Ruby Appleby
I have been telling stories for as long as I can remember, but I was nine when I started writing them down. The first one was a blatant plagiarism of a Jacqueline Wilson novel, and after that I never looked back (though I did start coming up with my own ideas). Each story, each poem, was a masterpiece to me, perfect simply because it existed and because I enjoyed making it exist. Writing made me feel competent, powerful, capable of building something from nothing; there was a magic to it that I never found anywhere else. I knew that I would be an author someday, that I was supposed to be one. How could I not?
Then I became a teenager, and something strange happened: the stories I began so passionately started to trail off after only a handful of pages, and everything I wrote seemed lame, meandering, ridiculous. What changed? Well, for one, venturing beyond the teen section of my local library led me to a new world of literature, which instilled both inspiration and self-consciousness in me. I learned from the likes of Donna Tartt and L.M. Montgomery two things, almost simultaneously: that stories could be more marvellously rendered than I’d ever imagined, and that mine were awful. Here, I realised, were the real masterpieces. My stories were only lacklustre imitations. [Read more…] about To Write or Not to Write
Nearly everyone wants to know the ‘secret’ to longevity. Several years ago, on his 107th birthday, Jack Coe (at that time the oldest man in New Zealand) declared that the secret was ‘popcorn and beer’. Hastings centenarian Vi Cassin, born in 1924, gave her answer as ‘onions and beer’. I would like to meet her, not only to find out whether she consumes these two items separately or together, but also because she is a pianist. As a pianist myself, I regularly work with retirement village choirs and have become increasingly intrigued by centenarian musicians. Is part of the ‘secret’ to longevity contained in their musicianship?
When you have treatment for cancer, information sometimes comes to you in a sideways fashion and not from the direction you expect. It didn’t seem weird, then, that it was from a newspaper article that I first learnt about the benefits of physical exercise during and after cancer treatment. The article detailed the closure of Expinkt, a gym and exercise programme that had been established by Associate Professor Lynnette Jones, a researcher in the field of Exercise Oncology. Expinkt was run by the University of Otago School of Physical Education, Sport and Exercise Sciences from 2009 until November 2021 (when funding dried up). During that time, the article said, the programme had treated hundreds of people with cancer, mostly breast cancer survivors. Now it was going to re-establish itself as The Wellness Gym, a not-for-profit in new facilities outside the university.