Far from home: Monet and Mansfield

This is an 1884 painting by Claude Monet: Cap Martin, near Menton. It's currently on display in Wellington as part of the "Colour and Light" exhibition from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
    When I went to this French coast, I was struck by its resemblance to part of the Wellington coast, especially the piece that runs along beneath the Massey memorial, looking back to the city. I didn't know about the memorial and the path up to it until Harvey showed it to me. By that time we'd already been to the coast Monet painted. Walking up the path and seeing the intensely blue-green sea through the trees, I thought that when Katharine Mansfield first went to Menton in 1920, three years before her death, perhaps she took comfort from this resemblance. She wrote some of her finest stories there.

PS: I had forgotten that the last post Harvey wrote for his blog, Stoatspring, on 22 December 2010 was about Katherine Mansfield. You can read it here. I came across it when I was looking at his blog today. Stoatspring has been chosen to feature in a new exhibition on diaries, opening at the Alexander Turnbull Library on Monday.

Dear Lord Pearson

Last week a form letter arrived in my letterbox. It came from the Auckland-based New Zealand branch of Pearson Education, the giant international publisher which states on its website that it is "the world's leading education company. From pre-school to high school, early learning to professional certification, our curriculum materials, multimedia learning tools and testing programmes help to educate millions of people worldwide - more than any other private enterprise."
        The letter confirmed that Pearson's education business in New Zealand - that is, its substantial local education publishing operation - will close at the end of August. It ended, "For further information, please contact [name of unfortunate staffer given this task] at [email address]."
         I used to work as an editor for this company, back in the days when it was no longer Longman Paul, just Longman. But I never wrote books for it, and the letter was not addressed to me. Here's what I wrote in reply:

Dear ... Lord Pearson [I didn't write that, but I wanted to]
Thank you for your information about Pearson closing down its New Zealand education business. I already knew this, but it is very sad news, both for Pearson's talented and loyal staff, and for New Zealand education. Evidently Pearson no longer sees the production of specific resources for New Zealand
schools as worth doing.
        My husband, Harvey McQueen, was a pioneer in creating anthologies of New Zealand poetry for New Zealand schools and had a very long association with Pearson and its predecessors, right back to the days of Longman Paul (though there was, of course, no mention of this in the form letter addressed to him,
and headed "Media External Stakeholder Statement").
         Harvey died on 25 December 2010. Your royalties department knows this, because it has since been paying his royalties to me as his widow. I would prefer not to receive any more letters addressed to Harvey years after his death. As I'm sure you will appreciate, this is distressing. Could you therefore please ensure that this information is clearly recorded in every list of authors kept by Pearson, so that it does not happen again.

Yours sincerely
Anne Else

In fact, except for the occasional royalty statement, I don't expect to hear from Pearson ever again. But after writing this letter, I felt better.

Into the future

My e-book memoir, The Colour of Food, published by Awa Press, is being launched this Sunday by Lois Daish, but it's already available online (see below). It feels very odd to be putting out a new book which Harvey will never read, even though a goodly portion of it is about living with him. If he had lived, of course, it would be a very different book.
     As it happens, I am reading Julian Barnes' Levels of Life, which is about the sudden death of his wife (they too had been together for 30 years). She was "the heart of my life and the life of my heart". His account of his experience after she died rings so true for me.
      It's available in print, but I'm reading it on my iPad. Like many readers now, I move between print and e-books, though I still tend to depend on conventional print reviews (often read online), as well as friends' recommendations, to decide what to look for. I think it will be that way for a long time.
       So now I hope lots of people will discover my book, and when they do, tell other people about it - especially, of course, online. Reviewing it for Amazon, etc is a huge help too (I am brazenly assuming you will like it). Here's how to get it:

For Kindle, you can find it on Amazon here. Or else go to Amazon and put this in the search box:

B00D0UTIT6

For Kobo, you can find it here. Or else go to Unity Books Online, find their ebook section and search for Anne Else.

And here's how it begins:

To start with
I’m three, and I’m sitting in the sun on the grass beside the narrow strip of garden in our long skinny backyard. Before Mum sees me I reach out for a handful of rich dark soil and fill my mouth with its crunchy, crumbly, satisfying warmth.Now I’m four, watching Mum as she cuts a neat square plug out of an apple. She hides sugar in the hole for me to find and puts back the plug, the cut-lines invisible in the green skin. 

Speaking quietly

In the supermarket today, I was once again being shouted at by someone trying to tell me what to buy. A shop assistant was filling up the bin of oranges, so I (very unfairly) told him how much I disliked being hectored by this disembodied voice while I was shopping. He said, with great feeling, that he hated it too - and I immediately realised that it's so much worse for the people who work there, they have to put up with it for hours.
        I hate being shouted at in writing even more. Fortunately there seems to be a wealth of quietly spoken, deeply considered writing on offer. I'm now reading The Burgess Boys, the new novel by Elizabeth Strout (the author of Olive Kitteridge). It concerns a family of two boys and a girl who grew up in Shirley Falls, Maine. Only the girl, Susan, has stayed there; Jim and Bob have both moved to New York. A peculiarly contemporary crisis with Susan's son, involving the town's new Somali community, brings them back one autumn:

"In Shirley Falls the days were short now, the sun never climbing very high in the sky, and when a blanket of clouds sat over the small city it seemed as though twilight began as soon as people finished their lunch, and when darkness came it was a full darkness. Most of the people who lived there had lived there all their lives, and they were used to the darkness this time of year, but that did not mean they  liked it. It was spoken of when neighbours met in grocery stores, or on the steps of the post office, often with an added phrase of what was felt about the holiday season to come; some liked the holidays, many did not. Fuel prices were high, and holidays cost money."

The whole book is perfectly balanced, and all the more moving for its calm, quiet, comprehending voice.

May Day: moving on

Well, just after - I meant to write this on 1 May, but have been languishing in bed with a pesky cold. I've decided that from now on I'll move the focus a little for this blog, so that it's mainly about reading and writing, two pursuits that were central to Harvey's life, as they are to mine. So it's fitting that this post centres on a wonderful children's book, A Great Cake by Tina Matthews.

I heard Tina talking about it to Kathryn Ryan on Nine to Noon. Apart from the fact that it sounded such fun, what caught my attention and made me go  to Unity Books and buy it next day was the name of the little boy: Harvey. It's the first New Zealand picture book I'd heard of which features that name.

Both the words and the pictures are by Tina, and she's come up with the most realistic family I ever saw in a kid's book - piles of washing, authentically messy kitchen and living room - as well as an enviably patient and creative mother. I'll be posting it soon to Taylor and Ryan, with a line inside that they won't understand yet, but their mother will appreciate: "From your great-auntie Anne, in memory of your great-uncle Harvey, who loved books."

The end of summer

I put the heater on today, the first time for weeks. Only a few sprinkles of rain, though the four days' quiet steady drizzle a while ago helped a lot. I've been keeping the important plants - lemon tree, rhubarb, geraniums - alive with water from a bucket in the shower, the clothes dryer (it cleverly collects the water), cleanish kitchen water, and the earthquake bottles in the garage (all well past their use-by date, but not being refilled till the drought's over, so no earthquakes before then, please!)
          The long gap since I wrote here last shows partly how busy I've been, especially with my food memoir, but also how far I've come over the last two and a quarter years. I still sometimes catch myself far away from the present, thinking about Harvey, but not nearly as often or for as long as I used to. For the first time, I feel as if I once again have my own life and am getting on with it. Most of the time, anyway. More book news soon. For now, I hope your Easter was as absorbing and pleasant as mine was, thanks to my work and my friends. And some very good hot cross buns and chocolate.

Home again home again jiggety jig

Safely back from Guangzhou, where the weather was astonishing - 27C the day I arrived, a couple of colder days and hovering around 22+ the rest of the time. It was great for us and for all the people who get their one decent holiday at this Spring Festival, but it certainly felt like global warming. It's such as enormous roaring city (at least 9 million people), and I did find it quite tiring, though the chaps did their very best to look after me. We went to a lot of lovely peaceful parks - and the food was great (more on Something Else to Eat soon). Now I'm flat out dealing with my memoir's edited manuscript, I need to get through at least  a chapter a day, and each one takes me 4-5 hours. A week should do it...meanwhile, some cheerful Chinese photos for you: a quiet corner of old Guangzhou that looked and felt like Paris; umbrellas made of recycled drink bottles; and the boy with the fish on his head who signifies wealth for the New Year..

China time

On Waitangi Day I fly off to China to visit my son, who teaches English there, while an American friend looks after the house. So unless I can master the intricacies of posting from afar, there'll be a gap until I get back. Here's one of the wondrous Terracotta Warriors from last year, with a marvellous hair-do:

We're not going to travel around this year, we'll just stay in Guangzhou in his new apartment and he can show me his neighbourhood. It's such an enormous city, every time I go he has something he's recently discovered to show me. He's an artist and art history buff, and this is his year, the Year of the Snake. John F. Kennedy and Audrey Hepburn were snakes too. It's said to be "an opportune year for change, growth, and transformation on many levels. You'll start a new fortunate 12-year life cycle. The energy of this Snake year matches your steady, wise, and unhurried pace."