Two Katherines and grey weather

It's grey here in northern England at the moment.  The air tastes of snow and there's what - in Scotland - they call "a lazy wind" - lazy because it goes straight through you instead of going round!  The Mill is very damp, having been uninhabited for a while, and it takes a few days for the heating to get a grip on the thick stone walls.

My trip back home is proving unexpectedly busy.  Before I was even off the train I was being rung up by BBC producers wanting to talk about Catherine Cookson. Not having seen the UK newspapers for a while, I had no idea why and had to Google the subject.   'Catherine Cookson Country' is, apparently, to be abolished.  The inhabitants are shocked and horrified.  The novelist's sales have slumped since her death (inevitably), and she isn't the household name she once was,  but the landscape Catherine Cookson wrote about and made famous is still associated with her, even though the tour buses don't come in their hundreds as they once did. 
Apparently the tourist board in the north east have decided that 'Catherine Cookson Country' is not how they want to market the area at all, that it gives a negative image and they want to advertise their beaches instead.   Catherine would have been furious with rejection. And it does seem to be a curious decision.  The north east of England has some of the most beautiful beaches in Britain, but add in the Catherine Cookson connection and it definitely gives them an edge - beauty and books.    Like the Bronte's Haworth and Du Maurier's Cornwall, Jarrow and South Shields will always be Catherine Cookson's country, even if they take the signs down.

So this morning I'm talking about CC on Radio 4, and then this afternoon I'm 'doing' the Wordsworth Trust's Arts and Books festival talking about Katherine Mansfield and the Dorothy Wordsworth connection.  Let's hope I don't get the two C/Katherine's confused!

Katherine Mansfield in Paperback

Yay!!!!   Katherine Mansfield is out in paperback on Amazon and in all good bookshops.   And on the wonderful blog 'The Reading Life', Mel U is giving away a copy in a competition if anyone wants to try for a freebie. 

The paperback looks exactly like the hardback, but it's a lot cheaper - list price £15.99 but being discounted.

  Here in Italy it's pouring with rain today, raining and thundering as only the Italian mountains know how to do it!  But I'm having a cosy day, making apple and lemon cake to take to a party tonight being held by some Danish friends.  It takes my mind off 3 weeks Cambodian washing steaming on the radiators, and the fact that my ex-husband has just come back from Thailand having married a Thai wife of 4 days acquaintance, to the consternation of the family.  This writer's life is never dull!

Goodbye Edinburgh

This is Alexandra Harris (author of Romantic Moderns) and myself  happily signing away at Edinburgh.  Really surprised that there are still people who can afford to buy hardback books - that can only be good.  There were a surprising number of Kiwis in the audience too - about half a dozen people from New Zealand and all Katherine Mansfield fans.

Michael Holroyd has also been appearing at Edinburgh and he entered the biography debate with an article in Friday's Guardian about the death of literary biography.    That type of  'life and work' is gone, he says, and he's right.  People are 'writing lives backwards', writing group lives, or parts of lives, in other words being totally experimental.  I've always been against the dry-as-dust academic tome full of facts about the subject, but utterly lifeless.  No wonder readers want something more exciting and illuminating!   Michael's comments are more ammunition against the academic lobby who don't like the way I've written my Mansfield biography - it's written for readers, not critics.   And that seems to have worked.  I had a quick coffee with my publisher after the event and it seems that the first edition of the book has almost sold out - reprinting time.  Yippppeeeee!!!!   

I had a lovely time in Edinburgh.  But now it's back home to clean out the fridge, pack the suitcases and dash back to Italy for some 'creative space'.   No Tuesday Poem this week because I will be travelling today and tomorrow, so apologies to the fans of the TP blog.  Normal service will be resumed next week.

I've also been having adventures of a different kind associated with my exploration of the world of the Haida Gwaii indians and will report on that later in the week.

Tuesday Poem - Two New Zealand Authors

Author’s Bluff

It never stops in the famous story
does it, the wind, the wind?
            It is there
when the book is shut, pelting
the house walls, pushing the pines
the wrong way, making the girl’s
skirts flounce like the edges
of the streamed clouds, her heart
riding the wind.
        No wonder the sea
rings, throws salt at her lips,
the street tilts its deck
beneath the bright, flung stars.

Open the book, only that
will stop it.  Open the book
to let her through.

Copyright - Vincent O’Sullivan: Further Convictions Pending
Victoria University Press

It’s National Poetry Week in New Zealand, so I wanted to use work by an NZ poet, and this poem manages to cover two.  The first lines reference Katherine Mansfield’s famous Wellington story ‘The Wind!  The Wind!’

A big thanks to Vincent for giving me his collection when I was in NZ last year, and for giving me permission to post this on the Tuesday Poem site.

For more Tuesday Poems visit the web site www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com 

Dartington: Day 2

Beautiful sunny day - though I woke up feeling the effects of too much wine and partying the night before.  There were lots of interesting people at dinner - Howard Marks, the drug courier who has come out of jail to write crime thrillers (Sympathy for the Devil); comedian Harry Hill, who was quite unlike his TV persona.  I sat next to him but was too diffident to strike up a conversation. What do you say to someone famous for their wit?
Food writers Joscelyn Dimbleby and Elizabeth Luard were very good company - Elizabeth could remember dancing with Mick Jagger at parties in the sixties (check out her memoirs!).  Fiona Sampson, editor of the Poetry Review was there briefly, and Blake Morrison - who is as nice as his books suggest he might be.  He was sitting with Ted Hughes wife Carol.
So, a very enjoyable dinner.  Being shy is a distinct disadvantage though - I’ve never been good at this networking malarkey and have absolutely no small talk.  But I do like people and enjoy listening to interesting conversations.

We ate our breakfasts on the lawn after the fire alarm went off and the building was evacuated, but it turned out to be only someone burning the toast.  After my Christchurch litfest event was prevented by an earthquake, I did wonder whether my Dartington appearance would be thwarted by the Hall burning down - probably giving rise to the legend of the Mansfield Curse!!

In the end the talk seemed to go smoothly - all beautifully choreographed by staff and a very good chairperson.  Though nervous I was soon feeling better in front of a friendly, welcoming audience - I even sold some books afterwards.

The only downside was having to get into the car and drive 350 miles home afterwards - a gruelling 8 hour motorway epic on a hot sunny day we would have loved to spend on the lawn at Dartington.  I shall just have to write another book and get invited back!

Safe Havens for Books

Selwyn quad. Don't walk on the grass!

I’ve had a very interesting few days at Cambridge university. We stayed in student accommodation at Selwyn College, around one of those beautiful quadrangles - Neil in the boys' block and me in the girls'. The rooms are very basic - not exactly Brideshead Revisited, more like boarding school. A single bed (no chance of any clandestine doubling up!), a few bookshelves, a built-in coat cupboard and a wooden desk under the window. But the outside was something else. Beautiful gardens, ancient buildings, a chapel, and a great hall that could have been a set for Harry Potter.  And beyond it, the river Cam where you can go punting, though none of us had time.

 It’s a very privileged environment. Selwyn College was until the 1970s an exclusively male college, but we had dinner in one of the historic women’s colleges Newnham, originally one of only two to admit women - and I thought what it must have been like to have been one of those early women who braved all that prejudice to get an education here - though they weren’t allowed to have a degree like the men, they got only a titular qualification, rudely referred to as a BA-tit.



Dinner at Newnham

 The conference was interesting - Katherine Mansfield experts from all over the world, including some of the finest literary minds. Writers Jacqueline Wilson and Ali Smith were also going to be there. So I was understandably nervous about standing up and talking. I was also the last act on the last day, so lots of time to get nervous. But in the end, because we’d had days to get to know each other, it was more like a conversation with book-loving friends. Afterwards, those of us not rushing off to catch planes and trains, went for a Thai curry and then sat on the floor in someone’s room drinking wine out of plastic tooth mugs like a group of students.



Spring in the gardens

 I’m very ambivalent about the growth of academic literary criticism. I think writers write books for readers to read and enjoy, not to create material for the university industry to torture students with. But that industry exists and, as a writer, it’s necessary to have a dialogue with it. It is also very seductive - this world of books and book talk - and I know I could easily be swallowed by it.

These beautiful Cambridge colleges with their atmosphere of reverence for The Book, seem very safe havens from what is currently a very rocky world for both publishers and writers. But in the end, more than anything else, I know that I want to write them, not de-construct them.

The Fictional Mansfield

So, Thursday afternoon and Neil and I are on a train to Cambridge. This weekend there’s an international conference, at the university, on Katherine Mansfield and her contemporaries. It seems a good place to promote the new biography, which is why I’ve agreed to give a short lecture about KM.. This is also rather scary, since I’m a writer, not an academic and we have very different approaches to the same material. At the moment I feel rather like a goat who is about to wander nonchalantly into a pride of lions, hoping they won’t notice I’m a different species!

I’ve decided to talk about the different authors who’ve used Katherine Mansfield as a fictional character - there are at least 16 novels about her, which seems something of a record for any author - unless someone out there can tell me otherwise. Two of her lovers wrote her into novels, using actual letters and diary entries, then her husband John Middleton Murry wrote 3 novels with KM as the central female character; then D.H. Lawrence cast her as Gudrun in Women in Love and Christopher Isherwood used her as Elizabeth in The World in the Evening.

Since 1940 there has been a further trickle of novels - American novelist Nelia White’s Daughter of Time, C.K. Stead’s Mansfield, Janice Kulyck Keefer’s Thieves, Linda Lappin’s Katherine’s Wish and Joanna Kirkpatrick’s In Pursuit.

Why this fascination? That’s what I’ve been trying to explore. What makes fiction writers choose one character rather than another? Isherwood said that KM’s life conformed to the ancient pattern of narrative tradition - paradise lost, paradise regained. But I also wonder whether it was KM’s enigmatic personality, her fascination with masks, and multiple identities, that intrigued all those authors who set out to explore who she was.

I’m looking forward to staying in Cambridge, which is such a beautiful city - the train is on time, the sun is shining and there are lambs frisking in the fields beside the railway line.

A Week at Words by the Water

It’s been a busy week at the Lit Fest as well as trying to keep up with my university job and daily life.

I love the Words by the Water event, not just because of the beautiful location, but also because there’s always a friendly atmosphere and you never know who you might bump into over lunch in the Green Room. This year one was likely to trip over Lesley Garrett, Melvyn Bragg, Maureen Lipman, Claire Tomalin, and a host of television journalists and philosophers - including A.C. Grayling. Several of the promised journalists were missing, due to the situation in Libya, but replacements were being ordered.

I was booked to give a couple of creative writing sessions in the Sky Arts Den, which was fun, though there isn’t much you can do in 45 minutes. I hoped just to give people a taste of writing and perhaps get them started on something they might want to finish later.

One of the nice things about the festival is getting a pass to other authors’ events. I went to listen to Cate Haste talk about her new book on Sheila Fell - a painter from Cumbria who was one of the youngest artists (and one of the few women) to be admitted to the Royal Academy. She was incredibly beautiful, a protege of L.S. Lowry, and  died tragically at a very young age. It was a fantastic talk with good images.  Of course I'm slightly biased  -  Sheila Fell was an Old Girl from  my school and she spent her short life painting the landscape I love. 



You can’t go to everything though - there just isn’t time. Apparently Rachel Hewitt was fascinating on the history of the Ordnance Survey map, and I would have loved to hear poet Jackie Kay talk about her Memoirs of an Adopted Daughter.

I did manage to go to a forum on the short story. A new small press called Nightjar is bringing out Chapbooks of limited edition short stories and there seems to be a general revival of interest in the short story form - it was all very encouraging. The editor prints a maximum run of 2-300 and sells them via the internet and a few sympathetic independent bookshops. He aims to break even after printing and editing costs. There’s no money in the short story, which is presumably why so few of the big publishers are producing collections. Literary presses such as Salt are very short of money, but they need to exist if published writing isn’t to be restricted to a choice of predictable commercial fiction and the work of a few celebrity authors.


I’m always nervous appearing at big festivals like this - I much prefer small intimate venues where you can engage with the audience. But my own events seemed to go well - I had a good audience for the Katherine Mansfield talk - part of which was filmed - and they all seemed to enjoy themselves. Some of them even bought books!


And the following day we all had a lovely afternoon, with a sumptuous tea, at Greta Hall - the historic home of Coleridge and Southey - imagining what it must have been like to live there - though not with Coleridge who was, according to Southey, ‘murderous to all domestic comfort’ after the copious consumption of opiates and brandy.

Greta Hall, Keswick

Those who took part in the writers’ workshop early in the afternoon even had the opportunity to sit and write in some of the historic rooms - Coleridge’s study, Sarah’s bedroom, Southey’s parlour, Hartley’s parlour - and soak up the atmosphere. My favourite part of the house is the hallway, remembering the description of the line of clogs (there were 11 children not to mention all the adults) arranged in order of size all the way from the front door to the kitchen - which still has the original dresser and wood fired range. The current owners have kept all the original features and with 7 children running around, and fires burning in the grates, it feels very much as I imagine it must have done 200 years ago.

And now home to start work on the talks for the next two events I’m booked to do this month, but utterly distracted by the tragic events on the other side of the world. I can hardly bear to switch on the TV to confront the suffering in Libya and now in Japan.

Lots of People Came

The book

Despite all my worries - lots of people turned up to the book launch at Foyles.  Friends, friends of friends, family, publishers, agents, members of the Katherine Mansfield Society, and a few people I didn't know at all!   My friend, novelist Wendy Robertson, came all the way from Newcastle for the party, but somehow managed to avoid the photographer - she is somewhere in the group below.

I hadn't been well beforehand and wondered whether I would have the energy for the evening, but after spending the morning in bed, I managed to stay awake. Several cancellations due to flu and didn't know whether my agent, Isobel, would be able to come until the last moment.




Isobel Dixon, Neil and a very stressed Kathleen

 My publisher, Jackie Jones of Edinburgh University Press came all the way from Edinburgh.

Jackie Jones (right)

Family and friends rallied round and the catering was in capable hands.

Ian, Jean, Peta and Phil

  The bar staff were a little on the young side ......

The music was great - beautiful modern jazz played by John Horler (piano) and Art Themen (sax).

Best-selling author Jacqueline Wilson came and was mobbed by fans.

Relatives of the cast of characters in the biography also came - nephews, neices and grandchildren.




Oliver Trowell and Janine Renshaw-Beauchamp (far right) with members of the KMS

 Also one or two unexpected celebrities.   Diana Dors' son Jason Lake gave an impromptu performance on the piano.

We had a creche in the corner and afterwards the babies went to sleep in the coat cupboard!

Later, exhausted and hungry, a few of us went out for a pizza.

Many, many thanks to everyone who came and made the evening special!

Photographs by Neil Ferber, Caroline Forbes and an Italian waiter.

Off to London for the Book Launch

So this is it - the gut wrenching moment when I have to stand up and wave the English version of my baby off into the London world of savage reviews and harsh critics.   We've planned a party at Foyles with lots of wine and Marks and Spencers nibbles and jazz musicians and hope lots of friends and book-loving folk will turn up.  No speeches, no boring bits, just fun and the hope that someone (or two) will buy a book.  Neil is organising the music and the bar and two of my daughters and a friend are doing the food, so it's a family affair.  I get incredibly nervous about these things - will anyone come?  will there be enough wine?  will they all enjoy themselves?  All the usual worries of the party-giver.
But I'm determined to celebrate - this book took me ten years from the proposal to the finished product and five solid years of writing and research.  It's taken a big chunk of my life.  So I will be cracking open the bubbly and saying a big thank you to all those who helped me along the way!

I'll be putting some photos up here at the weekend, once I'm safely back in Appleby.

Happy New Year Everyone!

Fireworks over Pietrasanta

We celebrated in true Italian style with lots of socialising and millions of fireworks! The animals we are dog-sitting were left at home suitably tranquillised.

I know that New Year’s Day is only a date on the calendar and that logically there’s no difference between one day and the next. But psychologically there’s always a feeling that you’re going through a gateway - glancing over your shoulder at the landscape behind you and then looking forwards again into the fog of the future just over the doorstep.
2010 has been a strange year for me - lots of travelling, living like a nomad, more airports, hotels and train stations than I can count, and saying goodbye to people I didn’t want to part with. England, Italy, Belgium, France, Cuba, Singapore, New Zealand - my life reduced to a travelogue.
The most memorable things?
The birth of baby Isabella in February.

An earthquake in Christchurch while staying with my daughter and grandchildren.

My first Whale in Kaikoura

The publication of the book in New Zealand; seeing children in far-flung places; lots of new friends; a new job.  The coldest winter for more than 50 years.

And then the other side, all the things you don’t blog about; family anxieties, personal disappointments, periods of depression and feelings of isolation. No human life can be without them I think, and writers (probably all creative artists) are particularly vulnerable - there’s a pendulum of insecurity inside you that swings from self-belief to unbelief and back again. And every now and then we have to peer over what Gerard Manley Hopkins called ‘cliffs of fall, no-man fathomed’.

The year ahead is going to be hard. Neil and I want to be together, but I earn my living in England and he earns his in Italy - a life in borrowed holiday apartments lent by kind friends isn’t good for either of us. We tried to sell the mill and relocate, without success in this economic climate and now feel rather trapped. So the main task of 2011 is to solve the problem of living in one place at the same time.
Meanwhile, one last very memorable and wonderful end of year present - finding the UK edition of my book at the top of DoveGreyReader’s* Xmas reading list. Yes!!!!!

*(Queen of the Book Bloggers)

Good News

Katherine Mansfield

So it’s all agreed. Edinburgh University Press are going to publish The Story-teller. They are moving very fast and hope to have the book available before Christmas. It appears to be (fingers crossed!) the happy ending of a long and complicated story. But it’s also a tale of serendipity. I was invited to do a small book signing at an event at New Zealand House; the editor came up to talk to me about the biography and that’s when it all began. I gave her a book to take away and three days later she came back with an offer.
Now I’m busy with all the copy edits and other alternations I want to make before it goes to the printer next week. However hard you try, there are always errors and in this case, a number of typos which slipped through the proof reading process of the 1st edition, including a photograph with the wrong person’s name underneath. And people keep approaching me with new information, which is very exciting, but has, somehow to be accommodated. I’m hoping that the EUP version will be as accurate as it’s possible to make it.

I can’t believe how things can change so rapidly in the space of a week. And on Monday Neil is coming home for a few days, so I will have my best mate back :-) No wonder I’m smiling!

Tuesday Poem: The Biographer at Fontainebleau

I came, by accident, the same
day she had chosen to arrive
at Avon station
eighty years between us
warm in clear October air
and as I drove towards La Prieuré
the limes were
lighting the Avenue like torches

There, all is gentleness
where Gurdjieff’s tribe
struggled to wrench
old lives
out of their patterns
leaving behind all
that had once been precious.

Where Katherine practised
declining Russian verbs
Her voice
‘I am, we were, we must have been.....’
whispering from the void
left by her rotted lungs.

Letters to Jack
described their future
dreamed
of visiting New Zealand, driving
from the sea.
When she was ready, she invited him
to watch her die.

For five years I’ve inhabited her life
Moved through the old rooms
of her houses,
touched the fabric of her clothes
her books, her letters
always travelling towards this point
to put the last words on the page
the last full stop.

The cemetery’s quiet,
but she hated noise.
And underground
her bare tubercular bones
stripped to the final truth
have found their last identity
beyond interpretation.

It was Katherine Mansfield's birthday last Thursday - 14th October - so I thought a Mansfield poem would be appropriate.  I wrote this a couple of years ago, after a visit to her grave at Avon, near Fontainebleau.  It was quite an emotional experience and I hadn't expected it to be.  Looking at her grave suddenly brought home the sadness of dying as a writer, barely 34, conscious of what you're capable of doing and knowing you aren't going to be able to do any of it.  KM was immensely courageous.  She was constantly on the move in search of health and didn't get as much support from her family and her husband as she needed.   Her body was moved twice after she died - her husband forgot to pay the cemetery bill and so she was re-buried in a communal plot.  When her family eventually discovered what had happened they bought a proper plot and had her re-interred.
For more Tuesday Poems, visit the Tuesday Poem Blog.

At University

I now have a new job - as Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Lancaster University.  The RLF is a wonderful organisation -  originally founded in 1790  as a charity to keep writers (and their families) out of the debtors' prison, they've been helping authors such as  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, D.H. Lawrence,  and James Joyce ever since.   They've benefited from bequests from wealthy authors, like A.A. Milne, whose estates have swelled the coffers.   The rights to Winnie the Pooh currently fund the RLF Fellowship scheme  - which was a brilliant idea.   Writers are put into universities to help students with their academic writing:  the writer gets financial support in the form of a proper job, and the university gets a useful member of staff.  

I was lucky enough to be appointed as an RLF Fellow in 2006 and am now in my first term as the new Fellow at Lancaster.  It's a scary feeling starting a new job - Lancaster is one of the top ten universities in England and the students all look very bright and enthusiastic.  AAAgh!   But everyone is very friendly and welcoming, and I have a lovely office which looks out onto a courtyard with a gigantic tree.  In the first week I have managed to find the photocopier and the kettle and have achieved a staff card and an email address.  I have also seen an actual student!

I'm very concerned about the new government's plans to scrap the current cap on student fees.  Students already leave university with a crushing level of debt.  How do you afford to make a relationship, have kids, buy a house when you're already more than £30,000 in debt?   The idea that only the children of rich parents can now afford to go to university makes me very angry.   I grew up with the concept of free education and went to university fully funded in the nineteen eighties.  My parents could never have afforded to send me to university if they had had to pay.  They struggled to keep me at school - even uniform items were difficult to afford and I was usually in hand-me-downs.  My own children got to university during the era of student loans, unfortunately during a period when I was a single parent and unable to give much financial support.  Only one child made it to graduation but - oddly enough - now earns less than any of the others.     

I think we've got to completely re-think our approach  to education in England.  We need to value practical skills just as much as intellectual ones and we need to fund training (both practical and academic) for those unable to afford it to enable all our young people to realise their potential.   We also need to provide much more part-time study so that students can support themselves while studying and make it possible for people to re-train when they find themselves in the wrong job.  18 is far too young to choose what you're going to do for the rest of your life.

OK - I'll put the soap-box away and shut up!  I'm going to be quiet for a few days anyway.  I'm off to Knutsford literature festival tomorrow to give a book talk and then dash by taxi and train to London to do a book signing at New Zealand house (they're celebrating Katherine Mansfield's birthday).  Then at 5am on Saturday I'm getting into Neil's ancient car to drive down to Italy - hoping to get there on Sunday evening in time to fly back on Monday to go to work on Tuesday!  One of these days I'll be able to stop travelling and get some peaceful time to write.  

Waiting for reviews

Leaving Kaikoura

So now it's back to Christchurch - my short holiday is over and I have to go back to the real world.  I chose to go by bus this time and enjoyed it very much.  Public transport in New Zealand is efficient, and very pleasant.  Now I'm staying with my daughter and two little grandchildren - Freddie and Jack.  They are really cute, but I can't show photos for obvious reasons.  Isn't it sad? 
I've been promised reviews of the book in New Zealand this weekend, but the Listener seems to have held theirs over until next week, which is maddening.  However, there was one in the Herald on Sunday, by Sarah Sandley and it was very pleasing.  It's always nail biting, waiting for press reviews, but this was one of those you treasure, that make you feel better about writing.  There are so many knock-backs for an author, so many people out there just waiting to criticise, you need the good reviews to keep you going.   Sarah said:

'Jones has brought to the work a scholar's regard for fact, a novelist's regard for form, and a poet's regard for cadence.  The test of a good literary biography is whether it makes you want to reacquaint yourself with the author's writing.  This biography does just that.'  So she liked it!   Time to open a bottle of something - but I might just keep it until the Listener comes out next week! Then I can either celebrate or drown my sorrows with equal efficiency.

Of Books and Mussels

Wellington from Thornden

It’s been a very busy couple of days. First there was an interview with Lynn Freeman for a Radio New Zealand arts programme 'Arts on Sunday'. I love radio - mainly because of the anonymity. No-one can see you, there's only the voice. And it was a delight to be interviewed by someone who really knew the subject and wasn’t just reading from a list of questions prepared by a researcher.

This weekend there was a second hand book fair in Wellington and it was book-browser’s heaven. If only I wasn’t travelling with a luggage allowance! There were books I’ve always wanted to read as well as a good selection of New Zealand literature we don’t get in England.  I've never seen so many books under one roof.

At 2 nz$ per book every one was a bargain and I bought quite a lot. I will try to read them all before leaving NZ and then release them into the wild! New books are so expensive here (a very sobering reality check for a writer) I’m sure I will have no shortage of takers when I leave.

After the book fair I met up with Mary McCallum for coffee. She runs the Tuesday Poets’ blog and is herself a very fine novelist and poet (see her novel The Blue, published by penguin). She is absolutely fizzing with energy and, like most people I’ve met here, incredibly welcoming and friendly.

Then to the Katherine Mansfield Birthplace, where KM was born and which is now a beautiful museum.

Katherine Mansfield Birthplace

On my first visit to New Zealand ten years ago I met its founder Oroya Day and over the intervening years have become friends with the curators, Laurel Harris and Mary Morris. Today, they had a film unit there making a documentary about Katherine Mansfield and toys, centred about the Dolls House - a treasured childhood toy that became one of her most famous short stories. So, unexpectedly, I found myself sitting in a chair in front of a camera (my least favourite position!) talking about KM for the tv.

Now, it’s off for dinner. The seafood here is miraculous - the green-lipped mussels are the size of mobile phones!

Windy Wellington

So here I am in the windy city - there always seems to be a gale blowing when I’m in Wellington. But it’s a very friendly place, which makes up for the weather. Wellington has a very distinct identity. The houses, hotels and office blocks are crowded around a succession of bays, and climb precariously up the slopes of the surrounding hills. The views are spectacular. There are also lots of coffee shops, wine bars, tempting restaurants and little boutiques - you need to keep a grip on the wallet!

Thorndon, Wellington

Wellington was Katherine Mansfield’s birthplace, where she grew up and went to school. Her father was an entrepreneur, banker and leading figure in Wellington society - knighted for his services to New Zealand. Thorndon, the area where the family lived, is still surprisingly recognisable, with its brightly painted timbered houses and the botanical gardens they often visited. It’s possible to walk around and get a feel for Katherine’s childhood experiences. There are still gorse bushes blooming on what she called the ‘gorse-golden hills’ above the streets and you can run into the wind down to Lambton Quay where she bought the paper with her first published story in and read it propped against a lamp-post.
Last night there was an event hosted by the New Zealand Book Council - an informal discussion about Katherine Mansfield and the book. The interviewer was Elizabeth Alley, a very experienced broadcaster and chairperson, who steered me through the subject brilliantly. I get so nervous at these events I lose all sense of place and time. But the audience seemed to enjoy it and they bought quite a few books.

Kathleen pretending to be a Real Author

I also got the chance to meet New Zealand writer and blogger Tim Jones (Books in the Trees) and we went for a drink afterwards and had a very entertaining evening discussing the differences in the publishing scene here and in England.  Tim is one of the other writers who contributes to the Tuesday Poem blog here in New Zealand. 

Book Launch in Auckland

There is nothing more satisfying for an author than seeing their books piled in a bookshop window!  In this case it was the Women's Bookshop in Auckland, run by Carole Bleu -  just one of those fabulous independent bookshops run by dedicated owners passionate about books.   The booktrade has been hit in New Zealand like everywhere else and bookchains are teetering on the brink of extinction.  As an author, I hope that the independents are going to survive because they put in so much hard work and they really care.

Carole organised a wonderful evening with wine and nibbles and a good crowd of book-lovers.  I've never had to give a talk perched on a table behind the counter before (just as well I'd only had orange juice!) but it was great fun and Carole was behind me to make sure I didn't fall off.  The talk was chaired by the brilliant Sarah Sandley, publisher and chief executive of New Zealand Magazines and one of the founders of the Katherine Mansfield Society, which now has an international membership.  It was a lovely evening.

Then it was off for fish and chips - the fish here is unbelievably good -  and the glittering lights of Auckland City.