Here.
Here.
‘When chopping walnuts put them in a sponge tin and chop with a mustard tin. Four edges to chop with, & the tin to keep the walnuts from spilling.’ Genius.
In an earlier blog I showcased the little green notebook with the meticulously copied handy hints. I found, on exploring the cardboard box entitled ‘Old Recipes’, that there is also a red notebook, a teal one, two blues and three black notebooks — enough for each grandadult to have one — full of tip after tip, in no particular order and with no way to access, say, Picnics: ‘When carrying a bottle of milk in a basket, to keep it upright use a bicycle clip fastened through the wicker.’ ‘To keep a pile of sandwiches fresh for some time, put slices of plain bread on top and bottom.’
Or kitchen hacks: ‘Jam substitute. Grate the rind of one lemon & one orange into half a cup of honey. Very nice.’ ‘To give an almond flavour to milk puddings, boil a peach leaf in the milk.’ Who knew!
Raising Kids: ‘When a child is left-handed, to teach her to knit, etc, sit her down opposite you and she will be able to follow your movements.’ (Which doesn’t answer the question of how to teach a right-handed kid or a boy. Nell had a child who needed to learn left-handedness because of malformation in the right. I’m pretty sure the hints came before the child.) ‘When giving a drink to sick children, make a small hole in the top of a screwtop jar & insert a drinking straw. This avoids spills on the bedclothes.’
Pure labour: you’re only going to do this when lovesick or desperate to impress. You’ll need to plan ahead: ‘Rose petal sandwiches. Gather petals as soon as dew is off them – before the heat of the day. Place some in an earthenware dish. Cover with wax paper, then a layer of fresh butter’, (chopped? melted? sliced or smeared?) ‘& another layer of rose petals. Weigh down’ (with a book? a rock? a pound or two of butter?) & leave in a cool place for 24 hours. The butter is now perfumed. Put this on brown bread & butter’ (more butter?) with a few fresh rose petals & press another slice of brown bread on top.’
This recipe is patently not one for hungry farm workers or the kids just home after walking/riding five miles from school. This is food for the subtly attuned or the lovelorn.
Making a book cover is always a bit of a mission. Where do you start? What kind of image do you choose, and how abstract should it be? If you have a committee (publisher Cloud Ink Press, author, designer, booksellers, friends), possibilities can multiply just when you need to narrow down the focus.I had blue in mind from the start, powdery blue with a tinge of grey. Thinking of a passage in the novel that follows a description of Nell’s hard-won flower garden — ‘She needs her … garden plots to speak for her, to speak back to the hills and sky, whose eloquence she has responded to more deeply with each passing year. The garden, she thinks shyly, is her song of praise.’ — I saw the hills of the Maniototo punctuated by flowers.
My rough sketches failed to convince. But designer Caroline Pope did her darnedest. We considered Maniototo-inspired hills by artist Claire Beynon.
We considered the Elizabeth Strout look:
Then, in a drawer in the old family house, I found photos we’d not seen before. Striking images of Nell in her school uniform. The look on her face sums up so much of what the novel wants to convey about her.
We opted for Nell instead of flowers. I conscripted daughter Alex to draw from the photo; the drawing could be superimposed on hills. Alex has a remarkable ability to sketch faces capturing the essence or spark of that person. She recently created a cardboard cover to wrap around the tape of the Ōtepoti Music Compilation she’d organised (a massive job, done brilliantly). I reckon my Dunedin readers will recognise a few of these Ōtepoti musicians.
And voilà, Alex clinched Nell too.
However, the team opted to stick with the photo. We asked designer Caroline Pope to play with that. We considered going psychedelic:
I feel that in our final, more conservative choice — Nell against a photo of Mt Kyeburn under summer snow — we might have clipped Caroline’s wings a little, but if there’s a reprint we’ll have another chance to showcase her design verve and colour flare.
Meanwhile, we have a cover I love, that all of us agreed upon. The drawing will be treasured and used again elsewhere…
I’ve had a rummage through the recipe book drawer at the old family villa. I guess this book was my grandmother Nell’s, and Cakes was the best garnished section. I can imagine the buttery finger pressed to the open page, the quick check: ‘one flat teaspoon of soda, same of cream of tartar’, as she flew around the kitchen. If the oven was hot and ready, she wouldn’t have stopped at Ginger Biscuits (Good), but also made a Fruit Cake and some kind of slice, perhaps the Khaki Cake marked with an X.
The ads in these old recipe books read as a kind of muted horror story. I wonder how much ‘Alumiumware’ the family was persuaded to buy, and if they did use it in the kitchen, how much did they ingest over the years? Likewise the Asbestos board, lauded in another cookbook as versatile for use indoors or out, painted or bare. And then there was potential loss to be reckoned with as you flipped the pages: not of cell phone or high-tech hearing aids, but of limbs and organs. At least each one was given a value.
The cookbook has lost its cover, but I imagine it was put together by some outfit such as the Mother’s Union (which in 1926 became the League of Mothers and Homemakers of New Zealand), and no contribution was overlooked. Take Jugged Hare, below, times three. Mrs Grigg insists that the hare, once skinned, should not be washed. Mrs Adams allows that it be wiped to remove blood, and be cut into pieces each ‘about the size of an egg’. Mrs Nicholls skips the fine detail. Each recipe adds in a second kind of meat: gravy beef; veal forcemeat; bacon. Two recipes include the addition of port wine, two include lemon (rind and juice) and two suggest serving with red currant jelly. I suppose you could also give rabbit the Jugging treatment, but why would you, when it could be Shaped, French, Casseroled, Hot-Potted, Pied, or Stewed in Milk?
Familiarity with the rudiments of baking was assumed. J.D.’s Jam Pudding: The weight of two eggs in butter, sugar and flour, two tablespoons of jam, one teaspoon soda. Mix and boil for two hours. (Good luck!)
I found the little green notebook in the aunts’ kitchen the other day. All written in their mother Nell’s hand with an ink pen (it was that or a pencil back in the 1920s, I guess).
When cutting out georgette on table dip your scissors in hot water before (and during) cutting.
Stew prunes in tea – the flavour will be improved.
I suspect that Nell wrote the little book of handy hints before she got immersed in the hurly-burly of life with children and the farm, when she was green enough to imagine there was a solution to every problem, large or small.
To prevent the fat from soaking into fish when frying, add a tablespoon of vinegar to the pot when it comes to the boil.
To prevent stocks from going back to singles, & be sure of getting double blooms, discard the seeds from both ends of the pods, & sow only the middle ones.
Nell loved the hills hemming the Maniototo and was pained to leave them as abruptly as they did in 1947, when wool prices had plummeted and our grandfather, less experienced in the farming cycles of paucity and plenty, sold the farm without consulting her.
Prevent slipping on icy roads by rubbing a raw potato on the soles and heels of leather shoes.
To make tinned peas taste like fresh ones, wash and drain peas, put a knob of butter in saucepan, add peas, a little salt and sugar & a large sprig of mint, Heat slowly, shaking saucepan round. Add 2 tablespoons of hot water, & the peas are ready for the table.
Our extended family has just returned from Naseby where in the 1960s Aunt F bought half an acre on the northern edge of town – a few miles from what had been the family farm – with a small caravan to park on it. A long-drop hole was dug, a dunny popped over it. Holiday park! There was plenty of room for tents, and a view over the infant hawthorn hedge of Mt Kyeburn and the Ida Range.
A few years later, she bought the old Kyeburn school house and had it trucked up the gravel back roads to the paddock.
Back from Naseby and full family immersion, it’s time for me to approve final tweaks of the manuscript before typesetting, to pep up ‘the socials’ and play with the blog. Thanks, re that, to my brother Hugh who does the background tinkering.
Soak a lamp wick in vinegar & dry before putting in the lamp.
Little girls’ socks sometimes bunch under the feet. To prevent this, draw a cake of damp soap around the child’s ankle, & the socks will stay in place all day.
Cold sou’west rain in late January. Nothing like it to keep a person indoors and contemplating the sedentary work awaiting her. In this case the blog that groans and creaks from under-use.
It always helps to start with an image. (Goes hunting through recent pics…)
These rough strands? Chimney plugs. Earlier in the summer, when indoor fires were still occasionally required in Dunedin, we lit ours. Gusts and tufts of smoke forced their way out through the door seal into the living room. R climbed onto the roof and fished around in the chimney, pulled out ti tree leaves and metres of grass. Relit the fire: smoke went up; smoke came down. Starlings were seen, and heard, scratching about up there. We made more smoke. They did more bird business. Another roof expedition: more vegetation removed. More smoke — inside the house. R capped the chimney with wire netting and called the expert. What you see above is what they retrieved from deep in the flu. Think of the labour. Strand by strand, the starlings gathered and flew and wriggled into the small chimney space and wove and wound, and repeated, trip after trip — in spite of human interference and smoke storms, banging and bad-mouthing. Puts me to shame. About the only area where I’ve manage to practise such pertinacity is in the writing of novels. Scene by scene, line by line. Who knows why. Bird-brained, perhaps.
When we go to Naseby, we walk most evenings up onto Ridge Road. You can see why. The light is in constant flux. The hill at the centre is Mt Kyeburn, the highest point on the sheep station where my grandparents farmed from 1927 to 1947. Danseys Pass Road winds up the valley to its east. It must have been a formidable place to raise five children. These days, we shut up the Naseby family house in winter, knowing that any un-emptied pipes would freeze and that the little woodburner would be inadequate to the task of warming the living-room, let alone further afield. Nell and Herb (as I’ve called him in the novel) built a concrete house at Glenshee — quite a novelty in the 1920s and quite a horror to contemplate from the comfort of the 2020s, since there was no insulation. Dad was given the open-air sun porch to sleep in, year-round. Still, he got a strong constitution.
That’s Nell in white in about 1910 when she would have been 13 and enjoying one of her few high school years. She was called home to help out on the farm. I don’t know what sort of car this is, but as early as 1915, Nell drove a Singer. In the novel the car becomes her passport to freedom, or the version of freedom available to a young woman born a hundred and twenty years ago.
It’s in the contract. I re-activate my website and plump up my social media presence. Nell, the novel of my grandmother, will be published early next year with Cloud Ink Press, I’m delighted to report.
Meanwhile, Ratty has been on the shelf, perusing the Rosa Mira backlist and itching for re-employment. There’s silver on his muzzle now but, unlike me, he’s not at all averse to scampering about on FB and Insta, doing the business.
The website is creaking back into shape. There are a few things yet to remember and figure out, however, we have allies, and here’s a start.
Lockdown day 21. Two weeks ago the grocery shop felt eerie: the spaced-out queue snaking around the carpark; the sanitiser; the distancing; the grim care we were all taking; being barked at for stepping over a blue line; germ phobia between groceries and car then adding bleach between car and aunt, aunt and car (who has the germs? I forget); the sanitiser (blow the nose, sanitise again)… I had a tiny weep for us all.
Then, today, I was at Vege Boys before it opened. Whisked around, then laughed with the owner about sudden cravings for takeaways: fish and chips (me, although we hardly ever eat them) and butter chicken (her). Whisked on through the supermarket in record time and, except for two tiny post-Easter bunnies, stuck to the list. Even though I was buying for two households, it was fast, as they intended: no queue, no pause, no bagging of items, no small-talk, and anyway the new plexiglass screen and face mask between me and the checkout operator’s words made them indecipherable.
The aunt was in good cheer, still a little baffled by my insistence on bringing her groceries each week. (‘But I can just pop over the hill in the car.’ ‘No, over-70s are advised…’ ‘Oh yes … vulnerable.’ I left her to unpack the fruit, veg, soup and packages, all mildly tinged with janola.
Lunch was a Skype call with C and R. They were eating leftovers from plastic snap bowls. We slurped pumpkin soup prepared with the aunt in mind. We learned from the doctor that although covid-phobia is high, bike accident cases are way down, along with the incidence of common-garden flu. I suggest we lock down every April in order to cleanse Aotearoa of incipient winter ailments.
Much has been written about the possible awful outcomes of this pandemic, mainly to do with the over-exertion of power by governments and the under-performance of ‘the economy’. At least as much has crossed my screen about the possible magnificent outcomes of this great, sorrow-tinged semi-colon in time (it’s not a full stop, nor is it a colon, which I think of as an equals sign [pandemic: med panic]; we don’t want after to be the same as before), mostly to do with our rediscovered, revivified fellow-feeling, Earth-feeling, creature-feeling, community-feeling, feeling-feeling and the slow, spacious kindliness we begin to sense underlies it all.
Turning 61. Life is still its old paradoxical self. (Why does the notion persist, that one day it will fall into order?) Taking it all in is the thing. Muskets and flowers. Trucks and colouring pencils. The presence and the absence of loved ones.
Have been reading Anne Salmond’s Two Worlds, coincidentally as Aotearoa reckons with the fact of 250 years since Cook et al turned up and bungled the first exchanges: nine Māori dead by the time they sailed on. An inauspicious start. Amends are made slowly; there will never be any laurels to rest on. There will only be doing better. And better again.
Spring flowers under gloomy skies. We hoist a swing in anticipation of the grandsons’ visit, and their parents … they’re in the country, but not here yet. Pangs. I swot up the road code for a class two heavy vehicle license. Passing the theory has proved the easy part.
Maiden, the film, is galvanising (98% on Rotten Tomatoes). Patently women have scarcely begun to unearth and exhibit their capacities in the world … in the case of the boat race, for determination, strategy, endurance, comradeship under pressure, courage. For a power-boost, women young and old, go and see it.
I was given a flowering Pulsatilla Vulgaris whose homeopathic signature is moping and weeping. A sweet reminder that it’s okay to do so — it’s only human — but ten minutes might be enough, okay?
Then it’s time to go back on deck, even if the deck’s slippery now and then, with ice or spume or tears.
Talking with a friend recently whose time is freer than it was. She notices a tendency to fret on her now-unscheduled days. That’s why people go to work full-time, I said. No time for fretting. I was going to be ‘at work’ this week, but without snow, my role as hut manager was postponed along with the ski-field opening. An ‘empty’ week. I’ve completed the novel I’d been writing and fiddling with for the last 8 years. Finished my editing jobs and tidied up various loose ends. In this unscheduled week, I can do what I like (get onto the tax return, start a new writing project?) but without the sense of urgency and preoccupation that ‘work’ brings. There’s time to fret.
This morning I’ve read about the million-plus Rohingya people anticipating months of monsoon rain on their villages of plastic sheeting, bamboo and mud. There are around 66 million refugees perched or wandering precariously in our world. I read about the misogyny, racism and slavery mindset inherent in the sex-trade worldwide, which is millions of children and women living in poverty traps every bit as ineluctable as monsoons and mud. And I watch videos of a southern right whale frolicking (if that word can be applied to so many tons of limbless mammal, but it really does seem to be playing) in Wellington Harbour, enjoying the spectacle, but the question lurks: how much plastic is it likely to be imbibing from our coastal waters, along with plankton and krill? Our oceans are rapidly becoming Plastic Soup.
Fretting! Futilely … unless I find ways to contribute to the improvement of these huge problems. A small donation. A letter in defence of. A wish or a prayer. A trip to Bin Inn to buy groceries not packaged in plastic. Is this the best I can do?
Also these days, world attention has been riveted on the 12 boys and their coach holed up in the flooded cave in Thailand. We felt prickly with anxiety over their plight and the agonised decision-making of those capable of getting them out. The navy seals became heros, gods with the power of life and death. Why were we so mesmerised by this story? Because we’re all cave-phobic to one degree or another. Because children were involved. Because it had all the elements of a thriller movie, but with more at stake. Because it resonated with our human plight: we have worked our way into a tight corner. The flood waters are rising. We might find ways, like the meditating boys, to keep ourselves steady in the short term, in our local setting, but we imagine we’ll have to rely on people with more expertise and prominence than we to get us out of the worldwide fix. Is that how it is?
Waiting again this afternoon for a report from the mountain. Perhaps a winter escape.
Three and a half years since I wrote here, in the hot Northland summer of 2015. Now I’m stockpiling stuff for the cold. For a winter playing lodge manager (‘hut mum’ if the age or behaviour of the ski-schoolers calls for it it) in the Southern Alps. I’ll go fortified by kindness and comfort from friends and acquaintances: slippers crocheted by dear hands; cosy ski pants and thermals given by a member of our local ‘Buy Nothing’ group; boots lent by a friend in whose footsteps I’m proud to walk; skis, boots, goggles (albeit outmoded) from my father-in-law who possibly hasn’t quite given up skiing at 95.
I don’t love the cold, but I’ll be well prepared for it, and it will be in keeping with the quality of the air at 1400 metres and the wrap-around snow-peak panorama. It takes an hour or more to walk from the car park to the hut where I’ll be living with 7 other staff members half my age. From the bullet points on the website, the skifield:
* is not for the masses, you won’t find the white Spyder pants type here.
* comprises big and raw alpine terrain, very different from other NZ ski fields. You can see glaciers from the lodge windows.
It’s ‘rad’ and friendly and besides my other duties, I’m the bar-person. Yikes. I’ll keep you posted.
I listened this morning as two women discussed the concepts of Hannah Arendt, who wrote, among other books, The Human Condition, and The Origins of Totalitarianism, and who coined ‘the banality of evil’. All of which are pressingly relevant in our century. I was freshly struck by the assessment that a person who flees their own country, and is thereby made stateless, loses also their human rights. Which is a hard condition to fathom. Basically, they’re no longer entitled to any of the things that make your life and mine worth living. To quote Arendt concerning the plight of the 20th century refugee stripped of their statehood: ‘The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human’. It seems we struggle to understand that unless we (the world) realise and honour the something sacred in every human (of whatever persuasion, origin or circumstance), our current experiment called human life on Earth will end in failure, soonish.
Conversely, when every person on the planet is granted the same rights as every other human, nothing will be impossible — except war, starvation and the exclusion of our human kin from the essentials (and the joys and comforts) of life.
Mundanely speaking, it seems worth considering how I unintentionally subtract from the humanity of those I’m in contact with: taking someone for granted; treating another in utilitarian fashion; failing to look and see, listen and hear; failing to think and imagine on behalf of another.
And it helps to realise that by remedying the failures listed above, I can add an iota to the sum of our humanity.
Woke this morning in another new house, with a full view of the Pacific and a fat Abyssinian who seems indifferent to our presence unless we’re stroking his ginger sleekness.
Over the road, we swim in waves which, in the south, would knock you flat. Up here they churn over you aerated and playful; it’s like being in a benign washing machine.
After four days in the bush, I’m out of touch with the world out there more in synch with the world in here. I feel more useful and productive than when I’m hearing the news and it’s making me agitated. How to do both: know the worst yet stay calm and productive?
Meanwhile I dip in and out; advance and retreat; listen and stop listening; inspire, expire.
Two years on, still house-sitting, still loving it. ‘Dolphins!’ comes the call from the beach. This month we’re perched between two bodies of water; such dynamism is alluring. In a roar of wind the estuary turns to ink. So, too, is the idea of home: vegetables we shepherd from seed to plate; trees we watch grow; rooms with our loved objects, clothing in drawers, real desks … sun again: a stripe of milky jade sweeps the bay … friends who know where to find us.
We’re perfectly okay ‘in the moment’, as long as we rest there. It’s the mind that races about and causes panic: what if we miss out on this or that house? what if the market gets away on us? can we live in a hut in the north? do we really belong in the south? will our friends forget us? why can’t we decide? A gannet glides past the window, gleaming wings spanner-tight. Still, we talk to the bank. The real estate agents. We’re keeping a finger to the wind. The pohutukawa shakes its head as shadows race ashore and gulls lift and cry.
Fork.
Sharp.
Corn.
A-ice.
Cold. Cold. Cold.
Baby.
Rock, rock.
Up
says Spencer.
There’s a fine line (there are many fine lines, including those in my favourite shirt) between objectively and wisely questioning what you think and do, and starting to wonder if it’s all wrong: what if I’ve taken the wrong turn here; made a poor choice there; spent my time badly; responded inadequately; pegged my life to a flawed set of premises — especially when every problem out there looks so big and insoluble while what’s in front of me is comparatively tiny and manageable. We’re strange creatures. If it ain’t broke, some of us look for cracks anyway.
It’s time to feed the dog. Pack up the house. Post this. Go and eat dinner with the man I’ve eaten dinner with most nights for 32 years.
Gratefully.
It takes a while (55 years or more) to learn and trust that life is rhythmic, to learn not to be thrown by the big shuddering in-breath or the (occasionally dis)gusting out-breath. Not to be dismayed by the sometimes-too-long pause between these two when it’s tempting to think something has died and gone forever.
Following panic, calm. Following antipathy, a warming smile. Following (self-recrimination, acceptance. After the burning question, (possibly not an answer but) acceptance. After visitors, fruitful hours or days alone (if you’re old enough and not too old to be allowed those). After days or hours alone, welcome visitors. After bread and vegemite, an anniversary lunch.
(Following The Collapse, The Reintegration but how soon and in what form no-one knows.)
After the high, brimming tide, the emptied mudflats. And a dog waiting to run across them. Okay, we’re off.
For the first time in months, socks and shoes.
At the bird sanctuary we waited amidst nikau and puriri for tui, bellbirds, kereru, fantails, a robin, and when we’d given up, at last, tieke — the saddleback.
Girls in bikinis were swimming out from the beach and surging back through the cavern. In the cool afternoon, we weren’t even tempted to join them.
Kate appropriated a nikau bonnet.
The dog was so thrilled by our return she piddled on the kitchen floor.
Walked into the sunrise.
Read half a manuscript. Strong and unsettling.
Swam at the next bay with the girl who laughs in water.
Joined the Great Northern Library.
The neighbour handed fresh, smoked kawhai over the fence. Kedgeree coming up.
It’s over three months since I last wrote or drew here. In spite (or because) of that, the Intertidal Zone has received this award:
Thank you, Bookie Monster. If nothing else gets me posting, this does. In fact, as a condition of accepting it, there’s homework in several parts. The first is eleven random facts about me. Without forethought:
1. I’m sitting on a cushion in the window. Outside yellow dusk is settling over the grapevine at the bottom of the rectangular lawn where two wild rabbits chew at the grass. We’re a week into a two-month rural house sit.
2. My feet are dirty from gardening this afternoon in jandals. I pulled grass and nightshade from the herb garden and picked the last tomatoes from their damp and dessicated vines.
3. Sewing implements are scattered at my right hand from my attempt to turn op-shop shorts into a skirt. I’ve done the easy part — cutting them open — the next will require skill.
4. I’ve just read a terrific article about the brain in the belly.
5. The birdsong here is myriad. Myriad. Looks odd here, but in its meaning of having very many elements it stays. Native and imported music.
6. Better get a move on. It’s suddenly dark.
7. My heart has been a little unsettled lately. So has my belly (see above). That the mind has, too, goes without saying. Knowing it helps. So many of our bodies’ gentle maladies pass under the radar.
8. I’m going to try out the rice cooker tonight. I’m skeptical but the householder’s enthusiasm for it was compelling.
9. I’m reading a book I picked up from the Napier Library’s sales table: Francis Petrarch’s My Secret Book:the account of the 14th century poet’s inner dialogue with St Augustine on ‘suffering, desire, fear and joy’.
10. The red yoga mat is rolled up on my left, ready for tomorrow’s morning ‘yoga quickie’.
11. I’m going down to cook dinner, all of it except rice from the garden. I’ll come back in a day or two to complete my assignment.
Until then, blessings.
I’ve been tagged as Emma Neale was tagged so, while the title may not be apt, if tag’s a game, I’ll play along at this weird self-interview blog-meme thing (although I still don’t know what a meme is). I’ll adapt the ten questions to answer my own ends.
What is your working title of your book project?
Let me see … (gazing out at the sky, macrocarpas, wheeling gulls) … how about Making Books Fly Faster?
What genre does your book project fall under?
Cyber-nonfiction … How-To for Dummies … a travelogue, perhaps.
Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
I have trouble remembering actors, and I have left unwatched those movies I ought to have watched, so I nominate instead our three children as they might have been 20 years ago on a lawn with the grandparents’ movie camera: S as persnickety, alternately irascible and affable publisher; A as brilliant renegade designer; J as publicist extraordinaire, axing his way into the wallets of readers.
What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book project?
I think the provisional title says it neatly but I’ll add: ‘freeing the book from its material trappings’, or more prosaically, ‘working from a traditional publishing model to issue exceptional and original writing digitally’.
Will your book project be self-published administered or represented by an agency run by others?
Rosa Mira Books is entirely self-inflicted. Although many play a valuable part in its activities, I take final responsibility. However, I’m definitely open to finding a like-minded partner, preferably with PR and entrepreneurial dynamism, who is willing to share the joys and vexations of epublishing for an indeterminate income. Enquire in the comments or track me down as you will.
How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript get your project started?
From the winter’s night when two stars tangoed across the sky above our house and the idea arrived fully formed (the idea, not how to carry it out) until the launch of Rosa Mira Books, two and a half years. The first 18 months I was floundering: I didn’t know a PDF from a Word document and there was little sense of urgency. I had a great ally in Carolyn McCurdie, who attended digital seminars with me and brainstormed, but we gained little traction. When my job with a traditional publisher ended abruptly at the end of 2009, the wheels began to grip. I had a website designed, got the name trademarked, read up, visited business consultants, fretted, negotiated with Dorothee, edited her fine novel, and took the many now-invisible steps that begin a brand new enterprise. Rosa Mira Books and The Glass Harmonica were launched together on 11.1.11.
What other books projects would you compare this story to within your genre one with?
I seem to be the only publisher in NZ doing just this, although all publishers except those working on heirloom, handbound volumes, are digitising new lists and back-lists and even, if they can retain or regain rights, out-of-print lists. I suspect I’m not the only publisher beginning to put out shorter works, like our 10,000-word series of short stories, novellas and essays catering to the reader’s shortening attention span, true, but also freeing myself to tackle two or thee projects at once; the editing and preparation of a 100,000-word manuscript makes for a long engagement.
Who or what inspired you to write this book undertake this project?
Several vital and hugely capable women have fired me along the way. When I first began to write, and discovered the wondrous comfort of being amongst writers, I heard Paula Boock speak to a group about walking for the first time into a publisher’s office. What a fabulous place to work, she thought, and so I felt, viscerally, as she told the anecdote. ‘One day,’ I told myself. Paula, by then at Longacre Press, was my first editor, for the children’s novel Three’s a Crowd. Barbara Larson, her partner and publishing director of Longacre went on to put out seven more of my books and to employ me as editor. I shared an office with Emma who instigated this post. Longacre (in 2009 subsumed by Random House) was a model of good publishing, a fact I appreciate ever more as my involvement in the industry deepens. Relationships with writers were cordial and respectful; editors and designers were given the time required to do a thorough job; books were beautifully turned out. Barbara was a multi-tasking model of cool efficiency and warm encouragement to staff and authors alike, while to work alongside an editor and writer as skilled, meticulous, funny and brilliant as Emma added to the privilege. Gosh, what am I writing here? Testimonials? And why not. These are terrific women, as are invaluable friends Claire and Pam who have never doubted my choices, always encouraged, and who run their own chosen endeavours to the hilt. Coral Atkinson has nourished me with enthusiasm, flowers, apt quotations, apt urls, good sense and sage publishing advice. There are other fine men and women with their fires burning at every turn of the road. Self-started it may be, but this is a truly collaborative enterprise.
What else about your project might pique the reader’s interest?
Rosa Mira’s five shimmering titles (did I say, RMB publishes terrific writing, which means 30 terrific writers represented thus far); Ratty who swans, dangles, swoops and splashes about on the Rosa Mira Blog — employed a year or so ago as the PR Dept, he’s done hardly a hand’s turn since.
The fact that I’m ever on the lookout for exceptional writing, particularly right now essays of around 10,000 words, also that I’m pondering a second list this year, of pre-published books given new life in digital form.
Phew. Thanks, Em.
Now I tag … let me see if I can find writers with blogs who are not yet pinned and not about to go AWOL … I’m going through my FB list, in no particular and Pat Deavoll order … Coral Atkinson, Dorothee Kocks … I’m going through my FB list … Kay Cooke, Pat Deavoll, and Paul Hersey
In the six or seven weeks since I last wrote here we’ve packed up our home of 17 years, said many fond farewells, long and short, and headed north with A, fresh from Edinburgh, in our laden wagon.
We’ve come to roost for a few weeks at the Whangarei Heads where we lap up the daily swims and eating outdoors. It’s been good to get back into our work, to see that we can knuckle down in a strange environment, and be open to its fresh ambience and opportunities.
The garden here is a marvel — full of bright, brash and succulent plants we don’t see 900 miles south. This china Kingfisher watches the steps. Apparently, a flesh-and-blood replica turned up within a day or two of his posting, stared long and hard, and (one supposes, mournfully) went on its way.
I’m not finding it easy to capture the frilly, curly, spiky plethora of detail in the plants here so bear with me as I practise, making wan and narrow hibisci, less-than-serene water lilies and things …
… such as this, which puts me in mind of the manuscripts I regretfully turned away this morning for being, well, a little too obvious. We have hearts in the south, but we speak of them in hushed tones. It’s said that we have sex and suchlike but we paint them in sober colours, abstractly. (Fifty shades of grey … how did she manage to nab that title?)
We of the south might be like the small transparent moth below, simple, monochrome-black lace and glad-wrap. However, put it on a hibiscus flower and colour glows through. Well, it might when I get the hang of colouring in the North.