Mary McCallum reports on MA students reading their work at Writers on Mondays: Medb Charleton, Peter Kemp, Marrissa Johnpillai, Chloe Lane, Jane Gardner, Sarah Bainbridge, Brent Kininmont, Joan Fleming and Ellie Catton, introduced by tutor Dora Malech (absent Larree Lust).

Dora Malech, the poet who fainted in full flight at the Writers on Mondays event a few weeks ago, was back this week with the MA class she tutors at Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters. She told the lunchtime crowd that she is not so much a tutor to her class of ten very different writers but rather their co-conspirator.

First up is Irish writer Medb Charleton who’s out here studying poetry and living in Pukerua Bay where her ‘new landscape unsettles’. Her work trembles beckoningly in the space between the life she knew in Ireland and her life in NZ on a windy coast where trees are ‘hell-bent’. Charleton declares herself prone to the Irish art of exaggeration but her poetry seems to me to be elegant and restrained with a nice sense of light and space.

Peter Kemp’s up next. A memoirist, he says it’s ‘neat to see how similar the Irish people and kiwis are – apart from the exaggerations’. His work is appropriately unadorned prose spinning out of memories of ordinary things. The extract he reads begins from a rattling doorknob near his childhood bedroom and grows into a yarn worthy of any Irish storyteller. Standing firmly in the middle of it is Kemp’s ‘look at this Gill it’s cast iron’ father – a substantial figure in only a short read.

Marrissa Johnpillai steps up to the mike and doesn’t read a thing. She knows her poems by heart and performs them like a Beat Poet – words both percussive and unchecked – a deluge even. ‘Cuba Street keeps her rain in buckets’ opens her ‘requisite’ Wellington poem, and there are other lines in there too fast, too strange to capture because you’re simply bewitched by the way they tumble from this particular fountain. I manage to grab: ‘She’s hungry Jack/ hungry to her jaws’, ‘chilli, cumin, cardamom, cloves’ and ‘frying is a one way street.’ Lots about food and sex. Exaggerate? Oh yes.

Chloe Lane is a sculptor grad and her prose is sculpted too. Her protagonist watches from a balcony as a man and a cat who don’t belong there swim in a neighbour’s pool. The woman shrinks down behind the railing so the man can’t see her and continues to shrink Alice-like. The scene stretches out like a cat – careful, crafted, oddly surreal.

Jane Gardner’s work takes a confident leap away from the contemporary world and gives a voice to Grendel’s Mother – the mother of the monster Beowulf battled in 500 AD saga. We are thrust into a scene where a deer is killed and Gardner doesn’t flinch from the details she needs to make this work: ‘she’ll piss and shit on you’, ‘use her own weight against her.’ Effective, weighted prose, which is not in danger of running out of puff before the tale is told.

Sarah Bainbridge lives in Paekakariki and she tells us that wherever you are in that town you either see or hear the trains. This informs her story of a train driver running over a woman who steps silently onto the track Anna Karenina-like. The scene has the surreal quality of the cat in the swimming pool and the unflinching approach of Grendel’s mum’s story. The details do it: the way the woman stands on the track like Marilyn Monroe over the air vent, the objects the children throw, the sound of the train running her over (like a split pumpkin? or am I imagining that? I felt squeamish cutting one up on Monday night with the story still freshly in mind.)

Rather than trains, Brent Kininmont has always had a thing for planes - his Dad having worked as a baggage handler at Christchurch airport for thirty years and Kininmont doing it himself one summer. The poems are on the surface controlled and plain, but they unfurl into stories that are engagingly personal with a welcome touch of humour.

At the end, the poet delivers something a little more ambivalent. Flying above the ice instead of just watching the planes come and go, he declares a hidden anxiety about his beloved mode of travel. The benefit of ice he says mournfully is ‘wreckage is easy to spot’.

Joan Fleming comes from all over – Canada, Australia and the US but calls NZ her home. She’s writing a collection of poems about different sorts of lovers and any thoughts that this might be a clichéd topic are immediately swept away by the first one on ‘The Young and Excitable Lover’. The metaphors came tumbling out as excited and surprising as the lover, ‘it’s like…’ repeating over and over until the poet is almost panting … having both arms are shot off … birds in the chest . ‘trying to fit a scream into a whisper.’ Fleming has, it seems, been drinking from the same marvellous bucket fountain as her classmate. Later the green-eyed lover comments, ‘I’m bringing home the meat/all you’re bringing home is a cheap smell.’

Ellie Catton is an actor who’s made short films and her novel explores serious ideas, we’re told, about performance and training methods and the potential for abuse, while also being very funny. The extract is about a saxophone teacher telling the parents of her pupils why their offspring can or can’t learn the instrument. Immediately we’re back there at the side of that fountain as Catton’s language spills out fast and clever, funny and surprising.

Get this – a mother is told her child doesn’t have the maturity to play the saxophone: ‘a film of sour breast milk clutches at your daughter like a shroud.’ It’s like water, all right, or music, battering, drowning, and then quietening down to the description of breath drawing in and out of the sax and the pupil, and falling away at last: ‘if you wanted to you could just let go.’ A terrific finale.

It was a terrific hour at the City Gallery all in all, so much that was fresh and exciting, but then – as Jenny Bornholdt commented on the way out - the MA readings ‘are always exciting.’ I have a feeling that Dora Malech in being a co-conspirator rather than a tutor has given this bunch of new writers permission to listen more closely to the way language whispers and beats and burns and to take a risk at letting it loose – jostling and subversive – into their work. Or maybe it’s just them.

Dora was up again on her own on Friday – sorry I missed her - and Damien Wilkins’ MA students take the podium on Monday September 17 at 1pm! Worth a look.

(Thanks Mary! - Kathy and Chris)