Door into secret garden of writers' imagination

Words Chosen Carefully - New Zealand Writers in Discussion
Edited by Siobhan Harvey, Cape Catley, $44.99
Words Chosen Carefully - New Zealand Writers in Discussion is a series of interviews with 15 writers. The interviewers are experienced writers or broadcasters, so the scene is set for a rich discussion. Black and white photographs of writers and interviewers by Liz March accompany each section - there is even a smiling C.K. Stead.
In Words Chosen Carefully we follow the interviewer through the front door to the writing room and inside the head of some of our finest living writers. The writers' craft is carefully and thoughtfully described. The landscape is both familiar and unfamiliar; familiar because most of the writers are living and working here in New Zealand where our heritage and culture is recognisable, yet unfamiliar because of their particular and very individual responses to our environment. Editor Siobhan Harvey says in her introduction: "Our heritage is located in listed buildings and architecture of civic importance, local and national museums, marae countrywide, art galleries, libraries, universities and schools ... Yet, by the same token, our heritage is a collection of smaller, but no less significant, memories, stories and ideas."
There are rich pickings from quotes, stories and the methods behind the craft of the writer, often referencing a wider literary world of inspirational readings.
All these writers love to read other writers and quote passages from their favourites. Lloyd Jones quotes Kafka: "Novels and stories have their source exclusively in pure subjectivity." And there is a lovely quote from Janet Frame: "Writing a novel is not merely going on a shopping expedition across the border to an unreal land: it is hours and years spent in the factories, the streets, the cathedrals of the imagination."
Reading this book reminded me of the similarity between the process of painting and the process of writing. Working blind, writing in a dark room, risking the possibility of failure is inherent in both disciplines. Elizabeth Smither and David Hill refer to Keats and negative capability: "Capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."
Elizabeth Knox sums up the paradoxical rewards of the creative process when she says, "Writing just creates that sense of inner order, you're housekeeping inside yourself somehow, by making something outside yourself."
I find Elizabeth Knox's writing difficult, but her interview was one of the most enjoyable and this divergence of writer and speaker was not unusual.
The writers interviewed are Lloyd Jones, James George, Jenny Bornholdt, Elizabeth Smither, Peter Wells, Elizabeth Knox, Kate De Goldi, Damien Wilkins, Paula Morris, Kapka Kassabova, Charlotte Grimshaw, C.K. Stead, Fiona Farrell, Witi Ihimaera and Owen Marshall.
There is a voyeuristic pleasure in reading this book - we are the invited yet unseen visitors and witnesses to these highly personal discussions. It is a privilege to be invited into that space where the processes of writing are laid bare. As the first such book to be published here for about two decades, it is well worth the wait. This is an insightful and pleasurable literary feast.