2025 Blackball Readers & Writers Festival

The fourth Blackball Readers and Writers Festival will take place on King’s Birthday Weekend, 2025, running from midday Saturday, 31^st May to Sunday evening, June 1st.

This year’s theme is The role of the writer in a time of crisis. The festival will take place once again in the beautiful and intimate setting of the local school.

After a midday lunch and welcome, Paul Maunder will speak with Tusiata Avia who was born and raised in Christchurch. Her father is Samoan and her mother European. Tusiata’s poetry explores Pasifika and cross-cultural themes. Her work has a strong performative element and contains feminist and anti-colonial perspectives. Recently Tusiata attracted conservative political attention with her confronting poem The Savage Coloniser about British explorer Captain James Cook. She has received many awards and residencies and is a Member of the NZ Order of Merit.

This will be followed by a panel discussion with attending writers on the theme of the festival, moderated by Paul Maunder and Catherine Woollett. In the evening there will be dinner at The Inn with after dinner speakers, Mary McCallum and Kathleen Byrne.

Sunday morning, Katrina Brown and a member of the Greymouth Youth Writers group will be talking with James Norcliffe who to date has published a collection of short stories, 11 books of poetry, an adult novel and written a dozen or so award-winning novels for young people including The Loblolly Boy series (Penguin Random). Jeffrey Paparoa Holman will take some of the time to explore with James his poetry writing. .

Westport-based Becky Manawatu (Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Mamoe, Waitaha) burst onto the literary scene in 2020 when her novel Aue won the $55,000 Jann Medicott Acorn Prize for Fiction (New Zealand’s richest literary prize), as well as the Hubert Church Prize for best first book of fiction, at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Accordingly, her new book, Kataraina, which further explores the whanau and whakapapa context of Aue, published toward the end of 2024, was eagerly awaited. Paddy Richardson will speak to Becky about her new novel.

Dunedin-based poet, Majella Cullinane was born and raised in Ireland, but moved to Aotearoa in 2008 where she began her literary career which crosses both cultures. She will speak with Jeffrey Paparoa Holman about her very well received writing project entitled Meantime, comprised of essays and poetry, and reflections on the loss of her mother to dementia during the COVID-19 pandemic.

After lunch Paddy Richardson will interview Christchurch-based writer, Saige England focusing on her historical novel The Seasonwife, which explores the colonial era of whaling and sealing and initial contact between manawhanua and tauiwi. Saige’s work has always had a strong social justice focus.

Mandy Hager is the third of four children who grew up in a household where books, reading and writing were encouraged and valued. Her first published book, Tom’s Story, was written after the death of her first husband in a boating accident, when she was trying to find books that would help her own children understand the nature of death and the emotions they were feeling. Since then, she has mostly written for young adults, and her books have often tackled difficult subjects such as grief, anger, violence, physical and emotional abuse, suicide and self-harm, racism, sexism, bullying and environmental issues. Her passion is to promote the politics of love. She will speak with Caroline Selwood and Catherine Woollett.

We will conclude the formal part of the festival with Leigh Cookson speaking with Rebecca Macfie who has worked as a journalist since 1988. In 2013 she published Tragedy at Pike River Mine: How and Why 29 Men Died, a non-fiction work on the Pike River Mine disaster which won the 2014 Best First Book Award for Non-Fiction at the New Zealand Post Book Awards, More recently she has been focusing on writing about poverty and inequality in Aotearoa.

On Sunday evening people may join us for dinner at The Hilton (you will need to book) and once again we will explore the art of the letter. We are suggesting people bring along a love letter, either personal or literary..

There is a range of accommodation in Blackball and we are also able to offer backpacker style accommodation at Kotuku School for Social Change (1271 Blair Road, Moana), for $20 a night. The Festival will be limited to 50 people plus the writers.

Registration: email wkcultur@gmail.com for registration form. Full festival $120 including lunches and Saturday dinner. One day $60, Session $25.

The Festival is supported by Creative Communities and Cycle Journeys.

2023 Festival programme

The third Blackball Readers and Writers Festival will take place on King’s Birthday Weekend, 2023, running from midday Saturday, 3rd June to Sunday evening. This year’s theme is Landscapes, Political and Spiritual. It will take place once again in the beautiful and intimate setting of the local school.

To begin the festival, Jeffrey Paparoa Holman and Michael Steven will ‘recover’ the work of Greymouth bred, Bill Pearson, novelist and cultural critic, who broke new ground in the gestation of NZ writing with his novel Coal Flat, written after a stint teaching in Blackball in the 1940s. His essay, Fretful Sleepers was also a seminal critique of settler puritanism. After a break Paddy Richardson will be interviewed by Paul Maunder about her new WW1 novel. The Green of the Spring which continues the Blackball connections of Through the Lonesome Dark. There will be a half hour available for people to briefly pitch any books they’re offering for sale. After dinner, hosted by Catherine Woollett, Paul Maunder will launch his new book, Solidarity, a Blackball novel, Michael Steven and Jeffrey Paparoa Holman will read a selection of poems pertinent to the festival theme, before Harry Broad introduces the mystery of Blackball communists, Bill and Annie Balderstone. On Sunday morning Jeffrey Paparoa Holman will talk with poet Nic Low (Ngai Tahu) whose book Uprising, walking the Southern Alps of NZ is ’an invitation to travel one of the world’s most spectacular landscapes in the company of Māori explorers, raiding parties, and gods.’ After morning tea, children’s author, Bill Nagelkerke will talk with teacher, Zella Downing about his recent books, The Ghosts on the Hill and The ghost house which trace Christchurch’s past and Jane Carswell will discuss with Caroline Selwood her experience as a teacher in China recorded in Under the Huang Jiao Tree and the cultural and spiritual shock which led her to embark on a spiritual journey as a writer. After lunch we focus on the political landscape as Christchurch activist, Leigh Cookson interviews the well known Auckland lawyer, writer and activist, Jane Kelsey who has critically tracked New Zealand’s involvement with neo liberalism since the Rogernomic revolution of the 1980s in a series of influential books and Paddy Richardson talks with Blackball writer and dramatist, Paul Maunder about his recently published memoir and his new book, Solidarity, a Blackball novel, a family saga which spans the last century, from the ‘08 strike to the Spanish Civil War to Isis. To round out the day, Catherine Woollett and Jeffrey Paparoa Holman share time with Sam Duckor-Jones, poet and artist who has recently moved to Greymouth to create and reside in the already famous pink church. The festival will conclude with a dinner hosted by Leigh Cookson, at which people can read a letter of importance in their lives, or simply a resonant letter, part of the festival’s aim to resurrect the art of the letter. A wide range of accommodation is available in Blackball. Once again, the festival will be limited to 50 visitors plus the writers.

Registrations are now open: wkcultur@gmail.com ; enquiries 0211063669

Full festival: $100, including lunches and Saturday dinner. One day: $50. Session: $20

Readers & Writers Festival successful

This year’s festival was well enjoyed by the capacity attendance. The programme was varied: To begin, Jeffrey Paparoa Holman chaired a panel consisting of Pat White and David Young, in order to ‘resurrect’ Coast poet and teacher, Peter Hooper. This was followed by a launch of his collected poems, published by Cold Hub Press. Sandra Arnold talked of her latest work which moves between historic periods and at the evening dinner Pat White read some of his poems and Paul Maunder told the story of Edward Darracott, inspirational teacher at Kotuku School in the late 19030s.

The next morning saw Becky Manawatu in conversation witih Stevan Eldred-Grigg, Elspeth Sandys speaking of her uncle, Rewi Alley; lunch was followed by an interview with Nicky Hager and the day ended with a conversation between Caroline Selwood, Tim Jones and Kathleen Gallagher. The festival finished with a dinner where guests read personal letters of resonance.

The feedback has been glowing:

The Blackball Readers and Writers Festival was a treasure where books served as jewels, gold coins as talent, and the many conversations were clever baubles from foreign lands. You are masterful in the way you brought them all together. I admire the spunk and grit needed to get a thing like that off the ground, and I am most appreciative of the ordinary elegance that gave it wings. There is authentic wisdom in downplaying renown and accentuating talent. Hoorah to Te Puawai Cooperative! Choose joy, Zella.

Just a quick note to sincerely thank you and Carolyn for a wonderful weekend at the Blackball Festival. As an ex-patriot returning to NZ (and more particularly reconnecting with the West Coast), it was a fantastic dose of the culture that I have been missing over 30 years spent in London. I’m sure it was not easy in having to “carry-over” a program in these uncertain times, but the whole atmosphere seemed to click right from the start, and the contributors and audience were all uplifted by the sense of a non-judgemental community simply seeking to benefit from the joys of exploring ideas and knowledge together. Russell Deyell.

Congratulations on a fantastic weekend. We had a ball. While we couldn’t come to the evening events (we have a toddler who needs feeding and putting to bed just when the fun usually kicks off!) we came away stimulated and charged up from the talks during the day. My highlights were discovering Peter Hooper’s poetry in depth, Becky’s talk, the session with Elspeth on Rewi Ally – what a masterful presenter she is – and Nicky Hager. So impressive. And thank you for your kind invitation to speak at a forthcoming festival. Let me know your address, and I’ll get a copy of Uprising posted out to you. Kā mihi mahana, Nic.

So, a rest for a year – in 2022 we will hold a retreat and hopefully host another writer in residence; perhaps two, for there is the prospect of the Labour History Project funding a writer as well.

Elspeth Sandys talks with Jeffrey Paparoa Holman

Writer in Residence announced

The inaugural Blackball Writer’s residency received thirty five applications from across New Zealand. The residency, funded by Creative NZ, allows a writer to receive a small stipend and to spend four weeks in a miner’s cottage generously provided by West Coast historian, Brian Wood. The project was required to have a Coast reference, be of a working class or activist nature or look into a progressive future.

Given the kaupapa, we were surprised to receive this number of applications, with some from New Zealand’s senior writers. It was difficult to select one from many excellent projects.’

The panel was made up of Greymouth literary enthusiast, Catherine Woollett, Christchurch writer with strong Blackball connections, Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, well known Dunedin novelist, Paddy Richardson and Blackball-based writer, Paul Maunder.

Selection criteria covered the strength of the project, its viability (likely to be completed and published), the attractiveness of a writing sample submitted and its alignment with the character of the residency. The initial judging resulted in a short list of Peter Clayworth, Stevan Eldred-Grigg, Mandy Hager, Becky Manawatu and Pat White.

After much discussion the panel chose Christchurch writer and historian, Stevan Eldrid-Grigg. His project is to write the final draft of a memoir called Grey Green Rain based on the first six years of his life, which were spent in Blackball. He wrote in his application: “My parents, with my three older siblings, moved to Blackball in the spring of 1952. My father was a public servant and had taken a job in the Mines Department, running the little office at the corner of Harper and Hilton Streets. My mother was a former shoe factory machinist; she and her sisters and their mother were my sources for my novel Oracles and Miracles. I was born a few weeks after our arrival in Blackball. We lived in a rented Mines Department cottage in Brodie Street, and afterwards in Harper Street. I spent the first six years of my life in Blackball before our family shifted back over the hill to Canterbury. Blackball, the Grey Valley and more broadly the West Coast have been something like a lost green dreamland in my imaginative world. All through my writing life I’ve been aware of a tension between ‘Blackball’ and ‘Canterbury’ ways of seeing the world. Blackball stands in my mind for the green, the wet, the warm, the homely, the motley, the welcoming, the kindly, the supple, the deep, the mysterious. Canterbury, by contrast, stands for the dry, the linear, the cold, the orderly, the colourless, the distancing, the logical, the superficial. Canterbury ways and Blackball ways of seeing and thinking and feeling have always nagged or fought or made love with one another in my books.”

These books include four novels and eleven history books of which The Southern Gentry and Diggers, Hatters and Whores would be best known.

The sample submitted shows that the memoir will be being something of a sociological study from a child’s point of view. To complete this project in situ was an attractive proposition for all concerned and will add to the local understanding of the broader literary tradition of the Coast that the Bathhouse Co-op, a subsidiary of Te Puawai Co-op is fostering with its Readers and Writers Festival, its Writers Retreat and now the residency.

While resident, Stevan will give a public talk in each of the town centres on the Coast, hold a writing workshop with a selected group of school students and give a final reading from his memoir at a Blackball pub.

As a taster he has given permission for us to publish this short extract:

“School is alright. The classrooms are in a long yellow building in a big park with lots of trees all around it and it’s just down the road from Brodie Street. The classrooms are big and brown and they’ve got big wide high windows all along one of the walls so you can look out and see the grass and the trees and the birds and the bush on the hills and the clouds in the sky. At the front of my classroom there’s a big long blackboard where my teacher writes with chalk. The blackboard isn’t really black. It’s green. So people should say greenboard. Mrs Driscoll, who’s my teacher, she looks at our fingernails at the startof each day.

‘Good, Billy,’ she says, walking along and looking. ‘A bit slipshod, Heather.’

Mrs Driscoll’s got a sort of squashed head like a bulldog but she’s not scary like a bulldog. Her face is soft and pink and powdery. And her hair is fair and all wavy. And shewears jewels in her ears. Pink jewels. Or glossy black jewels. So she must be rich. She looks at some more fingernails.

‘Good, good, good,’ she says. ‘Very good, Stevan.”

Given the demand, the Co-op will seek funding for further residencies and approach some local stakeholders. ‘For the Coast to become something of a mecca for writers with progressive agendas should surely be encouraged. What an amazing piece of branding that would be.

stevan_eldred-grigg1

photo: Otago Daily Times

Cancellation

Quote for the day: ‘…viruses are concerns not just for the police, medicine, science and the experts, but for the entire collective imagination; this is because there is more to them than mere episodic events in an irrational world. They embody the entire logic of our system, and are merely, so to speak, the points at which that logic crystallizes spectacularly. Their power is a power of irradiation and their effect, through the media, within the imagination, is itself a viral one.’ Jean Baudrillard, Screened Out.

It is with great regret that we cancel this year’s festival. The co-op members felt that given the uncertainty, it is best to cancel at this stage, before things get busier and so that people are not inconvenienced closer to the date.

There is no long weekend available later in the year (the school has a reunion over Labour Weekend) so we look to the same programme next year.

Thank you for your enthusiasm and support – and our apologies.

Heoi ano na

Paul

Festival 2020

The Bathhouse Co-op (a subsidiary of Te Puawai Cooperative Society Ltd) presents the second

Blackball Readers and Writers Festival

Queen’s Birthday Weekend, Saturday & Sunday 30-31 May, 2020

This intimate festival, a contribution to the West Coast transition economy, takes the model of the underground coal mine and transposes it to the world of NZ literature.

It takes place once again in the beautiful setting of the local school.

This festival will look at writers as activists, renegades and recluses.

Programme:

Saturday 30^tMay, noon, assemble for lunch and powhiri at the Blackball school, following which:

In keeping with the task of resurrecting forgotten writers, Pat White and David Young will discuss the life and work of Peter Hooper, the West Coast writer and poet, teacher and bookshop owner, who lived a lonely yet fruitful life on the West Coast, influencing many aspiring creatives.

After a break, Caroline Selwood will speak with Sandra Arnold, whose work includes two novels, a book on parental bereavement, a short fiction collection and her third recent historical novel, The ash, the well and the Bluebell. To conclude the first session, Pat White will read some of his poems.

For those new to the village, a short guided tour will take place before dinner.

In the evening, starting at 8pm, guests are invited to a performance of Waiting for Greta, the remake of the classic Waiting for Godot, this time set within the climate crisis. Written by Paul Maunder, the hour long production, premiered in 2019, is by local group, Kiwi/Possum Productions.

Sunday morning, starting at 10.00am, Paddy Richardson will talk with Becky Manawatu, whose first novel, Auē, dealing with ‘kids, gangs and curdled masculinity’, has been very well received. At 11.30am, Elspeth Sandys will then speak with David Young about her extensive writing life with a focus on her latest work, A Communist in the Family: Searching for Rewi Alley, a story that combines family memoir, biography, history and travelogue.

After lunch, at 1.30pm Paul Maunder will talk with Nicky Hager, NZ’s best known investigative Journalist, whose books have uncovered environmental, political and military skulduggery. How did his work begin? What is the role of the journalist-writer, what is the methodology, what are the ethical issues?

At 3pm, the afternoon will conclude with a panel discussion chaired by Kennedy Warne with two writers discussing their source material and their motivation,. Tim Jones, whose latest novel is a Cli-Fi book, Where we land will be joined by Kathleen Gallagher, whose recent novel Inangahua Gold is inspired by local history and environment. The festival will conclude with a dinner hosted by Paddy Richardson and Elspeth Sandys at which people can read a letter of importance in their lives, as part of the festival’s aim to resurrect the art of the letter.

The books of the festival’s guest authors and related works will be available to purchase throughout the weekend, and other writers are invited to bring books for a local mini market.

Ticket Prices

Full ticket covering both days $80 (inclusive of afternoon teas, Saturday lunch & dinner and Sunday lunch) – Sunday dinner to be paid for individually.

One day tickets $40 (includes lunch and afternoon tea)

Session Tickets $15

Accommodation for those from out of town: Blackball Hilton ($40 per night), Blackball Inn ($45), tiny houses at Blackball salami, AirBnB, and holiday cottages. For those on a low budget, there are 4 spaces available at the Brian Wood cottage and freedom camping (including tent sites) will be available at the Community House.

Please register your and purchase tickets by emailing wkcultur@gmail.com. There will be a car pooling box.

Authors 2020

Blackball Readers & Writers Festival 2020

The second Blackball Readers and Writers Festival will take place at Queen’s Birthday Weekend, running from midday Saturday 30^th May to Sunday evening. Part of the transition of the Coast from extraction, the festival uses the underground mine as a model to apply to literature. This year’s theme is activists, renegades and recluses. It will take place once again in the beautiful setting of the local school.

Pat White and David Young will ‘recover’ the work of Greymouth born, Peter Hooper, poet, teacher, novelist, environmentalist and mentor to young writers. Choosing to stay and write on the Coast, he was in some ways, a tragic figure. Pat White will then read some of his own poems. After dinner, Paul Maunder’s Waiting for Greta, a remake of the theatre classic Waiting for Godot will be performed. Sunday morning, Paddy Richardson will talk with Becky Manawatu, whose first novel, Auē, dealing with ‘kids, gangs and curdled masculinity’, has been very well received. Elspeth Sandys will then speak with David Young about her extensive writing life with a focus on her last work A Communist in the Family: Searching for Rewi Alley, a story that combines family memoir, biography, history and travelogue. After lunch Paul Maunder will talk with Nicky Hager, NZ’s best known investigative Journalist, whose books have covered environmental, political and military skulduggery. How did his work begin? What is the role of the journalist-writer, what is the methodology, what are the ethical issues? The afternoon will conclude with a panel discussion of writers, their source material and their motivation, chaired by Kennedy Warne. Tim Jones, whose latest novel is a Cli-Fi book, Where we land will be joined by Kathleen Gallagher, whose recent novel Inangahua Gold is inspired by local history and environment and Sandra Arnold, whose work ranges from the description of a mother daughter relationship during a battle with cancer to her recent historical novel, The ash, the well and the bluebell which begins with the Christchurch earthquake. The festival will include with a dinner at which people can read a letter of importance in their lives, as part of the festival’s aim to resurrect the art of the letter.

.Registration: wkcultur@gmail.com

Full festival: $80, including lunches and Saturday dinner.

Authors 2020