Joan Rosier-Jones celebrates Whanganui writers in her latest book.
PICTURE / PAUL BROOKS
Joan Rosier-Jones celebrates Whanganui writers in her latest book.
PICTURE / PAUL BROOKS
Writing is what Joan Rosier-Jones does. When she's not writing, she's teaching others to write or keeping busy with all things literary.
Sooner or later she had to write Literary Whanganui: A Reader's Guide. It took years, but now she has and next month it will be launched.
Published byTangerine, Literary Whanganui is a collection of articles about writers with strong Whanganui associations. Many lived and wrote here at some part of their lives, and many still do. Others found inspiration here or became part of the Whanganui writing community in some other way. Mark Twain warrants a mention, even if only some of what he wrote about the town was complimentary.
Others include one-time Listener editor Ian Cross, author of The God Boy. Ian grew up in Castlecliff. Robin Hyde, alias Iris Wilkinson, came here in the 1920s to work on the Wanganui Chronicle. James K Baxter walked Whanganui streets while living upriver at Jerusalem. He wrote beautiful poetry while he was here. The book is filled with the stories of people who enriched this community with their writing. With each name is an address or location, a place where they lived or wrote, or had some connection. "I had to put people somewhere and that was a difficulty."
Joan has created three fold-out maps on which are located places for people to visit and see where their favourite authors lived or worked. For example, Charlotte Warburton (1883-1961), who wrote Wanganui River, the Rhine of New Zealand, spent a lot of time sailing on the Wairua. The Wairua, then, is her mark on the map.
"When I first came here [to Whanganui] I got involved in the Wanganui Arts Festival," says Joan. She was asked to help with a literary component of the festival. "We got funding from Creative Communities, but the festival fell over." They went ahead with the literary part anyway. "In conjunction with that I had been curious about where some of these people — like Janet Frame — actually lived. It was 3 Andrews Place in Gonville. It's still there ... So we had the first of the literary bus tours."
After that Joan kept coming across Whanganui writers. "One of my greatest 'finds' was Robert Burchfield, the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (47 Alexander St). In the house, when he was born, they had one book, a sort of union pamphlet. That's how it started. The bus tours got longer and longer as I added more people."
Sometimes they got out of the bus, and sometimes they just sat in the bus and "gawped", says Joan. There was even a river tour on the Wairua.
"It's my choice, but I've tried to be as inclusive as I can." At the back of the book is a list of writers to look out for. Literary Whanganui is a book in which readers will discover lots of surprises.
Literary Whanganui: A Reader's Guide is being launched in Whanganui on July 26.
