Smart Talk

New Zealand's leading poet of this generation, Bill Manhire, talks to John Campbell in this highlight of the 2020 Word Christchurch Writers Spring Festival.

Bill Manhire is not only one of New Zealand's leading poets, he's mentored hundreds of writers through the International Institute of Modern Letters, where he established the MA in Creative Writing. For a long time, it was known simply as 'Bill Manhire's writing course'.

In this highlight from the 2020 Word Christchurch Writers Spring Festival, Manhire speaks to one of his former students, the broadcaster John Campbell, about his life and career.

A number of poems are read during this session, all featuring the verbal precision and delicate balance between regret and comic banality which mark out Manhire's writing.

Listen to Bill Manhire in conversation John Campbell

Manhire marks the extinction of the New Zealand native bird huia in this poem about loss from his latest collection Wow (2020).

Huia

I was the first of birds to sing

I sang to signal rain

the one I loved was singing

and singing once again

My wings were made of sunlight

my tail was made of frost

my song was now a warning

and now a song of love

I sang upon a postage stamp

I sang upon your coins

but money courted beauty

you could not see the joins

Where are you when you vanish?

Where are you when you're found?

I'm made of greed and anguish

a feather on the ground

I lived among you once

and now I can't be found

I'm made of things that vanish

a feather on the ground

Manhire offers a fresh interpretation of the biblical story of Noah in this poem, which imagines its title character as a musician less interested in the survival of the ark's cargo than the state of the instruments he has brought with him.

Noah

I abandoned the bad band

and joined the good band: I thought

that we would flood the world with music.

The first rains came and soon the trees

were somehow growing out of water -

we travelled through the forests

by canoe.

Eventually we built our boat,

the famous one with windows and the deck

of many roofs. Things that once were mountains

sailed on by, and then the whole of the world

had gone, and everything was sky. And yes

I brought instruments aboard - too late for some,

it's true. As for the animals, I never really knew.

Someone else did that. In the end we ate a few…

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Philip Armstrong's poetry and Laura Jean McKay's award-winning novel The Animals in That Country feature animals as significant characters. The authors talk at 2020 Word Christchurch.

Animals feature as characters in both Philip Armstrong's poetry and Laura Jean McKay's award-winning novel The Animals in That Country. The authors talk at 2020 Word Christchurch.

Listen to Laura Jean McKay talking with Philip Armstrong about The Animals in That Country and Sinking Lessons

Laura Jean McKay's novel The Animals in That Country imagines a world in which a new virus gives those humans who catch it the ability to understand animals. The core relationship explored in its Australian setting is between the main human character Jean, and a dingo called Sue. This audacious novel won the Victorian Prize for Literature and the Fiction award at the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards and is also shortlisted for the Stella Prize.

Laura Jean McKay:

It's no easy task to try to write a novel where animals might communicate. I felt that I needed to write two books - this gritty realist book about a woman who loves a drink and a smoke and has a very active love life.

She doesn't really like people but she loves animals, and she's going through a really crappy divorce. That's quite a realist thing.

And then I had to write this novel that was almost speculative, where suddenly there's a strange new 'flu, a pandemic going through the world, and one of the outcomes is that people can finally understand what other animals are saying.

And so, to bring these new novels together, and to make it work, was quite the undertaking.

I want people to take a step back, look at the animals in their life, and if you don't have a companion, maybe it's the birds in the street, and consider what is our actual relationship with them. What does that mean, and what can we do about that?

Philip Armstrong:

The protagonist, having caught this 'flu (which does something to your cognitive abilities, and enables you to understand animals) - you know, that's a hard sell for a reader. We can think of animals talking if we're reading Richard Adams or kids books, and there are people like Barbara Gowdy who have narrated serious novels from the point of view of animals, as if animals think and speak like us.

But Laura Jean doesn't do that. She knows, and we know that animals don't, can't, and will never, speak like us. What the virus in the novel does is enable you to be more sensitive to the chemicals, and the body language, and the pheromones, and the vocalisations, and the gestures, and smell of animals' urine markings, and these things come together in a most extraordinary way…

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From a childhood fascination with cooking, to possum trapping and living off the land as a hunter and forager, Annabel Langbein has always been obsessed with food. A 2020 Word Christchurch highlight.

From a childhood fascination with cooking to possum-trapping and living off the land as a hunter and forager, Annabel Langbein has always been obsessed with food. This talk was a highlight of the 2020 WORD Christchurch festival.

Listen to Annabel Langbein in conversation with Jo Malcolm about her memoir Bella

In a long and diverse life working with food, Annabel Langbein has experience of food styling - preparing food for a photographer - and she has some confessions to make about that period of her career.

Jo Malcolm:

You got into dressing food for photoshoots. You look at the food on ads. I had no idea of all the hideous things they do to make it look like that.

Annabel Langbein:

That lovely steaming ham, it used to be hydrochloric acid.

Jo Malcolm:

And what were some of the other ones?

Annabel Langbein:

Lots of tampons to make steam. And when I did it in America, a food stylist would turn up with a plumber's kit, with so much stuff to make almost fake food. On the West Coast, I had this hilarious time with a USA film crew. It's always hilarious in hindsight. Those terrible disasters that you have give you great stories for later on. At the time you're asking yourself, "What do I do now?"

And they wanted cherries, because they were doing yoghurt, and had this opening scene with the sun, and the table with the honey coming through, and every cornucopia of fruit available in the world. And I was phoning Harrods for cherries, Dean & DeLuca, Balducci's.

Nobody had cherries.

So I got the art department to paint polystyrene balls with various colours of nail polish. And then the makeup department got cross that I was using all the makeup remover and the nail polish. So I went into the local Four Square shop, and there was a bowl of cherries - perfect, fake, Eastern European glass cherries!

The lengths that you go to, to do things like that.

Jo Malcolm:

The next phase for you, when your culinary education really kicks off, is going to America. You wrote to Julia Child.

Annabel Langbein:

She didn't reply, but her husband did. It was so nice. I think it had been my mother who said, "Why don't you write to Julia Child?" She had always been a big thing in our house, so I wrote to her and said, "I'm crazy about food." I had started writing for the Listener, I had this catering business, I was doing food styling, but I just didn't know where I could take it, and I didn't want to be a chef…

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Farid Ahmed talks about his wife Husna, who died in the terror attacks in Christchurch on 15 March 2019. A moving highlight of the 2020 Word Christchurch Spring Festival.

Listen to Farid Ahmed in conversation with Raf Manji about his book Husna's Story

In this moving session from the 2020 Word Christchurch Spring Festival, Farid Ahmed talks about his wife Husna, who was murdered in the terror attacks in Christchurch on 15 March 2019.

In conversation with Raf Manji, he outlines his philosophy of forgiveness, peace and love. This view of the world had tested by the experience of having been made a paraplegic in a car crash decades ago. In the aftermath of that accident, he had been given only a 7% chance of survival, but Husna remained by his side in the hospital for the two full weeks in which he lay in a coma.

Sustained by their love through many years together, Farid has written Husna's Story to celebrate her life, brought to a bitterly premature end two years ago.

"She sacrificed her life for others, for me," he says. "She could have run away. The eyewitnesses say she came in and out three times. The third time when she went out, the gunman was going away, so he shot her. She gave her life for saving others, and most particularly for saving me."

Having forgiven the drunk-driver whose actions had made Farid a paraplegic twenty years before, he found himself in the same situation again this time.

"I grieve, I cry, I feel sad," he reflects. "But I never feel angry. I never feel any hate. Even when the shooting was going on, I was calm. I was peaceful in my heart."

But that doesn't mean he wasn't distressed by Husna's death, and even now three things give him pain when he thinks about her.

"The one thought always with me is, 'How did she feel when she was shot?' I wish I knew. I hope she did not suffer."

The second thing was having been shown a news photo of her lying down on the concrete. That picture, which went viral was shared with him only a few hours after the attack.

The third thing which stuck in Farid's mind was how physically close he had been to Husna, even though they never saw each other: "She went right inside the mosque, where usually I used to pray in the front row on the right-hand side. Just in front of the window. So she went there, to the window. I was only a few metres away, but I could not see her and she could not see me."

When the shooting began, Farid made his mind peaceful, as he thought that it was his last day…

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Elizabeth Knox talks to Noelle McCarthy about her most recent novel The Absolute Book. A highlight of the 2020 Word Christchurch Spring Festival.

Listen to Elizabeth Knox talking to Noelle McCarthy about her genre-bending epic work of fantasy.

Highlights of the discussion

After a generous reading from the opening of the novel, Elizabeth Knox begins by discussing its protagonist, Taryn Cornick, who responds to the trauma of the death of her sister by organising what she hopes will be an untraceable hit on the man who was responsible.

Noelle McCarthy:

Taryn is hovering at the edge of something, and it is an act of revenge in response to an act of brutality.

Elizabeth Knox:

Yes, she can't get over the murder of her sister, and she can't bear the fact that the murderer, who was only tried for manslaughter because they couldn't prove intent (which if anyone wants to say is improbable has happened - personal experience here!). She can't bear the fact that this murderer is going to be in the world and her sister isn't.

And if she had to accomplish the revenge herself, she probably would have been utterly helpless. She wouldn't know what to do. But she just manages to beguile this person who is willing to do it and she never tries hard enough to think why he's willing.

And this is not the end. "You know," he says, "This is only going to work if we never see each other again." But that's not going to happen because he's expressing his needs and his needs are different.

Noelle McCarthy:

He's not just willing to do it. He wants to.

Elizabeth Knox:

He's a person who isn't quite alive in his own emotions. So he latches onto her powerful feelings. He enacts her revenge but it doesn't fill the helpless gap that's inside him. He never understands himself or explains himself enough that you get that from him.

So Taryn is left to try and find out what the hell has happened to her because she's so deeply responsible. She's, at least in the end, responsible to understand what she's done to this man who's taken revenge for her.

So that's one of the stories that plays itself out. But in the meantime, she does break all the locks on the door to her soul.

Noelle McCarthy:

She's like a heroine. I read it as the story of her becoming a heroine -

Elizabeth Knox:

Yes

Noelle McCarthy:

- becoming herself. It's a very relatable story in the sense that you start off with a character who's been devastated by an event in her life that she had no control over, and didn't expect. And then she proceeds to make a lot of mistakes.

Elizabeth Knox:…

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Hosted by John Campbell, some of Word Christchurch's most distinguished writers respond to the theme of courage: Behrouz Boochani, Laura Jean McKay, and Witi Ihimaera. The second of two hours.

Hosted by John Campbell, three distinguished writers share stories created for this event. Their narratives are deeply revealing about the authors' own lives, but also the state of Aotearoa New Zealand

Listen to Witi Ihimaera, Laura Jean McKay, and Behrouz Boochani reading stories in the company of John Campbell at Word Christchurch 2020

Highlights of the session

Behrouz Boochani

Kurdish-Iranian writer Behrouz Boochani was relieved to be granted refugee status in New Zealand in August 2020. He had spent six years in detention in Papua New Guinea after unsuccessfully seeking asylum in Australia. At that time he said it had been a long journey to get to this point and a struggle dealing with systems that deprived him of basic human rights.

I should say something based on my experience.

It is my understanding that courage is very related to hopelessness. When you are like that you can do dangerous things. You can take risks. But for me, my understanding of bravery is that it's really difficult in this complicated world to stay human.

To be honest, to keep your principles. It's very, very difficult.

The bravest people are those who still stand up for humanity, who still keep these principles alive. It's very difficult to be like that. My experience here when I got freedom it became big news and it was very difficult to say no to some offers.

For example, I never looked at my story as a personal story, or a commercial story. I never wanted to be a celebrity. It's easy to be this.

I have been struggling to not let those people - this capitalist system - reduce this tragedy which is not my tragedy (it's a bigger story) to this  culture that I'm talking about. It's very difficult.

Still, I am struggling, but I am not sure if I became part of the system or not. In some ways, I became a part of the system. It's very difficult, a very complicated thing, but that is my understanding of bravery.

Laura Jean McKay

The full text of Laura's story is available on The Spinoff

To be honest, I begged her not to go. I wasn't considering how she'd lost her ability to move or that she'd been here for 93 years and her last sentence was "I've had just about enough of this."

I said, "Nanna, don't leave me here." I meant to add "alone". She gave me a look that was the very definition of world-weary…

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Hosted by John Campbell, some of Word Christchurch's most distinguished writers respond to the theme of courage: Elizabeth Knox, Mohamed Hassan and Becky Manawatu. The first of two hours.

Listen to Elizabeth Knox, Mohamed Hassan and Becky Manawatu reading stories in the company of John Campbell at Word Christchurch 2020

Highlights of the session

Hosted by John Campbell, three distinguished writers read stories created for this event. Their narratives are deeply revealing about the authors' own lives, but also the state of Aotearoa/NZ.

From Elizabeth Knox:

Courage is a thing I find myself saying to young friends discouraged by reversals. When they are talking about confidence. How great it would be to have more. Confidence is the idea we've been offered as if life was all first things. I say, "Never mind confidence. It comes and goes. It can't be summoned. The thing you'll need, no matter how well you start, or how lucky you are, is courage. Not just for yourself, but to be at all useful, you need courage just to live."

For the past little while, I've been spending time with a friend who has the kind of cancer with bad statistics. Eleven months ago, we'd crouched together on the top terrace of her garden, brushing our fingers through the top leaves of her strawberry plants, feeling for the fruit. Five months ago, she'd be telling me about her treatment, or we'd chat about the district nurse who was changing the dressing on a drain, about Covid, or the National Party's hot date night out changes of leadership.

Three months sometime into the course of treatment, the course of conversation has slowed. Her words are stepping stones, and some are under water. We reminisce about family picnics in Akatarawa, how we found the stream overflowing, and looking down at the drowned pasture was like looking into another world where the water was shining air. "Are any streams that near pasture now ever that clear?," she wonders.

Her husband appears with her frothed milk and my coffee, and with both of them in the room, I asked after her father. Her father spoke at my father's funeral, at my mother's. My mother visited hers in the months she was dying. She and her husband don't have kids, but she has this nuggety, active, 96-year-old who remembers training as a pilot in the war, and being kept back to train war pilots while his brother went off on the bombers.

We have a hard time getting him off his childhood, my friend tells me. I've only had ten minutes on how he met Mum. It was her Mum and my Dad who met first. Helping another tramper across a swollen river. They just happened to arrive at the bank together…

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Four adventurous women discuss their lives with Miriama Kamo in the opener to the 2020 WORD Christchurch writers' festival

Listen to Miriam Lancewood, Annabel Langbein, Kaiora Tipene, and Selina Tusitala Marsh talking to Miriama Kamo

Highlights of the panel discussion

Four women tell stories from their adventurous lives in this event which launched the 2020 Word Christchurch Spring Festival in October: Kaiora Tipene, one half of the Netflix duo The Casketeers; Selina Tusitala Marsh, former Poet Laureate and author of Mophead; Annabel Langbein, celebrity cookbook author and adventurer; and Miriam Lancewood, author of Woman in the Wilderness, hosted by broadcaster Miriama Kamo

Miriam Lancewood and her husband have for much of their life together been nomadic. Literally. Living in the bush, eating what they can kill, with no place to call home.

"We feel we live a very free life," she says. "But we don't have security. We don't have a regular income. We don't have a group of friends and family that we see regularly. We cannot accumulate posessions. And so it's quite a different life - a life of adventure. None of us want to live a mediocre life. Right? None of us want to die of boredom and live Groundhog Day, do we? None of us want to be called sheeple.

So what stops us from having an adventure? Age. When you're over 50 you think, 'I should settle down, and find some security.' Now Peter, my husband, is 30 years older than I am. And he started long walking the Te Araroa Trail when he was 62 years old. So it's all in your mind.

You have to have the courage and the mentality to live the adventure."

In her '20s, Annabel Langbein was living in the bush with her boyfriend, hunting, shooting and fishing, and loving the freedom. She recalls driving him home one afternoon after a session at the gun club where he had been drinking heavily, "and he grabbed the steering wheel and we stopped. And he got out of the car, and he threw up and his teeth came out! Like, I didn't even know anyone with false teeth at that stage of life. And I tell you what - he did not look quite so good without those pearly whites. But, as they say, love is blind."

During her time together with Luke, she lived in the bush and used to make crayfish pots. However, for me it was quite a lonely life because she's naturally quite a sociable, gregarious sort of person. "I didn't know anyone else,: she reflects. "I'd shacked up with this guy. I stayed with him for two and a half years."…

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In a powerful address, Lyttelton poet Ben Brown explores the impact of deprivation and cultural estrangement on generations of our boys, as well as the redemptive power of words.

Hear Ben Brown delivering the 2020 Read NZ Te Pou Muramura Pānui

Highlights from the lecture

You're a male, which is not the simple definition it used to be, but let's allow that's what you are. You're a thief, a drug dealer, a bank robber, a murderer. You're a gangsta, staunch as, notorious. You're a lone wolf on the prowl looking for the lambs. You're a screwed up teenage suicidal maniac.

You are the lost cause. You are the found. You're the kid that broke the mould and paved the way. There's a monument out there somewhere got your name on it. Maybe it's true you don't know why you did it. Maybe it's true you don't give a damn why you did, beyond the fact that you got caught in the process.

Statistically, of course, tēnā koe e tama, you're more than likely Māori. You're more than likely poor. Ironically, you've probably been the victim of violent crime in your short life. There's a good chance you've been abused, assaulted, neglected or abandoned.

Gangs and family dysfunction will be common themes for you. So I wouldn't mind at all if you called me Matua, or Uncle even, like 'Uncle, put away the thumb,' if I casually flicked you the shaka sign, forgetting it's the Mob salute and realising by your raised fist that you fight for the other side.

You know already the dark side of addiction, the sinister allure and the spiral to destruction. Anger, fear, help­lessness, and anxiety are emotions familiar to you. They are deep. They are visceral. They speak to the animal in you. Suspicion comes easier than trust. Paranoia follows. You require medication just to keep your head straight and go to sleep at night. You hate the world.

The State picked you up from kindergarten when you were four years old and took you to a stranger's house to live. You have a sister somewhere. You wonder what she looks like now. You are hardcore, resolute in your defiance, determined to walk an unrepentant path, for it is there you earn your scars. You think you're dead already and that's a crying shame because it makes you doubly dangerous. You are bigger than your Father.

You are sweet sixteen and adamant that vengeance will be done. You are young, you want your Mother. You are hard, you want a war. You are seventeen and a father who has yet to see his son. You are fifteen and you'd kill your Mother's boyfriend in a heartbeat. You like to train, it keeps you ready…

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The 2020 Lilburn Lecture is delivered by RNZ presenter and New Zealand music figure Karyn Hay exploring the reality of life for local musicians and songwriters. Recorded at the National Library.

https://www.rnz.co.nz/concert/programmes/appointment/audio/2018771465/the-lilburn-lecture-2020

In this extract from New Zealand Music: Living the Dream, Karyn Hay explores what it's like to have a career as a musician in this country.

Drawing on her own experiences as a writer, and one who is deeply involved with the music industry, she observes:

If you just have recognition and no money you have the worst of all worlds: the dreaded fame without fortune, which is a burden for any performer, and one I have seen repeated over and over in this country. It's wonderful to create meaning, to ignite something in other people (who happily steal it from you anyway, they make it their own. And quite rightly: it is theirs now), but there are only so many times you can be prodded, poked and shafted - in a non-sexual way - without getting paid for it before you begin to wonder if making music was a really bad career choice you made at 18. 

While we may live in a unique environment, a small market, where it's easy to plead that there's not enough money to go around, musicians are not show ponies. Well, they are, but - pay them. Pay them the absolute maximum the budget will allow, not the sum you think you can get away with. If they're coming to appear on your radio station, or your function, if you want to use their music for something, give them the most money you can. Don't try to get away with per diems and a few bucks for gas. Afford them the respect they're due for their talent and for what they're bringing to the party.

About the speaker

Author and broadcaster Karyn Hay ONZM is thought to have been New Zealand's first female Rock DJ, receiving national fame as the presenter of 1980s music TV show Radio with Pictures. Her debut novel Emerald Budgies won "Best First Book Award" in the 2001 New Zealand Book Awards. She presents Lately with Karyn Hay on RNZ National.

The annual Lilburn Lectures are a collaboration between the Lilburn Trust and the Alexander Turnbull Library, the partners with RNZ for this recording.

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