Self-publication looks up?

 At the risk of repeating myself, Rosa Mira's new website is millimetres away. It's just a matter of the two busy people responsible (yours truly and sib) coordinating over the last few details.

Meanwhile (I wonder if that's my most frequently used paragraph starter), I read this article called 'Self-publishing matters' about the popularity and destigmatisation of DIY. What do you think? I think that, even so, not every writer wants to go it alone. Many value a publisher's editorial judgment and input, design capabilities, ebook production and marketing know-how ... and that's where Rosa Mira comes in — with traditional publishing values and an innovative, collaborative model.

I'm currently reading a promising manuscript, one author is making small structural changes to hers, and two are waiting for me to pull my editorial hat down hard and get started.

It's always a thrill to see Rosa Mira authors (possibly not how they describe themselves primarily, but I'm entitled) out doing beautiful things in the written world. In April Carolyn McCurdie is going to have her first (ridiculous that her work hasn't been in mass circulation for the last decade) book of poetry Bones in the Octagon published by Mākaro Press. More when I have one in my hand.

Sue Wootton recently won the 2015 Caselberg Trust International Poetry Prize for her poem 'Luthier'. I happen to know she's just completed her Masters (submitted — that's 'completed', right?) so we might see more of her poetry and fiction out on the streets in the near future.

There's more but my skin is coming of age and I shortly have an appointment with a flask of liquid nitrogen.

Meanwhile, carry on: Writing is its own reward, wrote Henry Miller.

Vegetables, Self-Improvement and Good News.

While Ratty and Lily the Pink do their best to deal with the day's harvest (he a persimmon, she a pear) and the ratadilloes enjoy the soporific effects of lettuce (instructed as they were to eat it up before the frost does), I embark on Day Three of an online course called Work Less, Earn More and Make a Difference. Don't you hate titles with that 'you can have whatever you want this instant' promise? Nonetheless, two Kiwi women have put this course together and I like their infectious enthusiasm. Following their workbook seems like a good way to pin myself down, find new, workable ideas and, potentially, meet other women with small online businesses. I'll let you know how it goes.

Lily perches on a huge Italian pumpkin, a marina di chioggia, often used in the making of gnocchi.

In other news, you may have see that Sue Wootton (The Happiest Music on Earth) won second-equal placing in the Hippocrates Open International Prize for Poetry and Medicine with her poem 'Wild'. Some feat, with 1000 entries received from 29 countries.

The Linen Way is being styled up. An essay by Martin Edmond on the defeats, diversions, and even the delights, of cab driving is being tweaked to make the third in the 10k series. And editing has begun to Fait Maison (subtitle yet to be determined), a cookbook by New Zealander Rachel Panckhurst who lives in Montpellier, presenting recipes and anecdotes in a deliciously French-flavoured international culinary pastiche.

Another photogenic Rosa Mira author

I don't think you've met Aaron yet — Aaron Blaker, author of the forthcoming 10k ebook, The Siren. Here he is: green-fingered and stocking-footed in a photo that someone close to him suggested could gain him a wide-ish readership. I'm sure you'll agree. This and his writing, of course. A sample of which follows.

Photo taken by Lara Liesbeth and squashed by Blogger.

Here he makes a tasty meal out of a few stock questions from the Rosa Mira question file:

RMB: Aaron, would you say a little about writing this short novella — the time, place, and any anecdotes associated with it?

AHB: The physical setting and the lives of the characters in The Siren are loosely based on my experiences living in a small township on the East Coast of the North Island, a few years ago. The outlandish beauty of the place was quite unsettling, as was the isolation and the socio-economic reality. The fictional events of The Siren arose from my combined sense of discomfort and euphoria.

 RMB: Are there writers whose work or way-of-being you draw on for encouragement or inspiration?

AHB: The English writer Laurie Lee once inspired me, with his autobiographical As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, to walk through Spain. At the time I was just swept up in the romance of sleeping outdoors, getting heatstroke and drinking red wine that cost ten pesetas. Reading it again recently, I recognised more clearly his allusions to that disjunction between raw (including corporeal) beauty and human unkindness, and the lunacy that might result. That aside, Lee’s poetic prose has always made me want to experience life deeply and write about it in colour. Lately, Annie Proulx and Jeffrey Eugenides have been lighting my fire. Their stories are alive, ­like a Van Gogh painting. All motion and pluralism and resisting conclusions. This suggests to me a writer’s, a person’s, obligation to be alive, and aware of the sensual data in constant flow. Difficult for a writer to harness it of course, but those two manage to. I love that.

RMB: What are your current challenges?

AHB: Not being swept away in the tidal wave of my daughter’s obsession with painting and role-play. Finding a wee bit more time to write. (Not unique.) 

RMB: Current delight?

AHB: Rehabilitating my knee to the point of being able to play association football again. Learning how to build rammed-earth tyre-houses, Mike Reynolds style. Getting kind comments on the Goethe-Institut site. The pre-publication process for The Siren.

RMB: What's up ahead for your work in 2013?

AHB: More fiction. Tending toward longer pieces. My wife wants me to write a novel. Possibly. Will depend, as always, on having the consistent blocks of time to squeeze things out and set them down. I might have to give up role-playing…

Aaron comes from the East Coast of the North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand, but currently lives and writes in Dunedin. His fiction has been published in Takahē and Best New Zealand Fiction and online by the Goethe-Institut New Zealand.

Talking of pears, there's some peachy news this week: our first 10k author Sue Wootton (The Happiest Music on Earth) has just been (very) short-listed for the 5000-pound international Hippocrates Prize for a poem that touches on some aspect of medicine. Her poem is caled 'Wild' — congratulations, Sue!

New book launched today!

Ratty offers floral congratulations to Sue on the publication today of her exceptional collection, The Happiest Music on Earth. The three stories demonstrate Sue's versatility, her penetrating eye for the dynamics of human aspiration and foible, her skill as a wordsmith and story-teller.

There's Earle who leaps through light and shadow between the lure of his beautiful longings and the heavy footfall of his father; Margaretha whose life is tainted by her husband's alchemical experiments with urine; Lily's mother who see shapeliness waiting to emerge from raggedy rosebushes and from a gangly half-grown daughter, shapeliness that's threatened by a Saturday morning incident on the soccer field.

Congratulations, Sue, and many thanks for allowing Rosa Mira to share your work here. May it fly swiftly forth, find perch and purchase in its many readers, entrancing them all with its fine-tuned repertoire.

The Happiest Music on Earth is available here.

Two poems by Sue Wootton

Tomorrow The Happiest Music on Earth will be published here. I asked Sue to send me a couple of her poems as a kind of amuse-bouche for her stories, but also, I asked, might there be a poem set in Dunedin which we are about to leave for a spell? (I've had to make the font small so the lines won't be broken up by blogspot but, maddeningly, the line spacings are having a life of their own. Please try to see around the oddities. In the first, the stanza lengths are are 4 lines, 1, 4, 4, 1. The second is as it appears.)

Requiem

The usual Thursday route, the usual Thursday corner, round you go 

and on the top cathedral step eight boys in grey trousers and school blazers

jostle and jest and joust.  A rowdy show, all muscle and shout, all foot- stomp 

and wrestle and sweat.  An empty bus blats a filthy fart and grinds uphill

and you walk on

and stop:  in its wake some other sound, full and clean, like a memory of  rivers

before we milked them dry.  Solemn on the highest step under an array of stony spires

they are singing, holding out their palms in gift.  No teacher, no parent,

has composed this moment. This, they say, is us. Eight young men call up

a requiem from a well so deep it taps planet-flame; molten baritone

pours into the world.  Every Thursday pops its little allocated square, dissolves

to unexpected holy now.  All the deaths in you lift for this tenderness

and you lean a while on the curlicue fence, vow to make 

a better, more beautiful home.

                                                                        

I couldn't resist sharing this one, too, that speaks of return. 

Magnetic South

You are my magnetic south.
I fall to you true.

I am the eel, the gull,

the silvery fish,
returning and returning.

Yours is the tide I swim to.

                                                  SUE WOOTTON

                              
                                

Interview with Sue Wootton & unveiling the 10k cover

I've been talking about the 10k series for a little while: the idea of publishing a series of shorter ebooks, each showcasing fine work whether an essay, mini novella, piece of memoir or, as in the inaugural edition by Sue Wootton, a collection of stories. Here's the cover for the series, give or take a tweak or two, designed by the stellar Caroline Jackson.

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Sue and I talked recently, in the way we do these days, by email.

RMB: Sue, would you say a little about writing these three stories — the time, place, and any anecdotes associated with each?

SW: I think that seeds for stories drop into the imagination all the time. Sometimes I’m aware of this, and sometimes I’m oblivious – until one day, seemingly from nowhere, the story emerges. ‘Standard Roses’ comes into this second category. It was written in fits and starts. I kept going back to it, and for a long time nothing much evolved. One day, as if I had earned her trust with my patience, the protagonist started to speak. She told me, in one big blurt, everything I needed to write the story.

One seed for ‘The Happiest Music on Earth’ was the merry-go-round at Sydney’s Luna Park, which charmed me. Sort of. Beneath my enchantment there lurked an opposing feeling, very faint (I would have denied it on the day), but nevertheless a sense that there was also something sinister about it. In retrospect, that was the necessary second seed that sparked the story. 

‘Icy Noctiluca’ is seeded in historical fact. Hennig Brannig did discover phosphorus in 1669 by boiling putrefied urine in a search for gold, a process that did stink. He was one of a new breed of alchemists, beginning to think in a revolutionary – scientific – way about the composition of the natural world. Others pondered phenomena such as luminosity. What was its essential element? It was thought that a substance called phlogiston was responsible for fire, but nobody had ever isolated it. Thus there was much interest in cases such as the one I read about in a 1747 edition of the London-based Gentleman’s Magazine: a maid with sparking petticoats (the hottest maid her lady employer had ever shared a bed with). Gentlemen travelled from far and wide, said the article, to examine this phenomenon. In the name of science, you understand.

RMB: Are there writers whose work or way-of-being you draw on for encouragement or inspiration?

SW: Recently I read some early stories by Mavis Gallant. I marveled at the astute character observations in her work. So confident so young!  Alice Munro – I’ve just read her latest collection – always carries me off to Canada, from where I return deeply affected by my stay.  Marilynne Robinson’s novels are lodestones for their beautiful, measured language, and the deeply integrated crafting of her fictional worlds. There are no lazy observations in these writers’ works, and I bet there have been no short cuts to the finished product either. Contemplate, they seem to say. But also: concentrate, continue, and complete.

RMB: What are your current challenges?

SW: As always, abiding by the mantra above. The contemplation part is easy, especially idle contemplation (my favourite). Concentrating, continuing and completing – much harder.

RMB: Current delight?

SW: Writing poetry, after a long muse-less spell.

RMB: Hooray! What's up ahead for your work in 2013?

SW:2013 is the Year of the Novel. I am already carbohydrate loading.

Sue Wootton                                    Photo by Doug Lilly

RMB: (What's this box? I have no idea but I can't get rid of it either.)  I'm hoping to release The Happiest Music on Earth before Christmas but not all factors are in my hands — I'll keep you filled in.

A rat, a book, a blessing.

I had to haul him out by the ankle from under the sofa (sweeping out blue cheese wrappers and marmaladey spoons with him) but Ratty insists he's ready for the festive season, greasing up his salesman's patter, sponging his ears clean, and limbering up with the ratadilloes.

Meanwhile I've been working with Caroline Jackson who's come up with a winning cover design for the 10k series — to be unveiled soon. It remains to be seen whether we can put out the first edition, Sue Wootton's three stories in The Happiest Music on Earth, before Christmas. Hope so. Thanks to those who have sent me work to read; I haven't forgotten yours, and mean to be in touch with you all well before the holidays start.

I dipped my toe into Michael Jackson's latest book, newly published by the University of California Press, The Other Shore: Essays on Writers and Writing. From the Preface: '… while many claim that these new [reading] technologies are "disruptive", undermining and transforming the way we work and live, I see them as "sustaining" what we have always sought to do — bearing witness to what we learn of life, struggling to express it adequately, and comparing our findings with the findings of others." Amen to that. It's going to be my prized summer read, I can see.

I started to write something about Christmas . . . but it's only November for goodnessakes so no. But in the meantime, did you know that any buyer of a Rosa Mira eBook receives a delighted and grateful blessing into the bargain? That's how small and personal we are round here. 

Rat on a Roundabout

In time for the next ebook, Ratty has been coaxed back into the picture, or onto the horse, at least. He's looking a little stiff and neither right nor left, but I feel sure that the rocking motion and jingle-jangle of the carousel will lighten him up and have him back on the job he was born for: seducing readers into buying Rosa Mira Books while having as much fun as possible.

The merry-go-round horse alludes to Rosa Mira Books' next publication, a collection of three short stories by Dunedin writer Sue Wootton. Sue is a poet and fiction writer of flair, precision, wit and depth, the author of three volumes of poetry, most recently By Birdlight. She was Robert Burns Fellow in creative writing at Otago University in 2008 and has won numerous awards and accolades for her work. Her collection, The Happiest Music on Earth, will inaugurate Rosa Mira's 10k series. The rat will give a few more hints about Sue's stories soon.

Meanwhile, it's great news that the New Zealand Post Book Awards are now accepting original ebooks to be judged alongside hard copy titles. It seems important to step up and enter Rosa Mira's one eligible title for this year.

As for the 10K series, if you're a writer, do consider making a submission, and thanks to those who've done so already. If you're a reader, follow the rat.

How bizarre, how bizarre

I'm back on my laptop (I'm going to think up a suitable name for him/her, too — one that signals a sensitive but resilient nature, and a certain tolerance for water — any ideas?). Despite a quote (from Auckland because Dunedin is overloaded with ailing Macs) for fixing $4000 worth of 'liquid' damage to my $1600 model, my lap companion evidently decided it would rather come home and behave nicely than be scrapped.

I have to say that its malaise closely resembled my own at the time — the whirring fan that, like my head, was all noise and no traction; the X on the battery symbol; the 'something wrong' with the hard drive. I have to say that it gave me time to recuperate and consider my working habits (work when I'm working, play when I'm playing and quit the fretting); the need for creative time; the need to do a comprehensive back-up now; and time to consider Rosa Mira Books' chief objective: to become deft (and a little quicker) in the production of exceptional ebooks — which means looking for ways to travel more like an arrow than an articulated truck. Figuring out what's essential and what's not.  I have to say I'm grateful. And will be taking neither the laptop's vigour nor my own for granted.

Thanks and hugs go out to all — writers, followers, friends and family, who have been so supportive in spite of it all, and without whom this project would be a) impossible and b) pointless.

This week I came upon some helpful tips for digital dummies like me:

1. If you use iBooks, or other reading app, on your iPad/Pod/Phone, do notice if there are updates (red dots) available for it on the app icon of your iPad/Pod/Phone, and download them. Makes all the difference to the layout, as it turns out in the case of Slighty Peculiar Love Stories. 

2. SLPS writer, Salman, sent me this nifty feature:  as he says, 'If you use Firefox, you can add this and read epub directly.' It's not refined in its features, but is a very quick way to open an epub document.

3. Less a helpful tip than a celebration of beautiful web design, and a chance to have your own: check out Sue Wootton's web page (and drool, poets). She writes, 'I recommend Doug Lilly. He's started to specialise in arts/writing/creative people's sites, at very reasonable rates.'

Okay, there's no reason now not to release Slightly Peculiar Love Stories in the middle of next week. I have a day in mind and will confirm it with details here, there, and everywhere as soon as I get the okay from my techie.

Shall we have a nice cup of tea in the meantime?

Sue Wootton, peculiar poet, too

Editorial intrusion: from now until Slightly Peculiar Love Stories is launched — let's say mid June, fingers and toes crossed – we'll give a free copy as soon as it's ready to anyone buying a copy of The Glass Harmonica here.  

Sue's story in the collection is peculiarly sensuous and achingly wistful. Do explore her website.

Sue:
Here's a peculiar love poem. A couple of winters ago I spent a lot of time with Raymond Carver. Well, a lot of time reading Raymond Carver, but it's the same thing. For a while my daily life in Dunedin, New Zealand was filtered through a Carver-esque lens. 'Breakfast with Raymond Carver' was the result. The epigraph is from Carver's poem 'Looking for Work', which begins  I have always wanted brook trout/for breakfast. In his poem, he speaks of the quest to find 'a new path/to the waterfall'. Every writer knows the difficult task of getting to 'the waterfall', and the joy of finding it. The path can be quite peculiar. Like love.

Breakfast with Raymond Carver

 …brook trout for breakfast…
           from ‘Looking for Work’ by Raymond Carver

He says This way! He says
but I have to warn you
there may not be brook trout; there may instead be
birds like small brown empty wallets in the trees.

But what trees! Sharp and hairy as a man’s shins
when he lies in bed all day simply because it rains,
his heart going flip, flip, like playing with the top of a carton,
sucking itself down to the filter in only three drags.

Look, I say, camellias: crimson, with stamens like the hairdos
of recently re-blonded wives. But these are the wrong flowers.
Not enough snow, or kitchens, or bare yards, or pickups full of men
and beer and fishing lines. Not enough fish. Not enough cold river.

After the waterfall I make coffee, and there is a table.
No violets, but these bruisable camellias.
He is looking out the window. He is watching cars crawl
and some weather building. A boy’s arm and a girl’s waist.

We talk of selling sofas. And love, of course.


Breakfast with Raymond Carver is from Magnetic South (Steele Roberts 2008). It won the 2006 Aoraki Literary Festival poetry award.