Arja Salafranca’s collection of stories, The Thin Line is due out in April, 2010, just in time for the London Book Fair. Arja’s has received many accolades and prizes for her poetry and short fiction since the mid 90’s. She is currently the editor of the Sunday Independent’s Lifestyle section.
This is what Hamilton Wende has to say about the collection:
These are wonderful stories. They chart a new direction in South African fiction, where each line, each page – each story unfolds subtly, reaching deeper and more intimately into the tender spaces that exist in all our lives between love and doubt. Reading them kept me up late at night, wanting to know more about the characters’ lives. I was enthralled by the clarity and compassion of her insights; and moved by her obvious love for our fragile country and the fierce power of our unrelinquished hopes.
Here is the blurb:
‘Words grow up and reverberate … they come back’
The short stories in The Thin Line show what happens when a writer casts a thin line into a pool of character and situation. Characters assume position, while readers see the lines they have drawn around the selves in the stories. As readers we are lucky – we can then step over these lines and watch from inside the story. We see characters draw battle lines and retreat behind them, mark out their territory with boundary lines and dare others to cross them. We notice as story lines escape from one story to resurface in others, sometimes the merest thread, sometimes a bolder and more definite intrusion. And sometimes we watch story lines loop back on themselves to form circles, or sharply curved ellipses. Some stories are cross-hatched with many lines – webbed and netted – and we watch the people inside these struggle to escape from situations, often of their own making – and often because they didn’t draw the line when they should have. Lines create boxes and keep people lonely and separate from each other. And sometimes, lines fade, are erased, or can be crossed, with happy and satisfying effect.
Whatever may happen inside these stories the reader is hooked from the first one, reeled in on that thin line. And they don’t leave you alone. You get up to make some toast, or check the mail and as you’re walking back to your desk, you’re thinking about the woman artist, or Corinna trapped in her huge teenage body, or Cleo in love with a married man after all these years, or poor skinny Mark, seeing his love teeter away from him.
“Only my love of the straight line keeps me going,” Carmen Herrera (Artist)
March 2010 will see the Small Publishers’ Catalogue available to buy. Here’s a preview of the cover, done by Jesse Breytenbach (crocheted image) and lettering by Hannah Morris. I love the cover and have loved working on this project with the help of Bontle Senne, Natascha Mostert and Fouad Asfour of Khanya College. We decided to put together a catalogue at the Small Publishers’ meeting we had in Jozi last August.
The Catalogue has listings from about 40 African small publishers, there are articles by Gary Cummiskey, Arthur Attwell and Aernout Zevenbergen as well as some useful resources. The Catalogue will be useful to a number of different audiences including Africana librarians, booksellers, writers, book development agencies, the media and readers who are interested in the behind the scenes aspects of the world of books and publishing.
The Catalogue should be in bookstores by the end of March 2010 and copies will be available at this year’s London Book Fair. Publishers who may not be able to get to the LBF will still be on the international publishing map.
Die wonder van brood is dat dit met eenvoudige bestandele soos meel, water en sout gemaak word en tog kan die wonderlikste, geurigste gebak uit hierdie eenvoud na vore kom.
Dít is beslis deel van Hester van der Walt se fassinasie met brood. Hierdie fassinasie het gelei tot die publikasie van ‘n boek, getiteld Hester se brood, wat broodresepte en vertellinge van Van der Walt se bakkery op McGregor bevat.
Van der Walt het gisteraand by die bekendstelling van die boek by die Book Lounge in Kaapstad gesê sy gebruik baie min suurdeeg vir haar brode. Dit is ook nie die tradisionele soetsuurdeeg nie, maar haar eie skepping. “’n Mens gebruik die minimum,” het sy gesê. “Dit is byna ‘n leuse vir my.” Sy was verbaas oor die resultate wat sy uit hierdie minimum kon kry.
Broodbak is ook ‘n metafoor vir die lewe, het Pieter Veldsman, bekroonde sjef en skrywer, by die bekendstelling gesê. “Dit gaan nie om den brode nie, maar om die brood van die lewe.” As ‘n mens tussen die lyne van Van der Walt se boek lees, gaan dit volgens hom oor “vriendskap, vennootskap en omgee”. Hy het die boek met potlood en liniaal gelees en het in ‘n “beswyming van bewondering” gegaan oor bekoorlike beskrywings soos: “druk kuiltjies in die deeg met jou vingerpunte”.
Van der Walt is nie ‘n opgeleide kok nie, maar het op besonderse brood verlief geraak nadat sy oorsee getoer het. Daarna het haar soeke na die perfekte ciabatta begin. “Ek het baie Italiaanse kookboeke gehad, maar daar was min broodresepte in, want in Italië is daar in elk geval ‘n bakkery om elke hoek en draai. Toe het ek self begin eksperimenteer.”
Aan die einde van haar beroep by die Mediese Navorsingsraad het sy en Lies Hoogendoorn, die illustreerder van Hester se brood, na McGregor verhuis. Aanvanklik het hulle ‘n koffiewinkel bedryf en dit is hier waar hulle vir Niel Jonker ontmoet het. Hy was besig om elders ‘n broodoond te bou en het aangebied om vir Van der Walt ook een te bou. Só is Van der Walt se broodoond, Hestia, gebore.
En Van der Walt het uiteindelik die volmaakte brood gebak. Daarvan kan die gaste, wat by die bekendstelling aan haar brood gesmul het, heelhartig getuig.
Dit is vir Die Book Lounge en Modjadji Books ‘n groot plesier om jou uit te nooi na die Kaapstadse bekendstelling van Hester se Brood deur Hester van der Walt.
Hester van der Walt sal ‘n gesprek voer met Peter Veldsman, restauranteur van die befaamde Emily’s by die Kloktoring in die Kaapse Waterfront, bekende skrywer, en internasionaal bekroonde chef.
Kom geniet saam met ons ʼn stukkie van Hester se heerlike brood en ʼn glasie Leopard’s Leap wyn, geborg deur Leopard’s Leap.
Hester van der Walt sal gesels oor die boek en daaruit voorlees.
Wow! What a launch we had in MacGregor on Wednesday night for Hester se Brood by Hester van der Walt. The owners of the Karoux restaurant, a fairly new MacGregor hot spot, know how to organise a fabulous party. Andre and Kurt are charming, efficient and warmly hospitable hosts. The evening was summery, the Karoo courtyard and fairy lights the perfect setting. Karoux had organised delicious local wines from the MacGregor Wine Farm. Their Colombard is the house white at Karoux and their Shiraz and Pinotage are prizewinners.
Hester specially made bread for the occasion, what a treat. She made foccaccia with delicious toppings and a huge celebratory challah with a chocolatey raisin filling that was so delicious I thought I’d died and gone to heaven after one bite. Positively orgasmic. I think I will have to learn how to make challah. Hester uses only Eureka stone ground flour for her breads.
As people came in they greeted Hester and Lies Hoogendoorn, her partner (whose art work is an integral part of the book, including the cover painting) enthusiastically. The guests bought copies of the books like ‘hot cakes’. Hester sat down to sign and before the more formal part of the proceedings were begun, we had almost sold out of books. I was also thrilled that Natascha Mostert, who did the book design and layout, came to the launch. Hester and Lies were thrilled to meet her and to thank her for her input and sensitive book design work.
The more formal proceedings started with me saying a few words about Modjaji Books and what I am trying to do with this small press. When I first met Hester and Lies to talk about the book, I got my Modjaji feeling, it is an electric lighting up inside of me feeling. While I read the manuscript, the feeling intensified. And during the launch I was afraid I might burst into ecstatic flames. Hester is a gifted writer and a wonderful person, calm, centred, loving, focused and many other things besides. Hester and Lies saw the printed book for the first time at about 3 in the afternoon. The launch was only a few hours later, the most thrilling for me was to see the way the took the book and looked and it and held and paged through it. I could see they loved it. Every now and then they would look a little choked up, a little misty-eyed.
Hester spoke, her is what she said:
It was not difficult to choose bread for tonight. It had to be foccacia. I have a clear memory of my first bite into the crust of its close relative, the ciabatta. I knew immediately that this was real bread – the crust rough and honest like our landscape and the inside crumb tasty and filled with large uneven holes. The ideal bread for breaking with your fingers and for soaking up sauce and for cleaning your plate.
I guess that was the beginning of my search: I wanted to make a perfect ciabatta! I paged through recipe books and I experimented, I waited with bated breath to take the bread from the oven. But then the first cut through the crust was a disappointment – this was not the real thing. Until one day, during a difficult time in my life, a time of burnout in my work, when I had no energy, I stumbled on a special book on artisan bread by Maggie Glezer. That was the start of my life with bread.
Hester se Brood tells the story of that search. I share the what and the why and the how of making real handmade bread in your own kitchen. I tell the story of the oven, the wood and the firemaker, the market, and of this village and its people who provided the womb for the story to grow.
Hester read from the first page of her book
‘n Mens kry brood — en Brood. Dis wat ek besef het toe ek vir die eerste keer in ‘n ciabatta gebyt het; daardie lugtige Italiaanse brood genaamd pantoffel: plat en eerlik met ‘n kors soos ‘n gehaarde landskap. Binne vol groot rysgate, ideaal om met jou vingers te skeur vir die opdoop van daardie laaste souserigheid uit jou boord.
Net daar het my soektog begin, ‘n Geblaai deur resepteboeke het my van die een boekwinkel na die ander geneem. Halfskelm maak ek myself staan by ‘n tafel vol boeke, ‘n resepteboek oopgeslaan en notaboekie op my handsak gebalanseer. So skryf ek af. By die huis gaan probeer ek die resep uit. Wag in spanning vir die brood om uit die oond te kom. H’m, lyk nie sleg nie. Maar die eerste sny deur die kors weet ek al: dis nie wat ek soek nie. dit lyk soos die tuisgebakte brood van my kinderdae, die soort wat net lekker is omdat dit nog halfwarm uit die oond is.
Colleen Crawford Cousins my friend and collaborater also spoke about the book. Hester and Lies are old friends of hers, and right from the start she too saw Hester’s book. She advised me on cover design and book design. She saw that the book is about making bread, but it is also and perhaps more importantly about making a handmade life and Hester chose to write it in Afrikaans as an act of reclamation of her mother tongue. I wished Hester had read for much longer when she read us two tantalising paragraphs.
Niel Jonker, who helped Hester and Lies to build their wood fired oven came specially to the launch with his family. He also spoke about his involvement with the oven, becoming a baker of bread and of his friendship with Hester and Lies.
Oh and a charming little detail: Colleen and I stayed at the MacGregor Wine Farm Cottages – the entrance to which says “Ina Naude en man”. There has to be a story there.
Robert Berold (who edited the collection) will introduce Joan Metelerkamp and Burnt Offering. Wine and snacks will be served
RSVP: Crystal Warren at C.Warren@ru.ac.za or tel: 046 622 7042
About the book Burnt Offering is Joan Metelerkamp’s seventh collection of poems. The title comes from a poem in a cycle that embodies the labours of the medieval alchemists – heating and burning, transformation of passionate intensity, the search for an enduring element. In the process malignant doubt is burnt off, and what takes its place is trust in the everyday:
take this day, here, take it all its clarity, all its gold –
Like all of Metelerkamp’s work, these generous poems draw on and weave together, with this poet’s distinctive energy and passion, the details of family and rural life, dreams, landscapes and journeys:
the chainsaw in the valley;
the chainsong of canaries, cisticolas, sombre bulbul, sunbirds, despite the cloud cover;
the script of named fynbos; the clear horizon, the still sea;
the discomfort of day’s plans, narratives, narratives.
About the author Joan Metelerkamp is the author of seven books of poems: Towing the Line (1992), Stone No More (1995), Into the day breaking (2000), Floating Islands (2001), Requiem (2003), Carrying the Fire (2005), and Burnt Offering (2009). She lives with her family in the Southern Cape.
Jelly Dog Days – Erica Emdon Whiplash – Tracey Farren (short-listed for the 2009 Sunday Times Prize) Counting Sleeping Beauties – Hazel Frankel Little Ice Cream Boy – Jacques Pauw
WISER will host a discussion among four authors who have recently published novels.The panellists will engage their novels, each of which deals with a version of dysfunctional domesticity, family implosion and in two, how this has impacted on the adults who emerge. Whiplash and the Little Ice Cream Boy tell the stories of grown-up protagonists from fractured working-class worlds, while Jelly Dog Days that of a young girl who attempts to navigate her way out of a similarly bleak background. In Counting Sleeping Beauties an awful family tragedy is related, which threatens to destroy the neat, tidy suburban world of a middle-class, Jewish family.
The discussion will focus on the themes of marginality within, and the hidden interiority of, families, while also considering certain aspects of the craft of writing, such as the challenges of representing domestic drama, the demands of sustaining first-person narratives, questions of voice, and the ethics of representing disruptive and prospective violence. The writers will also comment on their sense of the particularities of South African domestic histories.
Date: 8 October 2009 Venue: WISER Seminar Room, 6th Floor, Richard Ward Building, University of the Witwatersrand Time: 18:00-19:30
On Wednesday night, the 2nd September, the Book Lounge and Modjaji Books hosted a fabulous party for two Cape Town poets, Sindiwe Magona and Helen Moffett. Veruschka and her team outdid themselves with the decor. The “Please, Take Photographs” installation, the balloons, the festive party atmosphere. Thanks so much for pulling out all the stops.
Helen and Sindiwe both read their poems with great style and verve. The BL was full to capacity, there were people sitting on the stairs, on the floor, standing. Many glasses were broken. Sorry Mervyn….
It was one of those memorable nights, a night of poetry and magic. Helen’s birthday was yesterday, the 2nd September (Happy Birthday, Helen) and Sindiwe’s on the 27th August (Happy Birthday to you too, Sindiwe – she is 66 – she told us, and puts many younger people to shame with her beauty, dynamism, humour, vibrant presence).
Sindiwe started the reading with the first poem she ever wrote, her coming out as a poet poem. She also read “For Maria”, the mother of a friend, an Italian woman, in honour of her 80th birthday. As Sindiwe could speak no Italian and Maria could speak no English, Sindiwe said she didn’t want to be a ‘foei tog’ (sp?) at the party. Somehow I can’t picture Sindiwe ever being a foei tog. She finished her reading with the title poem of her book, ‘Please, Take Photographs’ written about South Africa’s HIV/AIDS crisis while she was still living in New York, working at the UN.
Helen read from Strange Fruit, she told us she was reading ‘the sentimental ones’, some of which were written for members of the audience that evening, two dear friends and her niece. She finished with a poem for Pushkin, a cat that has since passed away but is sorely missed. When the readings were over, we all longed for more. She stuck to the ones which weren’t PG rated as her niece was there.
The birthday celebrants were given big ‘book cover’ cards signed by most of the people at the Book Lounge last night and flowers. The rest of us got soul food, cake and lots of other yummy eats and wine from Leopard’s Leap. Five lucky folk got free tickets to see Sindiwe’s play, “To My Mother’s Mother” which is opening at the Baxter in mid September.
The Book Lounge and Modjaji Books are delighted to invite you to a special event on Wednesday 2nd September. At 5.30 for 6.00 pm there will be a party/reading/poetry jorl/more intimate launch of Strange Fruit - Helen Moffett and Please, Take Photographs by Sindiwe Magona. It promises to be an evening to remember.
Both poets are feisty, powerful, audacious, courageous, wise, and funny. Do come along and join us.
Ps. It’s Helen’s birthday, so there will be cake.
This is what Jane Raphaely had to say about Please, Take Photographs:
Sindiwe Magona has published everything but poetry- great novels, memoirs, essays, educational books for children. Now, at the peak of her form, she has unveiled her poems – the most difficult art form of all to get right, but like an arrow to the heart when they succeed.
Sindiwe skewers the aid racket in one poem that will ricochet round the NGOs of Africa.
Foreign Aid
Foreign Aid Comes to my country Takes a U-turn Goes back whence it came
Foreign Aid Big Man President Grins and grovels Sells our coffee for a song To get World Bank money
Foreign Aid Buys our country nothing Gives our children less This Dollar Democracy Sure is expensive.
Please, take photographs, please buy this book for yourself, please give it to your friends, please copy the most cutting poems to your enemies, and the most beautiful ones to your children.
Here is what some readers have had to say about Strange Fruit: “Helen’s voice sparkles with humour and passion and your voice is blessed with intelligence, incredible clarity and verve.” Yaba Badoe, writer and documentary film-maker,UK
“I was touched by the depth and width of the feelings and experiences reflected by your poems. If I may say so – and this is intended as a compliment – you have certainly bared your soul.” A reader.
“Strange Fruit seems such a sincere collection of leaf and petal and bud and fruit that my bite into it is that even if I find a worm somewhere in the middle, I will still want all the flesh and juice of the fruit. Thank you for being so bold and sincere. You are (of course you know) tantalising and so humorous in some and so realistically observant and stating what many would shy away from putting on paper.” Iga Zinunula, Uganda
Monday night, Cape Town. Don’t think you have to stay home. Each Monday Hugh Hodge and Karin Schimke host Off the Wall at A Touch of Madness in Obz.
This Monday the 17th August, Sindiwe Magona will read from her debut collection of poems, Please, Take Photographs. Every Monday this month of August, Modjaji poets will be reading at Off the Wall. (more…)
Arja Salafranca’s collection of stories, The Thin Line is due out in April, 2010, just in time for the London Book Fair. Arja’s has received many accolades and prizes for her poetry and short fiction since the mid 90’s. She is currently the editor of the Sunday Independent’s Lifestyle section.
Monday night, Cape Town. Don’t think you have to stay home. Each Monday Hugh Hodge and Karin Schimke host Off the Wall at A Touch of Madness in Obz.
