Gig afoot
Four poets, a community hall, a cuppa tea and the beauty of multidimensional friendships among writers.
So next Sunday (2nd August) at three in the afternoon, Helen Lehndorf, Airini Beautrias, Helen Heath and I are part of a poetry gig in Paekākāriki’s St Peter’s Community Hall. The four of us have multiple threads of connection between us weaving through feminism, activism, craft and writing. I think we’ve all helped launch each other’s books at some time or another; we’ve performed together in various permutations; we’ve workshopped with each other; given feedback on each other’s work, and in various ways cheered each other on. I admire all of them greatly for themselves and their writing.
To give you a flavour of the connections that hover in and around and through us, 13 years ago, before Helen Lehndorf and I were doing another gig, we both wrote some stuff about our already, back then, 20 years of association. We planned to read it out to give context to our poems. With all three of these amazing women, writing, friendship and caring about the world seem to me part of the same conversation we’ve been having off and on for decades, and I hope will be going on for decades more.
So from the blog archives (different name, different platform)
April 2013
History of a writing friendship in 97 seconds (if read out loud really fast)
To avoid too much self-indulgence, Helen and I decided to give ourselves just one minute right at the start of our gig to say something about our shared writing history and our friendship. I discovered if I don’t breathe and I speak so fast no-one can understand what I’m saying, I can say this in less than twice that, but I didn’t want to leave anything out. So to get it out of my system here it is. Paragraph breaks would spoil the effect.
I met Helen in 1993 at her Wellington flat. I was there with my flatmate1, the current vice president of the Massey Students’ Association and the year before co-women’s rights officer with Helen. I was being obnoxious and wearing vinyl trousers where most of the vinyl had flaked off. Helen didn’t like me. Helen moved back to Palmerston North the following year and got over it. Timor was still occupied in those days and we discovered Massey Aviation School was training pilots for the Indonesian military government. People were still bothering to fight against fees. Trade Agreements were a new thing to worry about. All the interesting women were feminist. We went to activist camp together in the back hills of Wainuiamata and came back with a new technique called peer mentoring. Helen asked me to be her peer mentor but admitted it was a ploy to befriend me. I fell for it. Peer mentoring involved lots of dedicated active listening and cups of tea. We talked turnabout for an hour without interruption, except probing questions when we ran out of things to say. We told each other stories. We started writing together and read out what we wrote. In a few short months we became old friends. I wrote her, long morose, self-absorbed letters from Peterborough, England. If there was something else to do in Peterborough, I never found it. We sent each other quotes and photocopied poems and, after a while, nothing really happened until I wrote about it to Helen. I lived with Helen and Fraser in London. We went to open mic sessions where there was always a different man reading a poem about how each male ejaculation contains 900,000 spermatozoa. We went to open workshops where men writing bad prose about drug taking would nod profoundly at each other’s work and gleefully tell us that they had scared off the last women poets. Comparatively, we weren’t that bad. We knew our voices were different. We knew we had stuff to say. We drank more tea and tried to figure out how to say it.
Here’s what Helen L wrote at the time: Celebrating a long apprenticeship
New books from two of the performers
Helen Lehndorf and Airini Beautrais both have new books out. If you don’t have the good fortune of being able to come to the gig and hear them in person and get signed copies, find them in your local bookstore or buy them right here, right now.
And on our local community station: Paekākāriki 88.2FM
Helen Heath and I are doing a wee promo for the gig on the fabulous Te Pae show on Paekakariki FM this very evening (Sunday 26 July) at around 6.35 pm (NZT). We’ll have a chat with Te Pae host and read some taster poems, hopefully one from each poet.
You can tune in from anywhere, so you don’t need to be in Kapiti. The show is also repeated at various times over the next fortnight. Look for the 26 July Te Pae show in the daily programme.
Rumour has it, this old flatmate is, in fact, coming to next Sunday’s gig.