On becoming a writer - Gerry Coates

I was greatly taken by this collection of verse which I wrote about on the blog earlier. I found Gerry Coates' introduction an interesting essay on being a writer and publishers Steele Roberts have generously allowed me to reproduce it here.

Introduction from The View from Up There

If they asked me, I could write a book;

About the way you walk, and whisper; and look.

I could write a preface; on how we met;

That the world will never forget.

                                     from Pal Joey by Cole Porter

Becoming a writer … It wasn’t until Renée told us at a writer’s workshop to start calling ourselves writers that I began seriously to do it. Sometimes I enjoy putting Engineer on the departure card from New Zealand and Writer on the arrivals card. Or sometimes company director, or stage lighting designer or journalist. On the boat to England in 1964 — as a newly graduated engineer — I bought a Hermes portable typewriter with a blue and red ribbon to replace the old Imperial that my aunt had given me when I was at university. I’d had to abandon it along with my collection of jazz records when I downsized for the trip. I began to contemplate writing more assiduously.

 I have always loved writing stories. When I was twelve, around the time of the London/Christchurch air race, I won an Air League competition for the best essay on ‘The History of Flight’, and my name was in the paper. I kept writing daybooks through university, full of jottings and sometimes-pretentious poems. I surreptitiously had a poem — ‘Jazzville’ — published under a pseudonym. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be known as both an engineer and a poet at that stage.

My interest in aviation became lifelong, and underpins the title of this collection. I took my first flight with the Air Training Corps in 1956, and as the ground fell away beneath us I was fascinated by the ‘view from up there’. It’s a bit like writing poetry — another view of the everyday world. When I was in my 30s, and at a loose end with my children going to live in Christchurch, Sally said ‘Why don’t you learn to fly — you’ve always wanted to?’ So at the ripe old age of 40 I got my private pilot’s licence, sometimes using it to fly down and see my children in Te Wai Pounamu.

My folder of poems — from which I eventually selected these ones — grew till it had a name: Life, Death and the Bourgeois Poet. This was long before I knew that Thomas Mann felt that the true artist, in craving stability, contains a streak of the bourgeois. Meanwhile, I’d been working my way up in the engineering world, becoming a partner in a growing consulting firm, until I gave it all away and started my own consulting business. Suddenly I was free from having to carry the ‘authorising briefcase’ to validate walking around town during the working day. The sense of freedom was exhilarating. I could decide to do, or become, anything. I wondered about politics, but the writer in me decided that if I wanted to change the world the best way was to write something significant.

Optimistically I submitted work to literary periodicals and annuals, without success. My collection of rejection letters grew steadily. Some were scathing — ‘don’t write about writing’, ‘become familiar with the current post-modern vein’. Some were encouraging, such as those from Robin Dudding, editor of Islands, and Andrew Mason, literary editor at the Listener where I’d already had a book review published. Eventually I cracked the big one — Landfall, getting two poems published. Later I found that the editor, Peter Smart, was considered by some to be too liberal in his acceptances. The encounter with the seemingly bitchy poetry coterie gave me pause for thought. Maybe I’d concentrate on my novel — the one we all have in us somewhere — and the aspirational world-changing non-fiction I’d started writing when I became self-employed in 1980.

In 1983 I started a ginger group, Engineers for Social Responsibility. The president of the New Zealand Institution of Engineers, Sir John Ingram (also chair of NZ Steel) tagged us as ‘the lunatic fringe’, but his successor Alec Stirrat was kinder. He called us ‘the conscience of the engineering profession’. I was secretary and general dogsbody, which included writing a regular bi-monthly newsletter. Memorable articles included ‘Nuclear war — and the loud silence’, ‘Engineers as Moral Heroes — Are Our Ethics Good enough?’

It was now the dawn of the age of the personal computer. In preparation for my novel I’d toyed with dictating it, but the idea of a word processor, not just a correcting electric typewriter, grabbed me. I bought a luggable Osborne PC in 1985 and never looked back. When I told my friend, stage director Phillip Mann, that I wrote poetry on my computer he looked aghast.

My flirtation with regular newsletters burgeoned when I met Bob Beatty at a Society for Social Responsibility in Engineering gathering at Bundeena (near Sydney) in 1987. Bob, an engineer turned journalist, asked me to be the New Zealand correspondent for three of his stable of weekly news publications on water, electricity and aviation. Then, after a year or so, the editor of the Aviation Report had to pull out, so I took over. This meant writing some of the content and culling the rest from the 100,000 words of AAP wire service news. Copy needed to be emailed to Sydney for a Friday publication day. Suddenly I had to write to meet a deadline, come rain or shine, sickness or health, including an editorial. I also got to go to the biennial Avalon air show near Melbourne, and be an accredited aviation journalist, rubbing shoulders with others from more prestigious magazines like Australian Aviation and Flight. Bob eventually decided to give up publishing, and asked me to take Aviation Report off his hands. No money changed hands, but I had to assume the burden of meeting all obligations for as yet unfulfilled subscriptions. This went on till 1998, but finally I had emerged from the chrysalis as a writer.

In 1997 I also became a consultant to Ngāi Tahu for our Treaty of Waitangi claim settlement negotiations. Initially it was as a project manager, till it became evident the process was unmanageable. I then turned my hand to the communications side — writing feature articles on topics rebutting some of the redneck claims about Māori issues and Ngāi Tahu in particular, often for tribal leaders of the time such as Charles Crofts and Tipene O’Regan. This culminated in the consultation booklet, sent out to all tribal members — Te Karaka Special Edition Crown Settlement Offer.

In the ferment of all this practical writing my poetry has ebbed and flowed but never languished. Iain Sharp, reviewing in Landfall the Huia Short Stories 5 in which I was a finalist, said he believed I was a writer worth pursuing.

Writing is a way of putting words together with an aptness and a music that helps me interpret and understand better the human condition — its highs and lows. It’s a way of sharing an experience that might ring a bell with the reader. I hope you enjoy this selection.

Gerry Coates