The Hunter family has just returned yesterday from a Gold Coast holiday - high point Seaworld, we agreed. Cheesy but incredible waterski show, and the dolphins of course - surreally beautiful, sleek and effortless. How the hell do they get them to do what they do? It's not like the trainers can show them what they want… Anyway, I'm still grappling with 27 more loads of washing, so where would we all be without Mary McCallum, whose decision to cover and debrief us on Wellington's Writers on Mondays series is providing an illuminating window into the capital's ever-busy literary life.

This missive covers the last three sessions, and gives a great overview of up and coming graduates of the MA at the IIML, with an emphasis on scriptwriters, whose work will be gracing our stages in the coming generation. I'm back on board next week - looking forward to the Booker Prize…! Go Mary, with huge gratitude as always.

A sinister woman with a limp and a motive for revenge grooms ‘fluffy growlers’ to get to her victims. That is only one of the scripts-in-progress that has been entertaining punters over the past month as part of The Writers on Mondays series at the City Gallery (pictured) in Wellington. The scripts have been presented by professional actors with few props and a lot of chutzpah and are the work of MA students studying at the International Institute of Modern Letters. Novelists, short story writers, memoirists and poets have also continued to present their work to the lunchtime audiences.

OCTOBER 1 Scriptwriters
Fluffy Growlers by Rachel Callinan, the comic horror story of a woman whose passion for her profession of ‘growler grooming’ may conceal more sinister motives was the final script to get an airing at the city gallery last Monday (October 1.) It had the crowd laughing from start to finish with some snappy over-the-top dialogue between a salon owner and her client who is a former school friend.
Lydia: ‘Oh yes, Yvonne with the s-s-s-s-s—. Yvonne (encouragingly): s-s-s-s- Lydia: ‘S-s-s-s-skateboard.’ Yvonne: ‘Schoolbag.’

The Dying Season by Kate Morris strips a child’s murder down to its mythical components – the murderer father becomes a wolf and the child a wolf cub with a duck head. The cast tell the story using poetic monologues and dwell on the way the story is told in the media and how that can influence the event itself. Clever but not entirely engaging.

Leone by Tusi Tamasese is set in Samoa in early colonial times. A woman who is a traditional healer fights with her husband who is influenced by the missionaries over the fate of their son with leprosy. The missionaries ‘take the cursed ones away’. The woman grinds parts of plants in a bowl reciting their names – a sad, useless litany.

Three by Mark Gedye explores a relationship between one man and two women. The story moves back and forwards in time as the three come together in different pairings and briefly as a threesome. Some good lines and interesting effects with the juggling of time.

Soft Hands, Hard Yards by Tim Worrall is about a young woman who plays rugby and fancies one of her team mates. The trouble is she’s married, and then there’s the coach who’s looked out for her for years. It’s the last practice before the regional final and things come to a head. The language is salty but well-observed eg. ‘I was going to tug on your tits about this before.’

SEPTEMBER 24 Scriptwriters
I missed this session but my friend Penny gave me her notes. She says it was riveting stuff with intersecting mostly darker themes of families in crisis, countries in crisis, violence, politics, chaos and death. Memory played a role in most of the work and the act of recording and, at times, reshaping the past and the present. Penny says each play had its own tensions and surprises – and some humour at times – with the first two especially packing emotional clout.

Goodnight Elaine by Ellie Smith - a down-on-her-luck journalist pals up with a bag lady and storms the home she used to share with her husband and which he now shares with someone else. Not having children had been an issue of the journalist’s marriage and in the midst of her home invasion she hears a baby cry….

Brother/Sister by Catherine Bisley is about an adult woman and her brother and the impact on them of their mother’s death many years before. Imogen reckons Michael’s had it easy because he was so young and has forgotten what happened but in fact he remembers the details clearly… including how the mother died because the daughter got into trouble swimming.

Holding the Line by Simon Price is set during the ’81 Springbok Tour and shows how stress in a relationship impacts on two cops – causing one of them to beat up a clown.

Slippery Fish by Sarah Boddy is another family tale about a reunion and the rewriting of history that occurs.

Message to France by Kent Hainsworth is about the time of the Rainbow Warrior. The tensions between a family in NZ and the life of a son in France are explored using a split scene and family videos.

17 SEPTEMBER – writing for the page
Larree Lust’s extract from her novel 154 is a loud, dusty, buzzing scene of builders demolishing a boarding house that is a former ‘Maori boys’ home. Her voice by contrast is small and almost too quiet to hear - but you can’t miss the way the writer dwells inside the scene. You can feel the dust, see the staircase: the ‘fragments of rises and treads.’

Next, Vanessa Marshall confesses to being interested in celebrity gossip web sites. Like them, she has a sharp and unforgiving eye for the detail of how a person looks especially what s/he wears. Hence: ‘A surly man in cuffed pants and retro Hawaiian pants directed me down the stairs’; ‘for a thin woman she was taking up a lot of space in the building.’

Lawrence Patchett’s novel features ‘a llama, a woman called Elizabeth and a large Welshman.’ He reads an extract which shows Owen demonstrating to his girlfriend how to feed eels by hand. Elizabeth savours the stillness in him - it’s a sensuous moment – but when he finishes, Owen breaks the magic by becoming suddenly loud and horny: ‘Now I feel like sinning! …Let’s rock the caravan.’ Wacky but engaging.

SK (Sonia) Johnson’s another quiet speaker but not too quiet. Her voice strokes the words and gives each ‘c’ a small click. She’s writing poetry about the time of the Spanish flu in rural Taranaki. There’s a poem about rain and silence and the way one becomes the other, there’s Douglas Valley where ‘drained land holds firm under the weight of the railway’ and a poem where the poet navigates ‘The House where I was Born’. Her pauses are the size of rooms – plenty of time to think.

Asha Scott-Morris has a strange sound to contend with – in her novel a baby bird is stuck in the wall, the 9-year-old girl can hear it fluttering, and the family gathers around not knowing what to do. The child makes a nest with pillows so she can listen. This prose takes it slowly too – you have time to feel the desperation of the small bird, the small child.

Saradha Koirala likes the sound of words. She pries them from the air around her and holds them up to see. ‘I like fort-night’ she says in one of her poems. Her brother explains it means two weeks, but ‘we leant chairs together and hid behind them anyway’. Nice. In another poem – two people can’t agree on something but they can agree that ‘cormorant’ is a nice word.

Mark Blaustein gives us a short story called The Gambler. It hinges around a conversation - the noise, the repetition, the listening and not listening that goes on. The dialogue is naturalistic but at the same crafted to power the story forward and reveal the nature of three men in a café. There are Henri and Renée who work there and an old man who plays the slot machine. Renée wants to stop the old man ‘wasting his money’ and tells him the machine is rigged, but for his own reasons the old man continues to play. A satisfying story.

Rachel Burt’s poetry tells of the noises vegetables make: the ‘tiny crumpled sound’ of mushrooms when you pick them, the way when they’re cooked they ‘shrieked their names against the flames’ and the sadness a child feels that ‘the good ones got eaten.’ This is part of a lively sequence of poems about a girl and her grandfather. Burt is also writing prose for her MA and reads a colourful extract about a bunch of friends at the Notting Hill Carnival.

Pip Adam says she finds herself writing about religion and substance abuse despite attempts at writing about love and friendship. She reads a story called Drowning-Baby Prayer which is a wry, noisy piece. It’s one of those which pulls you along so fast you forget to take notes, but there’s a Quaker meeting and lots of rain and some rats and inside a book about the Dalai Llama is the Drowning Baby prayer folded as if ‘waiting to hatch’.

Lynn Davidson – already a published poet and novelist – is working on a poetry collection around the theme of the fool and how it encapsulates disorder. She also writes about the tidal zone which is the view from her home – a place where water and birds come and go. Her language is playful but controlled: ‘I am the wily one I am the willing one’, ‘My house with a kitchen like a crayfish torn open.’ The sounds of a practiced poet honing her voice.

Thanks again to the IIML for more stimulating hours on a Monday, and thanks to the readers and the actors. Still more to come – this coming Monday 15th has the award-winning Australian biographer and critic Brenda Niall dissecting the genre with Harry Ricketts. As usual, it's at the City Gallery, 1pm, and it's free.