Sarah Laing's Blog, page 8

Disbelief

First of all, commiserations to my U.S. readers, who now have to live with Donald Trump as their leader. I really didn’t imagine that this would happen. This comic may seem facile, but I felt like I had to draw something, no matter how simple, to mark this day. I don’t want the kind of world that Donald Trump represents. I want a world that is kind and full of compassion. Aroha nui.

 

Diversity

NEWS FLASH: (did I get your attention?) I’ll be at the Katherine Mansfield House and Garden at 2pm this Sunday, in conversation with Helen Rickerby and Anna Jackson, chaired by Claire Mabey! Come along – there’ll be afternoon tea! I’ll draw a picture for you if you buy my book!

This comic is partially a response to this article by Brannavan Gnanalingam in The Spinoff, amongst others. I always include non-white characters in my work, but I’m not sure they’d pass the racial Bechdel test. My central characters are usually white and middle class, like myself. I am a bit scared of writing non-white characters, scared I will get it wrong, that someone will tell me off, knowing that there are many things non-white people experience that I have not imagined. I would love it if more non-white-middle-class narratives were published in New Zealand. I just finished Black Ice Matters by Gina Cole, a Fijian New Zealander, and it was great – excellent writing, gripping stories, showing me a New Zealand that I knew existed, but that I wasn’t always party to. It made me feel like New Zealand had so many more layers than I could perceive, and that to me is a wonderful thing.

I do feel, quite passionately, that if we eradicated poverty and inequality, if we redressed the damage my pākeha ancestors did by stealing land and language from the Māori, if we were more welcoming to immigrants and refugees, our art and literature and society would be so much richer for it. How do we do this? It feels so hard! It seems like something the government should do, but the government we have is callous and imagines economic growth to trickle down and solve all of these issues. We need a new government, that’s what we need!

And talking of new governments:

 

Sophie and Henri overhear something they shouldn’t

Here is a comic from my journal, which is sitting in the Katherine Mansfield House and Garden right now. I’m going to be on a panel there next weekend, along with Helen Rickerby and Anna Jackson, and it would be lovely if you could come along! There will be afternoon tea in the garden, and November is when all the roses come out.

If you live in the Wairarapa, I will be giving a talk in Carterton on Sunday. 

Mansfield had a complicated relationship with her sexuality – it wasn’t ok to be queer in the early 20th century, and she definitely had Oscar Wilde impulses, as she liked to describe them.

(Actually Katherine does know what she’s talking about – she had a relationship with Māta Mahupuku and Beatrice Hastings, amongst others)

Kind of an act of voodoo, don’t you think? Sophie and Henri left, and Katherine and John never saw them again.

Littlerary comics

I was tidying out my office this weekend and I found a bunch of comics I did for a job, when I was still figuring out what the job was. They are a bunch of NZ literary jokes and it helps if you have an understanding of NZ lit!

Frank Sargeson was a short story writer and novelist who was famous, amongst other things, for being an excellent gardener and for offering his shed to Janet Frame so she could write her novels there.

I am quite excited about Catherine Chidgey’s new novel, which is going to be out in a week or so – I’ve been a fan since way back.

“The Magpies” is a classic New Zealand poem I first encountered at school – I can’t go past a magpie without thinking of it (and also thinking of how I must greet it or else I will have bad luck.

And I was raised on Margaret Mahy – her first book, A Lion in the Meadow, was published only a few years before I was born.

I was also born at the right time to enjoy Maurice Gee’s children’s books, and when I moved to Auckland, I thought I’d stumbled across the inspiration for “Under the Mountain”.

And the winner is… (plus doughnuts!)

Remember how I was giving away Helen Lehndorf’s Write To The Centre last week? I cut out all the names and drew one out of a dish and the winner was…

…Louisa! I will message you, and find out your address. If you want to find out more about this amazing book, you can listen to Helen talk to Pip Adam here.

Tomorrow (Saturday) is NZ Bookshop day, and I will be appearing at Vic Books at 12.30pm, Kelburn Parade, Wellington. I’m giving a small talk, and they are making Mansfield-inspired doughnuts that you can munch on, along with a cup of coffee, all for free!

This is Harry, the doughnut maker. I forwarded this recipe from Katherine Mansfield:

And Harry will provide:

The Making Of, part 356

Here is a comic I drew a long time ago, when I was still figuring out what I was going to write about in Mansfield and Me. For those of you who’ve read it, you may spot a few things that actually made it into the final version. KM = Katherine Mansfield, JMM = John Middleton Murry. Apologies for the small messy writing – these are comics from my journal.

Write to the Centre

When I was writing Mansfield and Me and thinking about how I became a writer, meeting Helen Lehndorf was a key element.

The fact that she was a devoted Smiths fan helped cement our friendship, and she went on inspiring me as an original punk, poet, zinester, and creative force of nature.

I went on to make many other wonderful writer friends, but Helen was my original collaborator, who pushed me to write poetry and put on fringe festival shows when my energies could’ve easily been sucked up by my design career.

The really cool thing is that Helen has a book out now too. It’s called “Write To The Centre” and you can find out more about it here.

It’s a super inspiring book about creative journaling, combining memoir and philosophy, and lots of practical advice as to how to go about journaling yourself. Also it has beautiful collages and illustrations.

It’s the kind of book that you really should read with your own journal and paints in hand, because Helen gives you so many angles to approach it with and doesn’t make it seem like an intimidating task. She is also very honest and revealing about how journaling has helped her through difficult patches in her life, and how it’s honed her superpowers of noticing.

Helen gave me a copy so I have one spare – leave a comment here and I will pick a random person and send you it! I am happy to post anywhere in the world.

 

 

Embarrassment

I am now suffering from post-publication embarrassment. It’s all very well showing your book to a select number of sympathetic readers, but when it goes out into the world, you no longer have control over who reads it. This is a wonderful thing – this is how we find out about lives different from our own – but this is also a bit awkward, especially when unsuspecting people can flick to straight that page where you thought it was a great idea to depict yourself losing your virginity. In a very discreet and tasteful way, of course. I was most nervous about my parents, but my mother was very accepting, and said although it was a bit weird for her to read about my experiences, she could see how they were vital to the narrative.

Anyway, here I am in the paper.

If you are in Christchurch this weekend, come along to South Library at 9am where I will be giving a free workshop. 

And if you’re in Nelson on Monday, I will be at the Arts Festival, talking with Stella Chrysostomou.

Happy Birthday Katherine Mansfield!

 

Today is Katherine Mansfield’s 128th birthday party, and it also happens to be the day after my book was officially published. That means you can buy it now!  But I also encourage you to go to your local bookseller and buy it there, so they feel like reordering it.

In honour of KM’s big day, I am having an opening this evening at her birthplace. I drew my very first comic for this project set in this Victorian villa, but it didn’t make it into the book.

The house did, though, in a few different places:

Also, here, depicting when I first visited her house:

There’s a new museum director now, and all the velvet cordons have been thrown away and you actually can go into the rooms, standing in the places Katherine once stood. Also, I’ve been allowed to place some of Mansfield’s possessions alongside my manuscript pages – the hei tiki she wore to Queen’s College in London, the pounamu pendent belonging to her brother, Leslie. Also, I have her father’s gun hanging on the wall, as a Chekovian lesson in narrative.

Come along! Katherine Mansfield House & Garden, 25 Tinakori Road, Wellington. I also have all my notebooks piled up on her father’s desk, and you are free to flick through and discover all of my secrets.

Press and lo-fi book trailers!

It’s school holidays, so I have been making claymation movies with the kids today. Gus and Violet also made me a trailer – Gus’s Mansfield ended up squashed between the pages of my book, and Violet’s Mansfield turned her head upside down to become a bearded hipster and my future boyfriend.

The book is about to be launched – tomorrow, in fact – and the press is beginning to come in. I really liked this photo taken in the Katherine Mansfield House & Garden by Anna Briggs. It accompanied an article by Sarah Lang, a journalist I am always trading identities with.

I was also interviewed the latest Listener by Paula Morris, who was wondering why people were still interested in Katherine Mansfield.

And I was interviewed by Kim Hill – one of my life goals! – and you can listen to the audio here. I was terrified leading up to the interview, but it was a lot of fun talking to her.

Finally, I answered some questions for the wonderful WordPress word wrangler, Cheri Lucas Rowlands, and you can read my answers here. Thank you so much for featuring me!