LOCAL CONNECTION
Creativity nurtured and spurred Nelson’s Elma Turner Library regularly hosts a group of writers who are exploring new territory. By Ann Fellowes. P H O T O G R A P H Y B R E N T M C G I LVA R Y
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olin Clough slaps a hand onto the table for emphasis. “That’s how he was,” he insists. “They were tough times, and he matched them.” Colin is reading out the first draft of a piece he’s writing on Ron Jorgensen, the notorious Bassett Rd machine-gun murderer, one of New Zealand’s hard-man criminals. “I knew him,” Colin says. “We were at sea together.” Around the table are 12 or so fellow writers. It’s a midwinter afternoon at Nelson’s Elma Turner Library, and STEM, the library’s writing group, is having its fortnightly session. The group are putting together another collection of short stories, 28
“There are lots of dark moments hidden away in our past, and maybe our present.” JA C K I E C O O K , W R I T E R
Nelson Noir – partly a local spin on the current vogue for moody, mean-streets storytelling; partly a self-conscious redress of the ‘nice Nelson’ promotional image. Group members believe that there are lots of hidden “dark moments”, both past and present, and that “not every thing about Nelson wins civic awards”. British migrant Jenny Dale, who writes as Isobel Sayer and has two novels awaiting publication with her London agent, has contributed a story on the notorious Murchison suicide-bomber of 1905 – considered the first such incident anywhere in the world. Jenny, an ex-police scenes of crime officer, has been up to the old courthouse in Murchison to visit the scene. “Atmospherics, not forensics,” she jokes. “It helps, though, to see where you’re setting the story.” STEM writers focus their interest on the local. They have two Nelson collections already published. Past/Present (2018) wraps stories around Nelson ‘street furniture’ – items you pass by and never question, like the eagles on the top of the old Tech building, now part of NMIT. Where did they come from? Why are they there? Doug Craig has re-imagined them as agents of vengeance; justice carriers of Norse legend. “Fiction, of course,” he explains, “but it gives them a new form of life.”