Well done to our creative writing postgraduate students Nataliya Oryshchuk and Janet Newman – both have exquisite pieces of work published in the latest issue of Swamp (and Janet has three!).
The Topp Twins use comedy as a means to unsettle ideas around gender, sexuality and what it means to be a New Zealander, according to Dr Nicholas Holm, Massey lecturer and programme leader in Media Studies at the Manawatū campus.Dr Holm presented a lecture on the Topp Twins at Te Manawa Museum in Palmerston North, which has recently celebrated the opening of a Topp Twins exhibition, running until October 29.
He described the Topp Twins characters as “pantomime fictions sprung to life and walking the fields and streets of provincial New Zealand, and when you encounter them you are asked to enter willingly and gleefully into their skewed world”.
“The Topp Twins are fantastic entertainers who also happen to be radically ahead of their time, and therefore have found ways through popular culture to gain widespread acceptance and even love. As such they exist in a fascinating and productive tension by virtue of their seeming ability to unapologetically reject powerful and normative cultural expectations while also being celebrated as wholesome examples of traditional entertainment.”
Through analysis of the comedy of the Topp Twins, Dr Holm identified the unexpected power of popular culture, as it “can serve as a platform from which to challenge assumptions and accepted ideas about how the world works, what is valuable and what is permitted, who counts in a society, and what it means to belong to a community”.
For more information about the exhibition see http://www.temanawa.co.nz/
Current Massey PhD student Gina Cole has won The Hubert Church Best First Book Award for Fiction for Black Ice Matter, a collection of short stories that explores connections between extremes of heat and cold. Listen here to Jesse Mulligan’s interview with Gina.
Annabel Wilson, a Massey Master of Creative Writing graduate, had her theatrical poem “No Science to Goodbye” recently broadcast on Radio New Zealand. Annabel’s play is based around her 2014 MCW thesis.
David Gruber was recently chosen as one of ten Visiting Fellows to The New Zealand Centre at Peking University, 2017 (http://nzc.sfl.pku.edu.cn/10VFS.html). As a result, in April, he traveled to Peking University in Beijing and delivered an invited talk entitled, “Neuroscience and the Media.” He discussed his own research into the public understanding of neuroscience and outlined future trajectories of the field area, encouraging more cross-cultural and interdisciplinary research projects. During his visit, he also met with professors from Peking University’s School of Communication and Journalism to promote Massey’s School of English and Media Studies. Toward the end of the week, he had the opportunity to visit an English class where he met with students and gave a thirty minute lecture on the importance of re-writing.
Brian McDonnell’s new book on the 2004 New Zealand film In My Father’s Den has been published by boutique UK publisher Kakapo Books which specialises in New Zealand material. In My Father’s Den is widely regarded as one of the most important films ever made in New Zealand and also as one of the boldest and most radical adaptations of a classic New Zealand novel. Dr McDonnell’s book is an extensive, painstakingly researched and copiously illustrated analysis of this key film. It scrutinises Maurice Gee’s 1972 novel In My Father’s Den, which is the source of the film’s story and delineates closely the process by which scriptwriter/director Brad McGann took the book’s core and made it his own, while reimagining its central ideas and characters for the 21st Century. McGann’s brilliance as both a writer and a director are addressed with key sequences selected for closer examination in order to highlight the film’s intricate texture. Brian McDonnell hopes his book will confirm In My Father’s Den as an undisputed classic of New Zealand cinema.
In My Father’s Den is also the first book in a projected series of short books (called New Zealand Film Classics) that are focused studies of single films, rather in the tradition of the famous BFI Classics series. Series Editor is UK academic Dr Ian Conrich and Brian McDonnell is Series Consultant. Each book is devoted to providing a comprehensive appreciation of eminent, momentous and acclaimed New Zealand movies that have been viewed as key texts within the history of New Zealand cinema. It is envisaged that one or two new books in the series will be published yearly, written by local and international academics and other specialists in the field. Among films already chosen to be part of the Film Classics series are: Heavenly Creatures, Came a Hot Friday, Whale Rider, Out of the Blue, Rain, The Piano, Boy, Rewi’s Last Stand, Once Were Warriors, An Angel at My Table, Ngati, Broken Barrier, Sleeping Dogs, Sons for the Return Home, Smash Palace, Bad Blood, No.2.
This is Dr McDonnell’s fourth book about film, his best-known previous work being the Greenwood Press Encyclopedia of Film Noir which he co-wrote with Australian film scholar Geoff Mayer in 2007.
Jack Ross spoke to Radio New Zealand’s Lynn Freeman about Poetry New Zealand: Yearbook 2017, featuring new and well established writers. Jack has selected 125 new poems from hundreds submitted internationally, and supplemented them with essays and reviews by other writers keen to get people talking more about poetry.
A play about the global refugee crisis penned by Massey University theatre lecturer and playwright Associate Professor Angie Farrow has won second place in the International New Works of Merit Playwriting Contest.
Award-winning author Dr Ti
na Makereti, who is Ngati Tuwharetoa, Te Ati Awa, Ngati Rangatahi, Moriori and Pākehā, says people are always surprised to hear that no one offers a single paper in Māori literature in English. “In fact there are less than a handful of academics working in the field in New Zealand. A lot of published research comes from overseas researchers, some of whom have never been to the country.”
Dr Makereti says she’s excited by the opportunity to contribute new research into Indigenous creative writing along with teaching in the School of English and Media Studies. “There is a huge deficit in academic research in Māori and Pacific writing in particular. It’s no wonder young people aren’t drawn to study if they don’t see their own literature reflected.” She says New Zealand literature courses touch on Indigenous writers but she’d like to see programmes that truly engage with matauranga Māori – Māori understanding and knowledge.
Dr Makereti has a host of awards to her name, including twice winning the Ngā Kupu Ora Māori Book Awards for fiction for her short story collection Once Upon a Time in Aotearoa (Huia 2011) and then her first novel Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings (Vintage 2014).
While her PhD in Creative Writing was completed at Victoria University, Dr Makereti completed a Post Graduate Diploma in Māori Studies at Massey University in 2007 and has taught at Massey in the past. She will be based on the Manawatū campus.
Dr Makereti is looking forward to getting students excited about writing and says she’ll be aiming to surprise them.“People have preconceived ideas about what creative writing is, so I’ll be looking for work that surprises and gets them to look again.”