As Victoria University's creative hothouse turns 10, its founder and influential leader prepares to retire. Kimberley Rothwell explores Vic's literary future without the velvet glove of Bill Manhire.
The lyrical quality of a list. The economy of a sentence. The moment in which a story makes you sit up and take notice.
In this room, with a white glare coming in off the harbour and cicadas sizzling in the trees that nudge the building, these things are discussed at length with lined brows and earnestly nodding heads. Ten students, aged 25 to 70, are on day two of their masters' degrees in fiction writing from Victoria University's International Institute of Modern Letters. There are two teachers, a lawyer, a climate-change analyst, a journalist, an architect and the head of a conservation NGO. For the duration of the year, they will meet to show and talk about their work, hungrily devour the works of favourite writers, and pummel their keyboards, writing like people possessed. This is their year to be writers with a capital W.
Today, they've been set an exercise by lecturer Damien Wilkins - write an autobiographical story with at least one lie in the text. Stories of coming out, changing names and obsessive hoarding emerge, read aloud by their authors. And then there's time for critique: "I like the phrase 'small, silent spaces'," says one writer to another, who half blushes at the compliment.
While reading, the students shuffle in their seats, play with their hair, click their pens and stumble over words. People are still nervous - "we're not yet lubricated" - says student Kate Simpkins, but in a few weeks they'll know each other's work inside out. As well as becoming Writers, great friendships are formed in this room with the glorious view.
This is the course that celebrated poet Bill Manhire has developed and taught, in various forms, since 1975. There's hardly a Wellington writer who hasn't been influenced in some way by his teaching - Rachael King, Hinemoana Baker, Eleanor Catton, Laurence Fearnley, Carl Shuker, Jo Randerson, Kate Duignan and Susan Pearce all hold an MA in creative writing from Victoria. Elizabeth Knox, Jenny Bornholdt, Barbara Anderson, Anthony McCarten, Emily Perkins, Dinah Hawken, and Alison Wong all completed Manhire's undergraduate original composition course, which ran until 1998.
With connections to the prestigious Iowa Writer's Workshop in the United States, publishing contacts and visiting writers from overseas, doing a course at the institute has helped closet poets and prose writers launch respectable publishing careers. Simpkins, who's been writing for 11 years, already has a bottom drawer full of writing. This year, she wants to make it into print.
It's 10 years this month since the institute was established, allowing Manhire's courses to flourish. In that time it has grown from offering 10 fulltime spaces in a masters' course for writers of all genres, to three masters' degrees, a PhD and several undergraduate writing courses, including classes taught by visiting writers from overseas. The institute has 44 fulltime post-graduate students at the moment. There are other "outreach" programmes that Manhire has developed, such as the Writers on Mondays series at Te Papa and the annual electronic magazine Best NZ Poems.
"It seems to me," he says, "there's something just as creative in building a small entity like this, which can do a range of really interesting things, as there is in maybe writing a poem or filming Lord of the Rings. That activity is not so different from the charge I get out of writing a poem that works. If the whole creative writing programme was a disaster I would feel quite differently. It would be a failed poem, I suppose."
Manhire slipped quietly out of teaching the MA a few years ago. Since 2008, he's been co-ordinating the PhD course, and says, "I spend a lot more time on administrative things than I might want to. I do some things outside the building a bit, but most of the time I'm here, trapped."
Not for much longer. He plans to step down at the end of 2012. Wilkins jokes that he's trying not think about when Bill goes. "I feel the whole structure of the building might collapse when he leaves."
Manhire didn't set out to head a writing programme. Armed with degrees in old Icelandic literature and two volumes of poetry on his CV, he started teaching at Victoria in 1973. English professor Don McKenzie devised a way for students to submit a folio of writing as part of their English degrees and called it a creative writing paper, but there were no formal classes. A small group of those students, including historian James Belich, asked to have some sort of meeting place so that those interested in writing could talk to each other about what they'd been doing.
"Because I wrote poetry, I was kind of detailed off to manage these meetings," Manhire says. "It was so exciting; here were these half dozen students sitting in a room doing all sorts of different stuff, so pleased to be talking to one another. That isn't your standard experience of an English department tutorial.
"Then I think one of them - rather than me - said, 'Why don't we all try to do the same piece of writing, if we all wrote on a topic'. I suspect I thought 'What a dopey idea'. They came back the next week with some amazing stuff. They'd all tried to do the same thing and all gone in completely different directions. So rather than become uniform by the same challenge, they'd become distinctively true to themselves."
Manhire started setting exercises for the class; challenging writers to create haiku with words from the racing page of the Evening Post, or short stories that had to feature a list of seemingly unconnected items. The idea was to use the exercises to break the ice in the workshop - any criticism of a story that's an exercise isn't going to be as painful to you as, say, criticism of the story you've slaved months over about a life changing breakup.
"People learn to talk about one another's work in - I hope - civilised ways," Manhire has written of the format. "Eventually we move on to discuss the 'real' work that people have been getting on with, and which will be in their end-of-course folios."
Over the years, the original composition course, based on the model of getting-to-know-each-other exercises before writing weightier folios, gained a reputation as luminaries such as Jenny Bornholdt, Elizabeth Knox and Emily Perkins blazed literary trails for themselves. With only 12 places available in the class, demand was high. In 1996, 150 hopefuls applied. The course became known as "Bill Manhire's course"; Victoria University Press published a volume of work from the course called Mutes and Earthquakes: Bill Manhire's Creative Writing Course at Victoria.
"I've never called it 'Bill's course'," Manhire says. "But it's sort of stuck with that. I must have supplied a tone of voice or something."
By 1997, the original course morphed into a Master of Arts degree, and three undergraduate papers; short fiction, poetry and children's writing. "I don't even think it was my idea," Manhire says. "I think it came at a point where universities were moving towards building graduate courses and research programmes and so on, and stepping away from that general undergraduate thing. We were part of a larger transitional moment, really."
Ten students joined the MA programme that year, including Kapka Kassabova and Catherine Chidgey. As well as submitting a folio of work, taking part in exercises and workshops, students had to undertake a reading programme. Manhire says: "I spent a few weeks travelling around the States looking at some of the famous creative writing programmes like Iowa and Stanford, as well as smaller ones like Tufts and, oddly enough, Harvard and Princeton - just to get a sense of what people did, the approaches they took - and used that as a basis to set up the MA.
What I thought was missing from some of their programmes was doing a lot of reading and thinking alongside the writing. Based on the primitive theory that you learn to speak by listening when you're little, you learn to write by reading people who can write well. That two- pronged [approach] is important."
It was 2001 when American casino executive Glenn Schaeffer turned up. "This person wrote to me out of the blue on casino letterhead from Las Vegas, and said, 'Hey, I want to give you all this money, would you like to change your name and be a sort of independent operation within the university? How does the International Institute of Modern Letters sound as a name?' I didn't think much of it, really, but said yes. Well, actually the university said yes. So we're now in a little building with a harbour view with Glenn Schaeffer's name on it.
"When he first got in touch with me I thought it was evil friends who had gone to Vegas and stolen some hotel notepaper and were really setting me up."
Manhire resolutely calls the institute "Victoria's creative writing programme". "[The International Institute of Modern Letters] is such a mouthful. It's almost at odds with the fine use of language."
The funding, which Schaeffer says is "sizeable", allowed creative writing courses to come together under one roof, away from the English department.
Read the rest at The Dominion.
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