fiction

Just in case you needed a reminder to look at the sky, sometimes we do..

   Why to be a writer is well answered by a lot of other authors, the question may better be posed, why write about being a writer?  Why read the writers writing about writing?  I'm about to teach writing that's why, and partly it's thrown me into these whirly states of philosophy, and partly it's left me kind of on a plateau of self propelled exist here I am here is my boundary between my keyboard and your computer screen, and am I not already a teacher of writing, insofar, as i write? and attend readings? and critique, and applaud and more.  Nevertheless I'm reading Margaret attwood and Bill Manhire, and a collection of english authors and a novel by Lessing thrown in for good measure...  so I think 'reading' is the best answer to 'writing?'

   Having just completed the very initial layer 1 course in Te Reo, at Te Kura Po, Unitec, -highly recommended...  I'm pondering on the efficacy of the teacher / student relationship in its different cultural contexts. In Maoritanga, and certainly in the kawa for the Kura Po, there is an understanding that all the students bring a teaching to the class, and so the student to student encouragement is even a little more.  When you feel able to give guidance ( I mean when you know something someone doesn't know really) you do it.  The whole class moves itself forward. Implements its own learning and extends itself further as a group and as a group of individuals.

  Nothing new here, it makes good sense.  But doesn't it come hard up against concepts of learning in schools and ... the city.  I'm trying not to say institutions...

  There's a slightly different politic going on in learning in one business compared to the one next to it. It's to do with just how much status and rank is playing a part in the natural forces of unity and competition.  On a personal level it's about being brave in your emotional sector, and for some allowing the possibility that you have something to learn, and for others allowing the possibility that you have something to teach...

  It strikes me that in the same way that a parent must be careful not to feel the pressure to 'know everything' so as to parent efficiently, and yet step up to the mark as brave and responsible and knowledgeable too, in other learning environments we should be wary of leveling off our accomplishment with the tenure that an appointment provides, we have to be careful not to stop learning from the process of teaching.  The awhi in community and small business groups, especially industry communities can, well can be missing altogether.  A browse through the job sites will give you and indication of how much business and administrative bodies looking to manage arts are willing to exploit and harvest from the arts.  After you've read this, try for example : part time / arts / 30-80 grand a year, and see how many 'competition' style job opportunities you come up with...  pay rate to be advised..  40 hours a week at 15 per hour several degrees required.
    The situation my friends is dire, no wonder it's competitive out there.  But I will urge all teachers, administrators, busy busy people hooning around with the power to influence, use your powers wisely and be humble enough to remember to learn as you go. Different strokes for different folks!  Whether your students are 4, 40 or 80, you have plenty to learn from them.



  

Go to the Make my movie page to read the synopsis

http://www.makemymovie.co.nz/entry/prima-materia/

While the world seems to be a little crazier than ever I'm calling for favours of the semi nude modeling kind...
 
           Hang On!!      It is really quite reasonable, and one person at a time, and mostly the pics won't be very recognizable so if you're a friend or just keen to help...


   I need about 20 or more people to come and be photographed from behind in my back yard with just undies on.  Some of the poses need to be a little directed.  I need people's body language to be a bit defeated / exhausted.    


  It won't take long but while you're here you can have a cup of tea or coffee, a snack a sandwich!!  and by the end of October if you want you can have the knickers, before they run out!  ( We'll wash them )


   Ok just to clarify.. It's confidential for now but  my film idea for the MAKE MY MOVIE competition is not actually gruesome revolting or explicitly violent, it's more intellectual / arthouse / extreme / has the world gone mad / omg they're going to what? / yes probably /  kind of genre,  oh and did I mention...


         It's going to be the coolest poster

p.s. I need all kinds of body types so don't be shy... mostly they'll be in the distance.


Thankyou so much!

...aand Sydney part 3.

I took Dave a big scrapbook with the Brand name MontMarte,
With the quieter tempo, I was pleased to see that he was not so subdued by the nursing home environment that he couldn't muster up a bit of repartée.  We hung out I wrote some pages of stuff in the book for him, and he waved his hand at me, 'come on hand it over...'  When I did hand it over "Wow" and Mont-marte!!"   Well it was lovely and sad.  I told him I'd return again before too long with Finn, and I told him I'd get everyone to write to him.

  c/- Philip House
321 Bronte Rd
Waverley
NSW 2024
Sydney   if you're reading this and you want to write to him.  But I'll make a Dave blog specially and put it there too.  Visit again for the link to that one, it will be the ongoing Blog of all things Dave.

Bob Orr is going to write regularly which is pretty cool.  It's letter and news and visitors he most needs, run the gamut of strung out nurses trying to have a morning tea ... hmm yes,  for more on the nurses you should hear it from Dave himself in his recent poems from the house at Bronte Beach which have just gone up on the EPC site Digital Bridge         http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/features/home&away/bridge.asp

There you will find pictures of Dave and his recent poems, and all sorts.

It was a race to the finish line after sleeping.  Sara and I had a plan to film her on the steps of the Darling school (both meanings) where she tells me Dave used to teach for a while.  It's one of those Sydney buildings which looks as though it's been made directly from the ground...  but we took too long at breakfast importantly!  Because we had to talk a lot about and then I had to pack, So I made her run to the ferry and then filmed her on the harbour telling the story of Dave arriving in Sydney. Which is Quite a story.

Caught up with Dirk for a coffee en route to the Aeroport, and he presented me most wonderfully with copied pages from a journal that I'd mostly remembered (I like the story as a film idea, so I'd asked him to copy it, but had definitely forgotten that I'd illustrated it with some funny little pen dot pictures. . .
Treasure! and a good way in to making the hand-made book that I'd promised all the fabulous people who sponsored me over there.  One more time, A BIG thankyou, your books will be in the post in the next few days.  It was cool. And did I mention the Jacaranda?

And so since I've been home, (watched Romulus my Father, and cried much to entertainment of fellow passengers), I've been in my office book-making, and doing various production jobs for These Four Walls and editing for Ayrlies, and planning an event for

February 11th at Time Out Bookshop to show case my work from the Decade.  

Please join us for that

Book it in I'll make a facebook event.

Yes it's been a Decade of Fat Blossom.  I can't upload any pics at the moment because we used up our broadband quota being a gadgety family.
   I've also just edited a short piece of Michele Leggott's off the page class chalking George Raft Hat on the footpath, and sent it off to Dave.

  Azure to zee you zoon.

Sydney part 2...

Look I didn't take a stills camera, I was busy enough with movie making, so I can't post pics up right at the moment.  But clearly I was long overdue for the Sydney Epiphany, It must've been Pott's point, the weather, and the differences...
   Bob Orr and John Pule Martin Edmond and Nigel Roberts all sat around and yakked, and Dave fingered his new books -gifts from John and Bob, like treasure, and signed copies of his book for Bob, and wrote in John's notebook too, it took him a while.  It was momentously slow, and the filming went well everyone!  Whew!  Dave seemed extremely reluctant to finally put the date on his last signing, I believe he was making a stand because he didn't want us to leave.  Aieee! it was really very special.

  I was in the mode of observance so that's what I did, and it occurred to me that when you find somewhere hilly to look down on water around Sydney, it feels a little bit like the Cote d'azur, I guess coming from NZ at 30º it suddenly does seem a little equatorial... I bought flimsy things from a stall that I feel a little bit too shy to wear in Auckland, funny that assimilating thing we do.
  And so it was that I found myself(always good) walking up to Observatory hill for the opening event of Euan Mcleod at the Ervin Gallery.  Of course this just enhanced an australian appreciation too.  And it was hot in the evening, and great to meet Jenny Neligan after having known Neil Rowe through the Dave connection.
  Dinner at Nigel's was a hilarious affair much thanks Nigel for putting sup, putting and us up and out fine dining, and putting up with us.  Not to be undone by my invented poems, Bob sat down and wrote a brilliant piece off the cuff. . .  crashed and exhausted rose, hooked up with Sara, and Sara, that place where you're living is so gorgeously Australian.  It's Balmain we're in now, and there's something about it I hadn't really had a sense of ever. . . . a timelessness.   a sense that a horse and cart is making the clop clopping noise behind you,  and for me, a poignant feeling not only of my own McClean heritage which dwelt several generations in NSW but also that my greek and arabic background was so very not unusual in this place.  Lovely.
   Darling street took me along in the heat and as I've told everyone I was totally blown away by the Jacaranda and Frangipani.  Sara was working on a multi-media live performance soundscape piece for uni, called Ze Black Dog Opera so I hung out with her in the studio at school for a bit and then went to visit Dave.

Sydney November 2010

Good morning,

as unaccustomed as I am to public speaking, I'm going to take the floor, strange expression.
Also despite all evidence to the contrary, I'm very much looking forward to thanking my sponsors...  I tell you, it was a funny thing to be sitting in the department of internal affairs at 9 at night before leaving the country, taxi-ing my internal state into a bit of a spin of coffee and sleeplessness, with a security guard sitting next to me 23 Punjabi, Civil Engineer, we talked about our lives, it was like a contemporary play but no-one was shot in the end, and the emergency passport call out team,( who refused to let me pull up the transaction on my internet banking page so they could cross reference the transaction number, preferring instead to phone me from upstairs, interrupting my lesson on the antiquities of Northern India ...  "but before 1896...    hang on" to say, "Hello again Genevieve thanks for your patience, do you remember who served you on Monday, Do you remember what she looked like?" )  Earlier that evening various staff members had paved the way for my callout team to get in touch on the grounds that Internal Affairs had lost my passport application, muttering things into the phone on my behalf to ease the suspicion of the process like, " I don't know, it never got made. . . .Yes it was an error on our part, Yes I just don't know, maybe Gary's department. . ."
      I tried very hard to feel a surge of Bourne Supremacy coming on, and looked around for foothold on the walls security cameras to block, and balconies to jump to through the glass, didn't much like my chances off pulling off my parkeur moves however and the high energy pursuit fantasy effect was subdued largely by the fact that the senior officers "Ok hi Genevieve I'm a senior officer", were all women younger than me shuffling around the passport office in their their polyester slippers and dressing gowns.

       You see previously by four days, Bob Orr and John Pule, rang me to say they were off to visit Dave in Sydney and did I want them to take a message.  In two days they were going.  I slept on it and the next morning I rang them back take me too I said I need to film you guys, sorry to totally crash the party, but you can't go without me, and I have no money but I'll raise the funds.  So as I put it to Martin, touched by the kind philanthropies of my friends and poets and poet friends, I had my air-fare all sorted out.  Then I realised my pasport needed refreshing.  So I raced around a bit, and now I have a new passport with a picture of a harrassed middle aged mania on the face of a woman in it. ( I am secretly pleased when customs officers do a careful double take).
        I raced into Poetry Live all excited and crashed the party there, most happily and strangely they didn't have a guest poet and so kindly they let me take the koha, and encouraged people to buy some pieces of paper from me with writing and pictures and my book Mine sold a few copies, so I left the country at 4am on two hours sleep, with enough to cope and manage, and a plan, and a camera with senheiser shot gun microphone, and stupidly in my socks and shoes and coat.

        four and a half hours later I considered throwing the coat across a Sydney rubbish bin but figured no one would want it unless they were leaving.  Really a second hand goods exchange at the airport would be a good idea.  I fought my way through blindness caused by the temperature and the QVB once I worked out What the QVB Was, and that I was in it; got lost then in a 5 storey high Supré store after buying a giant $5 dollar singlet to live in, exasperated a few locals and arrived in Balmain.  Balmain looks like Spain, downed two excellent coffees (good Australia), and befriended local real estate Agent with easy flattery to get a sense of my spatial surroundings, and rang Nigel from under a Jacaranda tree.  Who picked me up as I was just getting camera ready, and we drove straight over to Bronte Beach to see Dave.

        Wonder, I got quite hot around then, partly because it was 29 degrees in the breeze, and I was all camera operator and not very Australian.  You may have guessed that I haven't visited Australia very often, couple of times in transit, a couple of times to see Dave and Sara, once pregnant once with family, I'd never had more than a day to observe Sydney before, What was that I asked Nigel?  That's the native birdlife he replied. Between us we organized to ambush Dave with the Camera, and up on the balcony of the hospice where he's living.  Dave halted when he saw me out the corner of his eye and wouldn't sit till we had a big hug,