David Larsen meets the remarkable guiding light behind the Going West Festival, the literary section of which starts tomorrow
Murray Gray is a book person's book person. Or, as he puts it himself, a literary groupie. A serial bookshop owner and the animating spirit of the Going West literary festival, Gray has a teddy bear's physique, the benignly craggy face of a Santa Claus who's decided beards are for hippies, and the gravelly voice of a man who appreciates a good whisky. If cajoling writers into fronting up to their public were an Olympic event, he would be one of New Zealand's most celebrated sportsmen.
"Have a beer. It's a very healthy beer, it's Turkish. Do you all sorts of good". It's a Saturday afternoon and we're sitting in Gone West Books, a cozy single-room universe in Titirangi. This is where you go if you want to talk to Gray, and over the next couple of hours I form the impression that a conversation with Gray is the shop's most popular product, and would be even if it weren't free. People drop in every few minutes to talk books. Has Gray read...? Does Gray know of...? What does Gray think about...?
Yes, he's read it, and yes, he does know it, and oh yes, he most definitely has an opinion. These conversations can last two minutes or twenty, and they can lead all sorts of places. By-products of various booklovers' chats with Gray include life-long friendships, true love, and the Going West festival. Though for the latter two, which happened more or less as consequences of each other, we have to go back a few bookshops.
"My mate Bob Harvey was about to sell his business and run for mayor of Waitakere, this was 1993 I guess, and he'd drop by my old Under Silkwood bookshop in Parnell, and one day we got chatting about the whole business of Westies being perceived as bogans. The black tee shirts, the V8s, all this sort of hooha. And Bob or I – one of us, both of us, can’t remember now – was saying that people never talk about all the writers we've had out west. There’s Maurice Gee, there's Maurice Shadbolt, there was Allen Curnow, there's C.K. Stead, who lived at Karekare a lot of the time... the place was bursting with internationally acknowledged talent, and we should be doing something to celebrate it". Like a festival, maybe.
Two more bookshop conversations from 1993: a customer commented one day on how well Maurice Gee describes the train trip out to Helensville in his novel Going West. "And I suddenly thought, wouldn’t it be neat to get a whole lot of people on a steam train and have Maurice read the book to us as we went along the lines, and we could get drunk, make loud noises and have fun".
Some months later a rather nice lady named Naomi walked in off the street, and in the course of a lengthy chat, Gray mentioned his twin ideas of a Waitakere-based literary festival and a Gee-themed steam train. Naomi said she could make it happen. She turned out to be Naomi McCleary, Waitakere City Council's newly appointed arts manager. She also turned out to be Gray's future other half; or, as he suggests I phrase it when I complain that "partner" is too dry a word, "my very special friend. My lady. My best mate. Or you can just call her my squeeze".
McCleary is practical, level-headed and well versed in the arcana of local government arts bureaucracy; Gray is gregarious, charming, and knows, at a conservative estimate, half the writers, publishers and independent booksellers in the country. A lot of people have put a lot of work into the improbable 15 year success of Going West, a micro-festival which has somehow grown distinctly macro without losing its intimate scale, but the yin and yang Gray-McCleary partnership is its beating heart.
Among this year's festival events, there are song and poetry writing workshops, a book launch with an associated exhibition at Titirangi's Lopdell House, the ever-popular poetry slam (four heats this year, to accomodate demand), a Pecha Kucha night, two James K Baxter one act plays, and the centerpiece Books & Writers Weekend, at the Titirangi War Memorial Hall. Teeing up the latter's 21 consecutive writers-on-stage sessions is Gray's job. It's a proposition requiring two, maybe three months solid arm-twisting, mostly of local talent. "We do let the occasional Australian through the doors".
The literary weekend is all highlights as far as Gray is concerned – "It’s an indulgence, putting together the program I want to go to myself, but then I'm a very self-indulgent person" – but he's particularly looking forward to hearing Jeny Curnow, Elizabeth Smither and Albert Wendt discuss their memories of Bill Pearson with Paul Millar, Pearson's biographer. And to going on stage himself with Graham Beattie and the National Library's Penny Carmody, to pay tribute to Gray's old friend Paul Reynolds, the internet commentator and pioneer, who died in May.
And with these acts of memorial, Going West will draw to what may be its own final close. Its future under the supercity arts funding structure is as unclear as most things supercity-related, but whether or not the writing is on the wall, Gray doubts he'll be pushing on with the festival himself. "Fifteen is a nice round number... I've really done everything I wanted to do. Time for something new".
Something new? "Well, John Key's got this ten million dollar fund for entertainment during the world cup. So obviously, twenty five thousand groups have gone for the rights to put on Foreskin's Lament... but my thought was to bring back the train trip, which has just got a bit too expensive for us to run these last few years, and this time base it around Maurice Gee's first novel, The Big Season. Not too many people are familiar with that book, which happens to be about rugby. A themed train trip called The Big Season... that might offer a nice bit of cultural tourism while the cup's on. You know, for the three percent of people who aren't pissed out of their brains on Queen's Wharf".
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