Features

“Dunedin,” says local writer Sue Wootton, is “a fantastic place to be a writer. We have a great creative energy, often invisible to people who may not be directly involved. It's often thought of as a very conservative place, where nothing is happening, but there is a lot going on in wee pockets!” Wootton describes her particular pocket as “a vigorous writing community.”


The stunning natural landscape and the supportive community is seductive enough to have drawn a good number of successful writers to the area. Poet David Eggleton, who came down from Auckland, says “Dunedin’s size and sense of community, its particular identity and its relation to the hinterland of Te Wai Pounamu have all been important in my choice to live here.” 
   Here in the haven of the Deep South, writers can be very independent. The downside of writing in Dunedin is its distance from the main centers of literary funding. “Theoretically these things are all very egalitarian,” says Sue, “but the radar doesn't always extend this far south.” Nevertheless Dunedin does have its own distinctive literary heritage – most notably, the Robert Burns Fellowship.
 
   THE BARD’S BEQUEST
 
   The Burns Fellowship is the oldest literary fellowship in the country. Charles Brasch, the initiator of the Fellowship, once wrote: 
   "Part of a university's proper business is to act as nurse to the arts, or, more exactly, to the imagination as it expresses itself in the arts and sciences. Imagination may flourish anywhere. But it should flourish as a matter of course in the university, for it is only through imaginative thinking that society grows, materially and intellectually.”
   Each year the Fellowship offers a selected writer one year of financial and professional support. Past Burns fellows have included such literary greats as Janet Frame, James K. Baxter, Hone Tuwhare, Witi Ihimaera, Roger Hall, Brian Turner, and Cilla McQueen. Sue Wootton says, “It's a very important tradition for Dunedin, and the University. It's a very proud thing to have been a Burns fellow.” As an up-and-coming writer with only one book out so far, she says that receiving the Fellowship in 2008 was an immense encouragement to her: “It's so prestigious, when you look at the people who have held it before you, you definitely feel as if you are in a literary line, and you are part of it.” 
   David Eggleton, who held the Burns fellowship in 1990, has a somewhat different view of Dunedin's literary heritage. He says “while I am aware of the writers’ tradition, I think in some ways it’s a bit kitsch or perhaps opportunistic to imagine you have a literary heritage to live up to. I’d rather just do my own thing, follow my own instincts.” But he does commend the way the Burns Fellowship “is so strongly a link between town and gown, a symbol of community, but also with an element of ambiguity to it also [...] It’s a means to an end, one way of encouraging literary production of a sophisticated kind”
   Emma Neale, who both teaches creative writing in poetry at Otago and is a published writer herself, highlights how valuable the Fellowship is for Dunedin's creative community and student community, in the way it brings new talent into the city. Neale, well familiar with the struggles of new or hopeful writers, says the fellowship “a very nurturing, fostering” thing. Eggleton and Wootton both note the practical benefits of having a fellowship that allows a writer a year of time and space for writing in a 'collegial' setting. Wootton says, “that year gave me everything I needed to put in place the routines and the practices of being a writer.”
 
   PUTTING PEN TO PAPER TO PRINT
 
   According to Sue Wootton, every writer must find their own routine. She explains that she likes to dedicate specific time slots to writing, and that she tends to write rather slowly and revise a lot, often writing a poem out multiple times by hand before she is satisfied with how it looks. She laughingly notes, “I can spend an entire morning shifting commas!” With fiction, she says: “I never have a plot – I never really know, and I'm literally finding out with every sentence. I'd get bored if I knew what was going to happen! It makes it exhausting writing though, because you work a lot with archetypes, and metaphor, and symbol quite a lot, which is very hard. So something comes up, a person, a character, and you start to write that character, and you make all these associative jumps, and something nudges at you. You have to stop, and pause, and haul it up to the surface until you can see it yourself.”
   Like Wootton, Emma Neale tries to set aside some time in a regular, disciplined manner, to get to work on her writing. This must, of course, work around family commitments (Wootton has three children, and Neale has two) and usually around part time work as well. Wootton admits “You have to earn a living – and poetry will never be it. And neither will short stories ever be it. You try and get a job which doesn't take all your head-space, but is not too mind-numbingly boring either.” Wootton herself had a successful physiotherapy practice, three children, and a mortgage before the pull back to her lifelong love of literature became too strong. “It was a leap of faith,” she says. 
    “Your life works on you, and obviously a lot of material comes out through experiences you have had,” she says. Neale, who has a PhD in NZ Literature, explains that “Every writer has territory that they tend to work over and over. They have their own obsessions and preoccupations, which you could also say were their fortés.” From her own experience as a novelist, she notes that “It's very difficult to escape yourself when you are writing.” Nevertheless, poetry is more than the outpouring of an artistic spirit. Wootton:“Poems are artifacts. They are not autobiographical, although often people will read them as if they are – I've got a horror of that! You are shaping them, you want to make something that stands alone, on its own terms.”
   Dave Eggleton also spoke about his creative processes. He says: “I like to build soundscapes out of words and then travel along them in search of poetic epics, versifying and poetasting. To this end I cover scraps of paper with random spontaneous scribblings, much as the snail secretes a trail of slime to mark journeys through time. Eventually these accumulate and are crafted into discrete subsets of meaningful utterance. I’m the writer as artisan, a crafter and a maker of texts small and large to fit specific purposes.”
   Eggleton says that his strategies of “satire, parody, virtuosity, excessive lyricism, the perverse application of over-zealous literary logic” can sometimes produce good results, and other times “epic failures.” But Neale commends such flexibility, saying “You need to stretch yourself as a writer if it's going to stay interesting to you, as well as to your readership. It's all a process of exploration and discovery.” Editing is a really tough task, most writers will admit. Neale says that it can be very involved, since it involves looking at everything from semantics and syntax to character portraits. She also believes that a willingness to edit your own work is often the difference between a 'wannabe' writer and someone professionally pursuing the craft. She says, “It's the refining and the polishing which often really help you discover the essence of what you are working on.” 
 
 
   CREATIVE WRITING ON CAMPUS
 
   Emma Neale teaches the Creative Writing paper at Otago. This poetry paper is a limited-entry course, with only about 15 places available. While Neale enjoys teaching the course, she finds it very different from editing the work of established authors. “You are often dealing with people with quite a romantic and untutored way of looking at the form [...] you are kind of introducing them to the whole genre.” Her main instruction is that they read a lot – read widely and deeply. She says “What I have to say every year is 'look, if you were a filmmaker, you would be expected to be watching other films. If you were a musician, you would be listening to other practitioners', yet people seem to have this attitude to poetry that it can just spring from the 'heart’s fountain' within and that you don't have to learn much about technicalities and form and so on.” 
   Despite the challenges, Neale says “when you have a young new talent come along who just has a really quirky, idiosyncratic way of writing about things, it's just really exciting. Watching them take off is great.” Many of her past students have been published in magazines, newspapers, and literary journals. One burgeoning poet, Poppy Haynes, has just been awarded a mentorship with James Norcliffe through the New Zealand Society of Authors. “So things like that show that people are beginning to spread their wings,” says Neale.
 
   ADVICE FROM THE EXPERTS
 
   What do you need to gain success as a writer? “Aptitude and fortitude,” says Sue Wootton. “Just keep on keeping on,” says David Eggleton. “Read and read and read!” says Emma Neale.” These three folk have all walked the hard and lonely road to literary success, and are willing to share what they have learnt. 
   Wootton notes honestly that “You have to be willing to sit on your bum for large lengths of time. You have to be self-disciplined – it's hard work, it's really hard work. It's the hardest thing I've ever done in my working career, for the least gain financially. It can be very exhausting. It just feels like you are digging deep a lot. So sometimes you have to recognise when it's time to take a replenishment holiday and just go and do some fun stuff instead, or just go and have an experience ... go climb a mountain or something!”
   In fact her advice to young writers is to “Have a life!” She suggests you “Cultivate a curious attitude to the world. Most beginning writers are writing about themselves which is natural, and a very good thing to do – you get to know yourself very well through writing – but your writing will be more interesting probably, the more curious you are about the world.”
   Emma Neale says that writers need a persistence and a thick skin. They also need “A fascination for language. A fascination for people and the strange psychological subterranean life that we have. An alertness to the world around you, in terms of how it feeds into all our senses. And, particularly with poetry, an alertness to the music of language. People who are always listening out for the unusual phrase, or the sonorous phrase, people who can see the strange little ironies that there are in everyday speech. And people who are really observant of other people.”
   Her advice is to “read and read and read and read.” She also strongly encourages young hopefuls “don't think that the time to write will come 'one day'. You have to make it now, if you really are keen to write. Be serious about it and live by that commitment. I don't think there's any shortcut to being a successful writer. It's long, solitary, repetitive work. 
   David Eggleton says “There are many kinds of writing, and many ways of getting your ‘writing’ out there. I am a pluralist, a believer in multitudes and in impossible things as well as possible things: that is, I believe in the power of invention, and by extension self-invention.” His advice to aspiring writers is to “Create your own opportunities. Any writer worth his or her salt (of the sweat of the literary brow) will just keep on keeping on. So, more power to their writing arm; let the dust of ages deal with it.”
 
   SIDE BOX:
 
   UPCOMING EVENTS
 
   Upfront: Spotlighting Women Poets 
   Dunedin Public Library
   7-9pm Oct 6
   Fiona Farrell is the guest reader. The audience is open to both genders, and there will be an open mic for women.
 
   Poetry Nights 
   Circadian Rhythm, lower St Andrew Street.
   8pm Weds Evenings: Sept 22, Oct 13, Oct 27, Oct 10
   “Each night has a guest poet and open mic. It's really friendly. You get people who are reading for the first time, and trembling in their boots, and you get more established poets as well.” – Sue Wootton