Write of Passage

Wednesday is about books. And writing. Today, it's both. Some torch passing too, as our house welcomes its newest paid book reviewer. And I reflect on my journey...to wherever I am...

It was a bit of a milestone in the house yesterday, Oscar, 11, had his first published piece of journalism. Writing for The Sapling, he documented his evening at the YA Book Awards. Oscar, a keen reader, had been sent the shortlisted books in the YA category and had posted a review on his YouTube channel. From there he was invited along to the awards presentation, where he met the authors, got his books signed, and generally loved the evening. On the back of all that, his first gig as a reporter. Paid too. And rightly of course.

But wow. A whirlwind.

I was there as his “+1”, which Katy thought was pretty funny. In truth I was more of a “minus one” I think. Mostly the uber-driver. And occasionally a book-buyer. I knew a couple of people there, and met a couple more, and had another go at doing what I’ve generally never been much chop at: Blending into the background.

At one point I texted Katy and said, “I feel like you must have at all those jazz festival gigs”. To which she replied, “Good. You deserve this”.

We were both so thrilled with Oscar’s efforts on the story – it’s been amazing seeing his commitment to reading, which has really only taken full shape this last year. We read to him. Always. And he’s also seen us reading – which I think is super important.

He’s also seen us writing. Working. Trying…

My first published story for payment arrived sometime in my mid-20s. When I pointed this out to Oscar, he calmly replied, “that’s not really a surprise, I’m obviously a better writer than you”.

I had possibly been bitten by the reading bug even earlier than Oscar, but I was definitely not reading at his level. Voracious though, even before I was a teenager I was reading Willard Price and Margaret Mahy and Maurice Gee and Joy Cowley and so many things beyond that. I was also reading sports biographies and comic books (Garfield, Footrot Flats, Peanuts) and MAD magazine too. Reading is reading. So long as you’re reading. It’s not what you’re reading. It’s that you’re reading. I’m sure I thought that before I ever heard anyone else say it. (I’m also not sure I’ve actually ever heard anyone say that).

Then at 13, or thereabouts, Stephen King came into my world. And music biographies. They’ve never really left. There have been obsessions that stayed for years then disappeared overnight (Bukowski) and there are now new favourite writers appearing most weeks. The poet Joy Sullivan from Instagram, for instance. Or a loan of an E. Annie Proulx novel (which I’m yet to get to, but it just feels so promising. And, yes, I’m aware she’s not exactly a newbie, just new to me).

I was writing stories when I was a kid, absolutely. Although I can’t remember any of them being up to much. One thing I could do though, from the earliest age, was recite the plot of books right back to my adult reader. If they tired from reading me the same Golden Book or some such, I’d just hold the cover up at them and start reciting from memory the words of the text. Maybe a little editorialising on the fly…

My first reviews? Maybe. A part of the process certainly. The first indication I was a bit of a punisher? Definitely!

Poetry came into my world, as I’ve probably said before, when I was about 12 or 13. It just hit one day. And it still does. Most days, anyway.

With an electric typewriter (that my father won in a sales conference) I typed my first poems. And then (quickly) amassed folders and folders of stories and verse. And though many of them are in rubbish skips or still blowing where the wind will take them, I do have a giant crate of my teenage years that knows its place is up in the storage loft; never to be touched. And if I don’t want to read them, it’s certain no one else does either.

My very first piece of published work, at a similar age to Oscar, was my version of Goldilocks And The Three Bears (in homage/rip-off of the legendary Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes). And it was printed in the Havelock North Intermediate school newspaper. Back page. I still have it. Somewhat embarrassingly, I even clipped it and included it in my application for Journalism School as an “example of my creative work”. More embarrassing than that, it worked. Although it’s unlikely it was my point of difference. But I was welcomed into the class. My point of difference was my near total lack of attendance. I was off reading On The Road and thinking the ‘Beats’ really meant something in Wellington, in the late 1990s.

I wrote music reviews for New Zealand Musician. I thought I needed a point of difference, so in my handwritten letter asking for ‘work’ (unpaid, but hey, free CDs!) I said I had “expert knowledge” of jazz and blues. I possibly did, in the context of being an eager music fan prepared to write for nothing beyond free CDs, but at the very least it worked. And I was sent a Nairobi Trio CD and an album by a young boogie-woogie and stride piano revivalist named Will Sargison. He was just 17. I was about 21.

From there to Capital Times and other wee rags. The City Voice, briefly. Wellington gig guides (remember The Package?) and of course Salient too.

And then I emailed a guy at the Evening Post and told him all of the music reviewers were terrible and that I would do a better job. He replied and told me to help myself to the giant stack of CDs no one in the office wanted. I drove straight in and collected about 20 discs. I typed my reviews (135 words, no more) and saved them to a disk – driving back in a week later, having reviewed them all.

That was the start of reviewing.

I can’t remember exactly what my first paid article was, there were so many for free (there still are!) but I know I was about 25. And I couldn’t believe my luck. It was never just luck. I do remember buying five copies of the Evening Post and mailing one to my parents. I sat reading every word of the housing feature I wrote, which was never going to be my thing, but it was runs on the board. I never minded being edited, but was always interested in the process. It was a slight badge of honour if your copy was clean and stayed much as you’d sent it. But it wasn’t a big deal to have a few words changed. (I’ve come to see now how collaborative storytelling is, and how a first draft is the dump that gets it all started. You work on it from there – sometimes alone, sometimes with others).

Those first paid gigs felt like victories. Actually, any published piece feels like a victory. Then. And now.

I can’t say I’m proud of every single thing I have written. Nor can I even remember every single piece. But I’ve mostly always loved the process. And been hooked on the idea of it all.

There was a time when I was writing for about a dozen publications all up, some of them under a penname. I was on TV giving commentary, and radio too. I was doing all of this while working a job, because even the paid gigs never ever really paid enough…

Obviously, I could have been ‘smarter’ about how I went about it all. I could have given in and written the things that people wanted said about them, I could have gone to the meet-and-greets and done the schmooze. But that’s just never been my style. I always saw most of that as a distraction, as nothing to do with the art. And as unnecessary business at best.

I do have to say it got me to where I am.

And where is that exactly?

It is up at 6am and writing this for whoever will read it and anyone that might pay, or decides that they definitely will not.

And that’s fine by me. I’m exactly where I started in that sense as least.

Earlier this week, if you’re a subscriber, you will have been sent an email explaining the change of look and feel to this newsletter and website – my Off The Tracks archive now fully integrated here. You can search. You can find 11,000 needles in this massive haystack. And hopefully the navigation is a bit improved. You can only get all of the archive if you’re a paying subscriber.

Sending that email, having a subscription list, punching an invisible clock, all of that is something I could never have imagined when I was rewriting Roald Dahl or finding nice things to say about a middling collection of Kylie Minogue remixes. That wasn’t part of the plan when I was buying copies of the Dom Post to show to family members, or pitching stories to North & South and The Listener without luck.

But maybe it was exactly what I imagined too.

I showed Oscar his Sapling piece, showed him it was there. “Cool”, he said, and went off to school to talk to his friends about movies and music.

He hasn’t read it or mentioned it since, and so I asked him if he was planning to look at it and make sure he liked it.

“I read it when I wrote it”, he said. “And it was fine”.