It’s a long walk up between streets, a Wellington short cut, past cabbage trees and damp, tightly-planted agapanthus. […] Stopping to catch their beery breath, turning, they see the city below them. Closer, lights glow in scattered windows of the university buildings, patterning the sky. In ‘Beer goggles’, Warren and Lola take “a Wellington short … Read more…
Writing
Passion
A short story by Tracy Farr Ellie’s having trouble finding rabbits for sale. ‘Not much call for them,’ the man at the supermarket tells her. ‘You could try the butcher in Island Bay,’ but she already has. And no, Bambi won’t do. It has to be rabbit. At Easter. She has to cook the Easter … Read more…
The Hope Fault
The minutiae and messiness of family life as it comes together and unravels time and time again are delicately rendered in Tracy Farr’s second novel, The Hope Fault. Iris flicks the car’s headlights on, even though it’s not long past midday. There’s no rain yet, but you can feel it in the air, smell it … Read more…
The Hope Fault – Notes, resources and references
Like most writers, I’m a magpie, taking shiny things from the world around me and making them my own, absorbing and transforming them in my writing. So, in addition to the acknowledgements printed in the back of the book (reproduced at the bottom of this page), I wanted to acknowledge some of the sources, resources … Read more…
At the bay
The kids are busy at the river mouth. … There’s one black dog right in there with them, a mad barker, lolling and lollopping. Another dog, black-and-white, more serious, is hanging back, watching, crouched up the beach on its haunches, front paws out, ears up, attentive, as if it’s watching skittish sheep. The dog glances … Read more…
Do you see what I see?
That two-day hangover was mine in real life. But…home for me, then, was Vancouver, not the New Zealand of the story. Our boozy real-life night ended up…at First Avenue, the Minneapolis nightclub made famous by Prince – the Purple One – and the setting of much of his 1984 film Purple Rain. Life fuels fiction; … Read more…
The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt
A novel which reads like an elegant memoir … Farr’s powerful, sensuous writing brings the rhythm and movement of both the ocean and music to a life rich with art and colour, ambition, love, and indescribable loss. It’s glorious, the water in the morning, when it’s calm like this, when you can just bob on … Read more…
Greenwich, meantime
I started off on the path, but the cold soon got to me, and when I hit an open patch and felt the sun pull on my arms like some strange gravity I veered off to the left and onto the grass. There were Canadian boys with a hackysack – there are always Canadian boys … Read more…
Viva baby, viva!
They’d started drinking at noon. It’s one o’clock the next morning when Liz finally curls up on the beanbag in the lounge-room. The still dark heat, or some drunk obsession, keeps Jan from falling into bed, makes her start to clean up – wipe the salt shaker’s bottom of its crust of salt and lime … Read more…
Purple suit, junkie lover
Her plan took her back to his shop one afternoon – for the bookstore, she knew, was a time-honoured place for the acting out of romantic fancies – at a time when she knew he was most likely to be in attendance himself, reading at the counter, or perhaps arranging and rearranging the Bukowskis in … Read more…