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on November 11, 2018
Collage of Tara Black's drawings, made live at Verb Festival 2018

8 November 2018

Kaveh Akbar in discussion with Kim Hill at Meow Bar.

10 November 2018

Kidscrawl: The wonderful writers and illustrators of Annual provided a treasure-hunt, story-making adventure.

No Country Woman: Zoya Patel in discussion with Kiran Dass.

Writing Outsiders: Dame Fiona Kidman, Amy Head and Rob Doyle in discussion with Anna Smaill.

Anxiety Understood: Riki Gooch, Danyl Mclachlan, Kirsten McDougall, Anthony Byrt and editor, Naomi Arnold discuss their contributions to Headlands: New Stories of Anxiety, a collection of writing about anxiety.

Litcrawl 2018 Stage 1: Meet the Starling Residents – featuring Eleanor Morton, Ruby Solly, Isabelle McNeur, Aimee-Jane Anderson-O’Connor, essa may ranapiri and Rebecca Hawkes.

Litcrawl 2018 Stage 2: Bad Diaries Salon – featuring Rajorshi Chakraborti, Rob Doyle, Tracy Farr, Chris Price and Kate Camp.

11 November 2018

Bilingual Future: Scotty Morrison (Ngāti Whakaue) and Doireann Ní Ghríofa talk about their hopes for a bilingual future.

Bringing Down the Man: Michele A’Court, Sasha Borissenko, Lizzie Marvelly and Zoya Patel discuss feminism and activism.

Sophomore Year: Therese Lloyd, Kate Duignan and Michele A’Court discuss publishing their second books. Chaired by Chris Tse.

on June 23, 2018

Out of the Fire Pit and into the Dinosaur Pit

– a visual commentary on Jurassic Park: Fallen Kingdom

Image drawn while watching Jurassic Park: Fallen Kingdom

Many spoilers to follow. Although, if you have ever seen a film with dinosaurs, you will not be surprised. (All pictures drawn in the cinema, in the dark.)

This is a film that asks bold questions such as:

  1. Are children dinosaurs?
  2. If children are dinosaurs, are dinosaurs the future?
  3. Which would you prefer, death by LAVA or DINOSAUR?

I went to this film not having seen Jurassic World so was immediately disappointed to discover that this was not a sequel to a film set in the far future on an alien planet which had been colonised with dinosaurs to make a theme park. Instead, it was a sequel to a film about a dinosaur park called Jurassic World rather than Jurassic Park.

But it was okay, because after the cold open, we have Jeff Goldblum sporting a sexy beard! My eight year old self is excited. A thinking action hero! My 33 year old self is wondering if he still looks good in a sweaty white tank – I bet he will. But it isn’t to be. Jeff Goldblum will not be sweating valiantly in this film; we will leave that to the pretty red-head. Jeff Goldblum’s contribution to the film is to give us the THEME. He gets one of the few close ups in the film that are not of feet, so we know it’s important. I wrote it down in my notes.

And suddenly it makes sense why all the gates in Jurassic World look like teeth. It’s to tell us that they mean death. I don’t mean to quibble, Jeff, but we know what death looks like. It looks like dinosaurs and lava.

But wait, you ask, isn’t joker-with-a-heart-of-gold-in-a-practical-sort-of-way Chris Pratt’s sweating sexy enough for you? It could have been. Except the film-makers took every available opportunity to cover him in dinosaur  snot. This made him seem like he had just emerged from a placenta and masked any sexy sweating he might have been doing.

I have decided that there is a metaphor hiding here: Chris wishes to be a dinosaur parent. When we are first (re)introduced to him he is working on a half-built house (NESTING!) and soon after this he sadly watches baby videos of his lost velociraptor.

Don’t worry, though, he still gets to do cool things. For example:

  1. Make his ex-girlfriend feel bad.
  2. Roll away from lava while partially tranquilised.
  3. Roll through a T-rex’s mouth.

4. Crawl into the ceilings of lifts and drop down at opportune moments.

In fact, one of the morals of the story is that to survive a dinosaur apocalypse you really need to be able to control doors, ceiling cavities and dumbwaiters.

Reasons to see this film are also reasons not to see it (worst spoilers to follow):

  1. The film thinks that lamp-shading fortune cookie dialogue makes fortune cookie dialogue okay.

2. Vehicular mayhem and dinosaur heists!

3. Costume as character development:

a. Both side-kicks lose their glasses by the end.

b. Hot red-head goes from schoolmarm attire to breast definition through sweat.

4. Bad guys are really bad and we can tell because they say things like, “4 million is not worth getting out of bed for” and “nasty woman” and “You should have stayed on the island. Better odds” and generally are not as good at outrunning dinosaurs as good guys.

5. Good guys are good but may be responsible for mass death.

6. The last act is Home Alone 2 if there had also been dinosaurs

7. It has a cute orphan child who saves the day and loses and gains a family and may also be a dinosaur.

I ended up being genuinely moved by the mass extinction on the island in spite of myself. The majesty of the iconic long-necked dinosaur being swallowed by smoke is about as harrowing as an M rated film can get.

I give the film 3 de-extinctions.

 Comment 
on May 20, 2018
Collage of Tara Black's comics/drawing coverage of Auckland Writers Festival 2018

17 May 2018

AWF 2018 Festival Gala: Susie Boyt, Lisa Dwan, Gigi Fenster, Alex Ross, Damon Salesa, Tom Scott, Shashi Tharoor and Jenny Zhang tell stories on the theme “Under Cover”.

18 May 2018

The Creative Brain: David Eagleman giving a lecture on creativity and the brain.

Know Your Neighbours: Lorin Clarke in conversation with Alice Sneddon

Why I Am a Hindu: Shashi Tharoor talks about his book, Inglorious Empires: What the British Did to India

Janesville: Amy Goldstein in conversation with Toby Manhire about her book, Janesville: An American Story.

Sour Heart: Jenny Zhang in conversation with Rosabel Tan.

May 19 2018

Completely Beside Ourselves: Karen Joy Fowler in conversation with Kate De Goldi.

Too Much: Durga Chew-Bose talks with Ella Yelich O’Connor about her essay collection.

Still Lives: A.S. King in conversation with Kate De Goldi.

The Dry: Jane Harper in conversation with Kathy Hunner about her success as a crime writer.

The Big Ideas of Neal Stephenson: Neal Stephenson in conversation with David Larsen.

May 20 2018

Moustaches, Whiskers and Beards: Lucinda Hawksley uses images from London’s National Portrait Gallery to illustrate a history of facial hair.

Ode to Ursula: Karen Joy Fowler, Elizabeth Knox and David Larsen discuss Ursula Le Guin’s work and legacy.

City Streets: Xue Yiwei, Pip Adam and Dominic Hoey, chaired by Julie Hill.

 Comment 

My interview with Chris Riddel was first published on The Sapling! You can also read it here.

on March 8, 2018
Collage of drawings by Tara Black from NZ Festival of the Arts 2018

03 March 2018

Women Changing the World: Opening night, featuring Anahera Gildea, Maraea Rakuraku, Michelle A’Court, Charlotte Wood, Charlie Jane Anders, Renee, Annabel Langbein, Selina Tusitala Marsh, Patricia Lockwood, Kim Hill and Harry Giles, Jenny Bornholt, Louise Wallace, Tayi Tibble and Marianne Elliot.

9 March 2018

Electric Eclecticism: Francis Spufford in conversation with Ingrid Horrocks

Graphically Personal: Sarah Glidden and Mimi Pond, chaired by Sarah Laing

Science and Magic: Charlie Jane Anders, Intan Paramaditha and Cory Doctorow

Cousins Talk It Out: Tusiata Avia and Victor Rodger

Political Pricking: Sonny Liew, Sharon Murdoch, Toby Morris and Jonathan King discuss cartooning

With Salient Urgency – Former and current editors of Salient discuss their experiences in order to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the student paper. Featuring, Roger Steele, Bill Logan, Sarah Robson, Toby Manhire and more.

10 March 2018

Beautiful Fantasy: Charlie Jane Anders discusses fantasy and sci-fi with AJ Fitzwater.

Elizabeth Knox and Francis Spufford discuss writing and religious experience.

Blind Spot: Teju Cole in conversation with Paula Morris about his book, Blind Spot.

Tikanga Now: Emma Espiner, Morgan Godfrey and Mamari Stephens in discussion with Paula Morris about tikanga.

Blazing Stars: Hera Lindsay Bird and Patricia Lockwood in discussion with Charlotte Graham-Mclay

Outer Space Saloon Salon: Sci-fi inspired reading at NZFW 2018. Featuring, Queen Olivia Lucretia-Bourgeois Connie st Redfern Ⅲ, Charlie Jane Anders, Chris Tse, David Larsen, Ian Tregillis and Harry Josephine Giles

11 March 2018

Draw Your Weapons: Sarah Sentilles in discussion with Jo Randerson.

Midwest Memoir: Patricia Lockwood discusses her book, Priestdaddy, with Kim Hill.

Through a Child’s Eyes: Ursula Dubosarksy disucsses children literature with Lydia Weves.

Cut it Out: Jane Parkin, Fergus Barrowman and Ashleigh Young discuss the editing process.

 Comment 
on August 28, 2017

I left a place. I drew a thing. I wrote a speech.

Leaving-Rangitoto

In “How To Tell A True War Story” Tim O’Brien says you can tell a true war story by how it never seems to end. I am sure many of you feel the same about leaving speeches. No one says “I’ll keep this brief” in a leaving speech and means it. We all become Polonius – caricatures of the right thing to do. Buffoonish. Moralistic. Liable to narrate our own deaths. “Oh, I am slain.” Leaving speeches never end, not just in the pejorative sense of them going on in their Tolkienesque way – “You thought that was it? Oh no, we still have the scouring of The Shire, baby” –  or feeling fraught with the violence of experience but also they also never end because they stay with you. That last experience stands in for your whole experience. If you’ve never seen them before, it IS your whole experience of them.

This makes endings important. They are how we shape our understanding of characters and people. People become characters to us. Endings give them an outline. Endings, oddly, make people whole. They pull them into relief. They highlight the pertinent and mundane. They equalise. Endings defy the unceasing soap-opera of our daily existence, our work that is never finished, our feelings of scarcity. In the nothing of the ending, in absence, we can see what we have. We can be full. I can get drunk on the emotion, the authenticity, the intensity of a severed connection.

And they connect with our own endings, whether they are good or bad. Because, they are a time for reflection. Because, if you are like me, you may be writing your own leaving speech right now. I have 9 and a half years of writing leaving speeches. It doesn’t matter that I have not wanted to leave, that I have known this place to be a great place to work. Despite this, while our beloved colleagues and friends have been up here, doing this, standing here, year after year, while they were fearfully, tearfully, formally putting a fullstop on their time here, I may have sometimes let my attention wander. I may have been writing my own exit.

Obviously the construction of the ending is something that English teachers cannot ignore. It can come up in the exam. And if we weren’t already preoccupied with the richness of doom and gloom, as if meaning was only found in unhappiness, we would still need to teach it. It’s hard to end well. When Charlie Kaufman’s character comes to screenwriter theorist Robert McKee in Adaptation about his inability to finish his film, he is told: “Wow them in the end. Wow them in the end and you’ve got a hit”. There’s a bizarre hubris to applying this to a leaving speech, to my own end. As if I could make myself a hit. As if anyone has that power. And yet, this is the closest I’ll ever get to giving an acceptance speech. And what’s the prize, anyway? Calling a leaving gift a prize would be a mistake. I’m going to propose that my prize is your attention – or the illusion of it since you are in your own heads trying to work out how you go. I get to control my end. I don’t go with a whimper, but with a bang – and can defy the hollowness of an exit unseen.

Ironically, all my imagined endings, my leaving speeches, have been all beginnings. It’s hard to think about endings without noting the beginning.  Mary Ruefle points out in Madness Rack and Honey that in life the number of beginnings are equal to the number of endings but in poetry we never end. Poetry continues off the page. It is never finished.  Leaving speeches defy the poetry of life. One of my favourite endings in literature does this. Vonnegut begins Slaughterhouse-five with the end. “So it goes”. It is inevitable. He recognises that we know where we are going. The question becomes not, “What will happen?” but “How will it happen?”  Perhaps I like it because this conception of the end opposes McKee’s flashy idea of the end that ‘wows’. It takes the pressure off. The narrative attempts to exist all at once.

I never finish these speeches. They are delicately confined to the time limit of other people’s swansongs. I’m interested by the term swansong –  the idea that the end is transformational – the point of becoming – the point of beauty.

These speeches have reflected my mood. I could fill a speech with lists of insightful things students have said – Like the time Joon Im described conflict as the clash of competing desires, or Grace Foot proposed that tragedy was exquisite or the time Rosie Luo said the crisis she’d had while writing her Hamlet essay had been one of consciousness because existential did not seem to fit.

Sometimes these unwritten speeches are anecdotes of my own humiliation – Like the time I showed a colleague a boob by accident or when I explained to some Geography students that, if they thought Rangitoto Island looked like a nipple, they clearly hadn’t seen any nipples or realising, when David Hodge said to me at the meet-the-principal thing at teacher’s training college that “Oh, you’re that Long Bay girl”, that perhaps putting my high school certificates into a CV may not be the done thing.

More often than not these unwritten speeches are odes to colleagues, treatises on the value of teachers. Endings, in this way, are about thanks. You all deserve to have speeches made about you, to blush with the understanding of your worth and then to generously feel that someone else deserved that praise more because you are better people than me. This would take more than the 10 minutes I have allotted me. Actually, the thing in front of you took roughly 10 hours **gestures at picture**. If you want to read what has gone off the edge, I have given the originals to Patrick Gale, who I feel is a good steward. I got a bit over-zealous. I forgot the limitations of the photocopier. But there many of you are, held in a snapshot – still, unchanging. Held at my end.

Freud said that the pleasure principle is actually a desire for the ultimate stasis – the end. I’m not necessarily a fan of Freud, but what Peter Brooks does with this idea when applying this to story, is point out that narrative endings give us something we never let as individuals –  the chance to see our lives as complete. This makes leaving speeches even more important. They give us a celebration of ourselves that we never get. This is the weight that the ending must bear. It must hold everything together. It not only must wow, but contains the burden of completion.

There’s a morbidity to this idea, of course. And when you don’t know the person, it’s like you skipped to the back of the book or are at a funeral for someone you don’t know. The intimacy bridles and prickles you and you shift about, feeling lost in an absence of context or possibility. You become aware of the people you cannot and never will know. That they are people with inner lives, and they were here, parallel to you, and now they are going. There’s a word for it, perhaps invented, – sonder – but it is heightened in this context as you become aware of them only at the point of leaving. They were closer to knowable than the strangers you sit alongside on the motorway or queue with in the supermarket and perhaps you feel you missed out. I often do.

I will apologise for removing this speech to the sphere of the meta, not in the modern sense, but in the Greek sense. I will not ask for forgiveness; I will give you an explanation. Metaphor originally meant to carry. To carry meaning from one thing to another. The meta speech, then, must attempt to hold all of the others. The meta is a greedy and loving act. It is my way of pulling all of the other speeches, unfinished or otherwise, yours and mine, past and present, inside and making them part of me. I can remove myself and stay apart of it.

A Kate Camp poem, “The biology of loneliness”, notes that ‘it is a mistake to come to the end of ourselves’. And yet, that is what I have to do. I have to come to the end of myself in this place. I’d like this to be more like the Maori proverb of walking backwards into the future than a proper ending. I’d like it to be an ending where we are are all part of the wharenui, the living story. This end is the crest of a backwards wave of time, which, in this moment I can see as complete but, in time, I will push out and out until I cannot see the shore line anymore. I will leave my end with you.

 Comment 
on May 17, 2017
Collage of Tara Black's drawings, made at Auckland Writers Festival 2017

May 16 2017

The Ockhams 2017: Featuring Michelle A’Court, Ashleigh Young, Emma Neale, Catherine Chidgey, Hera Lindsay Bird, Andrew Johnston, Tusiata Avia, Gregory Khan, C.K. Stead, Peter Simpson, Harry Ricketts (labelled as Dr Who), Adam Dudding and others.

May 17 2017

School’s Programme: Jennifer Niven, James Shapiro, Ivan Coyote and Francis Hardinge

May 19 2017

The Sellout: Paul Beatty in conversation with Paula Morris about his novel, The Sellout.

Gonesville: Nick Bollinger in conversation with Karyn Hay.

The State We’re In: The 2017 Ockham winners, Catherine Chidgey, Ashleigh Young, Andrew Johnston and Barbara Brookes consider the role of the writer as cultural critic.

May 20 2017

I Love Dick: Chis Kraus

Old Guard, New Guard: Bill Manhire and Hera Lindsay Bird

Spoken Word Showcase at AWF 2017: Featuring Ivan Coyote, Ken Arkind, Mohamed Hassan and Glen Colquhoun.

May 21 2017

Art Crimes: Penelope Jackson

12 Photography Favourites: Teju Cole delivers a lecture on his 12 (current) favourite photographers.

Tomboy Survival Guide: Ivan Coyote in conversation with Kirby-Jane Hallum

 Comment 
on January 10, 2017

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For my 100 Days Project in 2016 I made a black hole on my wall. Almost.

It wasn’t a real black hole. My mad-scientisting skills aren’t that sophisticated and, you know, you’re reading this rather than having been folded in on yourself, again and again, mercilessly, until your matter expressed only a single point. I made a simulacra of a black hole, lacking in density and substance, yet beguiling in its own way. It was a storyfied banality of a black hole, that expanded rather than contracted – its only pull being the way it made people squint and refocus their eyes. “What is it?” They would say. “Oh I see.” Disappointment. Vague curiosity. Dismissal. I didn’t make a spectre of horror one wants to keep far away or an abstract notion of The End but a tangible, curated black hole, a black hole that, although you still wouldn’t want to take it home to your family, was a bit less anarchic and a bit more respectable.

The idea of the thought experiment was to explore what life would be like for linear creatures that could somehow survive on the event horizon of a black hole – “The world is almost flat…” I wasn’t even sure these creatures counted as being alive. I ran them through the MRS GREN rubric in my mind. I made them respire and reproduce. They recycled their own excrement. Then I made them with my sewing machine’s freehand quilting function, bright lines puncturing black material that I photographed so poorly they may as well have been flat, rather than almost.

At first I thought the objects I was making could be bookmarks. It would have made sense for creatures made of language to be bookmarks. But, ironically, the fabric wasn’t flat enough. It wasn’t even almost flat enough. This was bulk purchased fabric that survived from a Karen Walker outlet sale, that had been never used to make the coats it was intended for, that had been used to patch and protect a dying couch then salvaged from that couch before it was thrown out. It had had a dog on it. It had been through the washing machine. It was robust stuff.

Without the future utility of being marks in a book the thought experiment syphoned my enthusiasm. I toyed with the idea of these things I was pinning to my wall being coasters. I even changed their shape but this didn’t feel right. I couldn’t imagine the people I know stacking wads of fabric with twee pictures on a side-table to sop up drips from beverages when company were around. Perhaps the project had critical mass at that point. The pieces of the black hole wanted to stay on my wall as an imperfect, useless tessellation – not quite avant-garde comic, not quite artwork. A failure of intention.

I think that there are some psychological pitfalls to mounting a fake black hole in the room which you sleep. As it spread, I was the one trapped by its gravity. If anybody else saw it, it was only the pieces I posted on facebook, not the whole. It fed a particular sense of hopelessness that I’m prone to, creating a metaphor that expressed an inability to move on and a stagnation of expression that greeted me with the rhythms of the day. I started to feel like I was a black hole of a person, to be avoided at all cost, that I was at the edge of things. That line from Landfall in Unknown Seas took up residence in my brain, “here is the world’s end where wonders cease”.

And then it turned out to not even be a black hole. By the end of the thought experiment it was just a loop feeding on itself, where no new material could ever enter or exit. I feel like that sometimes. A hermetic circle marinating in my own experiences. Nothing can get in. Nothing can get out. After all, I can never stop being only me. I will never be outside of myself and any ability to jettison the material of identity is just a quiet death of forgetting.

Having just dismantled the almost black hole with my bare hands and committed it to this digital graveyard I now feel oddly heroic. I battled the crushing gravity of flatness.

I now have a blank wall and a sense of possibility.

 Comment 
on October 8, 2016

I love that the internet is so dense, with so many competing voices, with so many people trying to crack meme-able/virus-making content that so many things get to sit here, alone. There is a constant fight for the legitimacy that comes with being laughed at or loved that can just be ignored. And I’m sure it is. By many. Many who just have a free website and post stuff with the brash abandon of those who know they will be ignored.

I really like the idea that there are wonderful things that I will never discover because I do not seek them and they do not seek me. There are islands on this web I will never swim to. I certainly won’t surf in their waters.  I don’t really like sand anyway. I’m comfortable with the internet coming to me pre-packaged, in a google/facebook bubble that never touches the sides.

Maybe it will be someone’s job one day to be the archeologists of the internet and to uncover these things but there will be too many and the islands will get to sit in the anonymity of big data, remaining insignificant and unnoticed within wider patterns of behaviour.

 Comment 
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