Innocence and Experience
3 world class authors – all of whom have written beautifully crafted unexpected love stories this session this morning was a treat for me – and Chair Kate De Goldi did a fabulous job (3 cheers for Kate). Peter Wells read from “Lucky Bastard”, Peter Ho Davies from “”The Wesh Girl” and Laurence Fearnley from “Edwin + Matilda”. Interesting discussion about what inspired these novels – for Fearnley it was place (she is inspired by South Island landscape and rural settings), for Ho Davies objects his Grandmother had treasured (what were in fact sculptured shellcases made by POW’s), and for Wells it was an untold history (he is spurred on he says, by what we don’t know cf a “write what you know” mentality). Fearnley feels lonely when the book is written and her characters gone – Peter Wells recognises that, as for readers, characters become “part of the compost of your life”.
Michelle Legott
Another “show and tell session”, and for me one of the most moving of the festival so far. At 51 Leggott, our current NZ Poet Laureate, is suffering from retinitis, which means she is losing her sight – in her words, she has a narrower tolerance to light…and it seems to me doubly tragic somehow that this is happening to a writer who clearly has always treated poems as physical objects – text as something to interpret and explore – valued the aesthetics of the written word on the page – and effectively writes as though painting with words. Currently teaching digital poetry at Auckland Uni, Leggott has moved on to a new format where poems can now literally dance around the screen.
