Courtney Sina Meredith

 

The Fuse Box, edited by Emily Perkins and Chris Price (Victoria University Press, 2017) 296 pp., $35

The Fuse Box is a collection of essays on writing by celebrated writers from Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters. Edited by Emily Perkins and Chris Price, contributors include Lloyd Jones, Elizabeth Knox, Tusiata Avia, Pip Adam, Damien Wilkins, Bill Manhire, Patricia Grace, Briar Grace-Smith, Gary Henderson, Tina Makereti, Ken Duncum, Ashleigh Young and Hera Lindsay Bird.

The blurb promises writing strategies and guidance for all stages of writing life from poets, dramatists, novelists and writing teachers, but essentially this is a book about creative survival and a survey of the private processes of storytellers. The essay forms are as eclectic as the subjects they address. There are interviews, poems as essays and poems within essays, chapters that read like manifestos, experimental moments of impact, and the more traditional essay of pages dripping in words. Some pieces feel like a good friend exploring their personal wisdom while others are more academic, detached and contemplative.  [Read more…]

Kiran Dass

Can You Tolerate This? Personal Essays by Ashleigh Young (Victoria University Press, 2016), 223 pp., $30

Sometime in 2008 in Wellington, my good friend John Paul and I met for coffee at the Milk Crate in Quilters Bookshop. He told me about how his younger sister Ashleigh was studying creative writing and that some of the non-fiction pieces she was working on were about him. I asked him how he felt about that, and I remember how he said, resigned, that in order not to fret about what the people you write about might think, his sister’s tutor had advised the students to ‘write about people as if they are dead’.

John Paul is a friend who always inspired me to stretch my vocabulary, and I always admired his clever insights and beautifully unique way of looking at and experiencing the world. And these 21 superbly observed personal essays by Ashleigh Young show that this is something that must run in the family. And her family, from her brothers John Paul and Neil to her parents Russell and Julia, feature in many of these pieces. Young has a stunning sense of the quietly absurd, dryly hilarious, woebegone and wistful angles of life. She’s a sensitive writer and these are thoughtful and observational pieces written in an authentic voice. [Read more…]