{"id":32971,"date":"2016-08-23T06:30:34","date_gmt":"2016-08-22T18:30:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/?p=32971"},"modified":"2016-08-22T21:20:08","modified_gmt":"2016-08-22T09:20:08","slug":"my-mother-and-the-hungarians-by-frankie-mcmillan-a-tuesday-feature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/2016\/08\/23\/my-mother-and-the-hungarians-by-frankie-mcmillan-a-tuesday-feature\/","title":{"rendered":"“My Mother And The Hungarians” by Frankie McMillan — A Tuesday Feature"},"content":{"rendered":"

The house on Holloway Street.<\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n

My mother kept boarders like other people kept chooks or stray dogs. She liked the refugees best with their suitcases, their canvas shoes tied up with string, their boyish faces and willingness to share a bed so that if one woke in the night crying, no shoot, no shoot<\/em>, the other could turn and blanket their sorrows with their old European ways. My mother said our house was a little window into the twentieth century and that the cold war would soon be over. She lit a fire down the backyard and Stefan threw the clothes he had been wearing from the long plane flight into the flames. The fire snatched at his shorts, burnt them into ash that blew soft and blossomy about the yard. His sadness overwhelmed me, his Hungarian breath on the back of my neck, his foreign arms covered in fine, dark hair.\u00a0 But I liked him well enough when he took me riding on the bar of his bike. At night we biked through the streets, the bike lamp whirring against the wheel, light bouncing over the gravel road and Stefan singing all the way. I don\u2019t remember where we were heading but it was away from the busy house and hungry men and mixed up washing and quarrels over whose turn it was to have a bath.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2018Your mother wants everything,\u2019 Stefan once said, \u2018she wants the whole world.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a9 Frankie McMillan, 2016<\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

\"My<\/a>Whether you describe The house on Holloway Street<\/strong><\/span><\/em> as “prose poetry” or “flash fiction”, Frankie McMillan is unquestionably a maestro of the art in her ability to capture a universe of human emotion and experience in the literary equivalent of a grain of sand.<\/p>\n

I am not alone in that view, since the same term—“maestro”—is used by Owen Marshall in praising Frankie’s imminent new collection, My Mother And The Hungarians<\/strong>: ‘Frankie McMillan is our maestro of flash fiction.’<\/em><\/p>\n

This important new title is to to be released by Canterbury University Press this Friday, as part of the WORD Christchurch Writers and Readers’ Festival:<\/p>\n

Time:<\/strong> 6.00 – 7.30 pm
\nVenue:<\/strong> The Atrium, The Piano, 156 Armagh Street, Christchurch<\/p>\n

So if you are a Christchurch resident or in Christchurch for the festival, do consider coming out with the other stars for what I am sure will be a stellar event.<\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

About The Author:<\/h4>\n

\"Frankie<\/a><\/p>\n

Frankie McMillan<\/strong> is the author of <\/span><\/em>The Bag Lady\u2019s Picnic<\/strong><\/span> and other stories and two poetry collections, <\/span><\/em>Dressing for the Cannibals<\/strong><\/span> (Sudden Valley Press) and There are no horses in heaven (Canterbury University Press). Her work was selected for <\/span><\/em>Best New Zealand Fiction<\/span><\/strong> anthologies ( 2008 & 2009) and <\/span><\/em>Best New Zealand Poems<\/span> ( 2013 & 2015). <\/span><\/em><\/strong>In 2009 she won first prize in the New Zealand Poetry Society International Poetry Competition. In both 2013 and 2015 she was the winner of the New Zealand Flash Fiction Award. Frankie McMillan was awarded the Creative New Zealand Todd New Writers\u2019 Bursary in 2005 and held the Ursula Bethell residency at the University of Canterbury in 2014. She currently teaches at the Hagley Writers\u2019 Institute.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The house on Holloway Street. My mother kept boarders like other people kept chooks or stray dogs. She liked the refugees best with their suitcases, their canvas shoes tied up with string, their boyish faces and willingness to share a bed so that if one woke in the night crying, no shoot, no shoot, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,6,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32971","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other-writers","category-poetry","category-short-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32971","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32971"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32971\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32986,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32971\/revisions\/32986"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}