The challenge of publishing, and mystique of writing

Adrienne Jansen is the author of Light Keeping, out now (Quentin Wilson Publishing), RRP $37.50.

Tell us how your lifelong love of the sea and storytelling have collided.

When I was one, for the first time my parents took our family to the Marlborough Sounds for a holiday. After that, almost every year, we spent two or three weeks at the same bach. I learnt to swim, row, fish, and, although it was only a few weeks a year, I felt as though I did a lot of my growing up there. So 20 years ago, when we bought a house just above Tītahi Bay beach, it was like a childhood dream come true. I also read a lot as a child. I was a very unconfident kid, and reading was an escape. But it was more than that. I’ve always loved stories, the compelling page-turning quality of them. (I usually spend my summers reading crime fiction for that page-turning quality.) Over the past three or four years, the sea and stories came together. I was working on a collection of poems about Tītahi Bay, and I was also working on the novel Light Keeping. I think that was coincidental and I don’t think the two books fed into each other but I was constantly thinking about stories of the sea, and language to describe this amazing ocean.

You’re the founder of two presses. What is your biggest challenge as a publisher?

For Escalator Press, which was linked to the Whitireia Creative Writing Programme, the challenge was marketing and selling books – probably the same as for most small publishers. Landing Press, a small not-for-profit publisher, poses a completely different challenge. We publish poetry that many people can enjoy, with a social edge, and that particularly includes voices not usually part of the literary landscape – cleaners, the homeless, recently arrived migrants etc. Finding those poems/writers is a passionate all-absorbing hard-work challenge. Interestingly, selling books is not a problem; we usually sell 700-800 copies, which is not a sparkly bestseller but is pretty good for poetry in New Zealand. But with Light Keeping, it’s so good to be on the other side of the fence and working with Quentin Wilson Publishing. It’s such a pleasure to be working with such a fine craftsman, and it’s taught me lots of things that I thought I knew but didn’t!

Tell us how you write.

There seems to be some mystique about how/where writers work, but there isn’t any. It’s like gardening – some people spend days at it, while others do an hour here and there. I’m in both camps. When I get a chunk of free time, like in the lockdown, I really go for it. Other times I’m grabbing an hour here or there. But I do think that having an expanse of free time makes a difference, because you get a clearer, less busy head. I’ve tried to set up a writing routine a few times, and it’s usually lasted about three weeks.

Light Keeping is your sixth novel. Are you working on another?

Not at the moment. I have a vague idea for a novel about another character in The Score (an earlier novel about a grand piano falling off a crane) but I don’t know yet if I’ll write it or not. I might just do some gardening.