Public Address | Cafe | Muse: OPEN HOUSE: Margaret Mahy, The Storyteller in The Meadow

David Hood

Fri, 27 Jul 2012 09:35:28 +1200

Google, in conjunction with the Tate Gallery in London, are running a crowdsourced animation project where some of the results are displayed in the Tate Gallery. The website only works with Google Chrome, and is at:
exquisiteforest.com
Anyway, as someone who has been contributing some frames of animation, I thought…

Hebe

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 22:32:03 +1200

Marg had a sort of intelligent kindness- not soft or sentimental, but very deep, and perceptive- and now I keep seeing that in other people, and it’s very moving. Rob, what a wonderful tribute, and thank you for telling us. Intelligently kind is exactly what I would have wanted MM…

Craig Ranapia

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 16:07:09 +1200

Rob:

I'm just going to tautoko what everyone else has said, but make this observation. Margaret was an intensely private person, and I'd never ask you to violate that but her work shone with the generous wisdom and kindness of someone who has known adversity rather than been mastered by…

martinb

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 13:34:17 +1200

just posted on Jolisa's- wearing a colourful wig all day today...thinking of getting my hair dyed like it and using it as a period of...well kind of mourning- Mahi-ness until the colour come out...

JacksonP

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 13:22:43 +1200

I am continually astonished at the wide reach of this community.

And I love the way that a group that can spend time arguing vociferously about, well anything, can so quickly become so serious and genuinely caring.

Jolisa

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 13:10:24 +1200

I woke up in her house, in her daughter’s bed, to a clink as she set down cups of tea for us.

That's just brilliant! What an excellent start to an out-law relationship. Arohanui to you and the whole family.

Bart Janssen

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 12:03:33 +1200

My condolences to both you and your beloved Rob.

I am continually astonished at the wide reach of this community.

And I love the way that a group that can spend time arguing vociferously about, well anything, can so quickly become so serious and genuinely caring.

Russell Brown

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 11:52:33 +1200

Arohanui!

And to you and all the family, Rob. I'm pleased and proud that everyone here can play our part in remembering.

Lilith __

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 11:07:10 +1200

Rob, I'm so sorry for your loss. These must be hard days indeed for you and the rest of her family.

Deborah

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 10:34:46 +1200

I didn't realise that you and Margaret Mahy were family, Rob. I'm (a) jealous and (b) so very sorry that she is no longer with you. She has been a national treasure, and also from what you say, very much treasured in your family.

Rob Stowell

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 09:48:01 +1200

Thanks Jackie :)
It's a little weird that was my '1000th' post at PAS. Was feeling a bit teary, but we are bearing up pretty well.

Jackie Clark

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 08:18:23 +1200

Many many condolences to you Rob, and to Margaret's family.

Tamsin6

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 03:11:37 +1200

A few weeks ago, I read 'The man whose mother was a pirate' to my two girls – I kept finding myself moved nearly to tears, as Danielle describes above. I don't fancy my chances of reading it without a full-on weep now.

I remember her reading to us when…

Rob Stowell

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 22:06:09 +1200

Craig and PAS, what a lovely (and well-crafted and storyish!) tribute!
I can't do justice to this thread, or to Marg- the words are not there- but feel very humbled to have known her over the last 30 years- first as a 'mother-out-law" (she enjoyed calling herself this) and then…

Chris Waugh

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 21:12:55 +1200

It's odd, I can't remember any of Margaret Mahy's stories in particular, and I'm sure she did visit every primary school I attended, but my life has been so nomadic I'm just as sure her visits coincided with me having already moved somewhere else, but I do remember the sheer…

Hannah

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 21:10:38 +1200

I stumbled across "The Tricksters" at high school in the '80s, and fell in love with it. The protagonist was a nerdy 17 y.o girl, at Christmas time, in the summer, at the beach. It was one of the first books that really spoke to me with a NZ voice.…

Islander

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 20:30:57 +1200

Except, of course, nothing more to come (and yeah, I/U do know about the 2 forthcomings-)

Islander

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 19:15:48 +1200

How can she be dead when all her many books are pulsating with such vibrant and irrepressible life?

Report

Lilith – the great comfort-

Lilith __

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 18:34:42 +1200

I don't have much to contribute, I didn't know her personally. But I can't really believe Margaret Mahy can be dead. Her books helped shape my mind. How can she be dead when all her many books are pulsating with such vibrant and irrepressible life?

Ross Mason

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 17:04:33 +1200

When I was a house husband I – and my kids – loved "Jam".

Mrs. Castle is going to work as an atomic scientist, so Mr. Castle will stay home with the three little Castles. He is an exemplary househusband, cleaning, cooking, gardening and meeting the family at the door…

Charlotte Ryan

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 16:20:46 +1200

Last August I had the absolute pleasure of interviewing Margaret Mahy for my radio show – the focus of the iv was on her book turned TV series 'Kaitangata Twitch' , she loved chatting and had a great humour. She also spoke about her process of writing, favourite illustrators and…

Islander

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 15:34:29 +1200

Margaret impressed me so much...she wasnt just warm & kindly, she was acutely intelligent, had an extraordinary way with words & Story – and worked extremely hard.

Jackie's reminisence shows that: when she came to South Westland, my neighbour & self picked her up from Whataroa, which school she'd just visited. She had…

Hilary Stace

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 15:20:00 +1200

I love this photo. What an appropriate tribute to MM.

Bart Janssen

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 15:11:02 +1200

You see, she used to have the book turned to the kids so she couldn’t see the pages and yet she still knew all the words!!!

Brilliant.

Greg Wood

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 14:56:25 +1200

My Gabriel and Ruby cried at the breakfast table this morning, while I warmed my tears over the toaster. It was tough explaining to a 4 year old boy ("She ...died?! Forever?!") that there won't be any more Margaret Mahy books written; there was some solace in the fact that…

Jackie Clark

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 14:46:41 +1200

I told this story on twitter so it bears telling again, I guess. I didn't know Margaret Mahy personally. I didn't know she wrote YA fiction. I only knew her childrens' books – had read them time after time to the kids I teach. So, about 9 years ago, the…

David Hood

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 14:43:51 +1200

I always liked reading "Bubble Trouble" aloud to my daughter when she was little.

I vaguely recall my mother getting ready for a literary dress up party, and her saying Owen Marshall should come as "the man whose mother was a pirate" (which just really shows the reach of the…

JackElder

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 14:34:25 +1200

When I was a teenager, we lived in Japan. Margaret Mahy came over to Japan on some arts council thingie or another – I'm not sure of the details. But she stayed at our house, which was pretty choice. As part of the trip, she did a visit to my…

Craig Ranapia

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 14:33:29 +1200

Another really awesome thing about reading the tributes here and elsewhere? The reminder that reading is — or should be — a life-long conversation not a string of passively-received monologues.

Joe Wylie

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 14:32:10 +1200

Thank you Craig, much appreciated.
MM's ongoing generosity. Kindness, idealism, and towering common sense.

Grant McDougall

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 14:23:40 +1200

I remember one of my primary school teachers in the mid '70s reading one of her books to us, then saying she'd been through school herself with Mahy. Even then she was the one to read if you were a kid.

Deborah

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 14:10:32 +1200

I love her young adult books, and her children's books. One of the last picture books I bought for my girls, before they moved onto chapter books, was Down the Back of the Chair_ – a wonderful book to read aloud. We have Kaitangata Twitch in both book and TV…

pcorrect

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 14:03:12 +1200

I knew she was a witch!!!!! Heard it confirmed on the radio this morning.

I knew, because when I was a just grasshopper I'd go hunting in the Canterbury Library for Tintin books which usually leaned up against the grandfather clock (not the concrete library, the original one by the…

Anne Goodman

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 13:52:03 +1200

I knew very little about New Zealand when I arrived from England over 30 years ago but I knew about Margaret Mahy. Even then, on the other side of the world, she was hailed as one of the best ever children's writers – though I think it took a bit…

lynley ruck

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 13:49:45 +1200

My daughter (24) told me that she learnt that "some stories are true and some aren't" from MM – I learnt that a witch can only come into your house if invited, and that witches actually like the smell of burning biscuits and will ALWAYS think of MM when I…

Paul Williams

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 13:39:49 +1200

But her magic was something deeper and more profound. It was about respect.

Craig, this is exactly my sense also (and it's so very evident in your tribute too).

Gareth Davidson

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 13:21:53 +1200

I still remember Margaret coming to read to my primary school class thirty-something years ago. To this day I recall it was my first brush with someone really famous in person, even if she did wear a multi-coloured clown wig.

I don't have memories of any other visitor in all…

Paul Williams

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 13:17:27 +1200

Other favourites – The Summery Saturday Morning. which is so quintessentially Lyttelton harbour. And Kaitangata Twitch, which my 13 year old lad has been obsessed with, and which was turned into a wonderful TV series as well.

My youngest daughters were/are particularly fond of Summery Saturday Morning – I once…

Hilary Stace

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 13:03:58 +1200

MM was important for my generation because she was a single mother and a librarian and gave status to both.

It has been interesting in the tributes that she seemed to have visited every school and every library in NZ, and replied to every letter from every child. From what…

Simon Adamson

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 12:59:40 +1200

I have been surprised at just how much Margaret Mahy’s death has affected me today. I grew up with The Lion in the Meadow and no doubt have many other Mahy characters and phrases imprinted on my DNA. The Summery Saturday Morning has been a real favourite to read to…

Kairakau

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 12:57:23 +1200

My two children came upstairs in tears when they heard the news. They are 16 and 19. So many of our best family moments were a gift from Margaret Mahy.

Matthew Littlewood

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 12:14:57 +1200

Lovely tribute Craig, well done.
It was an absolute pleasure interviewing her back in 2006. Although we only had about 30 minutes (it was inbetween her reading to children at the Dunedin Public Library, yes, she was wearing one of her famous coloured wigs), she touched on so many different…

Carol Stewart

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 11:47:34 +1200

Danielle, that little excerpt from The Man Whose Mother Was A Pirate just choked me up as well. We love that story so much.
Other favourites – The Summery Saturday Morning. which is so quintessentially Lyttelton harbour. And Kaitangata Twitch, which my 13 year old lad has been obsessed with,…

Kumara Republic

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 11:44:23 +1200

I still remember "The Pirate Uncle", one of Mahy's earlier efforts.

B Jones

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 11:36:12 +1200

My daughters have some very generous book benefactors among their grandparents, so I don't often get a chance to buy children's books myself – last night I spent $80 ordering various Mahy anthologies from Amazon and Fishpond. It's been so long I hardly remember any details of her stories, but…

Grant Buist

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 11:02:25 +1200

Tomorrow's Jitterati:

JacksonP

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 10:57:04 +1200

My older son is obsessed with A Lion in the Meadow and I’ve read it to him literally hundreds of times.

We read that to the twins until they could 'read' it back to us while we turned the pages. Well before they could actually read of course.

Now at…

Craig Ranapia

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 10:50:59 +1200

Margaret Mahy made me a criminal!

If anyone did that to a book of mine, I’d be awfully stern… and struggling to keep the grin off my mug. :) Which reminds me, I’ve got to start recovering my copies of Mahy’s YA novels from various not-as-young-as-they-used-to-be-lings. As a general rule,…

Emma Hart

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 10:47:42 +1200

My daughter was just the right age for Maddigan's Fantasia when it came out. And then when she wanted to know if Mahy had written anything else, I could tell her, yeah, all those books you loved when you were little.

I don't think there's a kid who grew up…

JLM

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 10:36:38 +1200

“The little man could only stare. He hadn’t dreamed of the BIGNESS of the sea. He hadn’t dreamed of the blueness of it. He hadn’t thought it would roll like kettledrums, and swish itself on to the beach. He opened his mouth, and the drift and the dream of it,…

Danielle

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 10:24:05 +1200

I have no personal story to add (I don’t think I even had a school visit from her), but I was crushed when I read that she had died. I was given The Changeover to read in high school for English and devoured it all in one night. I, uh,…

Russell Brown

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 10:19:58 +1200

I suspect any family that has let Margaret Mahy’s books into the home has a particular book that characterises childhood reading time: ours is The Man Whose Mother was a Pirate, whose vowels and consonants tumble and repeat like waves.

How many times did we read that book? I have…

Craig Ranapia

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 10:12:09 +1200

One of my friends said “she’ll have an escort of 17 kings and 42 elephants”, and I didn’t even know which book she meant.

Oh, I love that so much — it's such great fun to read out loud you don't really notice what a lovely piece poetic clockwork it…

JLM

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 09:55:10 +1200

Seeing as there isn't the queue I thought there would be, I'll share my tiny memory of working at the Christchurch School Library Services over one university summer – I think it must have been 69/70. It wasn't till I'd been there a few days and saw the display of…

perplexed

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 09:29:22 +1200

I can't think of Margaret Mahy without thinking about my son. We read so many of her stories together and took great delight from them. The great grumbler and the wonder tree was an especial favourite.

Thanks for many happy memories, the books will be alive for a long time…

JLM

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 09:01:36 +1200

Thank you Craig. I have memories, a couple of direct contacts, so many more of words and delight, but I would rather let others start. As my daughter said when she heard , "I think my childhood just died a little bit too."

Public Address

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 09:01:36 +1200

Discussion from blog post.