Launch of The Dreaming Land by Martin Edmond

(All photos by Dan Liu)

You missed it? Don't worry. In an exciting first for Books in the City, we're offering a podcast of the event. We've asked Simon Comber from Readers Services, who presented on the night, to present it.


On a pleasant spring Tuesday evening in late October people gathered at Central City Library to celebrate the launch of Martin Edmond’s childhood memoir The dreaming land.

Martin Edmond has been writing acclaimed prose works since his debut in 1992, the haunting The autobiography of my father. Other significant works include Chronicle of the unsung (2005) and Dark night: walking with McCahon (2011). The launch of Edmond’s memoir this year coincides with his increasing acknowledgment as one of New Zealand’s best writers. In 2014 he was honoured by the New Zealand Society of Authors for his work, and this year he was the Michael King Writer's fellow.

The initiated and the curious turned up to have a wine in the Atrium before moving in to the Whare wānanga to listen to a discussion between Edmond and Peter Simpson, a former Associate Professor of English at Auckland University with an expert knowledge of, and large passion for New Zealand literature. Simpson had prepared thoughtful engaging questions, and Edmond never failed to reply with warmth and generosity, but what really made the discussion was the rapport between the two, and their obvious mutual respect as writers and scholars.

Stream the podcast to hear the discussion. Either listen via Soundcloud below or search for "Auckland Libraries" in iTunes or on your favourite podcast app to download the episode.

AWRF 2012: Martin Edmond on Creative Non-Fiction

Martin Edmond is one of my favourite characters (yes, he is a writer, but he is a character too) and I wish I had been able to make this workshop. Luckily Simon Comber from Readers Services was there to soak up the experience and dash off this description for us.
 
Martin Edmond's workshop on "creative non-fiction" (a term, he hastened to clarify from the start, which he had not chosen himself and was not particularly fond of ) was more of a freewheeling and fun discussion than a workshop. In a review of Edmond's most recent book, Dark Night: Walking With McCahon, by Justin Paton in The Listener, Edmond's prose style had been described as "Too personal to be called histories" and "too flagrantly imaginative to be called biographies". Edmond’s books, he noted, "look out of place on whatever shelf you put them." Thus it was no surprise that Edmond, a critically acclaimed prose writer, was the man to take this discussion -- even if he found the umbrella term for his own style a little reductive.

Edmond combined personal anecdotes with thoughts on writing in general, and explications of the "rules" of non-fiction. He always welcomed discussion and questions from the 40 or so attendees. He stressed that writing was an action. One was not writing when planning what to write or postulating on writing -- only when engaged in the process. Edmond felt preconceived notions of what one was about to write were often hard to realise, and that the best writing was often a surprise to the writer. He described the main qualities of creative non-fiction as selective truth, the inclusion of suppositions and the utilisation of one's right to speculate. "Perhaps" was a useful word, he contended.

Edmond shared his favourite version of the Greek muses: the pre-Renaissance notion that Mneme (memory), Aoide (voice) and Melete (occasion/practice) were the three muses that together bore art, including writing. He generously shared the story of how he came to writing prose (having tried and struggled to be a poet, by his own self-deprecating admission, for 20 years!) when being asked to speak at his father's funeral. The effortless voice that spilled forth when he got up to talk was the same voice with which he began to write his first book.

Discussion then turned more specifically to the complications of writing a personal non-fiction that may or may not refute other people's versions, and Edmond shared his own experiences in interacting with the family members and friends of people that he had focused on (and creatively speculated on) in his books, and the difficulty in deciding what to include and what not to, from both aesthetic and ethical standpoints. "Of course I've left things out," he admitted, "but they all think I've said too much."

AWRF 2012: McCahon and the Micronaut

Martin Edmond and Gregory O’Brien illuminate the pilgrimages undertaken to get to the heart of two New Zealand artists abroad. In Dark Night: Walking with McCahon (2011) Edmond retraces McCahon’s steps on the 1984 night he went missing in Sydney, a vivid reconstruction knitted together with Edmond’s imagination and intimate knowledge of his adopted hometown. To write A Micronaut in the Wide World: The Imaginative Life and Times of Graham Percy (2011), O’Brien and his family upped sticks to spend three months in Taranaki-born Percy’s London home, where he created many of his extraordinary and best-loved illustrations. -- from the AWRF 2012 brochure.



I have to say that there were times when the writers at the Festival seemed to be playing that game called Statues we used to play as kids; you know, the one where everyone runs around and then someone yells “Stop” and everyone freezes, then everyone runs around again and freezes again, each time in different clumps, and so on and so on. So we had, for example, Martin Edmond, who besides running his solo workshop on Saturday, talked with Gregory O’Brien and Peter Simpson on Friday morning about writing about NZ artists abroad, and then on Sunday afternoon with Anthony McCarten and Anne Kennedy about being an expat, McCarten having talked about his new book the day before with Lily Richards, while Anne Kennedy appeared with Greg O’Brien but not with Martin at the Open Mike event and again at the tribute to Hone Tuwhare, as well as with neither of them at “What the Dickens?”

How well these re-clumpings worked depended a bit on the people involved, how “event-genic” they were, and what connective had been contrived for them. For Emily Perkins and Jeffrey Eugenides, their joint appearance after their solo events, nominally about the future of the novel, was like a well-rehearsed scene in a drawing room comedy. For Gregory O’Brien and Martin Edmond, I don't know, they are both such un-persona people, and their books, despite being about other people, so personal and original, that the joint format hit me as more of a hindrance to getting to the heart of the matter than a help, with Peter Simpson valiantly alternating his, and our, attention.

Who had managed to intimidate the seemingly hard-to-intimidate Peter Simpson? I saw this man in action, here at the library, when the data projector unexpectedly failed just as he was about to present his beautiful book on Leo Bensemann (Fantastica: the world of Leo Bensemann). Every slide appeared as if seen through a green lens, and the IT guy we called just couldn’t understand why that wasn’t okay, after all they were just a lot of landscapes, so it took some time to spur him to action. Peter extemporised 45 minutes of amusing recollections and anecdotes until a new projector was found.

Quite a contrast to the Peter Simpson I saw on stage here, sounding rather like a school-master. “The format will be…” he intoned at the start in his rich baritone, and did he ever keep to it, to the point of cutting Martin Edmond off in the middle of his final line. I guess I never will know how Martin thinks the Australians see the NZ psyche in the setting of Australia.

The last time I saw Martin Edmond on stage at a Festival event, I remember using the word “rumpled” about him - not in the sense of unironed clothes or anything, just an expression of the contrast between him and his taut interviewer Peter Wells. Looking back I think a better word might have been “accidental”.But at “McCahon and the Micronaut” he filed out with Peter Simpson and Greg O’Brien looking positively, how can I describe it, springy, walking very upright, in tennis shoes and a white tee with what I think I recognised as the nzepc Richard Killeen seahorse on the front.

Of his book Dark Night he proudly said, “The reviews of the book said ‘This is a flimsy pretext for a book’. I wish they had said ‘audacious’. I didn’t think it was flimsy. I thought it was audacious.”

And then he told this wonderful story:

“Maggie and I flew in around 3 and decided to go have a glass of wine and a cigarette on K Road. As we were sitting there, three Maori guys, clearly living on the street, ragged and fearsome, came down the street and stopped at our table. ‘Got a cigarette, bro?’ I gave them cigarettes and two of them went off, but the third guy stayed and shook my hand. He said, ‘I’m drifting. I don’t know how to go back home. I had a car accident, lost two of my kids.’ Dark Night is a book about homelessness, and I thought about the Maori guy and I thought he probably would find his way back home, though he didn’t know it. My book in some way is to bring Colin McCahon home.”

Greg O’Brien recalled: “18 months after Graham Percy’s death we went to stay in his apartment in Wimbledon.” “Our friendship continued to grow” as he dug through boxes of thousands of drawings. He worked on the book in the study where Graham Percy’s ashes, spectacles and cellphone reside in a scale replica of the apartment, where he and his wife Mari had lived for twenty-five years, commissioned by his daughter. He found evidence that Graham Percy, during his last years, had used Google Earth to revisit places he’d been when young. A paddock he had walked across in New Zealand.

The AWRF brochure speaks of these two authors as having undertaken “pilgrimages”. Well done, blurb writer, whoever you are. I think it's a good choice of words, implying as it does humility, and a journey without conditions.

Gregory O'Brien concluded, “I hope that Graham lives in the book we made for him.”

And Martin Edmond summed things up thus for Peter Simpson:

(Simpson) “Did the process of writing this book change your view of McCahon?”

“I don’t know if it changed it, but it transformed it. I don’t look at it from the outside now".

AWRF 2009: Martin Edmond

Martin Edmond was a joy. He was "in conversation with" Peter Wells, whose high-strung air, which included at times clutching the arms of his chair like they used to do in the old Star Trek when it was a bumpy ride, was a perfect counterpoint to Martin's rumpledness. That's mood, not look. Because actually Martin was one of the best dressed of the Festival, and his were indisputably the best shoes there. No trapezoidal top seams or toes pointing up into the air, but good old black leather Doc Martens with the chunky rubber treads, neither scuffed nor spit-shined, just an understated saddle soap gleam.

I imagined him showing up in them at someone's house, an ex-railroad shack a kilometre's walk from where the sealed road left off. It would be dusk when he knocked on the door, unexpected, holding a bottle of wine, slapping the dust off the thighs of those dark blue trousers, slightly reminiscent of auto factory workers or Greek fishermen.

He talked about when he was an aspiring novelist "hanging about libraries" and how looking back, he now realises those years - 20 of them - were about finding his voice, which didn't turn out to be that of a fiction writer. "People are always a bit dismayed when they ask you what you write, and you say 'non-fiction'," he said, at which Peter Wells quipped "It's because they were hoping you were Harold Robbins."

The blurb of Martin's new book, The Supply Party, calls it a "quest-memoir". "I have to ask, what is a quest-memoir?", dryly asked noted memoirist P.W. "Oh," said M.E, "It's that the publishers were on to me for the blurb, and people are always confused about where my books go in a bookstore, so I thought I'd invent this new category." I understood "guest-memoir" at first, which works too.

The book looks at the infamous "ill-fated expedition" ("it's never mentioned without being called ill-fated" sighed M.E.) of Burke and Wills, with its 21 tons of luggage including "dandruff brushes for the camels" -- I still don't know if this is a joke or not, which I guess is actually the point. But the writer concentrates his insights on Ludwig Becker, the German scientist who served as the expedition's naturalist. "It's posited on the idea that I could get to know the interior workings of a man who never revealed himself intimately to anyone."

I told him how I had met him at Montana Poetry Day at the Library, how I remembered his very evocative reading of a beautiful poem. "Ah yes," he said. "I read that poem by Alan Brunton, and I muffed the last line. I couldn't get 'magellanic' right." Magellanic, such a Martin Edmond word. So now I have a copy of Luca Antara signed by Martin Edmond, with the annotation "to Karen, on a magellanic day".

"What do you like about writing?" he had been asked.
"I like sentences. I love a well-turned sentence." was the reply.