The NZSA Peter & Dianne Beatson Fellowship

A few weeks ago, I heard my application for the 2022 New Zealand Society of Authors Peter & Dianne Beatson Fellowship had been successful – which was a wonderful surprise!

As I told the New Zealand Society of Authors when they announced the news:

“I’m honoured and delighted to receive the NZSA Peter and Dianne Beatson Fellowship for 2022. It’s great that this fellowship recognises the importance of supporting mid-career and senior authors, and I’m honoured to follow in the footsteps of the wonderful authors who have previously received it. I’d also like to thank the judges for selecting my project, and to thank Peter Beatson and The New Zealand Society of Authors Te Puni Kaituhi O Aotearoa (PEN NZ Inc).”

“I’ll be using the funding, and the writing time it allows, to help me work on revisions to my novel in progress, which has the working title ‘Emergency Weather‘. It’s a near-future climate fiction novel that looks at what it’s like for ordinary people to be addressing – or trying to avoid addressing – the climate emergency as the weather gets more extreme, the seas rise, and politicians continue to run round in tight little circles of inaction.”

I’m very grateful to the judging panel for choosing my project. I’ve started on the revisions to my novel – it’s hard work, but I’m enjoying it. I hope to have more good news to report about “Emergency Weather” in 2023.

Eat, Pray, Love, Emit

The Saturday edition of Wellington’s Dominion Post newspaper carried a lengthy article about American author Elizabeth Gilbert and her latest book, The Last American Man. Elizabeth Gilbert is most famous for her previous book, Eat, Pray, Love, which has sold more than six million copies worldwide..

They sound like interesting books, but what really struck me about this article was a sentence in the final paragraph of the article, which says that Elizabeth Gilbert and her husband run a small import business “bringing back hand-picked treasures from their extensive, continuing travels”.

Now, I don’t have any beef with Elizabeth Gilbert, or her husband, but that made me think about writers and their travels, mine included, at a time when rapidly rising greenhouse gas emissions are leading many scientists to warn that the risks of catastrophic climate change are being badly underestimated by politicians and the public.

There is a lot to be said for writers travelling. It can lead to unexpected collaborations, such as the way Renee Liang has involved Wellington poets in the Wellington production of her play Lantern; it can lead to writers finding new audiences in new territories; it can help to ease that sense of isolation that writers often feel. I enjoyed my recent trip to Christchurch to take part in a poetry reading, and I’m looking forward to reading in Palmerston North on 2 June.

But all that travelling produces greenhouse gas emissions – air travel most of all. Of course, writers’ travel is a very small part of overall travel, but it raises the wider question: can we continue all the good things of our globalised culture, which depends so much on travel, when travel is so heavily dependent on burning fossil fuels?

With resources of those fuels depleting rapidly, the environmental consequences of their use becoming increasingly dire, and alternatives a long way from widespread deployment, I suspect that there will come a time when “bringing back hand-picked treasures from their extensive, continuing travels” is no longer looked upon as something to admire.

UPDATE: Having had a little bit of a go at Elizabeth Gilbert – even if only incidentally – it seems only fair to let her speak too. This is a very interesting video of a talk she gave about the nature of creativity, and how the modern West has got it wrong. It’s 19 minutes long and well worth watching: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86x-u-tz0MA (Thanks to Neda Akbarzadeh for the link)

Scriptwriters Wanted

From the NZ Society of Authors (NZSA) weekly email newsletter* comes this snippet, which I’ll post here as I know I have some scriptwriters among my readers:

Writers Wanted for Two Animated TV Series

“Currently in development are two concepts for separate animated TV series
primarily targeting boys aged 8-12. Script writers are being sought. The
first is a fantasy series based in colonial NZ; the second is a sci-fi
series. Expressions of interest emailed to nika (at) huntdigitalmedia.com”

I have no connections with these projects, so I can’t vouch for their chances of success – but if you’re interested, go to it!

*This newsletter, emailed each week to NZSA members, is a very valuable source of market information: I have made several sales, especially of poetry, to magazines or anthologies I first saw advertised there. Membership of the NZSA isn’t cheap, but it can [so I believe] be claimed as an expense against taxable income, and it’s definitely worth considering if you’re a New Zealand writer.