Craig Cliff's Blog, page 30

Auckland Writers and Readers Festival, Post #1

My Auckland Writers and Readers Festival 2011 (#AWRF) so far has been great.  The out-of-town festival participants are all being put up in The Langham, which you must pronounce with a plum in your mouth and the pinky finger on your tea drinking hand extended. So the pampering began last night when Marisa and I arrived around 9.30pm.

This morning I attenedd the Publishing Panel at 10am, which was chaired by ex-Penguin NZ big kahuna Geoff Walker, and featured Nikki Christer (Random House Australia), Tom Mayer (Norton, US), Alvina Land (Little Brown, US) and Alexis Washam (Random House US).  As you might expect the hour was focussed on the future of publishing: paper vs electronic books, self-publishing vs traditional publishing houses, the author's responsibilities when it comes to self-promotion. In all, the mood was optimistic: the book will endure, the paper-based book will endure (though the proportion of print and eBooks will clearly change), and there are new opportunities out there for writers and publishers (and readers) that have been opened up by technology.  As an example, Tom Mayer spoke about publishers willing to 'publish' 15-20,000 word pieces of non-fiction as stand alone eBooks, which would have otherwise only had the option of being published in magazines and/or extended/padded out into a 'book-length' book.

Alvina Ling suggested that it wasn't just writers who needed to be on Twitter and Facebook and everything else; that editors also need to be "a brand" to help attract talent and forge links in the publishing world (it's no coincidence that Alvina has a blog).

Tom Mayer said that writers had to make their own luck, and gave the example of the tireless Emily Perkins: "She doesn't just sit around writing books!" (Cue uneasy laughter).

Speaking of uneasy, the otherwise stellar Q&A session was derailed by the final question from the floor: "You mentioned how hard it is to get your books read as a new writer and how you have to be innovative and persistent [I'm paraphrasing slightly], so my question is: will you please read my book about reality TV shows and growing up the child of a holocaust survivor."

Um...

Next up for me was Inside Stories at 11.30am. Frances Walsh, author of Inside Stories: A History of the New Zealand Housewife 1890-1975 spoke with chair, Anna Miles, for half an hour about the book, domesticity and women's magazines more generally for half an hour. Then, the floor was opened for questions with a full 30 minutes left to run. This could have been a recipe for disaster but thankfully it wasn't. In fact, the erudite questions from the audience were probably better than those posed by the chair, ranging from birth control, Maori, politics, design and culminating in the best question of the session: 'You [Frances Walsh]' have said you tried to avoid nostalgia with this book, but if you could take a gap year in any one of the years in your time period, when would you choose and why?"  To which Walsh replied: 1895, and she'd work on Day Break magazine...

Walsh should be commended for being able to field every one of the wide ranging questions in an engaging and informative way, as, I guess, should Anna Miles for running the risk of handing the show over to the audience.

Up next it was my session with Hamish Clayton and Tina Makereti called "Emerging Writers", which was chaired by Iain Sharpe.  We took turns reading for about 8 mins each, then chatted about how we got here and where to next ("the difficult second album").

Come question time, there was a good split of questions from the auidence: each of us got a question directed at us.  Mine started off rocky when the audience member called me Cliff, and by the time I'd formulated a response to the possible racism inherent in on line in my reading, it wasn't really worth correcting her. But be warned Aucklanders, if you call me Cliff tomorrow, I may start singing 'Living Doll' and you don't want that!

I've just been to the session on Antarctica with Jane Ussher and Steve Braunias, and it's time to head to The Best of the Best NZ Poems. Will write about those (and more) in due course.

The Long and the Short of Success

Congratulations to Lawrence Patchett (a.k.a. Mr Long) and Kirsten McDougall (a.k.a. Ms Short) for coming up trumps in the Long and the Short of It competition run by Unity Books and Sport.

From the press release:

The judges – Elizabeth Knox, Bill Manhire and Emily Perkins – comment that both winning stories 'deal with difficult things and find their way to various kinds of human decency'.

Of Lawrence Patchett's long story: 'This remarkable—apparently artless, apparently old-fashioned—story strikes a quiet new note in New Zealand fiction. "The Road to Tokomairiro" shows us how ordinary human fortitude and decency can be, even in the most troubled circumstances. The story has moral seriousness, but feels "lighter" than its subject matter, perhaps because it is so beautifully and sympathetically written.'

Of Kirsten McDougall's short story: '"Clean Hands Save Lives" is about how families work; it's about generational power struggle; it's about how to be a functioning mother. There's lovely pacing, and yet we get a real story, not just a quick sketch of family dynamics—and there's also a nice sense of comic circularity (the snake with its tail in its mouth) courtesy of some supermarket biscuits.'

...

The stories are published, along with four highly commended stories – 'Anchorage' by Sylvie Thomson and 'When We Were Bread' by Anna Jackson in the long division, and 'The Orienteer' by Rachel O'Neill and 'The Waikato Farmers' by Craig Cliff in the short division – in The Long and the Short of It, which is available from Unity Books, RRP $20.

My story is inspired by this story from the Waikato Times; or more correctly, the farmers in my story seem to have been inspired/corrupted by the story in the news.

The wordcount is exactly 1000, counting the title. So yeah, just squeaked in.

There's a grand event (or a "petit finale" according to @FergusVUP) at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival, Sunday 15 May, 5.00-6.15pm. The two winners will read from their stories and be interviewed by Emily Perkins. It's free and all are welcome. Unfortunately I'll be checking in at the airport for my flight to Sydney at that time (my first Sydney Writers' Festival event is in the Blue Mountains on Monday morning). Excitement.

Aucklanders can still come and see me do my thang at these two Auckland events:

Emerging Writers session, with Hamish Clayton and Tina Makereti, Saturday 14 May at 1pm  (FREE!!)

Commonwealth Writers Prize session, with David Mitchell and Aminatta Forna, Sunday 15 May at 1pm  (ALSO FREE!!!!)

Okay, enough spruiking. I'm off to further pare back the wordcounts and whip up a 150 word short short story for the BNZ Literary Awards. Entries close 16 May.

Playlist for the non-grunge nineties, Or: It wasn't all sex and candy

I've been plunged 13-18 years in the past with my recent YouTube watching. I blame Marcy Playground. Now you can blame me.

1. Marcy Playground – 'Saint Joe on the School Bus' (1997)

2. The Refreshments – 'Banditos'* (1996)
Fun fact discovered while Wikipedia-ing the year this song came out: The Refreshments also did the theme tune for the TV show King of the Hill.
3. Spacehog – 'In The Meantime' (1996)
(I always just thought of pigs in space when I heard this band's name, but the other day I said, 'Stop being such a space hog' to a friend as we walked along the footpath and realised the second (and probably primary) meaning of their name.)
4. Smashing Pumpkins – 'Today' (1993)
I don't want to get into an argument about whether Smashing Pumpkins were grunge or not, okay? I don't think this song is grungy at all (it's kinda proto-emo, don't you think) and it's so good and it has an ice cream truck in it and it's my playlist and if you don't play along I'll take my blog and go home!

5. Toad The Wet Sprocket – 'Good Intentions' (1995)


6. Deadeye Dick* – 'New Age Girl' (1994)

* I was a bit iffy about including this song, but they are named after a Kurt Vonnegut novel, so...
7. Cracker – 'Low' (1993)


8. Fastball – 'The Way' (1998)

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Bonus Track (because it wasn't a single and there's no video, not even just an audio track with an album cover)

Nada Surf - 'Amateur' (originally 1998; this acoustic live version 2010)

Archival Footage

It's less than a week till I fly to Auckland for their Writers and Readers Festival and break my seal, so to speak, as a festival participant. Then on Sunday I fly straight to Sydney for a week of being on stage or in front of workshops or school groups. The ABC has already sought permission to film one of my sessions (the bromance one, of course), and there'll be a c.10 minutes video interview with me posted on the SWF website at some stage during the festival.

My cover will well and truly be blown.

Until now, I've managed to escape the world of video. Well, not completely. There'll be a two minute perve insight into my writing space on the final episode of season three of The Good Word (screening 7 June on TVNZ, and online thereafter).

And I (or eagle-eyed friends) have caught glimpses of me in two YouTube clips.

One: Gordon Downie, lead singer of the Tragically Hip, touches my head at 2:36. My head explodes at 2:37.



NB: That's not my singing you can hear on the video, I assure you.

Two: Best sporting event, ever. Brief glimpse of me in the crowd at the All Whites vs Bahrain at 5:10.



I told you it was brief. Still can't find me? Yeah, well.

I'm pretty much the Sasquatch in terms of verified video sightings.  The only other hits you'll find on YouTube are for dudes named Craig, cliff diving... poorly.

Maybe I should change my name to Acapulco...

Bricks and Bracken

I'm going to be spending less time at paid work and more time at unpaid work (ie writing fiction ie "the novel") in the coming weeks and months, which means I'm going to be listening to a lot more music and getting tired of the same old stuff on my hard drive and seeking out new and exciting albums that I can kinda sorta ignore as I create a fictional masterpiece (and write insanely long sentences).
But until then, I will settle for going on brief kicks with old bands I haven't listened to in a while and find pleasingly good upon re-listening, a la The Proximity Effect, On Avery Island, Grind...
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As if on queue, Richard Ford has a piece in the Guardian about "The Writing Life". He nicely sums up the pros of being a writer:

[You] run your own operation; you have at least a chance to admire what you do and feel a kinship with the greats; you get to make excellent use (by sticking it in your work) of the constant flood of life's jetsam – the daily freshet that drives most people crazy; and you have a chance to please total strangers with your efforts, and at least potentially, marginally make the world a better place.

Okay, so in isolation that sounds quite schmaltzy.

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Non sequitur of the week: I think Bricks and Bracken would be a good name for a law firm. Or a crime fighting duo (did Thomas Bracken, who penned God Defend New Zealand have superpowers? Probably not, if he was expecting God to step in and save the country when saving was called for).

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Frances Mountier has a short story, 'Bailout', online at Renegade House... WITH PICTURES. I was the external assessor for Frances' MA manuscript in 2009 ('twas a book of short stories) and it's nice to see this story come to life, so to speak.

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If you're in Wellington and you're looking for a younger-crowd book club OR you wanna hear me talk about myself (rather than just reading what I write about myself here...) you should come along to the Capri Bar Eatery next Tuesday, 10 May, at 6pm. Details here.

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Something I didn't know until I started taking photos of birds:

A flock of starlings looks like this...


But at any one point, there'll be birds that look like a pair of lips...

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

Okay, so I'm about eight months behind the rest of the world, but I've now finished Freedom.

I began reading it over Easter as it's the sort of book that benefits from long hours spent on the couch while nothing much needs to be done. It needs immersion.

Having said this, it took me a good while to get sucked into the narrative – in fact, I thought about giving up after 50 pages and again at 100.   Ah, at least I finished The Corrections...

Part of the problem was I'd previously read the opening section, 'Good Neighbours', in The New Yorker. This 23 page section is the obvious chunk to exhibit in other settings, but it is not a short story. The main characters – Walter and Patty Berglund – are at too great a distance, as events are told from the perspective of their Ramsey Hill neighborhood, often narrowing down to neighbours a fews doors down, Seth and Merrie Paulsen. Nor is this the standard opening to your typical contemporary social realist novel, which would start much less jauntily and also have the main characters in much closer focus.

The novel then shifts to the first manuscript within manuscripts: Patty Berglund's autobiography, Mistakes Were Made... (composed at her therapist's suggestion). Part way through this section I found the wormhole into Franzen's fiction and could finally empathise with his characters and I was away laughing (or sighing at the state of the world, as the case may be).

At page 190 there's another structural shift. This section is called '2004', and deals with events which all climax in said year of our lord. Each chapter takes a main character's perspective, and we often circle the drain of one nadir from two or more perspectives over two or more chapters. It is during this section that the POLITICAL MESSAGES are set forth in a manner so overt that one can't quite call the author out. Surely this is meant to be over-the-top? Surely this character is has moved beyond an authorial mouthpiece to become another extremist to be avoided?

In the end I didn't have a problem being bludgeoned with stats about overpopulation or declining numbers of songbird species (and Franzen did manage to make me feel a bit bad that I care more about the latter than the former). I even forgive the heavy handed 'You want freedom? You can't handle freedom' strand that shouted THEME, THEME, THEME, every time it appeared. That's fine. In fact, a book like this should come with some social commentary chops. It demands it. The love triangle stor line demands something broader, just as the social commentary demands examples on the micro level.

As Emily Perkins put it on The Good Word (watch the episode online here), the Walter-Patty-Richard Katz love story "acts as a Trojan horse for the author's moral outrage."

After '2004', we have a second instalment of Patty's autobiography in the third person, composed six years later, which is followed by a brief denouement section that mirrors 'The Good Neighbours', told from the perspective of Walter's neighbours in the newly (and appallingly) named Canterbridge Lakes Estate.

On a structural level then, there's a lot going on. I am undecided whether the palindromic structure is a stroke or a stunt of genius. It's clear J-Franz has IT, whatever it is we're all looking for in our writers: cajones, verbal alacrity and something to say, a deep moral vein and a finger on the pulse of kids these days... but there's always the push and pull of his fiction and his FICTION, of the story he's telling and the book he's writing, of the look at my characters and the look at me.

For example, there are scenes that are just plain bad. Like, so bad they couldn't work anywhere else except buried midway through a 600 page novel. Like the scene between Walter, his assistant and wannabe lover, Lalitha, and Richard Katz that starts on page 215 (NB: I think I have the version that was printed from the earlier proofs so my page numbers may be off; if not, they still missed some howlers in the final final version). We get nine pages of dialogue so ludicrously content heavy (explanation of the Cerulean Mountain Trust and Walter's overpopulation hobbyhorse) that Katz is reduced to, "Incredible," and "That does sound tough" and "This is all sounding more familiar." Way to turn the brooding, Byronic anti-hero rocker into a compliant interlocutor and shunt this here reader from your fictional coil, if only temporarily.

But I don't want to get too down on what is a good-great novel and will surely make my top ten books for the year. It didn't make me weep on the last page like it did the usually stoic Steve Braunias (as per the above Good Word episode), but it packed plenty of heart-punches (those moments of utter, instant sadness when you look up from the book and say to yourself, 'How could this middle-aged American author possibly now what it feels like to be me?'). I'm glad there's a writer like Franzen out there writing novels like The Corrections and Freedom and I'm glad there's a big readership for what he's doing. On a day like today, with the uncomfortable scenes coming out of the U.S. after the death of Osama bin Laden, I feel there's plenty of fuel left for the fire.

In Quotation Nation

I've been reading a lot of interviews with writers over the last couple of days. No real reason why, just something that's happened.

I've also been tasked with thinking about what the Commonwealth means (it's hard not to say this phrase without the Double Rainbow guy's voice in my head) for my sesh at the Auckland Writers Festival, but I find my thoughts are far from quotation-worthy.

Mostly just jokes about bronze medals and corgis.

Nothing like these excerpts from my Quotations Catalogue (incomplete)

#25 The tongue-in-cheek quotation

"The number of rooms in a fictional house should be inversely proportional to the years during which the couple living in that house enjoyed true happiness"  -- George Saunders (in an interview at Bomblog).

#51 The surely I read that wrong quotation

"I'm a perfectionist. I go to great lengths to get it all right. It's the biggest challenge I face when I'm writing. If you're confused about something in one of my books, you've just got to realize, Ellroy's a master, and if I'm not following it, it's my problem." -- James Ellroy (Paris Review interview)

#67 The hells yeah quotation (depending on what mood you're in)

"A lot of writing nowadays is very intellectual. Very wussy. Correct, wussy, and too much rationalization. That was my experience at Iowa when I was teaching. Stories had simply become too small, they took such low altitude. Take a couple, and then someone would acknowledge something in a Kroger parking lot about their relationship and he'd get back in his car and drive on. People were not going for much. They were going for very limited American realism, which is a bore to me. I really want stories that are rippers in the old sense. Tales of high danger, high adventure, and high exploration. Tales that are as wonderful as frontier tales. I want more adventure." -- Barry Hannah (Paris Review interview)

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While I'm kind of pointing people in directions, I'll say that I'm loving Joan Fleming's new(ish) photo-poetry blog and hope it's a stayer.

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Playlist for a cold but-not-as-cold-as-the-last-two-days evening
1. 'Like A Rolling Stone' by Spirit (hattip to David Kilgour)2. 'Hurdy Gurdy Man' by Donovan3. 'Halluncination Bomb' by Monster Magnet4. 'Give Up and Go Away' by Strippers Union5. 'Off He Goes' by Pearl Jam (earworming big time lately, dunno why)6. 'Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood' by The Animals7. 'Quarantined' by At The Drive In8. 'It's Easier' by John Grant9. 'Solitude is Bliss' by Tame Impala

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Craig's fortnightly photo diary (first and last)

My brother (the real photographer), Raumati Beach
Shipwreck, Tora
Obligatory seagull
FIN

Keep it simple

I'm off to Pukemuri Beach (which is by Tora, which is by… nowhere, really) for Easter with a bunch of friends. We have a bach, we have firewood, we have wine and board games. What better way to celebrate the incomplete crucifixion of a quasi-historical figure who may or may not have resembled Russell Brand.

I jest, I jest.

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Speaking of jesters, I recently devoured Katrina Best's short story collection, Bird Eat Bird. Katrina won best first book for the Canada and Caribbean region of the Commonwealth Writers Prize and we'll be hanging out in Sydney (and the Blue Mountains and Parramatta and and and…) in May.

Good thing I liked her book, eh?

I've previously declared my affection for slim short story volumes (despite the fact my own collection has been described as 'thick' and 'the sort of book you might pick up at an airport bookstore') and Bird Eat Bird exemplifies this type of book — closer in many ways to a collection of poetry than a novel.

There are only six stories and by the end of the book you feel you still have a handle on each story, can give a wee précis of the plot and recall its shining moments.

The stories are united by the wry tone and set-ups where the reader becomes more and more aware of the gap between a character's perceptions of the world and the reality. In 'Tall Food', we slowly see how deluded Ellie's hopes for a third date are. By the end of 'Red' we've figured out the narrator is off her meds (after much hilarity), though this has yet to dawn on her. In 'At Sea', Carol's struggles with the rip are foreshadowed such that her near-death experience seems inevitable and avoidable and wonderfully bathetic.

Next on the CWP reading list is Kim Scott's That Deadman Dance, which I just bought online (not so easy to get in NZ at the mo).

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Speaking of online purchasing, when I did finally find a copy of That Deadman Dance that I could get delivered in New Zealand for a decent price, there was a nice wee surprise. On the front page of thenile.co.nz, A Man Melting is number 3 in their "Top 5".

Geek that I am I took a screenshot (who knows how long it'd stay on the list):



I'm not sure what the Top 5 represents (it can't be linked to sales) but number 1 is Jean M Auel's latest (minor co-inky-dink: there's a reference to Auel's Clan of the Cavebear in 'Facing Galapagos' in AMM).

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I believe most writers are as geeky about this sort of thing as I am, but they are cool enough to keep it to themselves.

And if they don't get jazzed by seeing their name where they don't expect it, then I question if they spent enough time as a reader, fan and worshipper of writers before being published.

One of my favourite things to do is look at the "Customers who bought this product also purchased" part on my book's page on fishpond.

Right now, I'm regretting my Jesus reference above as someone who bought A Man Melting also bought Theology for Community of God.

Someone else (or perhaps the same person), bought Van Morrison's CD, Keep It Simple (minor co-inky-dink II: the sleaze-ball in my story 'Touch' sings 'Brown-Eyed Girl').

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A Tale of Two Davids

I took two books with me to Vietnam, both by authors who'll be appearing at the Auckland Writers Festival next month, both are authors of previous books I've enjoyed, both are authors with the first name David. The similarities end there I reckon…


The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell


Mitchell's Cloud Atlas is a flawed, uneven and at times frustrating novel but I love it. It was part of the inspiration behind me trying to write a linked HTML novella, which degraded with time to become the story 'Orbital Resonance' in A Man Melting.

I've also read Mitchell's follow-up, the more straight-forward and presumably semi-autobiographical Black Swan Green, which was less breath taking, but in some ways a more ambitious (for Mitchell at least) divergence from his previous novels than Cloud Atlas was from its predecessors.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is both a leap back to the ambitious, imaginative feats of Mitchell's Cloud Atlas days, and a continuation of the use of more linear and focussed plots exhibited in Black Swan Green.

The novel is set around the turn of the Nineteenth Century in Dejima, the man-made island which was the base of Dutch trade with Japan and one of the shogunate's few windows to the world beyond its borders. Aside from rushing through the later years of de Zoet's life in the final chapters, Mitchell focuses the action over a period of only a few years, and all within a few districts of Japan.

The ambition and imaginative feats are evidenced by the reconstruction of this cloistered world of 200 years ago. In the essay on historical fiction included at the end of the book, Mitchell makes it clear the amount of time and research required to pull such a historical fiction off convincingly. And the high points of the novel are those scenes where the reader feels privy to a little known but still historically convincing world, such as the childbirth scene that opens the novel and the goings on in the Nagasaki Magistrate's Room of Sixty Mats.

There is still some unevenness in this novel, due to the shift in perspectives through the various sections. The first section focuses on the Dutch trading efforts, particularly the new clerk Jacob de Zoet who is tasked with documenting the corruption under the previous Chief Resident and falls in love with a Japanese medical student. The second section shifts to the Japanese perspective, and it takes a while to re-engage with the story, but eventually we are gripped by the quest of a Dejima translator's quest to rescue de Zoet's love interest (who the translator also had/has feelings for). The third section introduces the perspective of the British on board the Phoebus under the command of Captain Penhaligon, who is charged with kicking some Dutch butt on Dejima and flying a Union Jack from the flagpole. Sadly, the Phoebus incident is a bit of an anti-climax and doesn't compare with the intrigue of the previous two sections, but it's still interesting on the level of historical insight. The novel rounds out by returning to the Dutch and Japanese perspectives. Plot elements are resolved. Time moves on. The novel closes.

The biggest sore thumb to me was the single chapter to open section three told in the first person (only chapter to do so) from the perspective of the slave, Weh, who may have been mentioned twice earlier in the novel and does not feature in any further part of the story. I can see how this chapter links with all the 'my hard life and how I came to be here' stories which which 1000 Autumns teems. These stories are as much the meat of the novel as the ostensible plot (the intrigues of the Dutch traders, the love story, the quest for rescue, the British attach, the Magistrate's action against the evil Abbott Enomoto), but Weh's felt like a loose end that survived successive drafts…

But one can overlook a couple of odd pages out when the novel is as entertaining and transporting as 1000 Autumns.

I look forward to meeting David Mitchell at the Auckland Writers Festival (we're both appearing in a panel on the Sunday) and asking him about Weh's chapter and whether he has any goss on the Wochowski's efforts to turn Cloud Atlas into a movie.


Caribou Island by David Vann

Last year I read and loved Vann's Legend of a Suicide. Of the books I read last year I only rated works by Janet Frame and Herman Melville higher, and with greater hindsight I might now nudge Legend slightly above Owl's Do Cry.

And so to Vann's follow-up book, the novel Caribou Island. Did I love it? No. Did I hate it? No. Why the lukewarm response? To answer this requires a…

Spoiler Alert: I will discuss the twist/end of both 'Sukkwan Island' and Caribou Island, so leave now if you wish.

Legend of a Suicide is a short story collection with a very long short story in the middle called 'Sukkwan Island' – it's the best story in the book, but (counter to the French version which omitted all the other stories) it relies on its preceding stories for its true impact.

The preceding stories in Legend all feature a narrator, Roy, whose father committed suicide in Alaska when he was a teenager. 'Sukkwan Island' is a third person narrative that sees a teenaged Roy go on a camping trip with his father, and at the point at which we expect the father to commit suicide, it is the son who blows his brains out. Wham. Twist-o-rama. But the story is only half done and we now switch to the father's perspective and must bear witness to the terrible minutiae that follows a son's suicide in the Alaskan wilderness.

The great power exerted by 'Sukkwan Island' comes from the way this fiction deviates from the previous lighter fictions (in that they appear to stick closer to the autobiographical truth). The story become a kind of fantasy, both a revenge from the son David Vann on his suicide father, an act of empathy, an attempt to inhabit his father, and perhaps even self-sacrifice, if only within this fiction.

Caribou Island is like 'Sukkwan Island' in more than just name. It is set in Alaska and features suicides of parents/children. They both feature adult males who set out to live though the winter with little planning or knowledge and bring someone else along for the ride/misery. They are both told in the same flattened male register and are unrelentingly bleak.

Caribou Island also has ties to the shorter stories in Legend as there's a womanising dentist similar to the father in Legend and the murder suicide of the dentist's partner's parents. But these are not the same characters as the stories in Legend were set in the past to correspond with the author's own age at the time of the events, while Caribou Island is set in the present world of email, cellphones and iPods, though these don't feature a lot, as one might expect in an Alaskan frontier story.

Caribou Island, like 'Sukkwan Island', is told in the third person, but covers a number of character's perspectives. In addition to Irene and Gary, the fifty-something married couple being rent apart by forces neither can do much about, we also sit on the shoulder of their daughter, Rhoda, her partner Jim (the dentist), and Monique and Carl, two visitors from Washington DC who get caught up in Rhoda and Jim's lives briefly.

Monique and Carl fade away from the story by about the two-thirds mark, when Gary and Irene finally start constructing the cabin on Caribou Island which Gary has dreamed about for 30 years (but never got around to considering the practicalities of constructing this dream). Similarly, Rhoda and Jim's intrigues are discarded as the tension builds…

As with Legend, we know something terrible this way comes from the first page. Irene describes finding her mother after she hanged herself and the tone of dread remains until…

Spoiler Alert reminder: The ending of Caribou Island will be described in three… two… one…

Irene shoots Gary twice with a hunter's bow and arrow and then hangs herself.

As with the precise descriptions of Roy's decomposing body and the efforts to move him in 'Sukkwan Island', readers are treated to the nitty gritty of how to hang yourself in a poorly constructed log cabin (including measuring the drop height, selecting the knots and securing your own hands so that you can't reach up at the wrong moment).

This finale is much less affecting than the events in 'Sukkwan Island' because there is no twist. This tragedy was inevitable, and dwelling on the practicalities of the murder/suicide – though it dovetails well with the practicalities of constructing a cabin together (which is the overwrought symbol for the degradation of their relationship) – feels tawdry. It is less an act of empathy than a mechanical need to culminate the tension, pain and suffering brewed up by the preceding 250 pages.

That said, Caribou Island does plunder the depths of its characters (less so Monique and Carl) and provide a compelling anatomy of one failed marriage (potentially two if Jim and Rhoda ever tie the knot).

This is not a light summer read by any stretch, and it pales in comparison to Legend of a Suicide, but it's still an accomplished work and I'm sure the ascension of Vann up the ranks of American writers will continue apace.

On Readings

Before my book came out I set myself the challenge of reading from each story in my collection in public. As there are eighteen stories and there's no such thing as a book tour for a New Zealand author, this was quite ambitious and meant I couldn't afford to double up on any stories.

Here's what I've read from so far:

'Manawatu' - reading as part of guest speaker to Whitireia Creative Writing Student, July 2010'Copies' - reading to Adult Continuing Education night school class, March 2010'Untitled (Crimson and Gold)' - NZSA Wellington Branch, Feb 2011'A Man Melting' - reading to Adult Continuing Education night school class, Oct 2010'Oribital Resonance' (part 2) - NZSA Wellington Branch, Feb 2011'Facing Galapagos' - Book launch and Radio NZ interview, July 2010 (they were the same day; Lynn Freeman asked what passage I'd be reading at the launch and then asked me to record it for broadcast later… I didn't have my wits about me to suggest another story… ah, lost opportunities!)The Sceptic's Kid - Te Papa Writers on Mondays, September 2010
So that's 7/18 or a slightly over a third of the way there in 10 months. Thank goodness for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, as I'll have tons of reading opportunities in Sydney next month.

Question: What can female residents of a Juvenile Justice Centre relate to? Answer: Please don't let it be one of the seven stories I've already read from!

I've already had to let the CWP people know what passage I'll be reading from at the event on 21 May when the winners are announced. I've gone with the opening of 'Parisian Blue', so that's one more to check off the list.

It always surprises me how long it takes to choose a reading, even when it is to be 1-2 minutes long. In fact, the shorter the reading the harder it is. The endings of my stories tend to be compacted into a readable 1.5 minute chunk, but much of their power relies on the repetition of early elements in the story and when divorced from that context, they seem (to me at least) a little weak. Also, there's the fact you're acting as your own spoiler in the case of stories with twists (though that didn't stop me reading the end of 'The Sceptic's Kid'; perhaps that's more of an dummy-twist-and-go?).

With short readings I prefer to be funny over deep (though both humour and profundity tends to be the product of several pages build up). With longer readings I try to pick something that doesn't have a sentence that makes me cringe and that may link to something I can talk about as a kind of spur for questions and answers.

I also shy away from dialogue that will force me to put on voices (though I have broken this rule already). Thankfully, most scenes in my short stories tend to boil down to double-handers and I can resort to the 'turn this way for him', 'turn that way for her' form of delivery.

With Auckland, Sydney and Melbourne festivals this year, I should get down to two or three stories left to be read. At that point I may just stand on a street corner and yell at people: "It began with a puddle…"