Author: helenlehndorf

a portrait of the (visiting) artist

Here’s some photos of the Massey Visiting Artist apartment where I am working during the day. The apartment is FREEZING. Thank goodness for tea – the instant hand-warmer.

Here is the view from the living room – I can see the steeple of All Saint’s Church from the sofa where I sit to work.

And out of the bathroom window I can see the steeple again, reflected in a big blue skyscraper.

Black and white lino in the kitchen which reminds me of mountain topography…

If I’m looking down, I should look up, too… the ceiling is classic 70s pegboard…

Teacups on the kitchen shelf…I wonder which visiting artist contributed these? Johanna Aitchison? Vivienne Plumb? Jennifer Compton?

The flat’s only reading material…

I put some things on the wall to gaze at when I’m thinking…

Here is the coffee table I am using as a desk….

Here’s what I got out from the Massey Library this week. So many yummy books!

Here is where I sit to read and write….usually covered in blankets because of the cold.

Here’s me. Still in shock (and extremely grateful) that I get to come here every day and write for three whole months! Lucky, lucky life.

May 16, 2013
mycology walk

Last weekend I had a yearning to go on a mushroom/toadstool hunt in the bush. I took my family out for a ramble around a bush track on the Woodville end of the Manawatu Gorge, looking out for autumnal fungi. I was not disappointed!

There were some wonderful red toadstools.

Bright orange fungus:

Tiny ethereal mushrooms (hard to photograph! This one was not much bigger than a pea and I liked the way it was growing upwards towards the light from underneath a log.)

Warty armies of toadstools:

Odd phallic looking ones with speckles:

I don’t know enough about wild mushrooms to know if any of these are edible, so I let them be and just took photographs.

After our walk, we stopped for a simple picnic of pikelets and feijoas.

Back home in the fridge was a package of field mushrooms a friend had picked from her farm. I cooked them in garlic, onions and lots of green herbs, stirred in cream right at the end of cooking and ate it on pasta. Amazing.

April 20, 2013
celebrating a long apprenticeship

Next Wednesday, 12.30pm, Theatre Lab 5D14, Massey University Wellington my dear friend Maria McMillan and I are giving a talk/poetry reading. It’s my first duty as visiting artist at Massey. We’ll be repeating it the following Wednesday 24 April, 6pm, at the Palmerston North City Library.

I invited Maria to share the reading with me because we have been friends for almost twenty years and it has been a friendship with our shared love of writing at the core. Indulge me while I tell you a little bit about our history.

We met just after finishing university, and quicky bonded over our love for poetry. We both took it very seriously, sharing books, discussing poetry, sharing our own writing with each other, even sitting and writing together. Our relationship was intense at it’s beginning and we were soon devoted friends.

A couple of years into our friendship, Maria left for her OE and a year later, I followed (with my husband Fraser) and we lived with Maria in Brixton, London.

Our time in London was wonderful – we called ourselves ‘Girl Germs’ and we wrote a lot, went on geeky literary pilgrimages (I actually cried when I sat in Virginia Woolf’s writing shed in Rodmell, Sussex), joined the Poetry Library on the South Bank, went to poetry readings (most notably Carol Ann Duffy and (for me) two of the ‘Liverpool Poets’: Brian Patten and Roger McGough who I adored as a teenager) and read at Open Mike Nights – all over London, but the best ones were always at The Poetry Place in Covent Garden. You were limited to read just one poem (always a good idea for Open Mike nights!) and the famous read with alongside the newbies. You never knew who might appear. Once John Cooper Clark popped up! For a while Maria interned with Michael Horowitz. Exciting times for poetry nerds.

Here is Maria outside the Poetry Cafe with our friend, American poet Debbie Urbanski. (These days Debbie owns a Letter Press Studio – the Box Car Press.)

Anyway – like most friendships in your twenties (when you have no kids or mortgage) we had many great nights out together…

We danced together…

We played a lot of hacky sack together…(in London we lived in overcrowded flats where people were sleeping in the living room or sharing bedrooms, so we made trips to nearby parks for hacky-sack compulsory for all flatmates. Hacky sack is both great for letting off steam and for discussions about stuff going on in the flat that cannot get tense because…dude, you are playing hacky-sack – it’s a collaborative game! Hacky sack stopped us all killing each other many a time.)

We went on adventures together….

Maria was a very patient model for my try-hard arty photo shoots:

We wore each other’s clothes. (Particular old men’s jerseys from op-shops were in hot demand. The kind that was old and worn enough to have lost all stretch around the bands. Holes were desirable, too, for scruffy street-cred.)

But the thing that means the most to me, looking back, is how we shared writing. We both had an unassailable passion for writing, we were doing it by ourselves – outside of any academic institutions – we learned a lot together. The bed-rock of peer support we gave each other was a great ground for growth and experimentation.

Anyway, neither of us found particular success (in terms of traditional writing institutions and publications) during our twenties and it wasn’t until we hit our thirties+ that we moved from underground to the more expected terrain (publication in literary journals, anthologies and finally, publication of our own books.) We were not wunderkinds. But I am really grateful for our long apprenticeship and for the opportunity we had in our twenties to be zealots for poetry! To be poetry fundamentalists! To be so passionate and nerdy without the self-consciousness and self-doubt that academic creative writing programmes often breed. We were not cool or understated or moderate or measured or even particularly talented but we were passionate and dedicated and optimistic and eager to teach ourselves and each other. I love that about us-as-we-were.

Anyway, when we were ready, we DID study creative writing – I did the Writing Programme at Whitireia Polytechnic and it was invaluable beyond words. Maria did courses at the International Institute of Modern Letters which I know she feels really helped her develop her work.

This winter Maria has her first book coming out with Seraph Press (who are my wonderful publisher also) ‘The Rope Walk’, and next year she has a book coming out with Victoria University Press, ‘Tree Space’. As you may know, my first book ‘The Comforter’ came out in December 2011.

So, yes, this talk is something of a celebration for me of our long apprenticeship, and a long and wonderful friendship, too. Girl Germs Forever!

April 11, 2013
picking up what the wind drops

I took a walk to a nearby section where an old house had recently been demolished. They are building shops there. I dug up a wormwood plant and rescued an iron gate from a skip which I’ll use as a frame for beans in the vegetable garden.

When I walk I am looking for stray plants and clues of what other humans are doing, their leavings, their signs.

So many gardens are neglected and full of mistakes – odd plantings, strange schemes gone wrong. It’s a lexicon of thwarted plans, migration, human error. But I love all the gardens, all of them. I love where weeds come in and grow where no one thought there was any dirt. I love the twee tidy gardens around the brick units where the widows live – all pansies and polyanthus and tight little roses. I love the student flat gardens with the crushed comfrey and the gnarled old lemon trees. There is a place deep in my heart for the gardens inside the gates of kindergartens – old tractor tyres full of marigolds and strawberry plants, glitter and matchbox cars.

These dahlias were planted behind a tin-shed, hard up against a damp bank…..in entirely the wrong place and where no one can see them (except me, because I creep and snoop) so I pick them and drop them at a friend’s door.

I pick up windfall apples from the house across from the supermarket. They are a bit bruised but will do for pie. At another house someone has left ice-cream containers of passionfruit for $2 each on their fence. I take one and leave a coin in the letterbox.

I don’t fully understand my own instinct for gleaning. It’s more than acquisition. It’s something to do with control, and side-stepping capitalism and burrowing into a universe where people trade in fruit and the urban environment is one big shared playground. I like my own company but I spend too much time in it and then I read the street and try to draw meaning from the random and the incidental.

Occasionally a garden is stunning and special and makes perfect sense, but these gardens are rare:

Right now, there is an American oil company doing exploratory drilling in the hills near Dannevirke. If they find enough, they have plans to frack for oil. Local farmers and Iwi have been protesting there this week and it is getting almost no media coverage. There are similar exploratory tests going on near Whangarei, but for gold.

I have been following the effects of fracking in Pennsylvania, USA where fracking for natural gas has been happening for some years now. None of the news is good. Profound pollution, deformities and stillbirths in animal stock, rising cancer rates and the tap water is flammable.

Hold a lighter to your running tap and it lights up. Imagine.

Parts of the Manawatu River are so polluted from intensive dairy farming and factory run-off IT SPONTANEOUSLY CATCHES FIRE.

Water on fire. Water on fire.

On the way to pick the youngest up from school I pass a house with a big walnut tree. There are walnuts all over the path, so I pick them up. I always carry a cloth bag in my hand bag for spontaneous foraging. It’s like maybe if I notice the trees enough, maybe if I honour the fruit enough, maybe if I pick up enough windfalls and rescue enough plants….maybe then…? Maybe then.

April 9, 2013
abandoned mattresses

Some neighbours moved out and left two mattresses on their front verge. (Where they then stayed for some weeks, until finally the real estate agent selling the house hauled them away. Isn’t it funny how people think if they leave something on the curb it suddenly counts as ‘rubbish’ and will magically disappear….?)

I love the painterly quality of the first mattress. Classic sixties.

And the second one is interesting how it has a geometric design behind the floral.

I think I’m slowly getting a reputation as the street’s dotty woman who a) walks up and down the road collecting all the leaves from the communal trees (I make leaf mold from them) with my wheelbarrow b) harvests the comfrey from the front garden of the student flats for fertiliser (I wouldn’t nick someone else’s comfrey if they were using it, but these folk aren’t & the plants regularly get run over by resident’s cars – maybe I should just dig them up and transplant them into my garden? When does ‘foraging’ turn into ‘theft’? I am not beyond nicking plants if I know they are destined for destruction c) grows vegetables in her front garden & along her drive and now d) takes photographs of trash.

April 3, 2013
a sudden break

My writing has taken off over the last couple of weeks, which is a relief because I was feeling a bit barren and uninspired after the summer hols and obviously needed a good few weeks of thinking time before anything was ready to come out.

Towards the end of last year I applied for and was accepted for the 2013 Massey University Visiting Artist programme. When you have kids, it’s pretty near impossible to uplift your whole family to move out of town for residencies, but this one is in my hometown so it works. (I am still hoping I can work out a way to do an out of town residency – homeschool the kids? But how much writing would I get done if I were in Wellington or Dunedin or Auckland homeschooling my children? Answer: not much.) I have the winter residency which starts late April and goes through until late July. The residency comes with an apartment, which I won’t move in to, but I am going to use it to write in during the day when the children are at school.

I had to write a proposal of what I would be working on as part of the residency application and (in short) I proposed ‘a creative response to environmental decline’. It is interesting writing down your intentions for writing, because to be honest, who really knows what will happen once you begin? Already what I imagined last November when I wrote the application is changing, but in a good way…my ideas are gathering steam and substance.

My first ‘duty’ as a visiting artist is to give two talks, one in Palmerston North and one in Wellington – these happen before the residency even begins, in April. (More details about these to follow.)

Virginia Woolf’s ‘The Waves’ is one of the books which is really firing me up. When she started writing it she wrote in her diary: ‘I am writing to a rhythm, not to a plot’ and she was terrified at the beginning of ‘The Waves’, she had a notion of what she wished to achieve but no clear sense of how to go about it. Without wishing to suggest I am in any way similar to the literary giant of VW, that’s how I feel about what I’m doing now. At the moment it is a ‘sense’ rather than a clear plan – every day I try to find the courage to keep working through the vagueness and inscrutability to certainty and clarity, although I suspect the latter two will only come after the project is finished.

March 29, 2013
Poetry reading in Valhalla

I’ve always wanted to visit the great heavenly hall of the Norse gods, so am very honoured to be not only visiting, but reading poetry there this Sunday. I wonder if we will be served Sæhrímnir? (A boar-like beast cooked & eaten each day in Valhalla, which then appears whole again in the morning.)

Of course I am just being silly – Valhalla is the name of a cafe in Raumati South which has a monthly poetry reading. I am reading with fellow Palmerston North poet Tim Upperton. I went to hear Bill Manhire at this poetry night when the cafe was called ‘Lembas’ and it was a top notch night out. I am always delighted to be invited to read, then I spend quite a bit of time getting very nervous and worked up about reading, then afterwards I am happy that I did it. If only I could skip step two of this pattern.

March 19, 2013
Rocky Outcrop hits The Swamp in just one week…

This time next week I will be sipping chamomile tea to calm my nerves because I’ll be mere hours away from chairing the Palmerston North leg of the Rocky Outcrop Tour of Kirsten McDougall, Ashleigh Young and Pip Adam.

Who are these people?

They have a blog for the tour – you can read a bit about them here on their about page.

Pip Adam is my friend so I am completely biased in my opinions of her, but trust me – the woman is brilliant and so is her book ‘Everything We Hoped For’ – stories full of searing honesty and humanity, I’ve read it several times and it gets richer with each reading. Steve Braunias once called Ashleigh Young a ‘poppet genius’ – a claim no doubt hard for her to live up to because how can one present as a ‘poppet’ past the age of about seven? but the notion that she is often genius in her musings is hard to argue with. Kirsten McDougall’s debut novel ‘The Invisible Rider’ examines with great insight and compassion the inner life of an ordinary and very recognisable man, doing his best and worrying about myriad contemporary problems. It a compassionate and absorbing read.

Each writer will read some of their work and there will be a conversation about writing, as well. These are three exciting and dynamic writers, who have all written remarkable first books. It is a FREE event – woohoo! – but do consider bringing some cash along to buy a book or two, perhaps.

I hope to see you there, Palmerston North locals!

March 6, 2013
porch sitting

It’s quite the year for foxgloves – they have self-seeded everywhere and are growing tall and pretty, especially around the front porch.

People don’t seem to use front (street-facing) porches, but mine gets the morning sun, so I put a little table made from an old sewing machine base and chair there for morning cups of tea. Passers-by always startle if they spot me – as if I were lurking on my own property, ha ha!

Sun has been a rare thing around here this spring and I’m despairing a bit at my vegetable garden. Seeds I have planted are not sprouting (could it be because we’ve had an unseasonal frost every week since September?) and the summer seedlings I’ve planted are either not growing at all or are withering. It doesn’t look like a November garden.

But on the mornings a bit of sun does show up…

November 15, 2012
a southwards weekend, in pictures

I nipped southwards to visit Emma last weekend. The trip began with a southwards train trip at dawn and ended with bus journey through the Manawatu Gorge at dusk. I met Emma in Wellington for some city rambles before we went over the Rimutakas to Featherston. Here is a photo essay of the weekend:

November 13, 2012