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All rise

In which our creative Southern gentleman overcomes his writer’s block by looking back into the mists of time.

JOE BENNETT has been writing for NZ Gardener since 2006 and he’s still not entirely sure why. He lives in Lyttelton.

What I want to know, Joe,” she said, “is where you get your ideas from. I mean you’ve been writing columns for the Gardener since Adam was an orchardist…” “That’s good,” I said. “Thank you,” she said. “But when, as now, it’s deep midwinter and nothing’s happening in the garden and the sun is barely peeping over the horizon and the log burner is pulsing like Chernobyl – and yes, I know that’s good but please don’t interrupt – how do you find a subject for a column?’

“Godisgood,” I said.

“God is good?”

“No no,” I said. “Godisgood: the medieval name for yeast.” “I’m one big question mark,” she said.

“It suits you,” I said. “Your medieval brewer and your medieval baker had no control of yeast. They’d make a wort out of grain and water, or a dough out of flour and water and then the brewer would leave his wort outside in a tub and the baker would put her dough on the windowsill. And because they’d been brewing or baking there for years there would be wild yeasts lurking that would find the wort or dough and get to work making the beer ferment and the dough rise which would cause the brewer and baker to exclaim, in part as an expression of gratitude, but also as an act of propitiation because the process was beyond their understanding, ‘God is good’.’’

“Interesting,” she said, “but I fail to see how that relates…” “To finding a subject for a gardening column? It is like this. Neither the brewer nor the baker sat around waiting.

They started to make their beer and bread without knowing that they would arrive at beer and bread. They set out in hope. And by setting out, by putting one foot on the road and then the other one in front of it, they were rewarded and they arrived.

“And so it is with any enterprise on this pretty little earth of ours. The key is to start. Start, as it doesn’t say in either the Bible or Shakespeare, and ye shall finish. Sit around scratching your head, however, and ye shall sit around scratching your head.

“Until you take the chisel to the marble you cannot find the statue held within it. And until you put some words on paper you cannot find the thing you want to write about, the subject, style or notion that was lingering in your skull all unidentified. Words spring to words. ‘How do I know what I think,’ said E M Forster, ‘till I see what I say?’

“Now a column’s not a novel, but the principle’s identical. You write your way into your subject.”

“I see,” she said.

“Which is why, right now, in deep midwinter when the sparrows stand on the bird table like tiny feathered beggars looking forlornly through the window and there is as little for them to eat out there in the dank and sodden garden as there is for me to write about, the trick is to start writing with in the hope that it will lead to somewhere interesting, and then, when an idea rises like a great sleek submarine that breaks the surface of the sea, it is important to exclaim at that point ‘God is good’ like any medieval brewer or baker.” “I see,” she said, “so what subject has surfaced this month?” “It doesn’t always work,” I said.

MAN’S WORLD

en-nz

2022-08-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-08-01T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://fairfaxmagazines.pressreader.com/article/283192972112181

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