It was a busy weekend in the city with many events on as well as WORD Christchurch festival.
Narrative Threads was competing with Bjorn Again, over at the Isaac Theatre, yet this panel still drew a decent crowd. Alex Casey, writer and journalist for The Spinoff, hosted the 'galactic brains' of Airini Beautrais and David Coventry.
Airini Beautrais is the author of the of short story collection Bug Week, which won the Jann Medlicott Prize for Fiction in 2021, as well as several volumes of poetry. Her new work, an essay collection titled The Beautiful Afternoon, scooped the prestigious Janet Frame Prize of $10,000 this WORD week.
David Coventry won the Hubert Church Award for Best First Book at the 2016 Ockhams with The Invisible Mile.
His new book, Performance, is described by Casey as a 'staggering self portrait' and a 'work that defies paraphrasing'. Performance draws parallels between David's condition of ME (Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome) and the states of the book - meandering visits around the world, getting lost on a mountain, to show the dissonance of putting your own persona into a book. It's as if the book performs the disease.
To read both books, says Alex Casey, is to have your mind stretched.
How was the experience of writing non-fiction, for Airini?
It was like being naked on the page, she says. A poet foremost, Beautrais felt that the formal structure imposed by writing non-fiction put a cocoon around the deeply personal. Fiction can be used as a mask, whereas essays are more personal and exposing.
David's book allowed him more scope - Performance retains the 'mask' of fiction, while being merged with non-fiction explanations of ME. It was freeing and exciting says David, to draw from his life and let the oddness of the disease come to the fore. 'I am a fiction writer, said David: 'a text is a memory', feeling that it would've felt false not to include fiction in this book.
Many of your characters are real - where do you draw the lines?
'Beyond the truth,' says Coventry. David enjoyed writing people into his text who didn't know about it - it gave him licence. Has he had any feedback? Apparently none of his 'characters' were bothered by the inclusion.
Airini also included real people in her essays. She ran their inclusion in the text by them, changing names if they were uncomfortable with that representation. Hence the tattooist with no name.
Both books share the link of cultural voices 'breezing in and out' says Casey. Airini started with Lord Byron: she has PHD in Creative Writing, in how verse forms narrative in long the long-form poem.
Are relationships with your favourite dead people something you connect with?
It's tempting, says Beautrais, wanting to live a lifestyle of day drinking and writing poems, but Byron was dead at thirty-six...
Who do the authors read for inspiration?
Airini reads Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion and George Eliot's Middlemarch on rotation.
David also dips into Middlemarch. He says he hated The Mill on the Floss, because (spoiler!) Eliot killed all the characters - but in Middlemarch, Eliot looks at her own failings. 'It's entertaining, with amazing prose.'
Performance is a mixture of memories, musings and meanderings around the world, combined with scientific research on ME. There are still a lot of unknowns about ME, which David finds both frustrating and illuminating. This confirmed the need for a book 'like a puzzle with no answer'. Coventry's narrative in the book cannot help but conform to his illness - which makes it hard for him to concentrate for long periods of time.
Airini: 'That’s what medicine is like. We live inside our bodies, not even knowing much about them.' (Airini is a science teacher by profession.) 'How can we believe what we can’t see?'
Does this make editing difficult?
Sometimes David doesn't remember what he’s written. Coventry's ability to focus is so compromised, he says, that he can't read an entire text, even his own, without getting sick. Which often led to repeated chapters that mirror each other. In the back of David's mind is the fact that he put things in there for a reason and,
'You write, and tell the text what to do, yet there is a beautiful moment when it gains consciousness and starts to write itself.'
Airini, a full time teacher with two children, finds it hard to have time to do anything. Her writing can be piecemeal and pared back when it doesn’t fit the form. It isn't seamless, but that's her intent in writing something that's not linear. David loves this - he's found Airini's book, The Beautiful Afternoon, one of the few things he was able to read.
The essay, says Airini, is a more fluid form. You must, however, know when to stop writing and editing, and move on with your life.
At this point she shares that pole dancing was a great antidote - a way to reclaim the body and the self. Dance connects you with the body and gets you out of your brain. Beautrais now teaches pole dancing, to lots of people living with injuries, making her classes a safe space. One of the themes in The Beautiful Afternoon is the trap of being in a woman’s body in a patriarchy. It's a basic 'bitch' project, she says.
How’s that going? Quips Alex Casey.
It's less about patriarchy than a desire to be normal, incognito. It may be linked to feminism. Standing out isn't safe. In her book, Beautrais mentions a woman in a queue, looking unkempt. 'Will that be me?'
Does the identity of being a writer make you an outsider?
David says he's always dressed normally - feeling it’s more 'punk rock' to not stand out. He's always been drawn to art, music and writing - that which is trying to open up the world and make it a better place - and that starts with the mind: 'it’s all I’ve got'. He finds it interesting that after the formal process of being a writer, once published, it’s not 'you' any more: the David Coventry on the book cover is a construction of the reader.
'I’m not sick at home - I’m the David in the book…'
David says, 'Why can’t I be like that character - I've written them better.' David writes lots of of dialogue - it's his go-to, based on moments in time. The one actual transcription is the clunkiest and most unreal text. Conversation itself, (like this one) is disjointed, unfinished, - banter.
What media do the authors consume to relax?
Both dispute the term 'low culture', as it applies to reality shows and light TV shows. David enjoyed non-thinking of watching the Survivor series, when the illness wouldn't allow him to think. The irony here is that those people were in agony! he says.
Airini feels uncomfortable with the divide of high and low culture. She enjoys nineties hip-hop and Star Wars. People panic about kids not reading books, but, she argues, they're consuming a narrative when gaming. Her kids don’t read novels even after being read to as small children. 'Yet we’ve been consuming stories (in different formats) for millennia':
'Do what you enjoy - don’t worry about the cultural narrative'.
David: Star Wars and movies like Lord of the Rings contain classic motifs of heroism. Who are these people that don’t like popular movies?
Airini is suspicious of them. She loves Game of Thrones, and Real Housewives. But are Real Housewives real? They're probably scripted. But no more than a book. David: 'even in Survivor the editing is how they tell it.'
Airini: 'Otherwise it would be boring! Some people become peripheral... David: 'Then they win!'
How do the authors keep going, find motivation?
Airini has three jobs, her house isn’t clean and the garden is wild. I can relate to that. As an anti-capitalist and an anarchist, she's still interested in the market. Art has value, but experimental fiction and poetry are something she’s compelled to do, that may not be profitable. There are many easier ways to make money.
'God yeah', agrees David. Performance was finished three years ago. It was a long edit, then with a strong market in fiction last year, he held the book back. David feels lucky just to have a home - 'as being ill is his full-time job.' He tries to write every day, but that's not always possible, for months at a time.
David actually finished a manuscript this week. He has good periods when a book tells him what to do - that’s his economics. He feels lucky with achieving four books. The illness made him fight to write.
It seems WORD Festival Christchurch was inspiring for all of us.
More WORD Christchurch
- Our WORD Christchurch 2024 coverage - Library staff report back from WORD sessions
- WORD Christchurch website
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