Sunday, May 22, 2011

Author Emma Neale on the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival

Spook Service? Auckland Readers’ and Writers’ Festival 2011


Like many writers, I’ve had a behind-the-festival festival, of coffees with writer friends; taxi-rides with poets and publishers; lobby conversations with novelists; walks through central Auckland with genial, clever film critics; of wines that marry silk and cheekiness (not to mention citrus and cynicism) with writers, publishers, festival organisers and volunteers.
I’ve sat in green rooms backstage with other panelists, in that heightened, shimmering, surreal, anxious space of the minutes before a public performance. In these moments I’ve longed for a costume, grease-paint, wig, props: all the ceremonial trappings of a stage show that help an actor get into character. I’ve longed for a script, with lines. (Hence poetry readings can feel less stressful than discussions.) Waiting backstage at a writers’ festival is something more like waiting for a job interview: where you know you are going to have to perform a version of yourself, but the lines haven’t been written yet, because readers’ curiosity can come spinning round all sorts of unexpected corners.

Before the panel talk with Carol Beu, Charlotte Randall and Laurence Fearnley, I’d crammed in a bit of breathless ‘I’m going to fail the exam!’ revision of a lot of my non-fiction research so that I could answer questions about everything from the Forbidden Experiment, feral children, hypertrichosis, gigantism, acromegaly and selective or traumatic mutism. I should have written it all up on my trouser cuffs, and done what they tell you to do in exams: which is to twist what you have learned to suit the question.
Because when I was asked about where Bu’s character came from, instead of talking about the way he grew  from a number of influences, rumours, sources, known phenomena, fantastic possibilities, I found myself calling on personal anecdotes. They told the truth: but they told it slant, and it was a different slant from the one I’d meant to take. Sometimes writers even hide from themselves. There is something in this, perhaps, of Bu’s own elusiveness – and the fact that the contact he makes with people is fleeting, restless; that he yearns for, yet can’t achieve genuine intimacy. He’s like a paper boat constantly pushed off course, slowed and entangled by the sticks and stones and water-weed it nudges into.

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