Experience
University writer-inresidence David Hill finds inspiration – and happy distractions – in the extracurricular.
University writer-inresidence David Hill finds inspiration – and happy distractions – in the extracurricular.
‘Resident artist”, it said on my office door. I’d have understood if passers-by pictured someone in Paremoremo doing a rehabilitation course in watercolour.
In fact, I was the damn lucky recipient of one of Massey University’s three-month tenures at leafy, labyrinthine Turitea in Palmerston North, surely the only campus in the hemisphere whose map features a small, neat square labelled “Equine treadmill”.
For those months, I was paid to sit and write. Bliss. It was, I told one class of students, a bit like being paid to drink. Their faces went all dreamy.
It’s trendy to disparage the town I refuse to call Palmy. Yes, it’s flat, the winds shear through like claymores, nobody knows what to do with the Square and Rangitikei St may well be the ugliest approach in the country. But avenues of big deciduous trees stretch green or gold to all points, eateries and drinkeries cram corners and the centre is a treasure hunt of public art, especially Paul Dibble’s whimsically potent bronzes. And anyway, how can any place be dull when it hosts thousands of elastic young minds and bodies?
Palmerston North City Council and Community Arts gave me a thirdfloor apartment in the red-and-blue Square Edge building, with views of ranges and roofs, and a front door with “Adore” satisfyingly painted on it. It was warm, bright, welcoming.
I eavesdropped on student discourse as I rode the 15-minute bus route from town to gown, and can report that the word “like” is, like, alive and, like, well.
In the genuinely stately Sir Geoffrey Peren building – all tall windows, plaster scrolls and chevrons, curving balustrades, Hotere and Peter Ireland and Marian Maguire on the walls – Massey provided me with half an office (appreciate your forbearance, Rachel) and a computer that could run a Mars mission. Luke the tech, 2m tall and dreadlocked like an Old Testament prophet, dropped by patiently every second day to fix my electronic stuff-ups.
On higher floors – how fitting – other writers worked and taught: novelist Thom Conroy, playwright Angie Farrow, poets Bryan Walpert and Tim Upperton. I could talk plots, publishers, rotten reviews and risible royalties without worrying that I was boring anyone. Or maybe these good folk were just skilled at hiding it.
But in an essentially solitary occupation (solo cello, please), I passed three months without ever having to explain or justify myself. Terrific.
Students brought me their fiction to read. They brought it on screens, of course. A couple of them stared at the pen I was holding in the same way I stare at King Tut’s sceptre. Their work was springy, edgy, adventurous. Nobody laughed very much in it. It breathed such eagerness and idealism that I wanted to hug the authors, but Massey has an admirably firm nonmolestation manifesto.
Iwalked the campus, getting lost at every third corner. I was too snobbish to use the library’s labelled “Recreational reading”, but I bored through a number of those semi-classics you tell yourself you have to read before expiry date. Your expiry date, I mean. AP Herbert’s sundering World War I novel The Secret Battle; WH Hudson’s Green Mansions, “a romance of the tropical forest”; several chapters of Galsworthy in-between falling asleep.
And I wrote a fair few pages. Forgive me if I labour that point, gentle reader, but after all, your tax dollars helped me be there. As usual, I’ve no idea yet if those pages have any merit.
I’ll remember Massey’s hospitality, the ways it said: “You’re the writer? Good. Get on with it, then.” I’ll remember other disparate things.
They include the two young women I watched most mornings – and there’s a sentence I’d better qualify instantly.
I’d see them as I got off the bus. They were a handsome pair, brunette and blonde. One had difficulty walking and moved with an arm tucked through her companion’s. The dark and fair heads, close together, bent always in conversation, crossing the quad like Jane Austen sisters.
They were quite likely raking over the previous night’s Real Housewives of Auckland, but to me they evoked youth, friendship, focus, everything you’d hope for in a university. Thanks to all concerned for the chance to see them and write about them.
It was, I told one class of students, a bit like being paid to drink. Their faces went all dreamy.