Thought we’d do a quick run-through of the weekend ahead on t'wireless with regard to NZ books and writers. There’s quite a bit, starting with tomorrow morning’s Books on Saturday with Kim Hill. Writers interviewed will be John Smythe, (wrote Downstage Upfront - the first 40 years of New Zealand's longest running professional theatre, VUP), Graham Reid ( Postcards From Elsewhere: Odd Destinations and Unusual, Random House), and Bernadette Hall ( Like Love Poems: Selected Poems' by Joanna Margaret Paul, VUP). This is a nice list … A friend nicked the latter off me in my own kitchen, and is currently deeply involved in it; she WILL review it shortly.

There’ll also be one Moira Smith on the show, who, according to the NatRad website, ‘has a PhD in folklore from Indiana University. She is the author of studies of New Zealand capping festivals, on the social reception of humour, and on the European witch-hunts, and has just completed a residency at the Stout Research Centre completing a book-length study of practical jokes in New Zealand and the United States.’ Nice job if you can get it. And there's more...

Moira’s organising Looking at the Overlooked: The Study of Folklore in New Zealand on Saturday, 22 April, 9am to 6pm, at the Stout Research Centre. If you’re into traditional Kiwi folklore – playground rhymes, cartoons, language, music and storytelling, this is for you. Email Moira on moira.smith@vuw.ac.nz for more info.

Then there’s the Arts on Sunday with Lynn Freeman, every week from 2-2.30pm. This week there’s Kitty by Deborah Challinor (HarperCollins); From the Swimming Pool by Michael Morrissey (Zenith) and David Howard previewing the Bluff Poetry Symposium. Speaking of which, David will no doubt be calling for submissions to Oban 06, the NZ Electronic Poetry Centre’s online poetry anthology, which they will be building over the weekend of the 21-23 April as part of the BLUFF 06 poetry symposium in Southland. It’s no accident that the famous Oyster Festival happens over the same weekend; poets are of course, renowned for their oyster fetishes.

What the organisers want you to do is email your contribution (or drop it off if you happen to be over that way) to nzepc@auckland.ac.nz between 21-23 April. They are aiming to set up this local and international poetry anthology over three days, and launch it on the Sunday in Oban on Rakiura (Stewart Island).

They say ‘We welcome your poem. We’d like it to engage with time and place, transience and duration, memory and forgetting, coming and going, poetry and oysters - any or all of the above.’ And here’s a small but perfectly-formed piece of one of Cilla McQueen’s poems (Antiphony – Letter to Peter Olds) that almost does it all (shamelessly pilfered from the AUP roundup, thanks Christine):

If you could see this jet
fire-seeded sky,
chill here with me
on a plastic chair
on the veranda, we'd hear Bluff hum
while lines of sodium and magnesium
bridge and wharf lights
bleed to black,
inexactly
…

For more about the anthology, get the pdf download at http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/features/bluff06/bluff06.pdf

Have a lovely rest of the weekend. We’ll be around, soaking up the sun, eating, drinking and gardening. Ahh… get it while it’s hot. Later.