Tim Jones's Blog, page 29

Tuesday Poem: Prove You Are Not A Robot, by P. S. Cottier

Prove that you are not a robot.
Affirm android is what you're not.
Prick a digit, we'll watch the blood flow
(though nanovamps may swim, and grow).
Indicate a lack of chips embedded -
that you are only fleshy headed,
with just the right amount of brain
to reason, love and feel all pain.
Now fill in the code that we select -
words unknown to mortal intellect.
Quickly, for we're losing time -
our batteries run down at nine.



Credit Note: This is an original poem by P. S. Cottier and is published here by permission of the author - and if you have not already done so, you should check out her blog.



Tim Says: The first time I saw the command to "Prove that you are not a robot", I suffered a prolonged period of existential dread. Might I, in fact, be a robot? Might there be telltale signs? How could I prove I wasn't?



P. S. Cottier did something more useful. She wrote a poem - and here it is. I really like it.



The Tuesday Poem: One does not simply walk into The Tuesday Poem. One clicks.You can buy books by Tim Jones online! Voyagers: SF Poetry from NZ from Amazon.Transported (short story collection) from Fishpond or New Zealand Books Abroad.

Voting Now Open: Vote Takahe for Bird of the Year 2012

It's on! Forest and Bird's 2012 Bird of the Year competition is now open - and this means that you can Vote Takahe right now, and encourage all your friends (and enemies) to do likewise!



Here is where you can vote: http://www.birdoftheyear.org.nz/



While most of you will understand that the takahe is just naturally cooler, sexier, and more electable than any other bird, there might be a few people who are wondering what's in it for them. Read Friday's announcement of the takahe campaign below and you'll have your answer - and if you're still a swinging voter, check back later in the week for a Vote Takahe FAQ that will answer questions you didn't even know you wanted asked.



Friday's announcement






What: Every year, the excellent conservation organisation Forest and Bird holds its Bird of the Year competition. The 2012 competition opens on Monday 10 September. And this year, I am the campaign manager for the rightful winner of that competition, the takahe.










Photo: Steve Attwood





Who: Yes, the takahe. There's one, right there, comin' at ya. It's the pukeko's bigger, cooler, rarer cousin. And the news that the pukeko won the 2011 competition? The takahe isn't taking that well at all.




Why: There are a lot of reasons why you should vote for the takahe, and I'll be telling you all about them over the next three weeks. Here are three to start with.




1) The takahe is a survivor. It was thought to be extinct for more than half a century - but it wasn't, and one determined naturalist, Dr Geoffrey Orbell, kept looking for it until he found it in the Murchison Mountains of Fiordland. When he clambered up the mountains and found them, the takahe just kept on going about their business. They didn't throw a big party or anything.




2) The takahe is beautiful. Just look at those gorgeous feathers!




3) If you don't Vote Takahe, it might peck you on the knee. True story: A takahe once pecked a photographer friend of mine on the knee as he was photographing it - this was in the days before the general public had access to takahe, as they do today, e.g. at Zealandia and on Kapiti Island. He kept taking photos. The takahe kept pecking his knee. And I lived to tell you the tale.




When: The competition opens on Monday 10 September and runs for three weeks.




How: You'll be able to vote for the takahe online from Monday onwards. Vote early. Vote often (am I allowed to say that?). Tell your friends to vote, and use social media to pimp out these important hashtags: #votetakahe and #birdoftheyear. I'll be tweeting like a bird that tweets - takahe don't tweet, because they're far too cool.




There'll be plenty more to come during the campaign, including a set of Frequently Asked Questions about the Takahe that I'm just about to make up. There will be more photos, some actual facts, and a comparison of the takahe with the honey badger. Keep checking this blog, keep voting, and keep watching the skies!*




*But not for takahe - they're flightless.
You can buy books by Tim Jones online! Voyagers: SF Poetry from NZ from Amazon.Transported (short story collection) from Fishpond or New Zealand Books Abroad.

Vote Takahe for Bird of the Year 2012

What: Every year, the excellent conservation organisation Forest & Bird holds its Bird of the Year competition. The 2012 competition opens on Monday 10 September. And this year, I am the campaign manager for the rightful winner of that competition, the takahe.








Photo: Steve Attwood


Who: Yes, the takahe. There's one, right there, comin' at ya. It's the pukeko's bigger, cooler, rarer cousin. And the news that the pukeko won the 2011 competition? The takahe isn't taking that well at all.



Why: There are a lot of reasons why you should vote for the takahe, and I'll be telling you all about them over the next three weeks. Here are three to start with.



1) The takahe is a survivor. It was thought to be extinct for more than half a century - but it wasn't, and one determined naturalist, Dr Geoffrey Orbell, kept looking for it until he found it in the Murchison Mountains of Fiordland. When he clambered up the mountains and found them, the takahe just kept on going about their business. They didn't throw a big party or anything.



2) The takahe is beautiful. Just look at those gorgeous feathers!



3) If you don't Vote Takahe, it might peck you on the knee. True story: A takahe once pecked a photographer friend of mine on the knee as he was photographing it - this was in the days before the general public had access to takahe, as they do today, e.g. at Zealandia and on Kapiti Island. He kept taking photos. The takahe kept pecking his knee. And I lived to tell you the tale.



When: The competition opens on Monday 10 September and runs for three weeks.



How: You'll be able to vote for the takahe online from Monday onwards. Vote early. Vote often (am I allowed to say that?). Tell your friends to vote, and use social media to pimp out these important hashtags: #votetakahe and #birdoftheyear. I'll be tweeting like a bird that tweets - takahe don't tweet, because they're far too cool.



There'll be plenty more to come during the campaign, including a set of Frequently Asked Questions about the Takahe that I'm just about to make up. There will be more photos, some actual facts, and a comparison of the takahe with the honey badger. Keep checking this blog, keep voting, and keep watching the skies!*



*But not for takahe - they're flightless.You can buy books by Tim Jones online! Voyagers: SF Poetry from NZ from Amazon.Transported (short story collection) from Fishpond or New Zealand Books Abroad.

Tuesday Poem: And yet it moves, by Helen Heath

And yet it moves                                  Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)





you say of the earth

      - not the sun around us.



You cannot close your eyes

to the view at the end



of the eyeglass. Faith

is not a veil. Eyes drawn



to the stars, the suns, again

and again for years until



they burn through your lenses

twin black holes, one for each eye.



The dark slowly spreads.

The inquisition judges heresy,



commands a recant, wants blind

allegiance from a man in the dark



so you recant, muttering

and yet it moves.



Credit note: "And yet it moves" was published in Helen Heath's collection Graft (VUP, 2012) and is reproduced here by permission of the author.



Tim says: I've just finished reading Graft, and while I enjoyed the whole collection, the highlight for me was a number of wonderful poems about science, scientists and the history of science - other include the prizewinning Making tea in the universe and Night's Magic. This poem about Galileo Galilei elegantly captures the great dilemma of his life.



The Tuesday Poem: You can read the hub Tuesday poem on the Tuesday Poem blog, and all the other Tuesday Poems are linked from the sidebar to the left.You can buy books by Tim Jones online! Voyagers: SF Poetry from NZ from Amazon.Transported (short story collection) from Fishpond or New Zealand Books Abroad.

An Interview With Sugu Pillay

Sugu Pillay is a poet and fiction writer who was born in Malaysia and now lives in Wellington. Her writing has appeared in journals, and online, and her first collection of short stories, The Chandrasekhar Limit and Other Stories, was published in 2002.



Sugu's first poetry collection, Flaubert's Drum, has just been published by IP. At the time of writing, Sugu and fellow poet Karen Zelas, with publisher and poet Dr David Reiter, are currently touring their new collections around New Zealand - look out for them at a poetry venue near you! I am looking forward to attending their Wellington launch event on Monday 3 September.



I ran the title poem of Sugu's collection as my Tuesday Poem this week, and Sugu was kind enough to answer the following five questions:








1. What is the
significance of the title, Flaubert’s
Drum?




As explained in the Notes at the back of the collection, it
refers to Flaubert’s comment: “Human language is like a cracked kettle on which
we beat our tunes for bears to dance to when all the time we long to move the
stars to pity”. Writers struggle with articulation, swinging on this pendulum
from the drum of the cracked kettle to the desired Music of the Spheres!  The title poem on page 37 exemplifies this
problem of articulation.




2. How is Flaubert’s Drum organised? Does the
collection have an overarching theme, or will the readers recognise a number of
themes within it?




Flaubert’s Drum
was submitted for IP’s 2012 Best Poetry competition as a collection of mostly
published poems written over a long period. Grouping the poems under suitable
headings is the only “organising” they have undergone. However, I could say the
theme of Loss and the problem of its articulation, runs through many of the
poems. Loss can be death of a loved one, the loss of love, loss of meaning, the
loss of one’s place in the world, a dislocation.




3. I know from
reading some of the poems in literary magasines that your experience as an
immigrant to this country has featured in your poetry. Is this also the case in
Flaubert’s Drum?




The first section under the heading ‘From Mission Bay to St
Heliers’, has nine poems which express “the poetics of migrancy” in the voice
of an invented persona, an immigrant artist. Although each poem has its own
raison d’ étre,
together the poems explore “the narrative of assimilation”, an on-going
negotiation with oneself and everything encountered in the new land. There is
another section, ‘Who Said What’ which unlike ‘Mission Bay to St Heliers’ is a
personal response to experiences in “this other Eden”. In a sense, all immigrants are on a pilgrim's progress from initial euphoria, depression and adjustment to acceptance of their chosen "other Eden".











4. Who are some of
your favourite poets or poets who have influenced your own writing?




Favourites change with the times. I had a very British
colonial education. I fell in love with poetry in the Fourth Form when I
encountered Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelly, Byron. At the University of Malaya, we read the then pantheon of
English poets from Chaucer to T.S. Eliot in the First Year, with in-depth study
in the Second & Third Years. My favourites were the Metaphysical poets,
especially Donne and Marvell.  Their
inventiveness of metaphor and “conceits” still delight and inspire.



Stylistically I can’t claim a particular influence. I think every poet you read stays
somewhere in your subconscious, surfacing unexpectedly in the midst of your
writing, like Donne’s “Busy old fool, unruly Sun” (and Cat Steven’s “Morning is
breaking”) ringing in my head as I write “here comes the sun of pop songs/
& metaphysical poets/breaking the morning /with its glare & demands/for
purposeful activity”.



It was much later, that I read American, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand
poets. When I lived in Auckland for about two years, I was influenced by poets like Michele Leggott, Wystan Curnow and those who were regular contributors to A brief description of the whole world (now abbreviated to brief thankfully!). You would have noticed in my poems the use of borrowed lines in italics. I copied this from Michele Leggott. This was the period when I read voraciously on Post-Modern
writing. I absolutely loved the intertextuality dense with references and
cross-references. There’s an electricity in subtexts! However, I learnt to
write in a variety of ways.



It seems to me while you use poetic devices in many
ways to land your poems, you can decide whether you want to parachute to safety
and make your poems very accessible to your readers, or you can parachute for
sheer fun, use word play and verbal gymnastics creating poems which are fun to
unpack. Or you can parachute to a secret destination, leaving no clear guide
for the reader, making the poem a challenging “writerly” text inviting the
reader’s active participation in the creative process. I hope I have written
all three types in Flaubert’s Drum.



5. Finally, and if you don’t mind me asking, what are you working on at present?



I have three plays and a novel in the burner but they’ve been there for quite some time now! For poetry, I have a rather ambitious project, Voices. The inspiration comes from the Upanishads which are ancient Sanskrit texts going back to 800 BC. They are abstract philosophical speculations about Creation, the nature of the Self and Reality. About 14 Upanishads are said to exist but I’ve only read 10 of them in English translation. Here’s a tantalising bit from the Isa Upanishad : “They have put a golden stopper in the neck of the bottle. Pull it, Lord! Let out reality. I am full of longing”.   


Book availability details



Flaubert's Drum is available from IP, from a range of online sources including iTunes and Amazon.com, and through bookshops. The ISBN is ISBN 9781921869945.You can buy books by Tim Jones online! Voyagers: SF Poetry from NZ from Amazon.Transported (short story collection) from Fishpond or New Zealand Books Abroad.

Tuesday Poem: Flaubert's Drum, by Sugu Pillay

that
harlequin tear again

its
fall threatened in Keats’ time




her
soapy slippery anguished palms

cup
for the reflecting bell-jar




each
drop

the
world’s grammar

the
Rosetta stone




plows
wide furrows

meets
with resistance

may or
may not connect

never
certain that it should




each
known thing easily

becomes
unknown




like
that cracked kettle
of
Flaubert’s



Credit note: This is the title poem of Sugu Pillay's debut poetry collection Flaubert's Drum, which has just been published by IP, who also published my collection Men Briefly Explained.



Tim says: Sugu and fellow poet Karen Zelas, with publisher and poet Dr David Reiter, are currently touring their new collections around New Zealand - look out for them at a poetry venue near you! I am looking forward to attending their Wellington launch event on Monday 3 September.



Watch out for my interview with Sugu Pillay, which should appear here on Thursday.



The Tuesday Poem: You can find links to this and all the other Tuesday Poems on the left of the Tuesday Poem blog, where you will also find the hub poem for the week.You can buy books by Tim Jones online! Voyagers: SF Poetry from NZ from Amazon.Transported (short story collection) from Fishpond or New Zealand Books Abroad.

Mansfield with Monsters: An Interview With Matt And Debbie Cowens

Matt and Debbie Cowens are both high school teachers who
live and work on the Kapiti Coast. They’ve each had a number of short stories
published online and in anthologies. Mansfield with Monsters is their first
collaborative collection of short stories – collaborating with each other and
with New Zealand’s most iconic writer of short fiction, Katherine Mansfield.



Tim adds: Mansfield with Monsters is the second book published by Steam Press, a new New Zealand science fiction publisher which has made quite an impact since it was set up.






Why Mansfield, and why with monsters?






We’re both fans of the science fiction and horror genres, and we’re very familiar with Mansfield’s work as we’ve taught her stories in high school. The opportunity to build a bridge between the two was too tempting to pass up. It created a lot of pressure to do justice to both Mansfield, as New Zealand’s most iconic writer, and to the speculative genre we love, but it was enormously satisfying to weave the two together.




Did you look at other works in the mash-up genre, like Pride
and Prejudice and Zombies or Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters , when planning Mansfield with Monsters ?




Debbie had read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which blazed a trail in the concept of reworking classic fiction which is in the public domain, but we wanted to take Mansfield
with Monsters in a slightly different
direction. It was important to us to have the supernatural or otherworldly
elements work with the source material on a thematic as well as a literal
level. Of course we also had the luxury of working with multiple stories,
exploring different kinds of creatures and mythologies, and how they could fit
into the lives of Katherine Mansfield’s characters, which kept the project
fresh and makes it a little different to other mashups.









Katherine Mansfield’s writing is not usually plot-heavy.  Did that cause a problem for you when you came to rework these stories, and if so, what strategies did you use to get around it?




Mansfield’s stories are quite varied, so we tackled each one
a little differently. A story like The Doll’s House follows a clear sequence of events to reveal the
injustice of prejudice and the class system. We took that concept and pushed it
to a darker place, filling in little details along the way to twist the story
into a tale of witchcraft, murder, possession and insanity – borne out of
prejudice and the injustice of the class system. Other stories were more
stream-of-consciousness and we had to be more bold in our reshaping. It was a
delight to sit down with each story and deconstruct it, probe it for areas
where the supernatural could worm its way in, or turn it upside down and give
it a good shaking to see what the bones of the story were and whether we could
arrange those bones into a different but coherent shape, like literary
archaeologists building their own ‘Tyrannosaurus Mansfield’.




On the other hand, of course, there is a Gothic – and New
Zealand Gothic – flavour to a number of Mansfield’s stories. You start the
collection with your version of “The Woman at the Store” – was it that story’s
pre-existing atmosphere of menace that made you decide to start the collection
with it?




Our wonderful editor Stephen Minchin decided the final order
of the stories. The Woman at the Store
is a story which already bordered on horror, and cast New Zealand in an
interesting Wild West, frontier light. Twisting it to include a Pet Cemetery vibe maintained the dark sense of menace of the
previously published version whilst referencing a classic of modern horror. It
signals to the reader that the collection is less tongue-in-cheek than
something like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. We asked Stephen why it was first up in the
anthology and his sagely answer was that the stories are chronological in terms
of first publication.




It may seem odd to ask about a story you haven’t included,
but when I opened the book I was looking forward to reading your version of “At
the Bay” – yet I see that you haven’t included it. Did you know from an early
stage what stories you would include, or did you experiment with more stories
than made it to the published collection?




We read a wide range of Mansfield’s stories and explored the
copyright laws of various countries. Mansfield’s death in 1923 placed her early
works in the public domain in all the countries we wanted to reach, but some of
her posthumously published stories are still owned by American publishers. We
looked for stories which sparked our imaginations, stories which gave us
opportunities to write a range of speculative adaptations. We were guided by
intuition, by inspiration, and by legal constraints. At the Bay was tempting as we both love it, but it was
structurally difficult and the idea of how to make to work without excising
enormous tracts of text never quite clicked into place.




Has working with a number of her stories “from the inside”
changed your opinion of Katherine Mansfield and her writing?




Mansfield’s place in New Zealand’s literary pantheon is well
deserved – this process served to reinforce that view for us. Her writing is
diverse and crafted and bleak and funny and relevant and historical – it’s
incredibly powerful and moving. We each became more intimately acquainted with
Mansfield’s stories and in working with her learned a great deal about the
power of words, of inflection and suggestion. It was a delight and lead us to
read Mansfield more widely – something we hope it will do for others too.




When I first heard of this project, I thought to myself that
it would be very interesting to see how the literary community reacted to it:
would there be guardians of the temple of New Zealand literature who would
disapprove of the project? My impression is that reaction, overall has been
very positive. Is that your experience too?




We’ve been very happy with the reception the novel has
received so far. It was a risky proposition but people have been very open to
the idea, from the Katherine Mansfield society to academics to devoted
fans.  For younger readers
Mansfield is definitely a historical figure, someone from a distant time whose
life and work can have a degree of remoteness. It was part of our aim to reach
out to a more modern audience with these stories. It’s a collection written out
of love for Mansfield’s work and for the horror and science fiction elements we
blended with them. It’s a tribute to a great writer, and so far it has been
received as such.




You are both school teachers. Do you plan to, or could you
see yourselves, using Mansfield with Monsters as a teaching tool?




Definitely. We know of a couple of schools where the stories
have already been used and the feedback from students and teachers has been
really positive. We’re working on some activities to help teachers use Mansfield
with Monsters and other literary mash-up
works as a point of comparison with their source material. 




If you don’t mind me asking, what other literary projects do
you have on the go?




We’re both working on our own individual novels at present.
Debbie is working on a young adult novel set in a Steampunk Victorian academy
for aspiring villains, while Matt is reworking a manuscript dealing with
ghosts, secret societies and arcane science in nineteenth century New Zealand.
The collaborative process was wonderful and went very smoothly, so we may well
return to a joint writing project in the future. For now we are savouring the
success of Mansfield with Monsters.




How to buy Mansfield with Monsters




Mansfield with Monsters
is currently available online at www.steampress.co.nz
and www.amazon.com as well as in Unity
Books and Arty Bee’s in Wellington, and Paper Plus, Whitcoulls and independent
bookstores throughout New Zealand.



You can buy books by Tim Jones online! Voyagers: SF Poetry from NZ from Amazon.Transported (short story collection) from Fishpond or New Zealand Books Abroad.

Tuesday Poem: The Wind Blew Back Biff Byford's Hair

We stand in the face of the wind, of the
wind machine

Our stylists ready with product and comb

We take up our stance and seize our guitars

In the face of the wind, of the wind
machine.




We sing in the face of the war, of the war
machine

Our stylists ready with product and comb

We watch the director and follow his cues

In the face of the war, of the war machine.




We laugh in the face of death, of the death
machine

Our stylists ready with product and comb

We tease out highlights and re-shoot some
takes

In the face of death, of the death machine.




We sneer in the face of hate, of the hate
machine

Our stylists ready with product and comb

We shout out to fans who've stayed staunch
and true

In the fact of hate, of the hate machine.




In the face of hate, in the face of death

In the face of the war, in the face of the
wind

We take up our stance and seize our guitars

Our stylists ready with product and comb.




Credit note: This is one of the poems I cut from the final manuscript of Men Briefly Explained. It is published here for the first time.




Tim says: You will scarcely need reminding that Peter Rodney "Biff" Byford was the magnificently-maned lead singer of Saxon, one of the bands that came to prominence in the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal, or NWOBHM as one should properly call it (Nu-wobbem).



Here's Biff's barnet getting a good workout in an otherwise rather dubious hair-metal cover of Christopher Cross's yacht-rock hit "Ride Like The Wind"from 1988: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0OFr3-JPSE



After Billy Collins invented a parody of the villanelle called the Paradelle, I felt I had to go one better (or worse). I call the form I have invented for this poem the "Paradiddle", and hope that more poets will take up the challenge to write in this form, especially when writing poems about the lesser bands of the NWOBHM era.



My poetic tribute to the St Valentine's Day Massacre EP by the combined forces of Girlschool and Motörhead, should it proceed, is almost certain to be in the form of a paradiddle. I plan to call it "Please Don't Touch": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5dAyPoYax4 (R.I.P. Kelly Johnson, sadly missed).



The Tuesday Poem: can be found in all its multifarious splendour on, and in the sidebar at the left of, the Tuesday Poem blog.












You can buy books by Tim Jones online! Voyagers: SF Poetry from NZ from Amazon.Transported (short story collection) from Fishpond or New Zealand Books Abroad.

Tuesday Poem: tusitala of white lies, by Iain Britton

a million blackbirds




     
fling full stops at the horizon







but who do I prefer to believe –




  the lady in black feathers




           who
owns and occupies




                  
a fig tree




or the slothful bugger




     who
lives in the letter box




posting mail to himself           




          or the
toilet roll author




                   
of Kingdom Street




           the
tusitala of white lies

        

                   
of uninhibited wafflings /       







the view from here




           
is global / inviting







                  
extinct frogs




      
continue to purse their lips




to chirp (bird-like) through solitary séances







                
the moon’s /          a cold lump




stuck hard




and helmeted




         

              but I prefer             
the brunette




                      
her feather cloak




                   
her moulting shadow         her strut







          I coax her
to come in




              
share the dilated vista of another’s reality







I’m the tourist guide bus driver jesus janitor / the son

reorganising the future footprints of a family yet to cement

its language in stone in grubby layers broken like old teeth




another thing?




I walk through my house every day




to the sound




               
of water music




               
a forest shuffling its roots




               
doors opening shutting




               
a mango melting at the altar of my mouth







but then




              
not all is at right angles




                            
all isn’t the perfect hideout




                         
for this fresh-air junkie




                  
contemplating




              
a dreamtime jaunt

            


              
an astral flight /    

              
with no strings dangling







loose-limbed haloes




                       break
down

                      
dissolve




           
reviving an animal magnetism







      I
retreat into the hood of my consciousness




                     
groping for the lady’s




                           
anatomy




            
her tightening grip – this flesh




                        
and blood




                              
mix of polarities





Credit note: "tusitala of white lies" is the title poem of Iain Britton's latest collection, a poetry pamphlet published by Like This Press in the UK. It is reproduced here by permission of the author.



Tim says: Iain Britton is a fine New Zealand poet whose work deserves to be better known. I interviewed Iain in 2009 for this blog, and since then, he's continued to have success publishing his work both in Aotearoa and internationally, as his bio shows:

Oystercatcher Press published my 3rd poetry collection in 2009, Kilmog Press my 4th in 2010. The Red Ceilings Press and the Argotist have recently published ebooks. A full collection with Lapwing Publications is out now, plus a pamphlet from Like This Press. Beard of Bees (US) chapbook in now online. Forthcoming  - poems in Peter Hughes' Sea Pie: a Shearsman Anthology of Oystercatcher Poetry. Also, Department Press and The Gumtree Press will be publishing collections later this year or in 2013.

The Tuesday Poem: Check out today's hub poem, and all the individual Tuesday Poems linked from the sidebar to the left, on the Tuesday Poem blog.






You can buy books by Tim Jones online! Voyagers: SF Poetry from NZ from Amazon.Transported (short story collection) from Fishpond or New Zealand Books Abroad.

An Interview With Claire Browning

Claire
Browning is a former lawyer, author, editor and
policy analyst, turned conservation advocate for Forest & Bird. She has
also written regularly for blog site Pundit
on environment and conservation issues, and green politics. Beyond Today is her first book, although
she’s been published on a number of previous occasions, as co-author of Adams on Criminal Law: Sentencing, and
in law reform reports and law journal articles. Wairarapa-based, she is renovating
a cottage, growing a food forest, and cultivating wildness in her garden.








How
did you come to write Beyond Today: a
values story?




Well ... there’s a bit of a story there. I’d
been blogging for a while on Pundit. Jeanette Fitzsimons was leaving
Parliament, and I wanted to write a valedictory post – and to do that, I wanted
to see the trajectory of her political career. Jeanette lent me her two Values
Party manifestos: Blueprint for an
Alternative Future from 1972, and Beyond
Tomorrow (1975).




They were what I’d been looking for from
the Greens: the key to the policy puzzle. And so, I wrote some blogs about
Values, and about Green policy, nagging the Greens about their story. That’s
where it started, and in the end, I wrote the story myself. The result is Beyond Today.




I worked hard to boil it all down to its
essentials; to keep it short and clear and simple; to make it approachable; and
beautiful enough to do justice to an amazing political story, and a compelling
policy one. But so much more could be written, about the history of the Values
Party, and the green movement, and the way forward.







If
you don’t mind me asking, what led to your personal decision to join the Green
Party?




It was a – I won’t say reluctant – but a cautious
decision. I joined with a personal commitment not to participate in any of the
party processes, as an inside observer, for research. I couldn’t find out what
I needed to know or wanted to understand about the party, without a better
sense of who its members were and how processes worked internally.




At the present time, my membership’s
expired.











Beyond Today is in part a
history of the Values Party, and in part your thoughts on the future of the
Green Party. Was it always the intention to cover both these aspects, or did that
combination develop as the book progressed?




It was always the intention to cover both -
to take a perspective on the Greens by looking back at Values, to move policy
and politics forward. But I want to correct this idea of the book as a
“history” of Values. It isn’t, and it’s title – Beyond Today: a values story – is values with a little “v”.




It sketches out how the Values Party started,
and some of the things that it achieved. I wanted to pay tribute to the Values
movement, and say to the Greens: let’s celebrate being 40 years out in front. It’s
a plea: don’t let that story get lost. The green movement was grounded in
values, and values are what need to change. So I’m less interested in the
history than the story for today: what being green really means, and why.




I wanted to challenge the Greens, too: to
shake out a bit of the righteousness.







Given
the often-tempestuous history of the Values Party, did you find that former
Values Party members were keen to talk with you for this book?




I gather that a few more of them wanted to
talk to me than I had realised! Perhaps it’s a consequence of the tempestuous
relations and different perspectives that people wanted the opportunity to
offer their own views.







In
contrast to the Values Party (of which I was a member from 1977-1980), the
Green Party seems for the most part to have maintained a high degree of unity,
and when splits or potential splits have occurred, they seem to have been well
managed. What do you think accounts for that contrast?




I think that the party has learned from its
history. Its first co-leaders Jeanette and Rod were former Values members, as
were others. But also, I suspect it’s been attained in large degree by simply
muddling, as a party, along through the issues; I don’t mean by that to belittle
anyone’s political management, or the care that’s probably from time to time
gone into political management, but there’s been muddling, too, on policy in
particular.




There’s always going to be a risk that in
becoming more definitive, it’ll alienate some people. One description that
resonated with me was of the party as a sort of Rorschach blot, on to which
members, candidates, voters project their own perceptions, and their different
(though not incompatible) priorities, and can rub along quite happily together
for quite a long time, in a culture of respect and tolerance. But when it comes
to a broader audience - and winning hearts, forever, not just a vote and power
for a few years - I don’t know if that’s enough.




I may be wrong. But it became important to
me to write the story down again, in 2012 not 1972 - to say what it is that
green politics actually represents, not just a cleaner environment. By far the
largest part of the challenge – and it’s the same challenge – is the economics.







In Beyond Today, you appear to be arguing
that the Green Party would be better served by not being identified with the
left of the political spectrum. Is that a fair statement of your position?




Yes. And I think there are both political
reasons, and reasons in principle.




Values dismissed the politics of both the
right and the left, and others share Tony Brunt’s hunch (Brunt was Values’
founder): that there are a lot of voters with a collection of values that
coincide with the mix of policies that you would find, and have always found,
in a green manifesto – voters who don’t and won’t identify with the left –
because they aren’t intrinsically left-wing values. Green politics hasn’t
tapped into that movement yet. It might be starting to.




In the end, I think you can express it very
simply. This is not about two-dimensional opposition politics. It’s about all
of us, and all of the kinds that it takes to make a world. It’s about
supporting and demanding individual responsibility and freedom, just as much as
supporting a strong social structure, and regulation to protect those without a
voice in society: nature and the disenfranchised. And it will take all of us.




There are right wing values that are not
admirable – they’re disastrous – but there’s ideology of the left that will see
this project fail, if we can’t practise inclusion and diversity, instead of
just talking about it.







In
my view, our core problem as a species is that we are living beyond the
planet’s means – we are using up the Earth’s natural capital faster than it can
be replenished. I don’t think that it is possible to establish a global
economic system that allows us to live within the planet’s means under
capitalism, because capitalism depends on economic growth. Does the Green Party
share that position, and if so, doesn’t that make the Greens an anti-capitalist
party?




I think you need to ask a spokesperson for the
Green Party! But the best response to that which I’ve seen to date, about a
managed transition to something else – as yet undefined – would be Jeanette
Fitzsimons’ on Pundit:




If you were designing a system to live
within the limits of the planet and care for all its people you certainly
wouldn't start with capitalism. But given that's what we have, and the only
thing most people know, and change is desperately urgent, like in the next 5
years - what do you do with it? What happens to the corporates which currently deliver
the goods and services we buy and in which many small people have invested
their life savings? They aren't going to just go away and there's no appetite
publicly for recolution and confiscation and nationalisation. I'm afraid that
if we have to wait to change the whole economic system and grow a form of
democratic eco-socialism that has never been tried anywhere let alone succeeded
in leaving us a blueprint, we will still be designing it when the oceans close
over our heads and food wars break out all over.




Of course it would be better to run society
as a participatory, democratically controlled egalitarian economy that plans to
meet human needs sustainably, but the big problem remains. What seem like the
obvious priorities to us - quality food and shelter for everyone, products that
last for ages and can be repaired, renewable energy, local production - just
aren't the priorities most people would choose. We assume a democratically
controlled socialism would give us the answer we support - where is the
evidence for that? And if the people, given all the facts, choose more shopping
malls and one trip packaging and junk food and waste, because they have endured
generations of advertising and corporate culture that inculcates those values -
what then? and how likely are they to choose to limit their own consumption
even more severely so that people in developing countries can get enough food
and fresh water?




It was in the context of a discussion, and people
might want to read
the whole thing. I don’t think we know yet exactly how a functional green
economy would look.







The
current relationship between the Green Party and the Labour Party is a curious
mixture of cooperation and competition. To what extent do you think the two
parties can – or should – find common ground? How about the Greens and other
parties?




Yes, “hugging”
or “mugging”? I was intrigued by Grant Robertson’s recent speech: the
latest in a series of indicators that Labour, as it has always been, is quite attentive
to the Greens’ approach, and green ideas. He gave the speech on June 28 - it’s
a thoughtful speech - and like Beyond
Today, it’s about values. Labour values, starting with the Labour
constitution.




But Labour’s also missing, or not fully
addressing, a very fundamental point, and I suspect this is a consequence of
the point having been so obscured – the key point I try to tease out in Beyond Today. There won’t ever be common
ground, until the economic paradigm of growth shifts. The environment part
can’t be done, without the economic part. Anyone who says it can is lying.




There are parts of green thought that
express both left and right wing ideals, which the politics chapter of Beyond Today explores a bit. And there
are parts so incompatible with both that the ground is not common. It’s not
common at all, in any sense: it’s not shared by anyone else yet, politically,
and it’s an elusive, radical (transformational) thing.




I guess that means by definition, it can’t
be the centre ground.







As
someone who’s both an environmental activist and a poet, and who finds that the
two roles don’t always fit neatly together, I am intrigued by your statement,
echoing Paul Kingsnorth, that “we need the quants, and the poets, both” (p.
107). Who do you mean by “the quants”? And how can the poets help without
losing their poetry, and turning into mere propagandists?




“The quants” is Kingsnorth’s term. It comes
from a blog
that he wrote, I’ve quoted from it in the frontispiece of the book, and the
whole thing is among my favourite blog reads.




My understanding of what he means by that
term is: people – well-meaning people, politicians often, but not exclusively –
who have lost sight of, or forgotten, or never understood what lay at the heart
of green thought. People who are focused on making the $ and the carbon cuts (and
the votes) add up; less focused, if at all, on confronting the whole economic
paradigm, and confronting ourselves.




He rightly pinpoints the fact that we need
a whole culture change, a total change of heart. And that one of the ways,
perhaps the only way, to achieve that is by changing the stories we tell
ourselves, about ourselves. Which is where the poets come in. The Club of
Rome’s saying the same thing (the Club of Rome, a high-powered think tank,
first published the Limits to Growth in
1972).




I’m both: quant and poet, both. Not,
literally, a poet - but I analyse (law and policy, usually), and when I get
tired of that, I dream. Perhaps that’s an uncomfortable mix in the book, I
don’t know, nor care really. It is what it is, and how I wanted it to be. It’s
the story, according to me.







Finally,
are more books by Claire Browning on the way?




I kind of half-accidentally ended up
writing this one, so... I think not. But you never know...







Book
availability details




For a copy of Beyond Today: A Values Story, which costs $15 (plus p&p), email
values.story@gmail.com.





You can buy books by Tim Jones online! Voyagers: SF Poetry from NZ from Amazon.Transported (short story collection) from Fishpond or New Zealand Books Abroad.