Deeper and Down

Perhaps writers are actually readers...

"Perhaps writers are actually readers from hidden books. These books are carefully concealed and surrounded by deadly snares. It is a dangerous expedition to find one of these books and bring back a few words." - William Burroughs, introduction to Alexander Trocchi's Man at Leisure.

But The Snake Poised Like A Sword Watches Me

The Accidental Navigator by Henry Denander

The Accidental Navigator by Henry Denander, published by Lummox Press, San Pedro, California 2011

120 pages of new and selected poems from Stockholm poet and artist Denander. Drawing on his background as a financial manager in the music industry, some of the poems focus on musicians such as Chet Baker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Keith Jarrett and Bob Dylan. Others are concerned with writers such as Henry Miller, Erica Jong, Haruki Murakami and Charles Bukowski. Some of the poems deal with Denander's sojourns on the island of Hydra, where the presence of Leonard Cohen is often lurking.

The volume also contains the excellent surreal story The Poetry of Mr Blue.

ISBN: 978-1-929878-88-8

The Accidental Navigator is available from www.lummoxpress.com

Against the tide

Review of The Edge of Things, in Wordsetc

An edge is the most exhilarating point for a story to place itself. Ask any reader. We don’t need cliff-scrabbling above a literal precipice; masters (and mistresses) of the form can hollow out spaces of mystery and risk beneath the most prosaic inner or outer landscape. But what we do ask, as readers, is that the threshold matter somehow and that we are surprised and, perhaps, even changed when the story crosses it.

The Edge of Things, then, is an enticing title and a flexible one too, stretching to cover all manner of brinks. Characters cross the endlessly fascinating boundary between innocence and experience, naivety and self-knowledge, one sharing his first kiss at the company picnic, another beheading her first chicken.

What would infidelity look like? one story wonders, while another shows us what looks like cheating but turns out, in the flick of a needle, to be bridal branding instead. Worlds collide: matter-of-fact house renovations clang against soul-exchanges in one story while in another an empty house invites a range of intruders, from teenage lovers to lowering-the-tone buyers to symbolic creatures, recalling District 9, that challenge notions of inside and out.

Liesl Jobson’s “tips for super pics” apply with wit and pain to parent-child relationships, tracing shifts that the photographer protagonist catches out of the corner of her eye while her lens is trained elsewhere. Beatrice Lamwaka writes about a schoolgirl who wants to win a race on sports day. She has, after all, trained hard, fleeing rebel soldiers who abducted her. “I outran them so that’s an A+ for me. If anyone needs more practice in athletics, I’m sure it’s not me.”

Sometimes, an edge is sharp enough to draw blood. Then there’s literary edginess, fun with texts, intertextuality. Iconoclasm (“I don’t like Coetzee”) meets homage, for example, in Jeanne Hromnik’s exploration of new-South-African father figures both lecherous and pathetic. Perd Booysen amuses himself, and us too, with the device of the discovered journal, inadmissible as historical evidence because of its fictional finesse.

In David wa Maahlamela’s playful bus ride across the fiction/non-fiction frontier, we meet both Wordsetc and its editor, Phakama Mbonambi. In the optimistic view of the narrator, also called David, writers who describe lived experience “know exactly the impression they are intending to give their readers”. But this is perilous terrain for less adept scribes.

An event that bit your heart for real needs just as much construction on the page as a situation you make up from scratch. You can’t refer to that day, you must weave it, as Bernard Levinson does in “Tokai”. We have no idea whether the story draws on his life or his imagination or some alchemical meld of the two. What matters is that he shapes place, time and action so fully, so deftly that, like the narrator, we are moved by the mysterious intensity of the last scene.

The Edge of Things is in every sense a mixed bag. Alongside Levinson’s story, gems include Salafranca’s unforgettable image of a mother in an iron lung and Pravasan Pillay’s characters, dialogue and spicy small-canvas family drama.

Silke Heiss’s “Don’t Take Me for Free”, arguably Best in Show, nimbly outstrips our expectations. Like its trucker-clown narrator, Vonny, the story “was built to change”.

In Vonny’s extended appeal to her lover, “All-I-Have, Azar”, the  language is as elating as the ride across ostrich and canola country in a bright-eyed van “with its massive, roaring heart and load continuing to doer ’n gone”.

The collection’s subtitle – South African short fiction – proposes that we read the stories as a kind of national sampler. (In a one-off slip, the introduction makes an unwarranted claim to be presenting writing “on our continent”.) Clearly, South African fiction has moved beyond the imperative to be earnest, political or even particularly South African. Mischief is now acceptable story territory, while Fred de Vries’s chilling tale could take place in almost any big city and Aryan Kaganof’s junkies claim that Amsterdam may as well be Durban, “there’s no fucking difference. Bars are the same everywhere. Drugs are the same everywhere.” But it is also true that, as per Hromnik, “the past is hungry”.

Several stories tackle a mix of  race and privilege, either head-on or obliquely. In “Telephoning the Enemy”, for instance, Hans Pienaar crosses the “what if ?” line for an intriguing revisit of apartheid-era violence.

Solitude, as Salafranca notes in the introduction, features in many of the stories. We glimpse various anxious, closed, self-referential worlds. A man sits at a café table in the last story, telling himself consoling untruths and inking “NARCISSIST” into his crossword puzzle as he fends off contact.

What feels like a limitation, though, looking back over the collection, is neither inner landscapes nor low spirits (excellent fiction fodder) but rather a sense of stasis in some of the stories, a single note struck and held, Act 1 from curtain up to curtain down.

For these writers and for all the rest of us, Jenna Mervis’s story offers advice. Her protagonist “mentions nothing of … the fingernails of trees that have begun to tear at her corrugated roof in the night”. She looks for “a sign that … that the dangers outside have become manifest”. But by the end (and this won’t spoil it for you), she steps off the edge of the deck and plunges into the veld. Why not, writers? Instead of tamping down tension, why not let it explode? Approach the edge. Plunge. Leap.

REVIEWER: A Zimbabwean filmmaker and writer,  Annie Holmes has published short stories in the US and Zimbabwe and a short memoir, Good Red, in Canada. She co-edited, with Peter Orner, Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives. 

(Published in Wordsetc, Third Quarter 2011)

The Call of the Wild by Jack London

The Call of the Wild, by Jack London, published in 1903.
This edition was published by The MacMillan Company, New York in 1931, for the Every Boy's Library.
There is a foreward by the chief scout executive of the Boy Scouts of America.

Voila! chatroom: an interview with Arja Salafranca, by Nikki Temkin

Arja Salafranca selected the short stories for The Edge of Things, a compilation of South African short stories. I chatted to her.

NIKKI:  What were the criteria for selection for The Edge of Things?
ARJA: Firstly, a story had to move and touch me, make me feel something, reflect on some aspects of life and our experiences here. Secondly, I was looking at excellence in terms of telling a story, well-crafted stories that begin with something deep inside and move readers because these were tales that just had to be told.

N: What was the inspiration for this book?
A: The book was initially meant to be an edition of the literary journal, Green Dragon. I received nearly 100 submissions and then selected the 24 stories that make up the anthology. It was too large for a journal, so I suggested that it become a special short fiction edition. I decided to do it because of my own love of the short story – as both a short story writer and as a prodigious reader of the genre.

N: Can you tell us about some of the themes of the book?
A: Some of the stories centre on solitude – and the ramifications of that, from loneliness, to a sense of fulfilment that also results from time spent alone, some centre on relationships experienced, some are about the outsider from society. Some of the stories explore the mother-daughter bond, some look at childhood experiences, some reach deep into South Africa’s past, looking at how those experiences have shaped those in the stories. Others look at identity issues in post-apartheid South Africa, and my own story deals with polio and the mother-daughter bond.

N: What do you think of South African writing currently?
A: It’s extremely vibrant and healthy – certainly in terms of the volume of fiction being produced, and we have some world-class writers, both established as well as emerging. South Africans are now so much more receptive to reading local literature – and there’s also such a range – from literary, to science fiction to crime thrillers and more.

N: Who are some of your favourite local authors?
A: I love Damon Galgut’s fierce, spare, almost uncompromising vision; David Medalie’s collection of short stories The Mistress’s Dog as well as Henrietta Rose-Innes’s Homing. I also love the poetry of Eva Bezwoda Royston (sadly she committed suicide in the 1970s). It’s personal, confessional poetry full of rich, dark and vivid imagery.


(Published in Voila!, Issue Number 8, 2011) 

A Separate Reality by Carlos Castaneda

A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan, by Carlos Castaneda, published 1971.
This edition, by Simon & Schuster Pocket Book editions, was published in 1975.

A lucky 7 for poet, by Graeme Shackleford

Parkhurst resident Gail Dendy has had her seventh poetry collection published by Dye Hard Press.

Entitled Closer Than That, Dendy' latest work "transports the reader into the world of glittering magical realism".

Married, with cats instead of children, Dendy is a research librarian for an international law firm by day. At night, she writes poetry. Drawing inspiration from nursery rhymes, myths, fables, and biblical and Shakespearean characters, Dendy personalises the world around her.

"My poetry is quite domestic - it's about a woman's environment - and it is always personalised", she said.

The first draft is always handwritten, then she types it onto her computer and begins the editing process."Editing a poem can take days, weeks, or years. It's true that poetry is one percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration. You know when a poem is finished - it just clicks," she said.

Dendy said poetry begins with raw talent and cannot be taught. "You have to have the basic talent for poetry. Teachers can help with various styles, but the danger is that the student starts to copy the teacher. That kills your creativity, your own voice", she said.

Her first poetry collection was published in the United Kingdom in 1993, while she was living in London. Nobel prizewinner for literature Harold Pinter was instrumental in the publication of Assault and the Moth, a limited edition.

Since then, Dendy's work has been published in America, South Africa and Austria.

When asked about her future plans, she said: "I've started on my next poetry collection. I've earmarked some poems, but I don't know what shape or form it's going to take."

(Published in the Rosebank Killarney Gazette, October 21 2011)     
  

Which way is the summer?

In the mythology of blue

Gedigte in die Goudstad: Melville Poetry Festival by Rene Bohnen

Op Saterdag 15 Oktober was gedigte in die Goudstad gratis. Veel liefliker nog: hulle was ook vry. 
Die Melville Poetry Festival het afgeskop op die hoek van Sewende Straat en Vierde Laan. Op soek na parkering toe ek daar aankom, het luide gejuig en lewendige tromspel aangekondig dat die gees reeds hoog loop. Die strate is nie afgesper nie; motors en voetgangers het ewe gemoedelik en behendig die ruimte gedeel. Die sonnige weer het bygedra tot ’n atmosfeer van spontaneïteit en vrolikheid. Ek sien nie dikwels dat ’n gehoor handeklap en saamsing op hulle eie wysies om te harmonieer met gedigte nie. Maar in Mellies vandag gebeur dit: die digters word aangemoedig, toegejuig – daar is suiwer plesier in die lug...Read more here

Malikhanye by Mxolisi Nyezwa

Malikhanye is the third collection 

by South African poet Mxolisi Nyezwa,
published by Deep South, 2011.  

"Nyezwa's poems are both violent and tender,
with an immediacy of language that strikes
the reader like a cry, or note of music."

978-0-9584915-9-4

all i can make of my country

is a sulphurous compound

a black room with two gigantic stars

as thoroughly silent as corpses

and during the many storms in my life

what happened?

what really happened?

during those nights

what did I really see?

The book is available from bookstores, or order directly from Deep South. Contact r.berold@gmail.com for order details.

The Melville Poetry Festival October 2011

Gail Dendy and Selwyn Klass at the launch of Closer Than That

Marie-Lais Emond and Eleanor Di Pasquale (back to camera) in the doorway of the launch venue

From inside the launch venue, looking out on the street

Gail Dendy talking at the launch of Closer Than That

Gail Dendy talking at the launch of Closer Than That

Gail Dendy reading at the launch of Closer Than That

The marching brass band for the festival 

The brass band's banner announcing the festival

Crowd watches the brass band playing; Allan Kolski Horwitz and Siphiwe ka Nywenga at extreme left

Bernat Kruger

Bernat Kruger 

Bernat Kruger

Kobus Moolman 

Kobus Moolman 

Khulile Nxumalo 

Khulile Nxumalo

Khulile Nxumalo 

Alan Finlay 

Alan Finlay 

Alan Finlay 

Arja Salafranca 

Arja Salafranca

Robert Berold talks at the launch of Rosamund Stanford's The Hurricurrent and Mxolisi Nyezwa's Malikhanye

Mxolisi Nyezwa

Rosamund Stanford

Mxolisi Nyezwa

Gary Cummiskey

Gary Cummiskey

Books for sale at the festival

Books for sale at the festival

Books for sale at the festival

Gary Cummiskey talks at the panel discussion 'The Ghost of Wopko Jensma'

Gary Cummiskey talks at the panel discussion 'The Ghost of Wopko Jensma'

Hans Pienaar introduces the panel discussion 'The Ghost of Wopko Jensma'

Run Through The Sun