INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE OF MODERN LETTERS Te P¯utahi Tuhi Auaha o te Ao

Newsletter – 11 October 2011 ISSN: 1178-9441

This is the 174th in a series of occasional newsletters from the Victoria University centre of the International Institute of Modern Letters. For more information about any of the items, please email modernletters.

1. MA and PhD application deadlines ...... 1 2. The Turbine deadline ...... 2 3. The Iowa deadline ...... 2 4. O Le Tulafale ...... 2 5. Writers on Mondays ...... 2 6. Two readings ...... 3 7. Commonwealth Prizes ...... 3 8. Morningstar ...... 3 9. Bird North takes flight ...... 4 10. Working briefs ...... 4 11. New Travel Writer ...... 5 12. The Caselberg Trust International Poetry Prize ...... 5 13. Gecko Press evening ...... 5 14. NZWG and NZFC Pitching Workshops ...... 6 15. Chris Price on the move ...... 6 16. Recent web reading ...... 7

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1. MA and PhD application deadlines

In the spring, a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love. Well, yes, Mr Tennyson, but in the southern hemisphere, spring is also the time when our thoughts turn to the application deadlines for the IIML’s MA and PhD programmes . . . Information about our PhD is here while details of current PhD projects are here. Information about the one-year MA is here. With the PhD, places are made available as current students complete (we expect to have three places available for a 2012 start). However, with the MA, we accept 30

1 students each year – 10 into the scriptwriting stream, and 20 into the two page-writing workshops. By page-writing, we mean fiction (long and short), poetry and creative non-fiction. By scriptwriting, we mean writing for the big and small screen and for radio, as well as for the stage. Some pretty significant books have started life in our graduate programmes recently, such as Laurence Fearnley's The Hut Builder, winner of this year's NZ Book Award for Fiction. Stage and screen projects are having their moments, too - not only Tusi Tamasese's acclaimed and Oscar-bound The Orator (on which, more below), but also the main-bill plays by Hannah McKie and Gavin McGibbon which have enjoyed sell-out houses at BATS.

The application deadline for both MA and PhD programmes is 1 November.

2. The Turbine deadline

A reminder that submissions for the next issue of Turbine close on October 21st – that’s next week, folks. Go here for details of how to submit your work, and here to browse the Turbines of yore.

3. The Iowa deadline

If you want to fast-track your writing this summer, remember that we offer the Iowa Workshop, a special credit-bearing course taught by outstanding graduates from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, America’s oldest and most prestigious creative writing programme. This summer we are offering separate workshops in poetry and fiction from 9 January to 17 February. Enrolment is restricted to 12 students per workshop, and applications close on 9 November. Start here for further information.

4. O Le Tulafale

No one will be surprised to hear we’re still feeling pretty chuffed about The Orator, which started life in 2007 in ’s scriptwriting MA. It went to Venice and a standing ovation, it’s been getting reviews like this, and it now looks as if it will be an Oscar nominee. We think that this – in writer and director Tusi Tamasese’s own words – is probably the world’s first glimpse of The Orator, while this is probably the second.

5. Writers on Mondays

This week saw the last of our Writers on Mondays presentations for 2011 – Patrick Evans in conversation with about his impressive novel Gifted. An excellent homosocial time was had by all. It's been a fine and busy programme this year, with constantly big audiences. Highlights have included the annual Best New Zealand Poems reading and the Joy Harjo event, chaired by Patricia Grace, and presented in the face of a nearly snowed-in Wellington. Big thanks to Te Papa, Circa,

2 and City Gallery for hosting us, to all the writers and presenters; and even bigger thanks to for curating this year's programme. It takes a lot of work and imaginative flair to put these things together, and Bernadette has an apparently endless supply of both commodities. Thanks, too, to Katie Hardwick-Smith for so much practical work behind the scenes.

6. Two readings

Sometimes Bernadette Hall gets time to write her own poems, and she’ll be reading some of them at the NZ Poetry Society’s October meeting, next Monday, 7.30 pm at the Thistle Inn, 3 Mulgrave St, Thorndon. The evening starts with an open mic, and there is a small door charge of $5 ($3 for NZPS members).

The IIML’s will be one of four poets reading on Friday 21 October at the Palmerston North Central Library. More information here.

7. Commonwealth Prizes

We were delighted to see MA graduate Sarah Bainbridge winning the Pacific region award for the 2011 Commonwealth Short Story Competition for her story ‘Ginger Beer’. ‘I wanted to write a story about home-made ginger beer because as a child it seemed the perfect combination of delicious and dangerous, with explosive potential.’

Next year the various Commonwealth prizes are being revamped, with the admirable aim of discovering and acknowledging new writers. There will be a best first book award, and a short story award. Fuller information here.

8. Morningstar

This year’s Writer in Residence, Albert Belz, has seen several productions of his earlier plays opening around the country. There’s the successful national tour of Raising the Titanics, of course, but here as well is the NZ Herald review of his award- winning Jack the Ripper number, Yours Truly, that recently opened in Auckland (the season closes on October 22). Amidst all this activity, Albert’s been getting on with new work, and here’s a message from him offering an early peek at his new play Morningstar.

‘I would like to thank Creative New Zealand and Victoria University, in particular the faculty and staff of the International Institute of Modern Letters, for giving me the opportunity to focus entirely on my own projects this year. Staff and students are invited to a rehearsed public reading of Morningstar to be held at Studio 77 (77 Fairlie Terrace, Kelburn Wellington) @ 6-8pm on Wednesday 9th November. Senior Lecturer David O Donnell has very kindly agreed to direct the piece. Morningstar has been my major work during the residency – it is set in the Kingdom of Heaven before the fall of the arch-angel Lucifer. Earth has just been created, the Master spends all his time “cavorting” with the naked apes, His throne sits vacant, all while

3 new passions are being awakened in those angels who step foot in Eden . . .’

9. Bird North takes flight

We liked the review in this week’s NZ Listener of Breton Dukes’s Bird North:

Breton Dukes is a recent graduate of Victoria University’s vaunted creative writing programme, and his earlier work in journals like Sport and Turbine gives some hint of what to expect from his debut collection – brief, stark sentences, uncompromising honesty in language and content, perfectly timed flashes of lyricism. The polished tales in Bird North and other stories add sudden contrasts and subtle confounding of a reader’s expectations into the mix, demanding careful reading – and rewarding it handsomely. . . Confident, nuanced and unselfconsciously local, this is an accomplished debut.

We imagine Breton was also pretty pleased with the reviewer in the Otago Daily Times, who reviewed Roddy Doyle’s new story collection, then moved on to Bird North:

Roddy Doyle is a hard act to follow, but in Bird North, New Zealand author Breton Dukes does it with a gritty, and sometimes disturbing collection of stories that illustrate the pitfalls and dilemmas facing teen to mid-20s Kiwi males.

10. Working briefs

The prizes and shortlistings just keep on keeping on for 's novel The Rehearsal. In its French translation (La répétition), it has been short-listed for the abroad category of the Prix Médicis which is awarded to an author whose ‘fame does not yet match their talent’ (David Vann won the award last year) and for the Prix Femina literature award which is decided each year by an exclusively female jury. The Rehearsal is also nominated in the Publication of the Year category of the 2011 Stonewall Awards. The book has now won four international book awards and the three recent nominations bring the book's international short-listings for awards to over seven.

Congratulations to poet John Dennison, who has seven poems in Carcanet’s just published New Poetries V. John is a one-time member of the poetry workshop here at Victoria. More recently he has acquired a PhD from the University of St Andrews, and has been lecturing in Victoria’s English Literature programme. You can read New Poetries poets blogging on each other’s work.

Congratulations, too, to Sam Burt, (MA Script 2010), Nic Gorman (MA Page 2004), and Joseph Ryan (MA Script 2011), whose short films have just been green-lit by the New Zealand Film Commission.

The Randell Cottage is again looking for its annual NZ resident – July 2012 to December 2012. There’s a stipend of $20,000 and the closing date for applications is Friday 4 November. For application forms and queries go here or email.

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And a heads-up that Making Baby Float – the collaboration between Bill Manhire, Norman Meehan and Hannah Griffin – is making a splashy comeback. The CD with bonus DVD will be launched at a special concert in Wellington on November 24th. Watch this space.

11. New Travel Writer

Travcom (NZ Travel Communicators) is calling for entries in the annual AA Directions New Travel Writer of the Year Award. The deadline is Friday 10 February 2012. The prize for the winner is $1000.

The award is open to writers who have never had a travel article published. Entries are judged by a well-known New Zealand writer, publisher or editor who will present the award at a Gala Dinner held at the Heritage Hotel Grand Tearoom on Tuesday, 20 March 2012.

For further information go here.

12. The Caselberg Trust International Poetry Prize

We sometimes feel uneasy about the number of fiction and poetry competitions these days that seem designed to raise money via entry fees for the bodies that run them. (In which case, we commend the Bank of New Zealand and the Sunday Star-Times for keeping entry to their short story competitions entirely free.) However, we find it easy to put our mild cynicism aside for the Caselberg Charitable Trust, which runs a residence for writers and artists at Broad Bay, . Its inaugural poetry prize was won by Tuesday Poem founder Mary McCallum, while this year’s will be judged blind by Wellington poet James Brown. First Prize is $500, Second Prize $250, and there will also be 5 Highly-Commended awards (with no monetary prizes).

Entry costs $5.00 for one poem, and $10.00 for up to three – and entries close on 31 December. The first- and second-placed poems will be published in the May 2012 issue of , and all winning and highly-commended entries published on the Caselberg Trust web-site (copyright remaining with the authors).

The Conditions and Entry Form can be found here.

13. Gecko Press evening

A note from the Children’s Bookshop (Shop 26, Kilbirnie Plaza, Kilbirnie, Wellington):

‘October already! That means our Gecko Press evening is drawing close. October 26th at 7pm We'll have the Gecko team and a guest author (or 2) in store talking about

5 the Gecko story, showing you their new titles, and we'll have all their fabulous books available for your early Christmas shopping. There are free gifts, special prize draws, and wine and nibbles. Tickets are $10 each, strictly limited to 50 people only, and all the money will go to The Altrusa Club Women's Refuge Appeal.’

14. NZWG and NZFC Pitching Workshops

Auckland - Thursday the 3rd of November St Columba Centre, Vermont Street, Ponsonby

Wellington - Friday the 4th of November CQ Quality Hotel, Cuba Street

This is a workshop for writer/producer teams with projects that are already in development. There will be some pitching theory but mostly it will be an intensive full day of workshopping your pitches.

Limited spaces available.

To apply to attend please send a one-page outline that includes a log-line, a half-page synopsis and brief team bios to NZWG.

Application deadline: Friday the 14th of October.

15. Chris Price on the move

Chris Price has now left Menton, and is slowly making her way home via Zurich, Berlin, London and New York. Yes, it’s tough out there! Meantime, she’s sent us some extracts from her Menton journal. Here’s a piece of poetry from 28 July, followed by a valedictory prose entry from 28 September . . .

The gravel greens outside the room, no gardeners for months. Will they find me sleeping here, behind a high hedge, wrapped in spider webs, unwilling to be woken? Across the way, a silent, tender crane leans to place a heavy pallet, concrete wrapped in plastic, on an apartment building’s roof. Benign neglect has always been the favoured strategy for breeding weeds and bugs, the things that fly and sting and feed the things that sing.

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6 The last morning in the room. On the walk, the usual hairy terriers, the bearable sun, someone in a cherry-picker on the promenade ministering to a palm. In the tunnel, a little boy in a bright white t-shirt comes noisily up behind me on his skateboard which sounds like a mechanical lion roaring across the ridged tiles of the footpath – and just past me hits a bump and falls slowly to the ground, so it’s clear he’s not going to hurt himself, and comes up grinning. In the avenue KM the refection des reseaux has crept upwards towards Chemin Fleuri, where big grey plastic drainpipes line the chemin almost up to the gate. And here is the room, which has been the room of one’s own for forty-two writers now, or at least those who didn’t choose to write at ‘home’, where for some days now I’ve been doing internet research, packing boxes, and planning travels. Not enough done, is how I feel, and yet the leisure of not working like a mad thing has been part of the joy of it, and discovering what it means to work on a single continuous book-length project with a tendency to grow in unexpected directions. In some ways the constraint of being here – without access to research libraries, or even much easy access to English books (which I’ve been reluctant to buy in large numbers because I’d then have to send them home) – have helped contain the book, keep it under control, prevent it from trotting off down every appealing path with its nose to the ground. But the absence of other commitments, the ability to put writing first, and the fact the office and the room of one’s own are the same thing, rather than two competing spaces – bliss. I now know not to embark on this kind of project again without the prospect of such circumstances in which to complete it.

16. Recent web reading

The Frankurt Book Fair - there's now a dedicated website for NZ as the 2012 Guest of Honour.

‘There is a special ward in psychiatric hospitals for former novelists who became too concerned about their Amazon reviews and critical opinion, and I have no intention of becoming a long-term inmate in that ward.’ David Mitchell in a recent interview.

We're finding the NZ Book Council's ‘Review of Reviews’ page interesting and useful.

Elizabeth Knox’s new website is a wonder to behold, and we’re especially liking her thoughts on why she writes fantasy.

Laura Miller on authors and patrons and Kickstarter

Twitter and epic poetry. The first real work of digital literature?

‘We bloggers suffer less and earn more than poets. We are more vain, and less patient’ – BoingBoing on poetry.

Nobel prediction just a little off the mark.

Bill Manhire's Listener review of 's Small Holes in the Silence.

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Paul Callaghan gets mixed and mashed ‘Structured Procrastination’ - winner of the 2011 Ig Noble for Literature.

Literally chronic - the top 10 most misused words in the English language.

Humblebragging

17. Great lists of our time

We found this nice list on ’s blog. Craig had been looking for names for characters in the novel he’s working on, and came across these ones via the National Library’s wonderful Papers Past website. Far too good, as old newshounds say, to check . . .

Temperance Dry. Thomas Jolly Death. Friendly Churches. Dover Beetles. Jonas Whalebelly. Young Fry. Frederick Smallbones. Leicester Midland Railway Cope. John Richard Pine Coffin. Sabbath Church. Robert Rainy Best Best. Pickup Pickup. Nelson Monument. Winter Frost. Butter Sugar. Morning Dew. Wilde Field Flowers. John the Baptist Arrighi. Christmas Day Jones. Daft Coggins. River Jordan. Urbane Cheese. Carolina Gotobed. Petronella Frederika Mess. Brown Fox. Time o' Day. Lesser Lesser. Bride Best Parsonage Pope. Urbane Cook. Christmas Day. Honour Bright. Jolly Death. Henry Hot Coddlings.

8 Queen Victoria Burr. Peternal Hole. Randalina Seedlum. Moderina Belmontina Kimberina Robertson. Ivynest Cowmeadows. Choice Tippling. Ambulance Bunn. Only Fanny Thomas Jones. Maher-shalal-hash-bas Sturgeon. Lily Margarine Sturgeon. Agathos Everley Alexander Eager. Mabel Helmingham Ethel Huntingtower Beatrice Blazonberrie, Evangeline Vise-de- lon de Oreliana, Plantagenet Plantagenet Todemag Saxon Tollemache Tollemache. William Rains Kneebone. Emma Sheepwash. B. L. C. Bubb (Beelzebub) J. L. Bird (Jail-bird) Through Great Tribulation We Enter Into the Kingdom of Heaven Slappe. Hurry Riches. Diehappy Harper. Merelthalfcar Lamb. Kerenhappuch Death. Jacob Choke Lambshead. Styleman Percy Bell le Strange Herring. Hephyibar Hibberdine. Philbrick Frank Colechin Elliott. Naaman Napper. Waples Canwarden. Tamar Anna Manship-Ewart. John Hadnot Kiss. Rose Shamrock Anthistle. Baron de Roths Child. Ann Bertha Cecilia Diana Emily Fanny Gertrude Hypatia Inez Jane Kate Louisa Maud Nora Teresa Ulysis Venus Winifred Xenophon Yetty Zeus Pepper.

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Supporting the IIML

The International Institute of Modern Letters was established at Victoria University in 2001 to promote and foster contemporary imaginative writing.

We value all those who have helped us to foster the development of emerging writers, for example through scholarships, prizes, and grants. We would welcome the opportunity to talk with you about continuing your support for the IIML, for example through a gift in your will.

All gifts are managed by the Victoria University Foundation, a registered charitable trust established to raise funds in areas of strategic importance to the University, such as the IIML.

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For further information on how you can provide philanthropic support to the IIML, please contact our Director, Bill Manhire, Ph: 04 463 6808, Email [email protected], or Diana Meads, Development Manager-Planned Giving, Victoria University of Wellington Foundation Ph: 0800 VIC LEGACY (0800 842 534), Email: [email protected]

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