University Press, 2021
.

Currently I’m reprising a Q&A series from 2019, which began on March 31  — and today’s refeatured question came from Lindsay. 😀

UK/AU/NZ

Lindsay: Which Battles Did You Research When You were Writing The Siege of the Camp? (Ed: In Daughter of Blood, The Wall Of Night Book 3.)

Helen: Well, I did a LOT of research, I can tell you that — most of which never made it into the book but was pretty fascinating stuff. Some of it was on pre-modern warfare generally, not just sieges, although I gradually honed in on those. In terms of specific sieges, I focused on those where the defenders were badly situated defensively, poorly supplied, and/or outnumbered:

• the siege of the Lucknow Residency during the Indian Mutiny (also considered the first war for Indian independence from British rule) of 1857;
• the siege of the Kabul Residency in 1879, during the Second Anglo-Afghan War;
• the defence of Rorke’s Drift in 1879, during the Anglo-Zulu War; and
• the siege of the Legation Quarter in Peking during 1900, and also the distinct but concurrent siege of the Beitang, the North Cathedral of the Roman Catholic Church.

I also looked at the siege of Metz (1552-3), and similar sieges of that era, particularly in terms of the effects of disease on siege warfare; the Roman approach to fortified camps; and several engagements of the American frontier in terms of assaults and sieges on scantily fortified positions and the tactics used by both the attacking and defending forces.

USA

I have learned with great sadness of the passing of renowned Fantasy author, Patricia McKillip, on May 6.

LocusMag has an obituary, here, that charts her literary contribution, and OregonLive also features her career, here.

What I would like to celebrate today is how much I love her work and the extent of her writing’s influence on my own. Whenever I get asked about writers I admire, Patricia McKillip is always on the list — and what we love, as I know I’ve said here before, we generally aspire to emulate.

My love and enthusiasm for Patricia McKillip’s work has always centered on her “gorgeous words”, sympathetic and identifiable characters, and the wonder and delight of the worlds created with each new story.

She wrote many books, so some are very old friends now. As recently as last year, I posted (again) on rereading The Riddlemaster of Hed — which was the very first Patricia McKillip novel I encountered.

That first encounter set a trend, which has endured from that day to this. And the Riddlemaster series (which includes Heir of Sea and Fire and Harpist in the Wind respectively) was swiftly joined on the bookshelf by The Forgotten Beasts of Eld.

Other favourites, over the years, include The Changeling Sea (1988), Ombria in Shadow (2002), and Solstice Wood (2006.) Most recently, in 2016, I was charmed all over again by Kingfisher and the creation of a world in which Arthurian-style knights drive cars and carry cellphones. (The same world appears in the short story, The Knight of the Well, which appears in the McKillip collection, Wonders of the Invisible World.)

I’ve  mentioned Ms McKillip’s language and storytelling, characterization and worldbuilding gifts, but the threads and themes that endure through her work include kindness and compassion, warmth and human understanding — whether as self-knowledge or resolving problems through knowing others. In short, her books are life affirming in their essence, which I believe may be why I return to them time after time.

I am not the only reader to fall beneath Patricia McKillip’s spell. Not long after first reading The Riddlemaster of Hed, I encountered an eleven-year-old boy who could not stop talking to me about the story. Clearly, he loved it as much as I did. A university friend married a man who was an equally avid fan, resulting in many in-depth and enthusiastic conversations. And Rebecca Fisher, who posted the Big Worlds on Small Screen series here for a couple of years, is also a devotee.

I don’t believe there can be a greater tribute for a person’s life and work than having touched the lives of innumerable people in positive ways — and that is my summation of Patricia McKillip and the gift of her writing to the reading world. Although I never knew her, except through the pages of her books, I shall miss her greatly.
.

~*~
.

Prior Posts On The Books and Writing of Patricia McKillip:

On “…On Anything, Really”:

• Gorgeous Words: Patricia McKillip & “The Riddlemaster Of Hed”
• Why I Like Patricia McKillip’s “The Riddlemaster of Hed” So Much
• Spending Time With The Best of Book Friends: I Revisit “The Riddlemaster of Hed”
• My Favourite Fantasy Standalone Novels
• What I’m Reading: Patricia McKillip’s “The Changeling Sea”

On Supernatural Underground:

• Romance in Fantasy Fiction: Constancy Amid Tumult & Patricia McKillip’s “Riddle-Master” Series

On SF Signal:

• Heroines That Rock My World: Raederle of An (Heir of Sea and Fire)

The About The Characters post series focuses on the minor characters in The Wall Of Night series, in large part because:

“I think it’s the presence of the smaller characters that “makes” a story, creating texture around the main points of view.”

~ from my Legend Award Finalist’s Interview, 2013

Initially, the series focused exclusively on characters from The Heir of Night, but now I’m continuing on with minor characters from both The Gathering Of The Lost and Daughter of Blood — in alphabetical order, by name, of course!

Last time, we finally exited “L” for “M” and in the spirit of my Heroes series on the Supernatural Underground, today’s character, Madder, is nonhuman. I’m not entirely entirely sure he’s a hero, but he’s definitely a “warrior.”

—

Madder: an Emerian destrier, raised and trained by the squire, Jarna; later gifted to Kalan.
.

USA

UK/AU/NZ

Carick nodded, looking around the forge and then back to the horse, which was a tall, red roan destrier, bred to carry the weight of its own armor, as well as that of a knight, into battle. “Is this a great horse? The breed for which Emer is famous?”

“The finest in all Emer,” said Hamar. “But that’s because Jarna trained him.” He grinned at the lad holding the horse, and Carick, looking more closely, realized that the boy was in fact the girl squire who had formed part of his escort to Normarch.

“Hello,” he said, and the girl nodded back. “Did you really train him? What’s his name?”

For a long moment, Carick thought Jarna was not going to answer, but then she met his eyes, a quick shy look. “Madder,” she said finally. “It’s another way of saying ‘red.’”

~ from © The Gathering of The Lost, The Wall Of Night Book Two – Chapter 13, Normarch

.

USA

UK/AU/NZ

Shadows leapt and Madder screamed, not in terror, but a warhorse’s cry of defiance and rage. That warcry would rouse the dead let alone the ship, Kalan thought, catapulting down the ladder as Tawrin backed away from Madder’s stall. The destrier half reared, his hooves striking at the wooden barrier between them before he lunged forward, his ears well back and his teeth snapping at the Sword warrior.

~ from © Daughter Of Blood: The Wall of Night Book Three — Chapter 10, Ship’s Business

‘It is a truth universally acknowledged’ — that the more point-of-view characters and settings a book contains, the bigger, and longer, it will be.” 

~ Helen Lowe 😀

“Enough said,” she thinks, and digs a little deeper, getting to grips with the denouement of WALL #4 and The Wall Of Night series.

Only to reflect that this is both meant to be a blog centered on authorial reflection (as well as anything else, really) and the opening salvo for the week. So, OK, then…

This truth was first made concrete for me when I began reading George RR Martin’s eagerly awaited A Feast For Crows, Book #4 in the A Song of Ice and Fire series (better known as Game of Thrones) and not only found myself in Dorne, a locale not previously featured in ASOIAF Books #1 – #3, but engaging with a completely new set of characters.

“Uh-oh,” thought I, “I know this is meant to be a six-book series, but given this development, I’m not sure that’s going to happen…”

USA

UK/Aus/NZ

One reason why is that every new locale needs to be established, or reestablished, in worldbuilding terms, and however concise and/or precise that process, it still requires some word and page time.

Another—and possibly more important—reason is that every new point-of-view character must have an arc, some degree of backstory, and interact with other characters, building relationships or burning them down, as well as affecting and being affected by events (i.e. that “must have an arc” again.)

Suffice it to say that armed with this revelation, when I commenced writing WALL #4, I knew I had to work hard to constrain both the introduction of new characters, especially point-of-view characters, and also locales.

USA

UK/AU/NZ

I’ve largely been successful in this endeavour, although it’s not proven possible to rule out new characters completely, but given how long it’s all taken me, the WALL cast was quite clearly already more than large enough.

“Enough said,” she thinks, and digs a little deeper, getting to grips with the denouement of WALL #4 and The Wall Of Night series. 😉

Soon… (all digits pretzelled)

I hoped to run this post for ANZAC Day last week, but couldn’t quite finish the book and muster the required posting energy in time — a shocking confession, I know! I mean, where is the commitment?!

Such appalling authorial revelations aside, I have mustered the energy and resolve to produce the post for this week, so without further ado, let me speak to you, gentle readers, of ANZAC Diary, subtitled A Nonentity in Khaki, which came highly recommended by the same friend that loaned me a reading copy.

The original edition

Introduction:

ANZAC Diary is the account of an enlisted NZ soldier’s war experience,from 1917 through 1918 and the end of the war (11 November, 1918.) The material is derived from his diary and extracts from letters home. The publisher’s note, which prefaces the volume, states the following:

“…We cannot see nay detail he has written that should be left out. No word has been altered, not only because this document is something in the nature of a historical work but because he has written it so well. He is, at present, little known to us except as No. 42110. Before he died, the old soldier passed his diary on to a military chaplain…”

The upshot was that the Returned Services Association (RSA) asked Treharne Publishers and Distributors to publish the work, which they did in 1987, almost seventy years after WW1 ended. My friend’s edition does not provide an author’s name, beyond the cryptic “A Nonentity in Khaki”, but the publisher attributes the diary to an N.M. Ingram, aka No. 42110.

The Passchendaele Society provides a little more information, i.e. that he was known as Monty Ingram and served for two years and eight three days, surviving the war, but little of substance beyond that. The Anzac Diary itself, therefore, stands as his chief testament — and what a testament it is.

Private NM Ingram, from the Passchendaele Society archive.

Reading ANZAC Diary:

Initially, I was not deeply engaged by the material, which covered his enlistment and early training, then the subsequent voyage from NZ to the UK. I began to be engaged during this latter section, not because any events of note happened, but because I realised the diarist was both a keen observer and one possessed of considerable wry humour. Once he reaches the UK, and subsequently the trenches, the well written, first hand account of a “rank and file” soldier, soon becomes absorbing.

Although I am interested in such accounts under most circumstances, I suspect most readers will find the ANZAC Diary interesting because the writing style is accessible, in addition to being well constructed and written.

One of the unifying themes among those whose relatives served in WW1, such as both my grandfathers, was that they never talked about it afterward. The fact Private Ingram’s diary did not resurface until shortly before his death in 1976, aligns with that trend. Reading a firsthand account that was composed as events happen, is doubly interesting for that reason.

Although the work is well-written, it’s also very understated. This, I believe, is what makes it memorable, through the juxtaposition of events, from the banal to the horrific and overwhelming, with the matter-of-fact prose style.

Private Ingram’s first major engagement was at the Third Battle of Ypres (also known as the Battle of Passchendaele), which was fought from 31 July to 10 November 1917. The detailed account covers twenty pages (until Ingram is invalided back to the UK for a combination of being wounded and myalgia [trench fever]), but the following quotes stuck with me:

“It was a wet bleak morning and a cold wind was blowing from across No-man’s-land, bringing with it the stench of the dead … A cataract of steel flows roaring, at tremendous pace, over our heads. Machine-gun bullets make a strange whistling sound as they pass overhead on their lethal mission … {The enemy] machine guns rattle out their message of death and their whole available artillery vomits forth … hate as it lays down the counter-barrage — a curtain of flame, mutilation and death, lashing the earth with its fury, through which we must pass before we can come to grips with the Hun.”

“…a tally is made of our company and we muster 30 men all told. All that is left of 120…”

A later account, once Ingram recovers and returns to the fighting, relates the particular consequences of such barrages:

“…I witnessed a couple of holocausts during the day. The first was a party of Jerry prisoners, who had been put to carrying out our wounded. Almost a dozen of them were struggling back carrying one of our wounded on a groundsheet. Suddenly there was a deafening roar, a cloud of smoke — exit the whole party. On approaching the scene, pieces of the trunks and limbs of the unfortunate party could be seen scattered everywhere. One chap’s head had been cut off clean, as though with a guillotene, and was lying apart with no corresponding body visible. The scene of the explosion was like a butcher’s shop with joints of red meat scattered about all over the floor.”

It’s graphic and brutal, and in general, Private Ingram describes in this way, rather than interpreting and commenting. On the few occasions he does so, the words command attention:

“There are times when one’s mind is filled with nothing but the awful waste and desolation that is the essence of War. Waste of everything — waste of lives, of money, of property, and of time. The progress of the world is at a standstill, whilst half the nations are using their brainpower, manpower, and moneypower to exterminate the other half. The World’s gone mad! Surely this fair earth was not created by the Almighty to be torn, shattered, and churned to mud and slime by Hell blasting cannon, and fouled by the rotting bodies of men killed in their prime. Surely we humans were not brought into the world to be disembowelled, torn, shattered, blinded, or maimed for life by these man-made engines of destruction. … It is impossible to describe the awful desolation, waste, and sacrifice of life…”

ANZAC Diary is not all brutality, horror, and death. The period when Ingram is recuperating in the UK reads like any young man’s record of meeting people and social engagements when in a new, and well-disposed, country. He comes across as a friendly and pleasant young man, which further underlines his own summation of the brutality and futility to which hundreds of thousands of similar young men were also being exposed. The noncombatant intervals, both in the UK and behind the front lines, not only balance and frame the combat episodes, but also provide respite for the reader, making the book more readable.

The subsequent, hard copy publication.

Conclusion:

In summary, I agree with my friend’s view that ANZAC Diary is an exceptional book and thoroughly recommend it to my fellow readers, particularly those interested in works such as Maquis by George Millar, The Periodic Table by Primo Levi, or The Young Lions by Irwin Shaw. If you’ve liked books such as Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks, Tu by Patricia Grace, or All Quiet On The Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, you will probably enjoy Anzac Diary as well.

Although I believe there is a reprinted hard cover edition, I read the original paperback, 156 pages.