Month: February 2016

A message from your friendly NZ Society of Authors Northland branch…

The competition

Entrants are asked to submit one piece of unpublished writing of up to 2000 words in length that has been inspired in some way by the land, people or history of Northland. This may be in any genre (short story, flash fiction, novel excerpt, essay, article or poem).

Prize

Registration at a 2016 national writers’ conference of your choice to the value of up to $700. For conferences where the registration fees are less than this amount, the balance of the prize may be used to cover travel and/or accommodation costs (receipts are required). A list of the conferences covered by this prize is set out below.

Competition guidelines

Entrants must:

• be 18 years old or over
• be permanent residents of Northland*
• complete the attached entry form (download here), including a short statement of up to 500 words explaining how attendance at the conference will support their progress as a writer. (This statement will be taken into account by the judges.)

One entry per person only.

The entry must be the original work of the writer and must not have been published, either in print or online.

The writer’s name and contact information must be on the entry form only. Any submissions with the writer’s name or other details on the writing entry will be disqualified.

Entries should be 1.5 or double spaced and printed on one side of the paper only.

Post two copies of the entry form and two copies of your writing submission to:

NorthWrite Competition

PO Box 841

Kerikeri 0245

Entries close on Monday 28 March at 5pm.

The judges’ decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into.

Copyright of entries will remain with the writers.

The results and judges’ comments will be published on the NorthWrite website.

The Northland Branch of NZSA reserves the right to publish the winning entry on their NorthWrite website.

Should the winner be unable to attend their chosen conference, the prize may be awarded to another finalist at the organisers’ discretion.

Entry fee

The entry fee is $15, to be paid by internet banking or at a bank to ANZ account number 06-0493-0251640-00. Please use your surname/family name and initial as a reference when making this payment.

*The Far North, Whāngārei and Kaipara Districts make up Northland. If you live in one of these districts you are eligible to enter.

Lunch With Mom [Competition winner – WritersBillboard.net]

“See this knife? Maybe I’m going to stab you,” Sylvia’s mother said as she set the table for dinner. Then her mother swallowed a whole bottle of pills and the ambulance took her upstate to the mental hospital. They called it The Nervous Breakdown.  

Sylvia’s father kept her home from school and drove them in the ancient Studebaker to visit Mom. He swore at the other drivers, words Sylvia had never heard before. “That guy’s tailgating me,” he hissed and stomped on the brakes in the middle of the freeway.

The hospital looked like a castle with patients calling to her in witchy voices, “Come here, little girl, come on.” Her father got her mother and they walked on brittle leaves golden, deep orange, red. They sat at an empty picnic table.  Her parents kissed.

Sylvia’s mother reached out for her but Sylvia jerked away.  Her mother’s hands were scary since she went to the hospital. Her soft skin and long fingers with red nail polish turned to cold lady claws with blue veins. They smelled like medicine.  Anyway, her mother was just going to leave her again and go back to the ward as soon as lunch was over.

They had tied her mother down and electrified her head. Sylvia’s parents whispered about it. Sylvia smiled so people wouldn’t see how sad she was.  Otherwise, they might do the same thing to her.

The three went to lunch at the steamy German restaurant. They ate sauerbraten and cabbage. “Mom’s coming home for a visit next week,” her dad said.  

Sylvia lay on the back seat on the way home watching treetops, sky, glimpses of windows upside down. After the drive, Sylvia stood on the edge of the bathtub and checked herself in the mirror. She could still see a line of lipstick from her mother’s goodbye kiss.  “I won’t wash my face until Mom comes home.  Only six days.”

Joke Told To King Juan Carlos

So, the Holy Roman Emperor, King Juan Carlos, gathers Hernán Cortés, Gonzalo and Fernando Pizarro in the pub
And orders that they regale him with their exploits in the New World.
Whoever makes him laugh the hardest will be beatified.

Cortés kicks it off:
“I assumed the guise of God, returned to Tenochtitlan,
a Venice 5000 metres up in the clouds,
dogged by 300 illiterate homesick Spanish
whose ships I scuttled.
In a continent of a hundred million,
I ask about the fate of just two white castaways.
Duplicitous Malinche works as my mistress while I
rape Aztecs across the Yucatan, twisting the Tlaxcalan;
Tludili comes, armed with only diplomacy
He licks his finger and sucks the dirt
he hands round straws to us in our peaked helmets,
carrying sharpened crucifixes, he slits
his wrist and sprinkles blood on the canapés
And to please us, chalks a million squirming slaves,
has their hearts cut out with obsidian blades
to appease us; the slaves run screaming into the lake,
wash the sacrificial pigment off their copper skin,
fetch their shields and feathered spears.
Emperor Moctezuma believes I’m a robotic steel God
Blessed with a blunderbuss gifted from above.
I order Malinche to tell him in Nahuatl
that my people suffer from an illness, it’s terminal,
We’ll die without that luscious yellow metal.
We beg for half a second then use pliers to wrench our medicine
from Moctezuma’s skin.
The funniest part, Boss Carlos, is it was a war of forgiveness
We poisoned the wells with communion wine
and waited. We forced Quetzlcoatl to forgive us
in our trespass, and we cast the first stone, sinless.”

*

Gonzalo Pizarro scoffs, tells Juan Carlos
“Ignore Cortes. My joke is the side-splittingest.
It is I who must be lionised.
From Peru, I marched into the Amazon, trampling Macchu Picchu
6000 kays trudged through tropical slush
with 6000 sows in a platoon,
and slaves we worked to death. God met
us in the forest and commenced the test:
Starving, desperate, we stole the local folks’ cassava,
gorged on it til our stomachs bloated with gas.
Every single thing was inhospitable to Spaniards, poisonous.
my pockets were stuffed with cinnamon and gold dust – all inedible, all useless.
Mutiny bisected us – Orellana, my best lieutenant
Forged a life raft with nails made from horseshoes,
Promised he’d be back to save us with a dugout full of food,
But Orellana sailed 5000 kays down the Amazon the wrong way.
We despaired, descended into the primitive, the satanic,
we would slice steaks from the packhorses and patch the abscesses
with mud to keep the beasts’ hearts beating
When God was done mocking us, we backtracked blister-sores
to Ecuador, eating sticks insects, and we were not scorned
for failing to find El Dorado and strip the golden skin from him, in fact
we became famed for forging the first economy, see, we
bartered our festering syphilitic cocks
for potatoes and smallpox, whether the Amazons wanted it or not.
They couldn’t resist, King Carlos. That’s the funniest bit.”

*

Then Francisco Pizarro interrupts,
“That’s nothing, wait’ll you hear this…
So we clambered up the Andes
Sweating in cotton armour, our scabs
leaking burning melting cheese.
We oozed tourist pus into the alpaca blankets Atahualpa,
the Sapa Inca, was good enough to offer us.
I declared the arrival of the Superior Spanish Renaissance Man
by garrotting, in public, his father Huayna Capac.
I charged my slavering stallion into Atahualpa’s face
This king of ten million who sat on top of a continent
shat himself, aghast at alien horses parading on the beach,
bells chiming in their manes.
The Tiwantinsuyu couldn’t withstand
the blasts of cannon. We raged enough to shake
emeralds from the people’s pockets,
to fill a ransom room with golden goblets.
My friar biffed a bible so hard at Atahualpa
He was knocked from his throne;
One ego and sixty crossbows pinned ten million at Cuzco
Mummies were stuffed inside the throats
of saints; we melted their temples,
chutnified their culture into a boiling Mestizo gazpacho.
Drop into San Salvador, Santiago, Cuzco or Quito
and laugh your arse off, Carlos, ‘cause the best bit is,
they’ve come to idolise us
thanks to the guy you got to sponsor us:
The punchline is
our holocaust
was endorsed
by Jesus.”

 

PHOTO – ‘Courts’ – Hokianga series by JOSEPH GRIFFEN

 

The Place Of Kupe’s Great Return

After all he’d been through –
a child lost at sea
the cutting of supplejack
naming the land into being
obstruction and resolution
sinew and circumnavigation –
to leave his son
seems some kind of collateral

though there’s no guarantee
of return for we who have left
a part of ourselves here.
From the high dunes I look back
to a cleft in the harbour
where Kupe settled not so long ago
from where he set sail,
weather and remembering all over
Hokianga freshly made under each living sky.

Time nests looser here,
the wellspring of moonlight,
in the graffiti of old conversations
the endless becoming and undoing
of trestle without table, empty bleachers
exposed rafters holding up the show
the retrograde longing
of sunlight and stacked chairs
exit and repair just a blink away
it’s always three o’clock
since the pub closed.

Barn on a tilt up a back road
oil drum kennel the dog long gone
farming wasn’t easy
living never is
there’s a lot to hold on to
a lot to let go
and always the river,
separating and connecting
emptying and filling.

 

 

AUTHOR’S NOTE

“This poem was written as part of the photographic exhibition and book Last Call For Drinks, of photographs of the Hokianga by Joseph Griffen and Sam Montgomery.  [Over here.]  Last Drinks refers to a pub which is now disused – the Hokianga’s layers of history, presence and absence.  As Joseph Griffen is my son, the poem also refers to the loss of the child as the son becomes an adult – and finds his own attachment to the Hokianga.”

Hikurangi poet Vaughan Gunson is offering, amongst other courses, an Introduction To Poetry course starting this month with Community Education Whangarei (CEW.)
*Writing Poetry (4 weeks, starts 24 Feb)

He’s also offering:

*Intro to Art History (6 weeks, starts 16 Feb)
*Fun with Philosophy (4 weeks, starts 23 March)

Change

She stood in her old tack room, the sight and smell of it like home and hearth. Things left where teenage hands had placed them: oozing pot of hoof treatment, greasy mane comb, bridles sweat-stained and stiff. Traded horses for boys, Mum said with a wink when interest waned, when she still had strength and a sense of humour.

Call in the horses! Your daughter’s failed an exam and she’s going for a ride. Feisty Mum. That seemed long ago. A college degree ago. Wistfully, she wondered if her own child would love to ride.

Images washed over her like seasons compressed. The diagnosis, at first full of promise and hope. The halcyon reunion of mother and daughter, small talk and smiles. The news of the baby, a bittersweet Indian summer.

At last, winter wrapped itself around Mum.

Now Dad was selling the farm. She heard the clatter and clunk of him loading wood. She turned to see him raise one log in the air, bring it down with a muffled crunch on a nest of baby mice.

“What are you doing?” Her voice, sharp and high, startled her like a slap.

“They won’t live,” he said.

“What about the mother, Dad? When she comes back?”

She fled the barn, running from the blow, her heart exploding.

In her childhood bedroom she wept. Inside her, the baby curled tighter.

She vowed to be strong for both of them.

 

 

– first published in Flash Frontiers, May 2012