Sally Hollis-McLeod
Culture
How to write
by Philip Matthews
Continued from page 1...
On a map of Shannon’s writing life, 400 words might be on one axis and 50 pages on another. Shannon takes public transport to work so that he can get through 50 pages of other people’s fiction a day (American fiction is favoured: Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, Russell Banks). Another Manhire notion is that writers are also readers: “I have met plenty [of poets] who declare that they never read other poets: their own pure, original voice might somehow be contaminated. People who talk like that aren’t writers.” Shannon got into literature big time in his twenties. “I just loved the immersion. I wasn’t a lonely person, but books are a great comfort, a great companion.”
His advice for those who want to write novels and stories? “The best thing to do is be brave, be bold. Don’t be afraid and try to concentrate really hard on what you’re trying to do. Imagine your characters, where they are, what they’re doing, how they’re talking, and something will come of it.”
Geoff Walker first started seeing creative writing school manuscripts coming through in decent numbers about a decade ago: the Victoria school initially and then submissions from the Auckland University course, which is directed by Albert Wendt and Witi Ihimaera. “The manuscripts are always well-written, very polished, have clearly had a lot of attention bestowed on them, and don’t always work. It’s sometimes the novel that writer had to write before moving on to publishable work.” Which isn’t to say that such novels are never accepted: Walker says Penguin had some success last year with Linda Olsson’s Let Me Sing You Gentle Songs, which emerged from the Auckland course.
But Walker’s comment touches on a fear that Manhire and others are sensitive to: the fear that writing courses might produce a sameness. The criticism that Manhire’s lab is cloning an army of imitators doesn’t stand up at all, but still, in a 1991 interview, Manhire wondered whether a certain “synthetic” sameness in American poetry of the 1980s might not be the fault of influential writing institutions, such as the University of Iowa. Is there now an Auckland school? Auckland is the world’s largest Polynesian city and Wendt and Ihimaera are Polynesian, of course -– but although this might explain Toa Fraser, Karlo Mila and Kelly Ana Morey, all Auckland graduates, it doesn’t explain the Swedish settings of Olsson’s novel.
Related to the question of whether creative writing teachers produce replicas of themselves is the question of whether creativity -– or talent – can be taught. Mark Williams dealt with this neatly in his Landfall review of Mutes & Earthquakes: “Can anyone be taught to write? If it is all a matter of techniques and exercises, then the ability to write well ought to be more democratically distributed than it is. The demystifying of the romantic associations of writing with genius and inspiration, of course, only carries the trainee writer so far with the craft. All the techniques and tricks in Mutes & Earthquakes are the writer’s equivalent of the weightlifter’s dumb-bells, not steroids: they build muscles rather than invent them. Janet Frame would not have been made into a writer by such a course and the course is not designed to produce Janet Frames. They must produce themselves.”
Last week, Karlo Mila’s Dream Fish Floating, published by Huia, won the best first book of poetry at the Montanas. Her response? “I was astonished, to be honest with you.” She didn’t think that her poetry is the kind that Montana judges like – it’s not clever, literary poetry, she says. It doesn’t make well-read references to Robin Hyde and Katherine Mansfield (put it this way, she adds: Auckland University Press turned her book down). But it has a strong social sense, it’s lyrical and accessible. “With her roots in Pakeha New Zealand, Samoa and Tonga, Karlo Mila writes with flair, energy and passion,” the Montana judges thought. Listener readers might remember her funny, sharp, angry poem “Eating Dark Chocolate and Watching Paul Holmes’s Apology”.
“I’ve written poems for my dad and my dad actually can’t read or write, because he was just too naughty and you could get away with wagging back in those days in Tonga.” She writes poetry, she says, for those who found poetry too hard, too opaque, at school. She wants to talk directly. In 2000, she did the Auckland course while doing a masters in social work (she’s on to her PhD now). Ihimaera was on sabbatical and she was taught by Wendt. She had read and loved her Palagi mother’s copy of Sons for the Return Home. “He was a hero of mine. I couldn’t really believe that I was lucky enough to meet him in person.”
She had written poetry since she was a kid and had been published in the Awatapu College school magazine back in Palmerston North. But the big adjustment when doing the course was going from writing “shoebox under my bed poetry” to public poetry that fellow students get to critique.
