C.K.STEAD recalls the Creative Reading Class of 1986 !

In the simply splendid Landfall 221 C.K.Stead reviews Their Faces Were Shining by Tim Wilson, Victoria University Press.

I was especially taken by this paragraph:


"In my last year of university teaching, 1986, Tim Wilson was in my Creative Writing class. I have a photograph of him with his class-mates, one of whom is the poet Andrew Johnston. Tim's hair is enormous, piled up in front in a sort of bouffant style. I thought he was brilliant and Didn't think I could teach him anything. Of all my Creative Writing students during those final three years he was one of four I felt certain we would hear more about. Three are now very well known. Tim vanished until he materialised on TV One with his mown hair and fluent clever commentaries from America. So I have been waiting a quarter of a century to hear from him, either as a poet or fiction writer."

I contacted Stead and asked him if he could scan me the photograph he was referring to, which with the help of his publisher, AUP, he did and here it is :

Andrew Johnston is on the left and sitting beside him is Tim Wilson who seems to be wearing an impressive pair of tooled leather cowboy boots and amazing tassels on his jeans, perhaps to match all that hair! Can anyone out there tell me who the other two guys are? They look vaguely familiar to me...........

Stead's review of Wilson's novel concludes:

I enjoyed and admired Their Faces Were Shining ; but as one who finds reality always richer and more richly ambiguous than fantasy's substitutes, I hope Wilson's next subject for a novel will give him access to that larger space in which to exercise his considerable talents.

There is a nice irony in Stead's admiration because of course Wilson's novel has been short-listed in the fiction category of the New Zealand Post Book Awards announced two days ago. Included in that very short-list of three is Charlotte Grimshaw's The Night Book. Grimshaw is of course the daughter of C.K.Stead. The other short-listed title is Laurence Fearnley's The Hut Builder. 

One would have to say that Wilson is the outsider in this three book race.

Footnote

Tim Wilson has just advised from New York - .

 The other two are Hugh Stevens, who is an academic in London, and has written a book (from memory) on Henry James; and Ross Lay, whose fate I don’t know.

And Andrew Johnston from Paris says:

Tickled to see the photo of CKS's 1986 class. I recently found a photo of Tim Wilson from the same evening and sent it to VUP, who published it on the VUP facebook page.

In the photo on your blog, the third from left is Hugh Stevens, who later did a PhD at Cambridge, published his thesis as a well-recieved book on Henry James, and is now a senior lecturer in English at University College London.