A thousand blessings rain upon the head of long-term LeafSalon faithful Curtbutnotshort: he has manfully ignored a ridiculous workload in order to bring us this - a thoughtful and smirkworthy insight into his Going West festival last weekend. Thank you, Curt - it's made this Kiwi cultural exile very happy.

My weekend at Going West was interrupted with tempering the PA at Eden Park (but was unable to dampen Wellington supporters) and paternal duties [Curt is a sound engineer, and yes, father, in real life - Ed.], however I did manage to lap up Friday evening and most of Saturday’s events.

The festival opened with Karlo Mila giving the Allen Curnow reading: a soliloquy on poetry and the death of a king. Her observations were punctuated with photographs: vivid images of fire lining the route of the funeral procession and the passion of the proceeding riot – scores of children kneeling by the roadside in formal attire, a lone child succumbed to the heat and occasion, Tongan dignitaries wrapped like Californian rolls.

Chris Price then presented the keynote address on the increasing prevalence of 'truthiness' (statements that sound true but which have no basis in fact) in both journalism but also literature. Whilst there can be little argument that truthiness is an unwelcome guest in news reporting its use is more ambiguous in literature and the blurring of fiction and history/biography appears to be at the bleeding edge. I personally was unfazed by James Frey’s outing and remembered having a good laugh on LeafSalon at the posts of Norma Khouri doing a Winston.

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I’ve had a few goes at this – it’s been really hard. For the first time in seven years, I’m not going to make it to the Going West Festival and I'm taking it hard. Wah! But two trips home from Sydney in a year is more than enough for the family wallet unfortunately…

But I have to be strong, and alert readers to the literary delights on offer. As usual Murray Gray, Naomi McCleary and the rest of the Going West team have come up with a programme that’s pure kiwiana, mixed with bracing, left-of-centre intellectualism; a bit like eating a meat pie with a very serious single malt whisky in your right hand (maybe a finger or two of Lagavulin, Murray?).

I would highly recommend lashing out and getting a whole weekend ticket – time would be the only issue because for the money it's a steal. A measly $150 gets you into all sessions, plus Friday evening supper, two lunches plus morning and afternoon teas. And it’s always so cosy, sitting down to eat and chat to clever people in the lovely Titirangi surroundings with like-minded literary enthusiasts (or pouncing on your literary victims while they’re halfway through their quiche, if you’re anything like me). God, I’m going to start crying in a minute. No, really.

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My attention was caught this week by the upcoming poetry event this Monday 4th as part of the Writers on Mondays series in Wellington. Whilst sipping a glass of wine from Te Mata Estate, you can listen to no less than five poet laureates doing their stuff – Michele Leggott, Jenny Bornholdt, Bill Manhire, Elizabeth Smither and Brian Turner. Plus there's the launch of poetry CDs by Bill and Jenny and the brilliant Kate Camp is master of ceremonies. What's not to like! It’s at the National Library Auditorium, corner of Aitken and Molesworth Streets, at 5.30pm.

And how serendipitous - just as I was writing this, an email popped through from Christine O’Brien at Auckland University Press with more poetic snippets: after the runaway success of their books Classic and Contemporary New Zealand Poets in Performance, Jack Ross and Jan Kemp have now edited another collection of poetry entitled New New Zealand Poets in Performance, (pictured with gorgeous cover by Sara Hughes, $45). This will complete the New Zealand Poets in Performance trilogy. It collects the work of 28 young and mid-career poets working from the ‘80s to the early 2000s such as Anne Kennedy, James Brown, Emma Neale, Glenn Colquhoun, Jenny Bornholdt, Robert Sullivan, Olivia Macassey and Kapka Kassabova. There are more than two hours of poets reading their own work on the two accompanying CDs.

Editor Jack Ross will be appearing at Poetry Live in Auckland, incidentally, next Tuesday 5th August, 8pm at the Classic, 321 Queen St. Entry by koha.

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It's been a long time between postings for this ex-pat. Here's an extra long rave to make up for it (which may or may not be a good thing).

The dust has settled – two weeks ago for youse fullas, but only just here in Sydney, as writers wind up their extra few days holiday and head for home, and the venues are packed down. Yes, I’m on about our respective literary festivals, the Auckland and the Sydney.

I did get the Auckland brochure and it seems Sydney got the sloppy seconds in quite a few instances. I’m ashamed to say, after years of reading NZ writers almost exclusively I hardly recognized anyone on the terrifyingly huge Sydney listing, and instead yearned to be at the Auckland festival cosying up with ma homies. The only Kiwi over here was a lonely Laurence Fearnley. Nice to read Mary McCallum's highlights from the Auckland festival (scroll down here).

However, having missed out on two of the international heavyweights I a) knew of and b) would have kind of liked to see (Jeanette Winterson and Anne Enright), I rattled my dags on a glorious Friday morning after dropping the kids at school, jumped on the Manly ferry and pootled over to the festival for the day. From Circular Quay, there’s a brisk, spectacular ten-minute walk around the harbour, past the Museum of Contemporary Art and under the Bridge to get to Walsh Bay – a seething cauldron of culture at the best of times, with theatres abounding and cafes and restaurants by the truckload. I was already feeling good.

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So Sydney eh? It’s been nearly three months and the sensory twitches that twang those twenty-something memories are starting to fade into normality now. Sydney’s distinctive smell – creamy whiffs of frangipani with low note of salt water is our daily background perfume; the strangled-cat howls of the crows, hysterical kookaburras and lurid rosella splashes aren’t making us stop and stare into the trees any more … crikey, even the accent is smoothing out to our ears and the kids have stopped giggling when they overhear someone saying ‘ben’ instead of ‘bin’.

The babysitters have been sought and found, the children are happily ensconsed at school, and we can start to kick back and take advantage of the considerable cultural advantages of the Big Smoke. Last weekend, for example, could have no other overall theme than glamour. Friday night saw the languid intellectual chic of New York husband and wife Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt on stage with likeable Sydney literary persona Ed Wright. The venue was the Sydney Theatre in Walsh Bay and the Harbour Bridge loomed over us as we scoffed our scallops afterwards in a sleek glass cube on the wharf, a spectacular lightning storm regularly floodlighting the view. Then, after a cruisy Saturday involving the Sydney Morning Herald, several gorgeous beaches and bays filled with multi-million dollar yachts, we nipped into town again to bask in the presence of Ian McEwen at the Opera House. And stepped out into the afternoon sun to the supersonic boom of superboats racing in the harbour – ten times forty phallic feet of glossy, supercharged power sending white tails of spray the same distance into the air, with the serene curves of (in Mr McEwen’s words) the most famous building in the world soaring behind us.

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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.

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A somewhat belated final de-brief from the Going West Festival last weekend I'm afraid, blame the end of term and three coughing kids. God, the coughing, the coughing... that way lies madness. Anyway - so I missed the morning sessions on the Sunday (Bob Harvey talking to Martin Edmond about painter Dean Buchanan; Joan Druett on her latest in the Wiki Coffin series; and 'The Meat of the Matter' - about the new book of essays on the role of the public intellectual in NZ) but made it up there for lunch, and the afternoon session which began with 'Bird's Eye View'.

Waitakere Arts Laureate Geoff Moon is a legendary bird-photographer and naturalist whose pictures of birds from the 1950s through to the present day have influenced ornithologists on a global scale. He was interviewed by equally legendary Steve Braunias, who is known for journalistic outrageous naughtiness, (also possibly on a global scale if he could wangle it), and for his latest book How to watch a bird (AWA Press). Steve has recently been bitten by the bird bug and rumour has it he was bowled over by the opportunity to interview this amazing nonegenarian.

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The Going West Writers Weekend (subtitled 'Food for Thought') surpassed itself yet again this year with an extraordinary feast of literary talent, and many a quirk, drama and surprising moment as always. I missed a few sessions (they’re naturally ones that everyone raves about) including the launch of Iain Sharp’s new book Real Gold (AUP), which details the various magnificent special collections gifted to libraries around the country by 19th Century collectors. Iain himself, Philip Rainer from the Turnbull and the lovely Donald Kerr from the Otage University Library excelled themselves in describing treasures in glowing terms, to the salivating interest of the crowd…

Owen Marshall's was the first session I made it to on Saturday morning. He was talking about his new book Drybread (Penguin) with the lovely Graham Beattie, who is obviously a big fan of Owen, and whose dry enthusiasm is infectious (especially when applied to the thought of himself in the press box at the announcement of the Man Booker Prize, for which Lloyd Jones is now the favourite – to say that Graham is extremely pleased that he’s going to be there is somewhat of an understatment). Drybread is a real ghost town in Central Otago, and Owen sketched a delectable vignette about how he was driving with his mate Graham Sydney along dusty brown roads, when he saw a sign etched with the name he gave to his novel. He asked Graham to turn – all they found was a graveyard with a ring of trees around it but Owen knew he’d found his setting. Interestingly, Owen Marshall confessed he reads mostly biographies, as he learns most from them about how people actually work – he’s recently gleaned much info on people under pressure from various bios about military leaders. Top tip I should say.

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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.

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Having just been privy to an extraordinary Poetry Slam event, part of the Going West festival on Saturday night, I wonder where the upsurge in this comparatively recent form of live entertainment (in NZ anyway) is taking us. Doris Mousdale commented in her NZ Book Month blog that she ‘sold more poetry on a wet Wednesday afternoon in Liverpool than in a year in a Queen St book store’. Could it be that Joe-Bloggs–NZ is at last turning around its legendary lack of general interest in poetry and that the vehicle doing the turning is not to be Bill Manhire’s luminous prose but the Poetry Slam? Well- hopefully it's a bit of both.

A capacity crowd (that’s around 300 I think) packed the Titirangi War Memorial Hall to listen to a broad range of people declaim, stammer and just plain read their own poetry. The only criterion was that it had to be under three minutes. We laughed, we cried, we heckled, we became utterly, hopelessly hysterical, we were stunned and amazed – and there were moments of sublime magic, (Renee Liang springs to mind, whispering, oh so slowly, sibilantly, sexily ‘S... T… O... P...’ into the microphone) when you could have heard a pin drop, and you knew that the hair of every single person in the room was standing on end.

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A hurried entry as my life is utterly consumed at present by the imminent launch of NZ Book Month on Fathers Day this Sunday at Te Papa in Wellington. It's going to be a most entertaining day with a full programme of free events starring some of our most famous authors including Joy Cowley, Jenny Pattrick, Rachael King, Owen Marshall with, as Campbell Live watchers will know, a Hairy Maclary lookalike competition judged by Lynley Dodd. Lots of storytelling sessions for the kids too, so come on down. The full programme is here. I'll be there, on photography and note-taking duty, so come and say hello, I'll be wearing... a camera.

On Monday in Welly will be another not-to-be-missed Writers on Mondays, with the lovely Andrew Johnston talking to the equally admirable Damien Wilkins about the book he's writing on NZ contemporary poetry, about his own poetry and no doubt about life in general. If Andrew's gently riveting blogs on NZ Book Month are anything to go on, this will be a superb session - 1pm, City Gallery.

Just like last week's session was, with Vincent Moleta (pictured). And here, to tell us about it with her usual eagle eye, flair and damned quick note-taking, is Mary McCallum...

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Mary McCallum reports once more on the Writers on Mondays readings - this time with with Mr Geoff Cochrane. It's fantastic to read such eloquent write-ups when you can't be there yourself. Thank you very much Mary:

To show I am not just a sensationalist when it comes to reporting on poetry readings, here is a report on this week’s Writers on Monday session at Wellington City Gallery where the writer in question not only didn’t fall down but is proud of the fact that he’s past all that (for entirely different reasons). Geoff Cochrane was the poet and as he said himself ‘before I was a famous poet I was a famous drunk.’ That was a long time ago – a year or so before Cochrane’s first mainstream publication with VUP in 1992 but recurring in his work since.

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Well after last week's excitement you'll all be glad to know that visiting poet Dora Malech is fine and has commented to the effect in the post below. And you'd be mad if you didn't get along to this week's Writers on Mondays for a rare glimpse of the wonderful Geoff Cochrane, who'll be chatting to James Brown about his latest release from VUP, 84-484 (his grandparents’ phone number in the '50s). Damien Wilkins has said his writing is ‘both stubbornly austere and wonderfully witty’, and his conversation ‘has the range of a voracious reader and the depth of some voracious living’.

If you're in Christchurch there's the Kim Hill/Paul Callaghan event - they're touring with their book As Far As We Know: Conversations about science, life and the universe (Penguin), which should also be riveting. That's at the Great Hall in The Arts Centre at 6pm
Tickets $12 from the Arts Information Centre – contact Ruth 03 384 4721. Have a great weekend.

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Time for a quick round up of upcoming events – and they’re all in my lovely community, Titirangi, in West Auckland. We’ve got the Montana Poetry Day offering, plus a raft of launches, and last but far from least, advance notice of this year's Going West Festival.

Next week, for the Montana Poetry Festival, Lopdell House in Titirangi is hosting a Wild Winter Night of hot mulled wine, hot jazz and of course, poetry with Neshamah, Karlo Mila, Ila Selwyn, Jenny Clay, Caroline Bensinger, Judith McNeil and Robert Hoare. That’s at 7pm, Friday 27 July, Lopdell House Gallery. There’s a paltry $5 entry fee, but you should probably book early to avoid disappointment as they say – phone 817 8087. (For lots more Montana Poetry day events, check out the full listing here - oh, and don't forget the Writers on Monday warm up event in Wellington this Monday 23rd – ten of the city's best poets reading from Best NZ Poems 2006 – 1pm at City Gallery, and it's free, of course).

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Stephanie Johnson said she was incredibly nervous when she interviewed Tim Winton on Saturday morning at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival, and a friend of mine who was sitting at the front said she was shaking like a leaf. But she gave a great impression of being relaxed as she sat with Tim, and he likewise, in his trademark black t-shirt, jeans, Blundstone boots and long brown ponytail.

To start off, Stephanie said they’d decided to just focus on a retrospective of a few of his books as she didn’t want to spread the interview too thin over his twenty-plus oeuvre – she went for The Turning, Cloudstreet, and The Riders. Tim bridled a little over the word ‘retrospective’ as he felt it was a term that should only be used for dead writers, but ‘as he hadn’t brought a shovel’, he supposed it could work.

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