Archives for October 2016

Literature of Crisis

October 24, 2016 4 Comments

Maxine Alterio

Our compulsion to make meaning of traumatic events through the reflective process of writing fiction and creative non-fiction fascinates me as a reader, and as a novelist. The reasons for the latter are multi-faceted and depend on the project. In my second novel, for example, I combined an interest in nurses who served overseas in the First World War with memories of a Southern New Zealand childhood and family stories about my maternal grandmother who ran a private nursing home in Riverton and said ‘Where’s your grit?’ if anyone complained of hardship. She had no time for wimps. Her generation had intimate knowledge of loves and lives lost in the 1914-1918 slaughter.

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Vision!

October 17, 2016 2 Comments

Ron Esplin

Braille Art and the Power of Touch

We all know how difficult it is when birthdays and Christmases roll round as each year advances. Your intimate knowledge of your partner may increase, but your knowledge of what he or she already has diminishes the probability of coming up with a present that will show them just how much they really mean to you.

When your partner is blind, the possibilities are even further diminished.

My wife Julie is blind, and she has been for nearly twenty years. Before Christmas 2005 I was looking for something that was really special, something that had to be personal, accessible to her, convey my love, and be a lasting tribute to her.

At this point I should explain that I am an artist, and you could be forgiven for raising your eyebrows at an apparently odd coupling of an artist and a blind woman. How could I gain inspiration and support for my work from her when the work could not be seen?

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A privileged job

October 17, 2016 13 Comments

Jillian Sullivan

toilet When the job seeker representative asked me what qualifications I had for a job, I told her I had a Masters degree. “Don’t put anything high faluting like that on your job sheet,” she told me. “You’re only going to end up a cleaner.”

I think of that sometimes when I’m scrubbing toilets in the middle of the night in my job as Hospital Aid in a small country hospital.

And if I ever needed a reminder that this is a privileged job, I think of the young woman I was on shift with one night, telling me in the kitchen, “One night my friends hassled me. They said, You have to clean up shit. And they laughed at me. And I said, Yes I do. Because those people need someone to help them. And then they went quiet. And they haven’t hassled me since.”

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No more with the deathly silence

October 17, 2016 Leave a Comment

Sue Wootton

Death, especially unexpected death, is the lure of much of the click bait we are offered in online news headlines. Likewise, sudden and/or violent death is central to the plot of many television shows, films and video games. Sometimes the resulting corpses are even autopsied for our viewing pleasure. A Martian watching us watch our screens would surely consider us a death-obsessed species. But it’s a revealing obsession: the kind of half-horrified half-titillated fascination that comes from flirting with the forbidden. Ours is, in truth, a death-denying culture.

But things are changing. Perhaps it’s because the baby boomers are getting old, and waking up to the fact that there’s no special dispensation for anyone: the petals of even the most beautiful former flower children eventually wither and die. Whatever the reason, people are beginning to talk, seriously talk, about death.

Two of many recent publications that tackle the subject are We’re all going to die: a Joyful book about Death by Dr Leah Kaminsky, and Death’s Summer Coat: What the History of Death and Dying Teaches us about Life and Living by historian Brandy Schillace.

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NEOLIThs Conference: Day Two

October 10, 2016 Leave a Comment

Dr Joe Baker

The first speaker on day two of the recent conference of the North and East Otago Literature Is Therapy Society (NEO-LITh-S) was Professor Iain U Endoe. Professor Endoe believes health professionals are talented actors who, more than any other group except perhaps, err, actors—and of course politicians—are able to radically modify their presenting personas according to the circumstances they encounter. A healthcare worker can discuss rugby with a freezing worker and then immediately go on to discuss post-modern concepts with a professor of literature, feigning interest all the while.

But there are limits, and if that limit is reached health workers may revert back to their innate states, with all their associated prejudices and offensive behaviours. Professor Endoe presented a case where a GP, “James”, transformed his usual solitary, rugged and stoic Cantabrian character into mellow bonhomie when called out to help a holiday maker from Paris who had met with misfortune. It was the severe unrelenting uni-directional banter which eventually led James to break his role play: [Read more…]