Showing posts with label Catherine Chidgey. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Catherine Chidgey. Show all posts

Monday, May 30, 2016

The Age of Slaughter



Tracey & me

Tracey Slaughter's Booklaunch
[26/5/16]


So on Thursday Bronwyn and I drove down to Hamilton for the launch of Tracey Slaughter's latest book, deleted scenes for lovers.

Here's Tracey with her book (unless otherwise noted, all the pictures in this post have been borrowed from Mayhem Literary Journal's facebook page):



Tracey & books


The event was very ably MC'ed by Waikato University's own Mark Houlahan:



Mark Houlahan


It was very well attended:



The Crowd in the Gallery


The speakers included her publisher, Fergus Barrowman, of Victoria University Press:



Fergus Barrowman


Distinguished novelist (and Tracey's good friend) Catherine Chidgey:



Catherine Chidgey


And also me, making the official launch speech:



Me launching the book


And, for those of you who are curious, here it is:

Tracey Slaughter. deleted scenes for lovers. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2016.

There are many great New Zealand poets, novelists – and creative writers generally, but I still feel confident in claiming that the short story is the genre in which we’ve most distinguished ourselves.

To my mind, these are the four great epochs of the New Zealand short story:

First (of course) the Age of Mansfield: It’s fair to say that the atmospheric intensity of Katherine Mansfield’s fiction was helped by her reading of Chekhov, Flaubert and Maupassant. But I think her work would have developed that way even if she’d never encountered them.

Secondly, the Age of Sargeson: Again, there were outside, mainly American influences on the innovations pioneered here by Frank Sargeson. But his exploration of the literary resources of the New Zealand vernacular – breaking away from dialect as a kind of comic turn – remains revolutionary.

The chronology gets a bit more shaky after that, but the next great age, for me, is the Age of Marshall. Owen Marshall – still with us, fortunately – with his immense body of work exploring the New Zealand experience in all its multifaceted variety, built on the work of previous writers such as Maurice Duggan to present a more consciously symbolic reading of the landscape and mores of the country.

And now we come to the Age of Slaughter. This last category may rouse a bit more controversy. There are, to be sure, many fine practitioners of the art of the short story in New Zealand right now: Breton Dukes, Sue Orr, Alice Tawhai, to name just a few. What is it about Tracey’s work which gives it such extraordinary significance?

It’s not simply a matter of talent – though I would defy anyone to read Tracey’s latest collection, deleted scenes for lovers, which I feel so privileged to be here today to launch, and question the sheer magnitude of her ability as a writer: her ear for language, the mythopoeic intensity of her imagination. No, it’s more of a question, for me, of a paradigm shift.

This is one I’ve been sensing for quite some time, both in the work I receive as an editor, and the kinds of writing I see our students starting to produce – since Tracey and I both work as teachers of Creative Writing.

The Age of Slaughter, for me, has an Apocalyptic air. The authors born into it, or who inhabit it by necessity, feel at home with intense emotion. Unlike the schools of the laconic and the ironic that preceded them, they have no problem with excess, with big themes and extravagant linguistic tropes.

There’s a certain black humour about them, too: like William Faulkner, Tracey writes about situations so devastating that she almost forces us to laugh. Sometimes, as in the passage from a projected memoir with which she won the Landfall essay prize last year, she jets out passages of jewelled prose so intense and dazzling that we hardly notice the banalities of the seventies key party and ranch slider aesthetic that underlies them.

Both Sargeson and Marshall specialised in apparent simplicity: a straightforward surface concealing strange depths. Tracey, by contrast (I would argue), has taken inspiration from Mansfield’s late stories to use the full resources of a poet’s word-palette when painting her complex and devastating scenes. You always have to read a Tracey Slaughter story twice: even then some of its subtleties may lie in wait to ambush you later.

Courage, however, is the word which most frequently comes to my mind when I read Tracey’s work. She goes places others (including myself) are afraid to. The interrogation of the word “consent” in the story of that name, the sheer intensity of the wish for escape and freedom in “How to Leave Your Family,” the dark close of “The Longest Drink in Town” – there’s no holding back in any of these pieces. But neither is there any over-simplification, no failure – above all – to find the “right word, not its second cousin,” which Mark Twain defined as “the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”

If you want to know where New Zealand culture is right now, read Tracey Slaughter. Buy her book; get her to sign it; you won’t regret it. I’ll go further. Even if many of you couldn’t care less about New Zealand writers and their various turf wars and attempts at self-definition (why should you, after all?), if you want to know how it feels to live in this country: to recognise the thousand small details that go to make up a sense of place: the feel of wet flannelette pyjamas on a child who’s wet the bed; how it feels to kiss a smoky mouth you shouldn’t, read Tracey Slaughter.

To say I recommend this book is to put it mildly. I think it’s an indispensable book. This is our Prelude, our That Summer, our The Day Hemingway Died. This is no drawing-room talent we’re talking here: this is Tracey Slaughter. And for better or worse, in all its beauty and complexity, but also its fears and devastations, its intimations of total eclipse, this is the Age of Slaughter.



Steven Toussaint, Catherine Chidgey, Catherine Wallace et al.


Congratulations, Tracey!

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Writers without Borders


[Update - Friday, 2nd August:]



So here are some photos from our most entertaining excursion to Waikato University yesterday (courtesy of Bronwyn). Unfortunately there are none of her, as she was holding the camera the whole time:











[Original post:]




So, if any of you should happen to find yourselves in Hamilton on Thursday, 1st August, towards evening, why not make your way to Waikato University to enjoy this event?




Writers Without Borders

1st Aug 2013 6:30pm


Acclaimed writers Catherine Chidgey, Tracey Slaughter and Jack Ross are joined by visiting US author, Lynn Bloom, for a lively exchange about writing. The writers will read from their work in progress and exchange views on fiction and non-fiction writing. Drinks and nibbles from 6pm, event begins at 6.30pm


Jack Ross


This event funded by the University of Waikato Cultural Committee

Tickets: Gold coin donation appreciated

Venue: Gallagher Academy of Performing Arts
Gate 2B, Knighton Rd, University of Waikato, Hamilton




There's a nice article promoting the event on the Yahoo! NZ News site where you can find out more about it. These are the principal details:


Lynn Z Bloom: The Essay Connection (10th edition: 2012)


Join us at the Gallagher Academy of Performing Arts for a lounge style conversation with four accomplished writers who will be discussing their current work.

Lynn Z. Bloom learned the essentials of writing from books such as Dr. Seuss, (fun); Strunk and E.B. White, (elegant simplicity). She holds the AETNA Chair of Writing at the University of Connecticut and has just received a Fulbright Specialist grant to lecture on Creative Non-fiction in New Zealand. Her latest book, Hot Genres: Alluring nonfiction, is due for publication in 2014.

Catherine Chidgey’s first novel, In a Fishbone Church, won Best First Book at the New Zealand Book Awards, the Betty Trask Award in the UK and Best First Book at the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Among numerous awards, she has held the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship to Menton, France. She has been Writer in Residence at Canterbury, Otago and Waikato & the Wallace Art Centre in Auckland.

Jack Ross is a New Zealand poet and fiction-writer. His publications include four full-length books of poems, numerous poetry chapbooks, three novels, a novella, and two books of short stories. He lectures in English and Creative Writing at Massey University’s Auckland Campus.

Tracey Slaughter’s first collection of poems and short stories, Her Body Rises, was published by Random House in 2005. Her short stories have been widely anthologized and have received numerous awards including BNZ Katherine Mansfield Premier Award in 2004. In 2010 Tracey received the Louis Johnson New Writer’s Bursary. She currently teaches creative writing at Waikato University.

When: Thursday 1 August, 6.30pm
Venue: Te Whare, Gallagher Academy of Performing Arts, University of Waikato
Light refreshments will be provided from 6.00pm



Catherine Chidgey: In a Fishbone Church (1998)


My original suggestion for a name for this event was "Three chords and the truth" - Tracey was pretty happy with being the truth, but I fear the others thought it might sound a bit flippant. We're all planning to have a good time, I can assure you. Whether or not the audience will is more debatable, but I'm sure we'll all do our best to be entertaining ...



Jack Ross: Kingdom of Alt (2010)


Lynn Bloom's visiting New Zealand on a Fulbright scholarship and I'm glad to say that she'll be giving a guest lecture in my Travel Writing course at Massey Albany on the 12th August.



Tracey Slaughter: Her body rises (2005)


Catherine Chidgey and my good friend Dr. Tracey Slaughter are too well known for me to need further introduction here. I am (of course) hugely looking forward to being on the same platform as them!



Paul Theroux: Doctor Slaughter (1985)