This year’s shortlisted titles for Small Press Network’s Book of the Year Award have been announced. They are:
The BOTY 2022 winner will be presented in partnership with the Wheeler Centre as part of its Next Big Thing series, on 25 November 2022 at 6:30 pm. You can find the event details here.
I mention this in part cos it reminds me of entering Pete’s book in the award a couple of years ago, (and it won). I was asked to write something for use as part of the award presentation. I suggested yes I could (see below) but that I’d feel less comfortable reading it live. That’s okay, we can take care of that, I was told. (In the event, what I wrote was way too long and just a short segment was used)….
As to Pete….
One evening some years ago I was driving a taxi late at night, parked down in the vicinity of Hobart’s waterfront. Two women – tourists from New Zealand, I was to learn — climbed into the cab. They’d attended a literary event an hour or two earlier. They were cheerful and relaxed and happily exchanged literary perceptions of the evening in the comfort of the back seat of the vehicle. Generous and inclusive, they invited me to share their conversation, to which I responded by noting that for many Tasmanian writers —particularly those who wrote of the environment — a closer affinity was felt with the landscape of New Zealand than with the ‘… sunburnt country, A land of sweeping plains’ of Dorothea Mackellar’s Australia.
The pair asked if I could suggest the name of a praiseworthy Tasmanian writer, someone who’d perhaps slipped under their radar back home in New Zealand. I mentioned Pete, describing him as a poet and essayist and one of our country’s most respected environmentalists. Of the many reasons I might have offered in an appreciation of Pete’s work, I settled for just one — the fare was only running Salamanca to New Town, after all — and that was ‘generosity’. And I tried in my own words to recall for them a conversation years past when Pete had suggested ‘I don’t write because I think I’ve profound truths that other people would benefit from having exposure to. I don’t write to provide anyone with answers, I write to provide people with dilemmas. My essays – even my poetry lately – are written to set up tensions that are ultimately not resolved. I explore the tensions, but I don’t conclude.’
For their benefit, I’d have also mentioned — if the words had come to mind — Richard Flanagan’s support for Pete’s previous essay collection, Vandiemonian Essays, wherein Richard wrote, ‘All (these essays) are written with wit and without fear, with an erudition lightly worn, and with a pen dipped in a large love of this world. All can be read with both joy and curiosity… ’
It’s Richard’s allusion to ‘joy and curiosity’, coincidentally, that I’d recommend as an approach to Pete’s current essay collection, ‘Forgotten corners’ — that, along with an openness to being challenged, informed and entertained.
***
As the cab pulled to a stop, one of the women turned to me, remarking ‘I know it’s eleven-thirty in the evening, but I’m about to jump on the internet and learn a little more about Pete Hay — right now!’
The other leaned in towards me. ‘And I guarantee it, she will!’
