My Katherine Mansfield Project E-Book

Kirsty Gunn

• Herausgeber: Notting Hill Editions
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Kirsty Gunn returned to spend the winter in her home town of Wellington, New Zealand, the place where Katherine Mansfield also grew up. Gunn explores the ideas of home and belonging and of the profound influence of Mansfield on her own creative journey.

Leseprobe

‘I began reading it and could not put it down until I had finished. I think it is beautiful … It amalgamates memory and fiction and research and journal so sensitively and in such an original way that I came away feeling [Kirsty Gunn] had escaped all the old hackneyed ways of writing about influence and created something wholly her own … It really lives. All of it.’ – John Carey, critic, author and twice chair of the Booker Prize

‘A beautiful and mood-provoking book … the writing went into my consciousness and I felt the loneliness, the sadness, the love and identification with Katherine Mansfield … It was beautiful.’ – Jane Campion, screenwriter and director

Kirsty Gunn has written five works of fiction and three short story collections. Her books have been broadcast and turned into film and dance theatre. Her most recent novel, The Big Music, won The New Zealand Post Book of the Year 2013. The Boy and the Sea was the 2007 Sundial Scottish Book of the Year and her previous work Featherstone was a New York Times Notable Book and received a Scottish Arts Council Bursary for Literature. Her new collection of short stories, Infidelities, was published in 2014 and won the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. She is Professor of Writing Practice and Study at the University of Dundee, and lives in London and Scotland with her husband and two daughters.

Kirsty Gunn

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MY KATHERINE MANSFIELD PROJECT

Contents

– Title Page –– Introduction –– 1My Katherine Mansfield Project –First Thoughts, Context and Ideas about Home– 2 The Voyage – Setting Out, Rough Seas and a Story, Essay and a Letter from Thorndon– 3 The Doll’s House – Settling In, Arranging Papers, Writing and Reading and Creating Fiction– 4Sun and Moon – Light and Dark, Winter and Summer and Living in Two Places at Once– 5 Postscript –– 6 Going Home –– Selected Bibliography –– About the Publisher –– Other titles from Notting Hill Editions –– Copyright –

– Introduction –

A number of years ago I wrote a collection of short stories called This Place You Return to is Home. The title story, connected to the others by themes of homecoming and identity, explored the idea that, as the poet Robert Frost had it, ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in’, could be created in a narrative. ‘Do you remember? How we were safe there?’ I wrote, about the grandmother’s house in that title story. ‘Can I make for you in words that safe place where we can stay?’

It’s an idea that has always preoccupied me – that notion of creative process as a making, a willed brick-by-brick, word-by-word building of a place on the page that might let a story inhabit it – to create a home of words where I, the writer, may also live. And the idea of return, too, as is there in the title of that story – that writing itself may enact a kind of going back, to the next story one is writing and then to the next and the next – back to the desk, again and again, to the page, to the paragraphs, those bricks and mortar of the writer’s life – returning, as well, to some central idea that powers and draws all my work to it in the first place, that’s ineffable and, in the end, mysterious to me, waiting at the end of the road, to take me in.