Writing Courses from Janice Marriott
February 2023 Newsletter
I took this photo two days after Auckland’s Friday night deluge. When the sun came out – temporarily – on Sunday afternoon I noticed this sunflower was bending but not broken. Everything else was flattened. It wasn’t just rain. The wind had been like a scythe as well. The sunflower was, before that Friday, the tallest plant in the garden, far taller than I can reach with up-stretched arms. It was now swaying alarmingly and needed help. I pulled a pole out of the beans. Thy had been beaten into a tangled mess at the bottom of their poles. I pushed the bean pole into the jelly-like soil next to the sunflower, tied the two together and – the sunflower is still there, upright, still growing, nearly touching the powerlines, having weathered many more wind gusts! That’s my image for your 2023 writing year. Don’t give up. Keep growing. And I’ll be your bean pole.
Holiday reading
Holidays can be a fine time to read. Instead of lying under a sun umbrella I spent some of the rainy days indoors reading Mike Herron’s comic spy thrillers. I love his colourful metaphors. But now I’m reading memoir. Insomniac City by Bill Hayes is a beautiful example of a string of anecdotes interwoven with short dialogue and lists. It’s about his time with Oliver Sacks at the end of Oliver’s life, and mainly about New York. I loved it.
I also discovered Lauren Groff, a fine novelist. Anyone else found some new authors this holiday?
Recommendation from a client:
“I love how science is presented in the series ‘The Magic School Bus’, by Joanna Cole and feel that children will retain the serious message when they are entertained by their research.”
Quotes to recharge your batteries
Here’s one from Oliver Sacks:
“The most we can do is to write – intelligently, creatively, critically, evocatively – about what it is like living in the world at this time.”
“The amount of minute and delicate joy I get out of watching people and things … is simply enormous, the detail of life, the life of life.”
Katherine Mansfield – in her journal.
Life is not about finding yourself; it’s about creating yourself.
Somethings to think about
ChatGPT is the latest project released by OpenAI, a San Francisco company that also has created a program that generates art. It’s been in the news a lot recently because it can write your essays for you, or your novels. And it can imitate your own style or write in the style of any writer you choose. Scary? Yes. It has created a debate in the education world about how a teacher can assess a student’s work. How do they know it is the student’s? And in the writing world it means there could well be thousands of versions of popular novels suddenly self published.. It means we must value originality more than everything else. An original viewpoint, a brand new way of looking at the world and recording it in whatever media you choose, is always going to break new ground. Let’s hope the Chatbot isn’t showing original thought yet.
Whisper is a useful tool if you are transcribing interviews. It is open sourced so you don’t pay for it. It will transcribe speech into over ninety languages.
And still in the tech world: Have any of you any experience of Booktok? Do you use it? Is it helpful?
Somethings for those who write Poetry
Congratulations to Sophia Wilson on the publication of Sea Skins.
It’s available on the flying islands website although I found it very difficult to order online.
Poet Charles Simic died this week, aged eighty-four. He had been the United States Poet Laureate and won the Pulitzer Prize. His work is described as “a trove of surreal, philosophical verse, melancholy yet marked by a profound sense of humour and joie de vivre, in which the everyday mingles with the existential.”
Poetry quotes
“Being taken by surprise is one of the fundamental experiences for any poet writing any poem. You know you are in the grip of a poem when it—the subject, the terrain you are entering, traversing—reorients you and puts you before a question that you did not know existed. You are irrevocably changed. One writes to be so changed. The silence you break to enter the poem is never the same silence closing over again when the voice reënters the silence. The poem is an action you have taken and an experience you’ve undergone. You’re not the same person you were when you entered the poem.”
Jorie Graham – a poet I’ve just discovered.
A poetry client drew my attention to an image from a Mary Oliver poem:
“I am in love with the ocean
lifting her thousands of
white hats
in the chop of the storm.”
I love it when a client draws my attention to something I didn’t know.
This leads nicely to the next topic:
Stretch your vocabulary this year.
Thank you, poetry client, for this gem, a word I didn’t know that was in a beautiful poem she wrote:
“Sashiko is a specific way of mending holes in clothes (Japanese) to make them pretty in the mending. I guess a textile form of kintsugi.”
Share with us, either in the newsletter or the Facebook page, your favourite new words.
Derivations too are important and oh so interesting to appreciate more how language is built up.
Here’s one I came across this summer:
Halcyon days. It wasn’t until I read a book on Greek mythology that I discovered the halcyon was a mythical bird, like a kingfisher, that hatched its eggs in a nest floating on calm seas during the winter solstice – hence the term halcyon days.
Text Publishing Prize
The Text Prize for Young Adult and Children’s Writing is an annual $10,000 prize awarded to an outstanding unpublished manuscript from Australia and New Zealand, either fiction or nonfiction.
A Go Write Now client has been a previous winner.
The winner will receive a publishing contract with Text and a $10,000 advance against royalties.
SUBMISSIONS CLOSE: Monday 20 February 2023
For more details: WWW.TEXTPUBLISHING.COM.AU
For those who write for children
Most popular Children’s books of 2023, according to the Dorothy Butler Bookshop:
“Number 1 spot went to our all time best-seller The Noisy Book,
second place (by one book) went to The Memory Thief by Auckland author Leonie Agnew . This highly original and all-consuming story won the Junior Fiction Prize at the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults.”
6 out of the 10 bestsellers in this children’s bookshop in Auckland were NZ published books. Great.
A student who has completed the course told me, in answer to the question, What do you like about writing:
“EVERYTHING! Being alone is my favourite thing. Living inside my head used to be a curse, and now it’s my craft. Creating is my forte. Meals, gardens, garments, families, ideas, etc. Now stories. Crafting something that can move people, inspire change, give a situation humour, teach, or entertain gives me great satisfaction.”
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More holiday reading
In the fourth century, Evagrius Ponticus, himself an avid reader, described a common scene in the monasteries where he lived in Jerusalem and the Nile Delta: a
monk who was supposed to be reading “yawns a lot and readily drifts off into sleep; he rubs his eyes and stretches his arms; turning his eyes away from the book, he stares at the wall and again goes back to read for a while; leafing through the pages, he looks curiously for the end of texts, he counts the folios and calculates the number of gatherings, finds fault with the writing and the ornamentation. Later, he closes the book and puts it under his head and falls asleep.”
Sounds a familiar practice?
Evagrius had a name for this inability to focus—acedia—and scholars now variously define it as depression (the so-called noonday demon) or spiritual ennui (a kind of sloth). Acedia wasn’t caused by books exclusively, since a monk could suffer from it even without reading, but the book was initially as suspect a technology as the smartphone is today. Evagrius argued that demons were cold, so they drew close to monks for warmth, touching their eyes and making them drowsy, especially while they were reading.
I leave you with this quote and another image from the garden:
“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
Anais Nin
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Although it is already February it is the beginning of my writing and mentoring year. So I’m hoping you all have made achievable new year resolutions and are looking forward to a year of positive results. One advantage of constant rainfall is that the desk and the computer or note book suddenly seem more attractive than the great outdoors.
