Summer Shakepeare brings ‘The Comedy of Errors’ to the Esplande, Palmerston North

Summer Shakespeare director Peter Hambleton has presented the Bard in Palmerston North before.

In 2009 he directed Summer Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well on the car park in front of the Esplanade Scenic Railway station, incorporating the miniature trains as part of the action.

For this year’s The Comedy of Errors, which opens in the Esplanade Rose Gardens on Thursday, Hambleton has moved from miniature trains to model boats.

When the audience arrive, they will be greeted by a small flotilla of model boats bobbing on the Esplanade Rose Garden pond.

“The community aspect of the production is really important to me. I’ve done a few Summer Shakespeare productions now and celebrating and involving the community, and making it fun for the audience is all part of the Summer Shakespeare spirit,” Hambleton said.

The models are being provided by Maurice Job, a member of the Palmerston North Aeroneers.

The Comedy of Errors is a story about seafaring and shipwrecks, and Maurice has a wonderful collection of model boats. What we’d like is for people to bring their own models and add them to the fleet on the pond.”

For Sunday’s Esplanade Day 2pm matinee, Hambleton is expecting Job to turn up with a large model of a battleship.

Boats wouldn’t be the only models on show during the hour-and-a-half long play-through production.

“Nic Green has constructed a replica clocktower that will appear in the show. You’ll have to come along that to see why that is.”

As well as the teamwork and collaboration involving “a raft of people from across town”, Hambleton said he had attracted a great cast, including several local theatre award-winners.

“The play is about two sets of twins separated at birth and brought up in different countries. They get together again during one day in the city of Ephesus.”

In a gender-bending twist to the comic tale about double mistaken identity, Hambleton has the lead male characters played by women, and some of the female roles played by men, with the setting a thoroughly contemporary one.

“Shakespeare wrote this play with Palmerston North 2018 in mind. It has taken all this time for this startling piece of information to be revealed,” Hambleton said.

Expect some fast-paced action around the Rose Garden fishpond, with entry to the five 7pm and one 2pm performances by koha. There will be no wet weather venue, and any affected performance will be postponed until the next fine evening.

Massey PhD student wins 2017 The Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems

Janet Newman is the 2017 winner of The Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems, given by the International Writers Workshop, for her sequence Tender. The $1000 prize was judged by Auckland poet Robert Sullivan. Tender is a seven poem sequence about Janet’s father, Doug Newman (1919-2008). Janet, a runner-up in the prize in 2014, has a Masters of Creative Writing through the School of English & Media Studies at Massey University and is presently a PhD student at Massey, where she is exploring New Zealand’s long history of environmentally-oriented poetry and writing a collection of original ecopoems.

Inmates explore morals in Greek theatre

Inmates performed an abridged version of an Ancient Greek play, using puppets.

Is pride the ultimate crime? It is a big moral question that a group of inmates at Auckland Prison explored when they performed an Ancient Greek play using puppets, in a partnership between the prison and Massey University.

The project involved seven inmates who staged an abridged version of Antigone, by Sophocles (written around 441 BC) last week. The aim was to cultivate the performance skills and confidence of the participants, says Dr Rand Hazou. He is a senior lecturer in theatre, based in the School of English and Media Studies at the Auckland campus. Along with storyteller and theatre-maker Derek Gordon, he led the Theatre Behind Bars project at the prison in Paremoremo through his interest in community theatre and social change.

He says theatre can provide a constructive platform through which prison inmates are able to explore deeper personal, family and social issues, giving them the opportunity to develop creative and communication skills, as well as understandings of human behaviour through storytelling.

The production, Puppet Antigone, by the group called the Unit 9 Theatre Group, built on a series of introductory theatre workshops Dr Hazou organised at the prison in May and June. The latter was facilitated by Canadian theatre director David Diamond, artistic and managing director of the Vancouver based company Theatre for Living. “As a result of these initial engagements, a small theatre group has developed at the prison that is interested in continuing to engage with theatre practice,” Dr Hazou says.

Inmates at Auckland Prison at Paremoremo performing the Greek play, Antigone. (photo/supplied)

Old play but relevant story

He says the show went well, and the response of the 40 audience members – made up of prison staff and invited guests, including some Massey staff, and a large contingent of inmates – was overwhelming.

“This was wicked! I’ve never done anything like this before, and even though it is an old play, we understood the story,” one of the actors said. “I’ve also learned about the power of standing still in one place when acting, but using my arms, voice, and facial expressions, especially my eyes, to communicate with the audience.”

Kellie Paul, Principal Advisor Rehabilitation and Learning at Auckland Prison, says that participating in Antigone was “a powerful and challenging experience for the men involved in the Theatre Behind Bars project.

“They really had to push the boundaries. The actors also had to memorise complex lines in a short period of time, and learn how to manipulate puppets for the first time to add dramatic effect to their performance. Auckland Prison is privileged to have access to the expertise of Rand and Derek to help the prisoners explore their strengths, improve their learning and education, and develop their self-confidence.”

While the utterances and dilemmas of Ancient Greek characters may seem far removed from the realities of New Zealand prison life in the 21st century, Dr Hazou says the play provides “a creative opportunity for inmates to cultivate their emotional, physical and literacy skills by adapting a classic written play into performance.”

After all, the play hinges on a key quote from Tiresias, one of the main characters: “All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and repairs the evil. The only crime is pride.”

The play tells the story of Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus, who insists on giving her dead brother, Polynices, a form of ritual burial in keeping with divine laws. But her brother has been ruled a traitor by her uncle, King Creon, who has decreed that anyone caught giving burial rites will be executed. The play questions whether Antigone should follow her heart and insist that family responsibilities and religious rites are more important than the city’s law. Or should she bow to her uncle and king and follow the responsibilities expected of a citizen to the state?

“The play raises important questions about ethics, standing up for what is right, and not bowing to authority. But it also raises questions about pride, which is described in the play as ‘the only crime’ that men make,” Dr Hazou says.

Kellie Paul (Principal Advisor Rehabiltation and Learning at Auckland Prison); Derek Gordon and Dr Rand Hazou (Massey Unversity); with Simon Chaplin (Assistant Prison Director, Auckland Prison). (photo/supplied)

Why the play Antigone?

By exploring the primal and universal desire to respect the dead with due rites and the sacred obligation to provide the dead a dignified transition from the land of the living to the world of ancestors, the play holds cultural resonances with Aotearoa, he says.

“Māori tikanga are well-known for rituals and protocols to deal with the dead, and the conflict in Antigone would be immediately recognised by Māori and Pākehā alike. The play also highlights the conflict between men and women in a patriarchal society and demonstrates the harsh and tragic consequences for one woman who decides to stand up to this patriarchal power.”

Summer Scholarship Opportunity

If you plan on joining us for postgraduate study in 2018, check out this exciting opportunity! One lucky student will be awarded an 8-week Summer Scholarship, valued at $5000, to assist Dr Claire Henry with an exciting new research project. Contact Claire to apply: c.henry@massey.ac.nz.

College of Humanities and Social Sciences

Summer Scholarship 2017-2018

 Information for student applicants

 

General information: 

  1. Purpose

The CoHSS Massey University Summer Scholarship is offered to provide senior students with the opportunity to experience supervised research over the summer semester. 

  1. Tenure and value

Each scholarship will be offered to the value of $5000.  The scholarships will be tenable for a period of approximately eight weeks and will represent a full-time commitment to the project (except for public holidays). 

  1. Eligibility

The scholarship is open to students who are intending to enrol at Massey University in 2018 and who will be studying at 400 level or above in the Colleges of Humanities and Social Sciences. Applicants must be New Zealand citizens or permanent residents. 

Conditions

  • The scholarships may be held in conjunction with other scholarships, bursaries and stipends if the other award so allows.
  • A Scholarship may be terminated by the Pro Vice Chancellor on receipt of an adverse report from the relevant Head of School/Institute/Centre.
  • Summer Scholars will be expected to enrol for 2018 courses. At the end of the project the Scholar will submit a report to the Team Leader of the Project.

 Payments

Each scholarship will be paid in two instalments, one at the start of the project and one upon receipt of the project report.

Project information:

 Project Title:    Releases and Reception of Eraserhead (David Lynch, 1977)

 Supervisor:      Dr Claire Henry, School of English and Media Studies (Wellington campus)

c.henry@massey.ac.nz

Project Description:

This project involves undertaking a piece of preliminary research for Dr Claire Henry’s proposed monograph on David Lynch’s 1977 cult film, Eraserhead, which is intended for publication with Wallflower Press (a Columbia University Press imprint) in the “Cultographies” series. The summer scholar’s project will facilitate an accelerated initial research phase and support the submission of Dr Henry’s book proposal in early 2018.

The monograph will in part assess how academic reception of Lynch’s film maps against its reception by audiences. The summer scholar’s task will be to research this latter aspect of reception, by collating and analysing data focused on how critics and audiences received Eraserhead at different stages of release. The summer scholar will gather film reviews and other qualitative and quantitative data on the reception of the film (and subsequent releases on VHS/DVD), and enter the sources into the referencing software, EndNote. The summer scholar’s research will be an important foundation for the encompassing analysis of Eraserhead’s cult status in the monograph, an analysis that contextualises the film not only within film theorists’ understandings (such as auteur studies of David Lynch and theories of cult media) but also within the different responses of critics and audiences over the years since the film’s initial release 40 years ago.

Tasks:

Collate reviews of Eraserhead

  • Locate reviews of the film in mainstream and fan media, save PDF copies, and accurately enter information into EndNote;
  • Compare and analyse the reviews, writing a report to categorise the reviews and identify common themes and interpretations.

Research the releases of Eraserhead

  • Identify the cinema/VHS/DVD/online releases of the film, including dates and places, audience and box office figures (where available);
  • Identify any variations in the text between releases (eg. ‘director’s cut’, censored versions) and extras accompanying the releases (eg. DVD extras such as behind-the-scenes documentaries, interviews, or additional short films).

Research the contribution of actor Jack Nance to the cult status of the film

  • Research the actor’s career, relationship with David Lynch, and mysterious death;
  • Compile notes and sources on how Jack Nance’s star image and cult fandom contributed to Eraserhead’s cult status over time;
  • Maintain an annotated bibliography and accurate Endnote references for sources on this topic.

Identify competing and complementary books, and potential illustrations, for the book proposal

  • Locate images related to Eraserhead for possible inclusion in the monograph (such as film posters, DVD covers, stills, behind-the-scenes or location images) and identify copyright holders;
  • Compile a list of key competing books, and a list of complementary books that may appeal to the proposed book’s intended audience. Annotate the list with brief comments on how each book contributes to knowledge on Eraserhead, its context, and its cult status.

Benefits to the scholarship holder:

This is an excellent opportunity to enhance your research skills (including locating sources, synthesizing data, and writing reports), develop experience in data management for research projects and using referencing software, and gain insight into preparing a book proposal for an academic publisher. The tasks will be great preparation for your 2018 postgraduate studies at Massey, as you will gain an experience of how to commence the groundwork of media reception studies research, as well as develop your broader research skills.

Going places – women writers and wanderers

Author, editor, lecturer and traveller Dr Ingrid Horrocks has long been fascinated by women who travel and write, in past and modern times. Her new book, Women Wanderers and the Writing of Mobility, 1784-1814 (Cambridge University Press), was recently featured in the prestigious Times Literary Supplement.

The book explores the perils and challenges faced by four British women writers of the Romantic period who ventured from home to embrace the world at large. Frowned on socially for stepping out, these unconventional women encountered and were influenced by the turbulence of the times, from the effects of the French Revolution to the uncertainties of juggling writing, motherhood, love, debt and the desire for independence.

Dr Horrocks, based in the School of English and Media Studies on the Wellington campus, shares insights on writing the book, on the deeper implications of travel for women – then and now – and evolutions in ‘mobility studies’.

How did the idea for this book come about?

When I was doing my PhD at Princeton University, I was studying women writers from the late 18th century and Romantic period and was amazed by the richness and strangeness of their books. I was also acutely homesick and what I saw everywhere – in novels, poetry, and travel books – was uprooted-ness, and homelessness. There seemed to be vagrants, refugees, orphans, unmarried mothers without secure lodgings, feminists abandoned by their lovers in everything I read. The working title for the first version of the project was ‘Reluctant Wanderers’.

What particularly interested me was how radically different this was from how I’d been taught to think about movement and travel – both in my own life and in literature. Travel was meant to be about going out into the world, discovering oneself, and returning home victorious, somehow both wiser and better.

But mobility looked completely different in these texts. I became interested in unpicking influential ideologies that have taught us to see mobility as ‘freedom’ and, as a result, have obscured all the ways in which mobility can be painful, difficult, and continuous for some. My book looks at the ways writers sought to evoke what this feeling of economic and emotional insecurity feels like, in particular for women on the move. I see this as speaking directly into our current historical moment too.

Who are the four women writers you focus on, and why did you choose them?

The four key British women writers I focus on are Charlotte Smith, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Frances Burney. I was interested in how ‘wandering’ disrupted different genres, so each chapter in the book is about a woman author working in a particular literary form. These writers are now at the centre of the new Romantic canon.

Charlotte Smith was a novelist and poet who started writing in debtors’ prison when she was 25 and had nine living children. The obvious fix for her financial woes, of course, was to begin writing poetry! Astonishingly, she managed to support her family by writing for the rest of her life. Her friend, the poet William Cowper, described her as “chained to her desk like a slave to his oar”.

As she was shunted from one temporary lodging to the next, Smith wrote about wanderers of all sorts, using her own experience to write about displacements. One of her poems I write about is an amazing long blank verse poem, The Emigrants, which explores what our material and ethical responsibilities are toward refugees. The refugees Smith [whose poetry was launched in a new edition co-edited by Dr Horrocks and published by Broadview Press last month] was writing about were those displaced by the French Revolution, who arrived by the thousands on Britain’s south coast in the bitter winter of 1792-1793, often in open boats and with nothing but the clothes they wore.

Ann Radcliffe is the mother of the Gothic novel – I was interested in what happened if we considered gothic heroines as the most coerced of wanderers.

Pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft is probably the most well-known author I write about. She felt endlessly homeless as an intellectual woman in her society. She’s best known for her ground-breaking work The Rights of Woman, but her most moving work is a beautiful travel book she wrote about a journey she took through Scandinavia with her baby in 1796. She’d been disappointed in the French Revolution, which she’d hoped would change women’s situation, and she’d been abandoned by her American lover. It’s an intensely melancholy work.

What she evokes is a kind of deep homelessness – literal, political, emotional and aesthetic – associated with feeling out of joint with the time in which she was living. Wollstonecraft went on to marry the political philosopher William Godwin and died giving birth to Mary Shelley.

Frances Burney had become a literary sensation in the 1780s with a novel about London society life, and is probably the best-known novelist of the late eighteenth century. Her long, digressive final novel is called The Wanderer or Female Difficulties. It tells the story of a female refugee from the French Revolution trying to find work and safe, secure lodgings in a British society that can only see her as a foreigner and outcast.

What Burney’s wandering heroine finally sees is a strikingly unjust society, unable to see that people’s sufferings are not necessarily a result of their errors. She sees a society of “failure without fault; success without virtue; sickness without relief; oppression in the very face of liberty; labour without sustenance; and suffering without crime”. It’s an astonishingly modern novel.

In the time frame of your book, leisure travel/tourism was clearly not something women did easily, often, or independently – what motivated these women to travel?

Part of what I aimed to do in the book is to shift what we think of as travel and find ways of illuminating all kinds of movement. Part of what’s exciting about this is it makes visible the very many ways in which women have always been on the move. So, Wollstonecraft is really the only figure I look at who would conventionally be seen as a traveller. But even she wasn’t a leisure tourist. There’s an exciting backstory to her journey: she was on a business trip on behalf of her ex-lover to find a stolen ship filled with silver being smuggled out of Revolutionary France. Wollstonecraft was also travelling in the hope of writing a book out of the journey that would help to make her financially independent, which it did to some extent. There were other women travellers at the time, but no one quite like Wollstonecraft. She tended to break most rules for women of her day.

Other authors, poets, and characters I write about move out of necessity: those displaced in various ways by war, divorced mothers living in insecure, rented accommodation, and orphans whose guardians prey on rather than protect them. I’m interested in what happens when we pay attention to these everyday kinds of movements, rather than simply movement that can be more easily conceived of as ‘travel’.

This kind of shift in attention to the everyday is exactly what’s happening in scholarship on contemporary movement in the interdisciplinary field of what’s called ‘mobility studies’. Even in the travel writing course I teach we talk a lot about travel as not being necessarily about voluntary movement, but for many people something that is forced upon them. We’re also mobile every day, not simply when we’re on ‘holiday’.

What role did the French Revolution play in the lives and writings of the women in your book?

The French Revolution is central to the British writings of the turbulent 1790s. Mary Wollstonecraft and Charlotte Smith in particular were early public supporters of the Revolution. Wollstonecraft wrote the first extended British response, her Vindication of the Rights of Men, which she followed up a year later with Vindication of the Rights of Woman. The books I write about mainly come after the ‘Terror’ of the September massacres in France in 1792, and out of an immense sense of disappointment and loss in the hope many British radicals had placed in the Revolution, including in changing options for women.

Also, the 1790s, following the Revolution and the subsequent declaration of war between France and England, was a period of extreme social, political, and economic upheaval. In this decade literal wanderers, from discharged soldiers, to emigrants, to war widows, to the growing ranks of the homeless, became more literally visible. Literary texts that told stories of troubled wanderers at this time were in part simply seeking to respond to, and represent, this historical reality.

Do you draw parallels between then and now for women travel writers?

I don’t do this explicitly in this book. In a travel book I wrote some years ago – Travelling with Augusta, 1835 & 1999 (Victoria University Press) – I compared my own experience as a young woman abroad to that of a woman traveller in the early nineteenth century.

What I do see in this [latest] book are parallels between these women’s lives and the difficulty of voicing the specifics of their situations – something still very much with us today. For example, Wollstonecraft was fierce in her rejection of the notion that as a wandering, unmarried mother she should be treated as an object of pity. What she wanted to draw attention to, instead, were the systemic social conditions that led to situations like hers. I kept thinking of Wollstonecraft during the fallout from the Metiria Turei controversy during the election. Whatever you think about how this was handled, it was striking the extent to which her story was reduced to an individual, personalised story – which you could either pity of revile – and how difficult it was to hear the wider story of a social failure Turei had sought to highlight.

What do you mean [in your introduction] by the traveller as ‘the emblematic modern subject’?

We live in an era where millions are uprooted by war, economics and climate change and even those who are not obviously on the move are often still subject to conditions such as insecurity of housing or work. The traveller embodies this sense of unsettlement, making it easier for us to see it. What’s particularly illuminating about the Romantic period is that this is the moment when we begin to see what will become a radical shift toward thinking in terms of mobility. We begin to see an ideological shift toward seeing mobility as freedom, which is central to neoliberal thought in ways that obscures just how unequal the experience of mobility is.

What are you working on at the moment?

I’m writing about New Zealand literature currently – in particular how New Zealand has been imagined in contemporary nonfiction writing. And I’ve also been writing and reading about swimming, as an embodied way to think about movement and how to engage with a particular landscape. I’ve got a travel piece coming out in the next Landfall about swimming in some of our most polluted rivers.

Still Waving Climate Change Creative Writing Competition: Read the Winning Entries

We are delighted to have the authors’ permission to publish all the Still Waving Climate Change Creative Writing Competition shortlisted and winning entries. Congratulations to everyone who entered: the standard was uniformly high, and we were sorry we only had three prizes to award. Selecting just three was a challenge as there were so many fantastic pieces, and we have to say a huge thank you to our principal judge Dr Ingrid Horrocks, and to Dr Jack Ross, editor of Poetry NZ, who also assisted with the final results to make sure our judging was really thorough! Click on the titles below to read each item.

Winning climate change creative writing

We are delighted to bring you the winning short story in our Still Waving Climate Action Creative Writing competition.  From a very strong field, this is the piece chosen by our judges, creative writing lecturers Dr Ingrid Horrocks and Dr Jack Ross, as the outstanding item.  To read others of the top items, click here.

Image of green grass in closeup

Grass Still Grows

By Sharron McKenzie

Marianne pulled the cover over the printing press, and packed the last of the slim volumes in the bags on the floor. The nagging ache in her gut gave a sharp twinge as she bent down. Indigestion, she told herself, but she knew it wasn’t. Knowing did no good, anyway. No more chemo, no more wonder drugs. There hadn’t been a shipment of any drugs from overseas in years. These days, if you couldn’t make it locally, you went without.

She slung a bag over each shoulder and shuffled down the hallway, smiling at Mrs Niroshan, who was tiredly walking back and forth trying to quiet the baby. Behind the closed door of the second bedroom she could hear raised voices. At least the authorities were only sending her one refugee family at a time these days, while they waited for their place on the inland convoys. There had been times when she’d packed up to eighteen people into her three bedroom house.

Melba greeted Marianne with a loud “Meeeehhhh!” from her stall in the garage. The goat shifted impatiently as Marianne attached the carrier bags to her harness.

“Dude,” she said to the goat, as they walked out to the street. “Where’s my driver-less car?”

Melba knew the answer to that one. “Meee!”

“Goats go where goats want to go. I don’t think that counts as driver-less!”

She could feel warmth in the wind from the east, bringing a swampy stench with it. And barely spring yet, Marianne thought. The mosquitoes would be hatching in the brackish marsh that covered the remains of eastern Christchurch.

She could hear high pitched giggles as two little boys played in the water-filled pothole that spanned half the street, conducting a naval closeup of goatbattle with tiny ships made from flax stems. Dot’s granddaughter was hanging out washing in her front yard as Marianne passed, singing in a pure high soprano.

Rain still falls and the grass still grows,

Boy sees girl, you know how it goes.

Dot was leaning on the gate watching the kids, and Marianne stopped, yanking at Melba’s rope when she tried to sample a roadside patch of cabbages.

“Here,” Dot said. “I saved some carrot tops. Did you hear about the latest reading? 10.73 metres! I always wanted a seaside property.” She never seemed to tire of that joke.

“Better get that bikini ready,” Marianne countered, as she always did, and Dot cackled happily. The truth was there were no more beaches. There was no edge to the ocean any more. It had gulped down half the city, and vomited back a swamp of stinking mud and twisted wreckage.

The last ten years had been a frantic race against the tide to render down buildings and infrastructure to their constituent parts. Everything of possible use, including topsoil and trees was removed by the Locust Army, to be loaded onto the electric trucks travelling inland, to the new cities. Fairlie, Ranfurly, and even sleepy Naseby, had been transformed as the coastal refugees fled to higher ground.

Melba plodded around the corner, a carrot top dangling from her lips. Marianne let the goat pull her along, thinking back over the years. When was it? Was there one particular day? That day we finally realised things were never going to get better?

There were those pictures on the news, back when they still got television broadcasts. That shaky video shot with a phone from the last plane to leave Kiribati. The crowds pressing against the chain link fence at the airport. The wave of brown water churned up by the plane’s wheels as it moved down the runway. The view of that young woman below, waist deep in the swirling water, holding up her baby over her head, mouth open in a silent O as the plane lifted away. Was it then, when the first nation drowned? Or had they still thought something could be done?

Was it the summer the farmers built pyres of black and white carcasses, sending columns of stinking smoke rising up from the plains, after the ships stopped coming and the dairy industry collapsed?

Was it the winter that the flood waters covered south Dunedin, the Hutt Valley and Greymouth, and never receded?

Or that summer the meteorologists added new colours to their temperature maps, and half of Australia went up in flames? Or the autumn that the first F6 hurricane hit the Caribbean joined up?

Was it the neo-dengue fever epidemic of 2037, or Black Tuesday when the banks went down for good?

Or that one terrible night when a dirty bomb rendered Sydney uninhabitable. And then likewise Chicago, Los Angeles, Tel Aviv, Manchester and Marseilles? Or the vicious twelve day war that turned both North and South Korea into radioactive wastelands, and the last frantic flailing ‘accidental’ missile strikes that took out Japan and half the coastal cities of China?

Marianne shook her head. Maybe it was a different day for everyone who’d lived through the last twenty five years. She tied Melba to a post outside the old supermarket, now filled with a combination farmer’s market and traveling garage sale. A hand painted sign in the window of the old pharmacy offered “Books, Drugs and News for Sale. Gossip for Free.”

Marianne stuck her head in the door. “Hey, Sam,” she said. “Got a fresh batch for you.”

“Marianne, lovely to see you,” Sam said, stepping outside to help her carry the bags inside. He laid the slim volumes on the counter, one hand absently scratching the lumpy melanoma on his left ear.

“Diphtheria, symptoms and treatment,” he read slowly. ”What else have we got here? Goat husbandry, compost toilet construction, Ross River virus, radio operation and repair. Excellent. Riveting reading as always, Marianne.”

“At least I achieved my life’s ambition,” she said, with mock hauteur. “I am a published author, with sales in the hundreds.”

“We should have a book launch party.”

“Oh yes, with wine, and those little canapes on silver trays!”

Sam laughed. “I really don’t know where I’d get the smoked salmon and crackers.” He took out a small notepad and added up some figures.

“With what you brought me today, here’s what you have to spend. What can I get for you?”

She was looking out the window at the hills. “Something from the back room. I need 200 mg of morphine, Sam.”

“Oh, my dear,” he said. “So soon?”

She avoided his eyes. “Not yet. But I’d like to be ready. I don’t know how much longer I’ll be mobile.”

He looked at her for a moment longer, then turned and unlocked the door behind the counter. He returned with a small plastic container.

“Send word when it’s time,” he said, coming with her to the door. “I’ll come around.”

“I will,” she promised. “I’ve put some books aside for you.”Springtime grassy hillside

Outside, Melba had finished the carrot tops and was chewing on her lead rope, a thoughtful expression on her face.

“Come on, you silly goat,” Marianne said. “Let’s go to the park and you can have grass for lunch.”

“Meh,” Melba said, agreeably.

Marianne looked up at the green hills as they walked. Rain still falls and the grass still grows, she thought. Maybe I have not had that one particular day yet.

Climate Change Creative Writing – Third Place Winner

“Recycling Worlds: A Collation of Works”

By Melanie Ferguson

Author’s note: “This piece deliberately enacts a recycling, by reusing and repurposing fragments of older works, that are fully referenced in footnotes. The words used are from four countries and three centuries, connecting ideas across time and space. All borrowings of material in this essay are limited to brief passages used for critical purposes, and are fully acknowledged in the references. I apologise in advance for any inadvertent infringements of copyright, which I will be happy to rectify as soon as they are brought to my attention.”

I stood in my garden pulling loquats off the tree and eating them to be full of spring[1]; a tree that may have spent further time as a house or classroom, or a bridge or pier. Or further time could be spent floating on the sea or river, or sucked into a swamp, or stopping a bank, or sprawled on a beach bleaching among the sand, stones and sun[2].

The train went on up the track out of sight, around one of the hills of burnt timber[3]. And further west on the upper reaches the place of the monstrous town was still marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars[4]. I said his heaven would be only half alive; and he said mine would be drunk; I said I should fall asleep in his; and he said he could not breathe in mine[5]. A ray peers into the room of your eye . . . . Why is our art so introverted? It doesn’t mean a thing – to the seagull or sun – the clouds don’t understand – a word – their language is silence[6]. His mouth opens. From inside him comes a slow stream, without breath, without interruption. It flows up through his body and out upon me… washing the cliffs and shores of the island, it runs northward and southward to the ends of the earth. Soft and cold, dark and unending, it beats against my eyelids, against the skin on my face[7]. And if several people talk at once an overlapping howling noise begins, echoes generate echoes[8]; our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places, after death. Perhaps – perhaps[9]; the tree, after a lifetime of fruiting, has, after its first death, a further fruiting at the hands of a master. This does not mean that the man is the master of the tree… He is master only of the skills that bring forward what was already waiting in the womb of the tree[10].The new things born there console or constellate they measure space they keep time. But who wrote this story? And before writing who told it to us that we tell it over and over? [11] With what ineffable pleasure have I not gazed – and gazed again, losing my breath through my eyes – my very soul diffused itself in the scene[12]; You are of me and I of you, I cannot tell – Where you leave off and I begin[13].

[1] Michele Leggott, “a woman, a rose, and what has it to do with her and they with one another?”, as far as I can see. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1999.

[2] Patricia Grace, p. 7, Potiki. 1986. Auckland: Penguin, 2010.

[3] Ernest Hemingway, p. 133, “Big Two Hearted River: Part I.” In Out Time. 1925. New York: Macmillan, 2003.

[4] Joseph Conrad, p.5, Heart of Darkness. 1899. London: Penguin, 2007.

[5] Emily Bronte, p. 180, Wuthering Heights. 1847. Great Britain: Wordsworth Editions, 2000,

[6] Graham Lindsay, from “Cloud Silence” The Subject. 1994. Retrieved from NZEPC Oct. 5th, 2017.

[7] J.M. Coetzee, p. 157, Foe. 1986. London: Penguin, 2010.

[8] E.M. Forster, p. 137, A Passage to India. 1924. London: Penguin, 2010.

[9] Virginia Woolf, p. 129-30, Mrs Dalloway. 1925. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

[10] Patricia Grace, p. 7, Potiki. 1986. Auckland: Penguin, 2010.

[11] Michele Leggott, from the back cover of DIA. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1994.

[12] Mary Wollstonecraft, p.72, Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. 1796. Canada: Broadview Press, 2013.

[13] Susan Howe, Articulation of Sound Forms in Time. Windsor, VT: Awede, 1987.

Climate Change Creative Writing – Shortlisted

A Mother’s Fury

By Eden Shearer

Mother will not stop yelling

She is casting cyclones

That are destroying precious lives

 

She has become a home-wrecker

Sowing the seeds

Of volcanic eruptions

 

She is angry

Causing innocent feet

To flee from their homes

To run far away

 

We are too scared to look her in the eye

So we keep running

Hoping for grass that is greener on the other side

Only to find that there is nothing left

 

When will we learn

To stop arguing with our Mother

And to start implementing change?

 

It is about time we cleaned up our mess

And as they always say, Mother knows best

 

It is too late to diffuse her temper completely

But we can still use our actions

To decelerate her intensity

 

Let’s turn mindlessness

Into mindfulness

 

Oh Mother Earth, we can hear you.

 

Climate Change Creative Writing – Shortlisted

 Always

By Janet Newman

 

The river always

finds a way

down from the ranges

through the plain

to the sea

 

although sometimes it takes

a circuitous route

around corrals of cliffs,

through macrocarpa roots,

sometimes cross country,

clear across old stones

 

because the river has a way

of folding back

on its way forward,

lengthening and stretching out long and wide

as it takes its time

 

as it longs to find its way

by longing for the sea

 

and in longing reveals

the length of its persistence

 

which is something to long for

however slow

 

the way any life

sometimes doubles back,

folding and looping

 

because the river

always finds the sea

by following

a doubtless course

 

sometimes doubling back

but always moving

eventually

forward.