Showing posts with label The Oceanic Feeling. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Oceanic Feeling. Show all posts

Sunday, November 06, 2022

James Family Values


Barry Sonnenfeld, dir.: Addams Family Values (1993)
June 17, 1905

Dear Mr. Johnson:

Just back from three months in Europe, I find your letter of May 16th awaiting me, with the very flattering news of my election into the Academy of Arts and Letters. I own that this reply gives me terrible searchings of the heart.

On the one hand the lust of distinction and the craving to be yoked in one Social body with so many illustrious names tempt me to say “yes.” On the other, bidding me say “no,” there is my life‐long practice of not letting my name figure where there is not some definite work doing in which I am willing to bear a share; and there is my life‐long professional habit of preaching against the world and its vanities.

I am not informed that this Academy has any very definite work cut out for it of the sort in which I could bear a useful part; and it suggests
tant soit peu the notion of an organization for the mere purpose of distinguishing certain individuals (with their own connivance) and enabling them to say to the world at large “we are in and you are out.”

Ought a preacher against vanities to succumb to such a lure at the very first call? Ought he not rather to “refrain, renounce, abstain,” even tho it seem a sour and ungenial act? On the whole it seems to me that for a philosopher with my pretensions to austerity and righteousness, the only consistent course is to give up this particular vanity, and treat myself as unworthy of the honour, which I assuredly am. And I am the more encouraged to this course by the fact that my younger and shallower and vainer brother is already in the Academy, and that if I were there too, the other families represented might think the James influence too rank and strong.

Let me go, then, I pray you, “release me and restore me to the ground.” If you knew how greatly against the grain these duty‐inspired lines are written, you would not deem me unfriendly or ungenial, but only a little cracked.

By the same token, I think that I ought to resign from the Institute (in which I have played so inactive a part) which act I herewith also perform.

Believe me, dear Mr. Johnson, with longing regret,
heroically yours,

WILLIAM JAMES

Cambridge, Mass.


- Quoted from Letters to the Editor. The New York Times (April 16, 1972)


R. W. B. Lewis: The Jameses: A Family Narrative (1991)


I think you'll agree that this is quite an odd letter to send to someone inviting you to join their organisation - all the more so given that William James had already agreed to be one of the founding members of the American Institute of Arts and Letters some years before.

What can have motivated it? Was it really an expression of humility on his part, or was it - as Leon Edel, in his immense, magisterial five-volume biography of Henry James (1953-1972), suggests - because his "younger and shallower and vainer brother" was already in the Academy: i.e. had been asked first?

It's important to stress that William James was 63 at the time, with a worldwide reputation as one of the most influential psychologists and philosophers then living. His "younger and shallower and vainer brother", Henry, was 62, and already seen as a potential candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, for which he was nominated in 1911, 1912, and 1916.

William himself, in context, characterises his own reaction to this insult - an Academy daring to offer priority to his younger brother - as "a bit cracked." His choice of words in describing the possible "James influence" on that institution as "too rank and strong" is also strangely visceral - as if there were something lurking in his family background which literally sickened him.

I've written elsewhere about the mountain of books by and about Henry James collected by me over the years. Which is yet another reason for being surprised at Williams' characterisation of this "Master of nuance and scruple" (in W. H. Auden's phrase), this "great and talkative man," as a "younger and shallower and vainer brother." Vain, yes, perhaps - younger, definitely - but shallow? The mind boggles.

The family tree of the Jameses was more or less as follows ("A shilling life will give you all the facts" - Auden again):

On July 28, 1840, [Henry James Sr. (1811–1882), an American theologican and Swedenborgian mystic], was married to Mary Robertson Walsh (1810–1882), the sister of a fellow Princeton seminarian, by the mayor of New York ... The couple lived in New York, and together had five children:
  1. William James (1842–1910), a philosopher and psychologist, and the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States.
  2. Henry James Jr. (1843–1916), an author considered to be among the greatest novelists in the English language ...
  3. Garth Wilkinson "Wilkie" James (1845–1883) ...
  4. Robertson "Bob" James (1846–1910) ...
  5. Alice James (1848–1892), a writer and teacher who became well known for her diary published posthumously in 1934 ...
- Wikipedia: Henry James Sr.
[It could almost pass for a picture of Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes, couldn't it? The article I borrowed this image from is even entitled "Henry James’s Smarter Older Brother." And is it just me, or is there something a little territorial in the way William is trying to tower over his brother, while Henry obligingly tilts his head to try and look as small as possible? It's like two cats establishing precedence when they meet in the backyard.]
I guess what interests me most about the James family, though, is not so much the primeval struggle for dominance between the two eldest brothers - it's a psychological commonplace that a second child tries to distinguish him or her self as much as possible from their older sibling. No, it's how that pattern affects the other children that concerns me.

And, yes, I am the youngest in a family of four children: my eldest brother embodies scientific method and logic; the next brother down is completely dedicated to creative writing and the exercise of the existential will; the next down, my sister, was an invalid a little like Alice James, very gifted artistically but unable to deal with the stresses of the workaday world.

So what was left for me, the youngest child? The necessity of avoiding all of these prior choices - in part, or wholly - in order to construct my own independent existence. And how successful have I been? Well, I'm not really in a position to judge: but all I can say is that I believe that your place in the succession, from first to last, has a massive influence on your own individual process of individuation, especially in families with a very dominant ethos: like the Jameses, or the Manns, or (for that matter) the Rosses.


Viktor Mann: Wir waren fünf. Bildnis der Familie Mann [There were five of us: A Mann Family Album] (1949)
Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann (1840–1891), Lübeck merchant and senator, married Júlia da Silva Bruhns (1851–1923), a German-Brazilian writer. Together they had five children:
  1. [Luiz] Heinrich Mann (1871–1950), author, president of the fine poetry division of the Prussian Academy of Arts ...
  2. [Paul] Thomas Mann (1875–1955), author, Nobel Prize for Literature laureate in 1929 ...
  3. Julia Elisabeth Therese ['Lula'] Mann (1877–1927), married Josef Löhr (1862–1922), banker. She committed suicide by hanging herself at the age of 50.
  4. Carla [Augusta Olga Maria] Mann (1881–1910), actress. She committed suicide by taking poison at the age of 29.
  5. Karl Viktor Mann (1890–1949), economist, married Magdalena Nelly Kilian (1895–1962).
- Wikipedia: The Mann Family
[In this picture, taken around 1902, Heinrich seems still to be trying to assert dominance over Thomas. He was, after all, a well-known writer and cultural figure by this time. He'd already published a number of books. Thomas, by contrast, had only published one novel, but it was Buddenbrooks, a massively influential work which would eventually earn him the Nobel Prize. Is he already conscious, here, of biding his time?]
You see what I mean about the possible perilous effects of family dynamics? First Carla, then Lula, both sisters, both suicides. Carla was conscious that her acting career was not going as she'd planned: she had little hope left of rivalling her two elder brothers. Whatever miseries drove her to the final act, it cast a long shadow over the whole family. And, then, of course, Lula followed her example seventeen years later.

Thomas Mann's eldest son, Klaus, another writer, who'd striven all his life to get out from under his father's long shadow, would commit suicide in his turn in 1949. He, too, had lived much of his life in a closer-than-close conspiracy with his older sister Erika, a well-known actress married - for passport reasons - to homosexual poet W. H. Auden.

So what am I trying to say about this succession of family tragedies? Nothing to belittle or attempt to 'explain' them, I assure you. Let's return to the Jameses in an effort to make the point a little clearer.


Marie Leon: Henry and William James (early 1900s)


William and Henry had their intense rivalry, co-existing with a genuine love for each other, to keep them going. But what of the rest of the family?

You'll note that both brothers were just of an age to be eligible to join up for the American Civil War (1861-65) - William 19, Henry 18 - when it first broke out. Henry bowed out as the result of an 'obscure hurt', a phrase which generations of critics interpreted to mean some kind of debilitating accident in the genital regions: a little like the hero of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926). It explained a lot.

However, his biographer Leon Edel has deduced from careful sorting of the evidence that it was far more likely to have been a bad back. In any case, it was enough to spare him from joining the forces in any capacity whatsoever. Was it residual guilt over this that explains his rather patronising review of Walt Whitman's poetry book Drum-taps (1865), a record of the older poet's hospital visits and tending of wounded soldiers during the war? Certainly in later life Henry felt deeply ashamed at having so missed the merits of Whitman's work when he first encountered it.

William, by contrast, was already at Harvard, where he made sure he had enough to do in the scientific arena to make it quite impossible for him to find leisure to take note of the war. Nor was he alone in this. As was the case during the Vietnam war, very few university students in the North actually joined the colours. It was mostly those with manual jobs who marched off to the front.


Jane Maher: Biography of Broken Fortunes (1986)


It was Wilkie and Bob, their two younger brothers, who actually joined up. In her book Biography of Broken Fortunes: Wilkie and Bob, Brothers of William, Henry, and Alice James, Jane Maher traces the sorry saga of their lives thereafter: their abortive attempts to be accepted on their own terms, their business and other failures. Wilkie went bankrupt, was left out of his father's will, and died at the early age of 38. "Unsuccessful at poetry and painting, Bob, an alcoholic with a violent temper, spent many years in asylums, and died at 63, not long before his brother William," as her blurb has it.

But that's not really the whole story. It's important to note here that both brothers were legitimate war heroes, men of honour and principle, and that many of their subsequent difficulties ought properly to be attributed to post-traumatic stress. Both volunteered to serve as officers in Massachusetts' newly-formed Black regiments. As Wilkie put it in a speech to Union Veterans many years later:
When I went to war I was a boy of 17 years of age, the son of parents devoted to the cause of the Union and the abolition of slavery. I had been brought up in the belief that slavery was a monstrous wrong, its destruction worthy of a man’s best efforts, even unto the laying down of life.
Wilkie subsequently took part in the heroic (if misguided) Union assault on Battery Wagner in 1863 - the subject of the 1989 civil war film Glory - and was only a few steps behind Colonel Robert Shaw when he died.
Gathering together a knot of men after the suspense of a few seconds, I waved my sword for a further charge toward the living line of fire above us. We had gone then some thirty yards ... Suddenly a shell tore my side. In the frenzy of excitement, it seemed a painless visitation … A still further advance brought us to the second obstruction … The enemy’s fire did not abate for this crossing, and here it was I received my second wound, a canister ball in my foot.
He did eventually recover from his wounds, but walked with a limp for the rest of his life.

Bob, too, saw action in the sea islands off coastal South Carolina and Georgia, and nearly died of sunstroke while campaigning in Florida. Little was done by their family after the war to assist them in their transition to civilian life.

When their father decided to buy some land in Florida which he intended to farm with the help of freed slaves, Wilkie was put in charge of the venture. Bob joined him just before local hostility and bad financial conditions put an end to the experiment. They eventually both ended up working for the same railroad in Wisconsin.

Were they failures? In the material sense, perhaps yes. But as Henry remarked (a little guiltily?) of Wilkie:
"He is not particularly successful, as success is measured in this country; but he is always rotund and good-natured and delightful."
- quoted in Carl Swanson, Milwaukee Independent (2021)
As for Bob, his alcoholism gradually estranged him from his family, and:
In 1885 he returned to Concord to become, in the quarter-century remaining to him, an amiable dilettante, painting, writing poetry and endearing himself as a conversationalist of remarkable powers.
- Edwin M. Yoder, The Washington Post (1986)
Henry James found this brother's conversation, too, "charged with natural life, perception, humor and color ... the equivalent, for fine animation, of William's epistolary prowess."


Alice James (1848-1892)


What, then, of Alice, the youngest of the James siblings? Well, in many ways she had the oddest destiny of all. She became a professional invalid in the High Victorian manner: like the sofa-bound Signora Neroni in Trollope's Barchester Towers (1857), or (for that matter), the crippled heir of Redclyffe in Charlotte M. Yonge's famous novel.


Alice James & Katharine Loring (Leamington Spa, 1890)


William, the psychologist, was largely unimpressed by her vapours, but empathetic Henry lavished her with attention. It was mainly for that reason that she shifted her residence to Britain after their parents' death. She also wrote an exceptionally subtle and (at times) acerbic diary, which has become a classic in its own right.

Subsequent biographers and critics, Jean Strouse and Susan Sontag among them, have veered between sympathy and impatience with "Alice-as-icon and Alice-as-victim". She did, however, at least for a time, succeed in putting herself at the centre of the family discourse - which is more than her other two brothers, Wilkie and Bob, ever managed to do.


Leon Edel, ed. The Diary of Alice James (1964)






Anne Ross: Poinsettia: A Mermaid's Tale (2013)


My own sister, Anne Mairi Ross (1961-1991), a gifted writer and artist, took her own life some three decades ago now. The rest of us rage on. Surviving such family conflicts can be a difficult thing to achieve, and it's therefore with more than an Academic interest that I pore over the histories of the Jameses and the Manns - as well as those of various other creative families, the Bells (Julian and Quentin), the Powyses (John, Theodore, Llewellyn and their eight siblings).

I'm not so naïve as to think that such analogues could ever account for the complexities of any human life, but I'm not sure it's really feasible to ignore the similarities in all these Freudian sibling dramas, either.

I'd like to conclude with a poem from my latest book, The Oceanic Feeling. This one comes from the section called "Family plot," which begins with the following epigraph:
These works of fiction, which seem so full of hostility, are none of them really so badly intended … they still preserve, under a slight disguise, the child’s original affection for his parents. The faithlessness and ingratitude are only apparent.

– Sigmund Freud, ‘Family Romances’ (1909)

Jack Ross: The Oceanic Feeling (2021)


Oh br/other!


My eldest brother is flying up

to Auckland
for the weekend
to see my mother

Bronwyn is flying down
to see her sister
in Wellington on Friday

coincidence? hardly
Bronwyn’s younger brother
arrives today

last time we stayed with him
I had a tantrum
and wouldn’t sleep another night

under his roof
I read a thesis recently
on placing far less stress

on Oedipus
the br/other was the term
the author coined

for his new theory
Luke, I am your father!
try your brother

then the sparks will fly  



Anne Ross: Poinsettia (2013)






Thursday, May 20, 2021

The Oceanic Feeling on Paula Green's NZ Poetry Shelf



Local poet and longtime poetry supporter Paula Green has just posted a series of readings by me from my latest poetry book on her blog the NZ Poetry Shelf:






Jack Ross reads four poems from The Oceanic Feeling, Salt & Greyboy Press, 2021:



Jack Ross works as a senior lecturer in creative writing at Massey University. He is the author of five poetry collections and eight works of fiction, most recently Ghost Stories (Lasavia Publishing, 2019) and The Oceanic Feeling (Salt & Greyboy Press, 2021). He blogs here.

Notes to The Oceanic Feeling



Thanks Paula!

Friday, April 30, 2021

Takapuna Poetry Tour - Saturday 8 May, 2-4 pm



If you're at a loose end next Saturday, why not try one of the walks in Auckland's Urban Walking Festival? In fact - hint, hint - you might choose the one that I'm involved with, the Takapuna Poetry Tour.

The walk is free, but you're asked to book at this link to give some approximate idea of numbers. Here's Festival Director Melissa Laing's description of the event:



In the mid 20th Century Takapuna was the home to many of New Zealand's significant writers, poets, and playwrights, including Frank Sargeson, Bruce Mason, Janet Frame, and Karl Wolfskehl. The works they wrote influenced the shape of New Zealand literature for generations to come. The Takapuna Poetry Tour features writers performing poems in response to Takapuna’s literary history and urban future. Join us for spoken word and poetry on the streets.

Our poets include: Zak Devey, Amèlia Homs Ferrer, Renee Liang, Elizabeth Morton, Kiri Piahana-Wong, Ruby Porter, and Jack Ross.

Duration: 90 min
Access: Wheel Accessible

The Takapuna Poetry Tour is part of a day of activities presented in partnership with 38 Hurstmere, including films screened on site.




As you'll see from the map above, there are approximately 8 stops on the route, at each of which one of us poets will regale you with a short performance of one of our (Takapuna-related) works.

I have to say, Shore-ite though I've always been, I did find it a bit challenging to locate any specific references to Takapuna in my collected works, so have decided to settle instead for something more generically "North Shore" in inspiration.

I shall be stationed at stop 3 on the tour, the Frank Sargeson House at no. 14A Esmonde Road. I'm told that we'll be reading in the garden, as his bach is closed for refurbishment at present. I have to say that I'm hoping devoutly that it doesn't rain, as there's no real shelter anywhere near.



Bronwyn Evans: Reading at Frank Sargeson's House (8/5/21)
[image courtesy of photographer & Melissa Laing at Urban Walking Festival 2021]






Here are the proposed stops:



    Bruce Mason: The End of the Golden Weather, dir. Ian Mune (8/5/21: 12-3 pm)


  1. Takapuna Beach / Bottom of Ewen Street - Bruce Mason's Home
    Mason moved to Takapuna at the age of 5 and lived in Ewen St from 1926 until 1938.



  2. Paul Estcourt: Kevin Ireland (2007)


  3. 9 Rewiti Ave - Kevin Ireland's home in the 1940s



  4. 14A Esmonde Rd - Frank Sargeson House
    Janet Frame also lived here in a shed in 1955-56, while she worked on her first novel, Owls Do Cry. We'll be reading in the garden, as the house is closed at present.



  5. Rachel Barrowman: Mason (2004)


  6. 24 Tennyson Ave - R. A. K. Mason's house
    We'll do the reading in the car park of 22 Tennyson Ave, which is a medical cannabis practice beside Mason's old house. NB: Karl Wolfskehl also lived near here, on the corner of Burns Ave and Bracken Ave.



  7. Takapuna Bowling Club and Tennis Courts - not yet confirmed



  8. Brett Graham: Mataoho Wall (2012)


  9. Hurstmere Green Park
    This space was built in 2013 as part of a revitalisation of Takapuna, creating better town centre beach connections. It contains a text work: "Story Wall,” by Brett Graham, which concerns the myth of the origins of Lake Pupuke and Rangitoto.



  10. 38 Hurstmere
    "A transitional space and home for tactical urbanism and placemaking, the first phase of a redevelopment of public land in Takapuna’s City Centre – a place for all of Takapuna.”



  11. Christine Young: Soapbox (2019)


  12. Soap Box, Killarney Park - (a possible extension to the walk)
    This sculpture was made to mark 125 years of women's suffrage





Jack Ross: The Oceanic Feeling (2021)


Actually, I tell a lie, I have managed to located a poem from my latest collection, The Oceanic Feeling, which references some of my feelings about Takapuna. I'm not sure that it's entirely appropriate to the occasion, though, so will include it here instead:



Anthony Minghella, dir.: Truly Madly Deeply (1991)


Rather a shock

i.m. Alan Rickman (1947-2016)


to think it’s been 25 years since
Truly Madly Deeply
1991

my sister died
or rather
killed herself

so hungry ghosts
seemed documentary realism
to me

living by Lake Pupuke
with its gigantic eels
and those students next door

who had to pump up the stereo
to psych themselves
into going out

every evening
1991
an unhappy time

as Rickman said
roles win Oscars
actors don’t

that swing inscribed for
Alice who used to play here
that makes the other parents

hold onto their kids
so tight
as though death were an infection

they might pick up







Te Ara: Lake Pupuke


Saturday, March 20, 2021

The Oceanic Feeling - Pictures from a Booklaunch



Cover image: Katharina Jaeger / Cover design: William Bardebes (2020)
[All Photographs by William Bardebes (11/3/21)]


The Oceanic Feeling. Drawings by Katharina Jaeger. Afterword by Bronwyn Lloyd.
ISBN 978-0-473-55801-7. Auckland: Salt & Greyboy Press, 2021. 72 pp.


So Bronwyn and I drove down to Hamilton last Thursday with our good friend Liz Morton for the dual launch of Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2021 and my own new poetry book The Oceanic Feeling.





Poppies Bookshop Hamilton
[l-to-r: Mark Houlahan, Aimee-Jane Anderson-O'Connor, Alison Southby, Bronwyn Lloyd, Janet Charman]


Luckily my publishers at Salt & Greyboy Press, William Bardebes and Emma Smith, were able to come down as well - and the former got a number of pictures of the event.





Tracey Slaughter launching the book






& me reading from it


So what is this "Oceanic Feeling," anyway?



J. M. Masson: The Oceanic Feeling (1980)


Here's a book on the subject by Sanskritist and animal-expert Jeffrey Masson. To quote my own abstract (alas, those of us in Academia do have to compose such statements when claiming such works as 'creative research'):
In a 1927 letter to Sigmund Freud, French writer Romain Rolland coined the term "the oceanic feeling" as a way of referring to that "sensation of ‘eternity’," of "being one with the external world as a whole," which underlies all religious belief (but does not necessarily depend on it). In his reply, Freud described this as a simple characterisation of the feeling an infant has before it learns there are any other people in the world.
Of course, those of us who live in Oceania, may have our own alternative interpretations of the phrase. This, at any rate, is mine.




Huge, heartfelt thanks, then, to everyone who worked so hard to make this event a success: Tracey Slaughter, for her luminous launch speech (and for inviting me along in the first place); Katharina Jaeger, for the use of her beautiful images in the book; Bronwyn Lloyd, for her afterword, not to mention her imperturbability in the midst of crisis; William Bardebes, for his amazing book design, as well as for rushing the copies down-country in time for the launch; Alison Southby for offering to sell it at her delightful bookshop Poppies Hamilton; and (of course) to all those who turned up on the day for the Yearbook launch, and kindly stayed on for this part of the event.















Thursday, February 18, 2021

Launch of The Oceanic Feeling - Thursday 11 March



Cover image: Katharina Jaeger / Cover design: William Bardebes (2020)

The Oceanic Feeling. Drawings by Katharina Jaeger. Afterword by Bronwyn Lloyd.
ISBN 978-0-473-55801-7. Auckland: Salt & Greyboy Press, 2021. 72 pp.


[I'm going out on a limb here and gambling on our present COVID-19 Level 2 status to assume that this event will be permitted to go ahead. You might be best to wait on confirmation of that before booking your fare to Hamilton, though. I think we should come in under the 100 participants restriction, but of course social distancing will have to be considered as well.]

Tracey Slaughter has very kindly invited me to piggyback the breaking of a bottle of champagne over the bow of my new book of poems onto the launch event for her first issue of Poetry New Zealand Yearbook as Managing Editor. Here are the details:





Venue: Poppies Bookshop Hamilton

Time: Thursday 11 March, 5.30 onwards

All welcome!




So what exactly is this book? It contains poems written over the past seven years or so, roughly the period I myself was editing Poetry New Zealand, with illustrations from Katharina Jaeger, and an afterword by Bronwyn Lloyd, beautifully produced by William Bardebes and Emma Smith at Salt & Greyboy Press.

Here's what the blurb has to say:




Blurb:
Jack Ross’s latest collection combines poems about ‘families – and how to survive them’ (in John Cleese’s phrase) with darkly humorous reflections on Academia and various other aspects of modern life. It concludes with some translations from Boris Pasternak and Guillaume Apollinaire.

The book also includes a suite of drawings by Swiss-New Zealand Artist Katharina Jaeger, ably explicated in an Afterword by Art Writer Bronwyn Lloyd.

'… picture yourself on a Gold Coast beach, the wind idly leafing through the pages of a much-annotated copy of Benjamin’s Arcades Project on your lap; as ‘Baudelaire’ flashes by in your peripheral vision, you disinterestedly observe a sleek conferential shark feeding – though far from frenziedly – on a smorgasbord of swimmers, whose names end with unstressed vowels and whose togs are at least a size too small. The water is the colour of an $8 bottle of rosé. I find reading Ross – to borrow his victims’ parlance – kind of like that.'

- Robert McLean, Landfall Review Online





Born in Zurich in 1964, Katharina Jaeger studied art at Kunstgewerbeschule Zurich before emigrating to New Zealand in 1986. She has a Bachelor of Design from Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology (now Ara Institute of Canterbury), where she currently teaches in the Visual Arts Programme. Katharina has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally for over two decades. She was a finalist for the Parkin Drawing Prize in 2017 and her most recent solo exhibition, Billow, was held at PG Gallery 192 in September 2019.

Bronwyn Lloyd is a freelance art writer and textile artist who lives in Mairangi Bay. She completed a PhD on Rita Angus’s Goddess paintings at the University of Auckland in 2010. Since 1999 Bronwyn has been publishing articles and catalogue essays on New Zealand painting, applied art and design, as well as fiction: her first book of short stories, The Second Location, was published in 2011 by Titus Books. Her series of needlepoint amulets, Under the Protection, was exhibited at Masterworks Gallery in November 2020.

Jack Ross has published five poetry collections, three novels, three novellas, and three books of short fiction, most recently Ghost Stories (2019). He was managing editor of Poetry New Zealand from 2014-2019, and has edited numerous other books, anthologies, and literary journals. He lives in Mairangi Bay on Auckland’s North Shore and teaches creative writing at Massey University.



Crissi Blair: Salt & Greyboy Press (2019)


So there you go. The gang will all be there. There'll be readings and book-signings by Tracey, me, Aimee Jane, and a host of others - it'll be standing room only, and a night to remember. As Tracey has written about the work she's been receiving over the past year of COVID-19 lockdowns and confusion:
They wrote like their breath depended on it! Poem after poem that came in showed the traces of writers using language in its rawest form — to reach out, to make human contact, to leave some skin-temperature mark. When we were cut off from real presence, when we were barred from crossing thresholds, we sent language instead ...
I don't think that's something you'll be wanting to miss.