Jenni's Off-Grid Newsletter No 54: Back again...
June 13, 2024
Goodness, who is this person sending me a newsletter, you are likely asking. But it is I, still here, still writing this very occasional newsletter! Very occasional being the key.
I am often inspired to write a newsletter after the annual Auckland Writers' Festival (AWF) and it certainly inspired me this May. 85,000 other attendees and me. What a line-up. For example international writers, Celeste Ng, Richard Flanagan, Anna Funder, Lauren Groff, Peter Frankopan, Leslie Jamison, Paul Lynch, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Sam Neil, Bonnie Garmus, Shashi Tharoor, Abraham Verghese, Ann Patchett, Meg Mason. And many wonderful New Zealand-Aotearoa writers. The aforementioned are just some of the sessions I went to. I had to miss many more such as Trent Dalton. The final session with Ann Patchett being interviewed by Meg Mason (introduced by Bonnie Garmus) was one of the funniest I have ever been to. (Later in this newsletter I'll paste a small piece of random writing I did inspired by Meg Nason's novel 'Sorrow and Bliss.') But take note of the AWF website as many of the big sessions (often 2500 people in the audience) are videoed and put on the AWF website in due course. Previous year's greats are also there for your free viewing. AWF WEBSITE VIDEOS HERE
It is bad form for an author newsletter to rabbit on about one's own books too often, especially if it includes messages about buying them. So forgive me for doing this here…My excuse is that I have been totally overtaken this year with working on two novels; the first because its publication date is 16th July and this is the 'launch' part of its 'journey', and the second because it is the very challenging Nazi-Germany novel I am writing now. I mentioned in my last newsletter our big world trip last year, including an intense research trip to Germany (I admit I had to read that newsletter just now to remind myself what I wrote as it was so long ago). I am still doing research while writing (and despairing as the nightly news demonstrates that politicians have learned little from WWI and WW1I, and despots and terrorists continue to destroy our world) but am cheered and motivated by being one of 14 students (and a fabulous tutor) in a workshopping online class with Curtis and Brown, London. As is so often said, writing is a solitary task and having a few mates in the same bubble adds some fun as well as expertise to the process. As they say in New Zealand, "It's a big job. Better get a mate in."
If you are still reading, thank you! Here goes. 'Dancing with Dragons' (cover, designed by me, is at the top of this newsletter) is due out in e-book paperback and hardback everywhere on 16th July. If you want to check it out it is up on Goodreads, 'DANCING WITH DRAGONS' ON GOODREADS gathering a few reviews from readers who read an advance digital copy. I am pleased to say it won the Gold for Best Fiction, Australia/New Zealand-Aotearoa/Pacific Rim in the 2024 Independent Publisher Book Awards and was given a generous 9/10 by The BookLife Prize. The back cover blurb reads:
"From Jenni Ogden, author of multiple-award-winning A Drop in the Ocean, comes another evocative story of friendship, coral reefs, and marine conservation for book club readers.
It is the late 1970s and teenagers Gaia and her brother Bron live with their parents on their isolated property on Western Australia's Coral Coast. Intensively trained for a career as a professional ballet dancer by her mother, once a Principal Dancer in the American Ballet Theatre, Gaia also loves snorkeling over the coral reef that borders their small market garden. Then comes a day that changes her life forever: she discovers a rare pair of dramatically colored seadragons, their courtship dance over the coral spellbinding, and that night she loses her entire family and her dancing dream. Two years later she returns to the abandoned property, determined to live off the land. For years her only friends are the wild animals of the bush and reef, and Mary and Eddie, an Aboriginal couple who work for the racist farmer on the neighboring property — until one morning Jarrah, Mary's 11-year-old orphaned nephew, is entranced when he sees Gaia dancing on the beach. As an unlikely friendship between these two lonely and scarred people deepens, they discover that when you lose everything the only way to survive is to open your heart."
So here is my polite request! If you read e-books and think you might like this, I would be most grateful if you pre-ordered it from your favourite online store (Amazon, Kobo, Nook, GooglePlay, etc) now—especially as it is cheapo on pre-order and for a few weeks after publication to encourage this behaviour (at US$3.99 and equivalent $$ in other countries/currencies). Pre-orders seem to influence how sites like Amazon rate one's new book and thus it gets more prominence on their site (so it is rumoured). This is the easiest link to go to to get whatever format of whatever book of mine you want; just click on the book, then the format (audio, e-book, print) then the online retailer you prefer.
JENNI'S MAGIC BOOK LINK
On 16th July (US time) your cheapo pre-order will magically appear in your e-book library and you can dive into it or not…and review or rate it, or not. So that's me getting a mate in.
I like to recommend my favourite latest reads here; so many. Although to be sure what I read mostly at the moment are non-fiction and fiction books (and websites) about and set in Nazi Germany. And that is an acquired taste. If you like you can hold off until my work-in-progress is published and then you won't need all those others, and as well you'll get a good cry and perhaps even a few giggles (it ain't all bad as they say in Yorkshire.)
In fact, the piece of writing that follows was my very un-edited response to a sort of quickie homework task we get from our tutor each week in the workshopping course I am in. This task was to take one of our characters and put her in a situation that is not usual or part of the novel. As we had just returned from the Auckland Writers Festival and on the morning we got given that task I'd just finished, with floods of tears, Meg Mason's novel 'Sorrow and Bliss' (which I somehow missed when it was published and then shortlisted for the Women's Book Prize), my little story turned out to be about books. So it is in the voice of Sylvia, a 73-year-old New Zealander who has finally found the courage to go and live in Berlin for 6 months and try to find out about her long-dead parents' Holocaust past. She is a widow, a music teacher/musician and both her parents (German, probably Jewish) were also musicians. She has one daughter aged 46 and one granddaughter aged 22. That is her entire family that she knows about. On her DNA she has only 10 possible matches, all 4th to 6th cousins, which is very distant. Most people have hundreds of such matches (including me!) She believes her father was a prisoner in Sachsenhausen, the concentration camp not far from Berlin. (But of course nothing is that straightforward.) So here she is on the train back from her first confronting visit to Sachsenhausen and to distract herself from thinking about what she has just seen, she has been reading Meg Mason's novel (and has just finished it)! But really I am pasting it here because it lists not only the fictional Sylvia's, but my three most loved novels, and I feel like Ann Patchett about them. (You'll need to read it to understand the Ann Patchett reference.)
"Sylvia closed her book. She looked out the train window as the countryside went backwards to Sachsenhausen where she had been for the day, trying to find her parents. Wiping her eyes she shoved the wet tissue into her pocket on top of twenty others. She read the title of the book she had come to the end of. 'Sorrow and Bliss' it said. If she ever wrote her story it would be called 'Bliss and Sorrow'. Bliss for the first 72 years and sorrow for the 73rd. But without the sorrow would she have loved this book so deeply? On the surface it seemed it was mostly about sorrow and the bliss was hard to pin down. Was it even possible to have one without the other? Reading this book she wondered if books were as important to her as music. If she had to lose one, which would she choose to keep? It was an impossible question with no answer. They both gave her sustenance, laughter, and tears in equal measure. She could list her most felt pieces of music, most loved performances, but could she do the same for books? She did a quick calculation in her sad head. She had probably read 3,400 novels at least since she was five. If she put aside the obvious classics, what would the top novels on her list be now? She knew immediately, without delving. They were tears above all the others, laughter above all the others, recognition above all others. Starting now and going backwards, in no particular order with respect to gold, silver and bronze, they were:
"Sorrow and Bliss" by Meg Mason (2020)
"One True Thing" by Anna Quindlen (1994)
"Crossing to Safety" by Wallace Stegner (1937)
It was interesting to think about what they had in common. Two were by American authors and set in America. One was by a NZ/Australian author and set in London and Oxford. Two were by women, one by a man. So it didn't matter where they were set or where the author came from or what gender they identified as. It only mattered that they were about people and families and sorrow and bliss. They all made her weep on the train after she didn't find her parents at the Concentration Camp or more usually in bed in the morning when she couldn't get up until she'd finished them. Cry so hard that tissues didn't help. Sometimes music had the same effect. None of them reflected her life in any obvious way. Except that they were all about love and family. Which, she supposed, was why she was here on this train 12,000 kms from her daughter because she needed to find her parents. Why she was leaving another terrible memory of what humans without love could do to other humans who all had families.
She read the numerous blurb snippets on the back of "Sorrow and Bliss". Most of them said in one way or another what the first one from Ann Patchett said. It applied to all three of my most loved novels. "While I was reading it, I was making a list of all the people I wanted to send it to, until I realized that I wanted to send it to everyone I know."