My year in 2019

A Christmas wish list

I was making a wish list for Santa with my niece Mia and she suggested for me, amongst other things, a diary for my secrets and a park, and I added a lake. I have kept diaries at different moments and during travels, with notes and sketches and it is a nice way of thinking and reflecting on what I’m doing. I sometimes feel like I’m getting nowhere, but then by taking a minute to look back I see I’ve actually travelled a pretty long way, and today looking forward I have some amazing things coming up.

I haven’t been short of parks and lakes either. I used to run around lake at Virginia Water in Surrey and now I regularly run to the boating lake in the Retiro Park here in Madrid. I’ve been practising the piano a lot this year and my niece has recently started piano lessons so we have begun playing together via Skype. Santa brought her a keyboard!

Ten years ago…

I’ve made some progress on my large cityscape oil painting that I began ten years ago. Yesterday I bought a daylight fluorescent tube so I can work longer hours on it. I’ve been working this year with my friend Ben Williams on a poetry-music project (that we also started ten years back) which will become a poetry film with material that Joanna Wivell filmed of me in the neighbourhood parties a couple of years after I’d arrived in Madrid. That was more than 10 years ago and the gorgeous rich colouring of the footage makes it look like another age.

Filming

My poetry films have taken on a life of their own. After many travels last year, in April Lucas went to the Newlyn Film Festival in Penzance. Then Morning’s fishing was included in Atticus Review in March. In May The Afternoon began a tour as part of the Poetry+Video programme curated by Marie Craven which premiered in Murwillumbah, NSW (Australia), and has recently been to Cork (Ireland), Split (Croatia), Athens (Greece) and Foggia (Italy), and in October my piece Vertigo was included in the Ó Bhéal Poetry Film Shortlist in Cork. You can click the links to watch the films!

My poetry film Vertigo goes to Cork

 

This year I’ve edited videos related with the Antonio Machado Poetry Residency of Segovia and Soria that I filmed in 2018: A Poetry Walk in Segovia with Paladio Arte and a Poetry Walk with pupils of a school in Covaleda, Soria. I also directed two videos with poems by Lilian Pallares: Whispering Wind, filmed one afternoon between rainstorms in the beautiful surroundings of Alconaba, Soria, featuring the music of Manuel Madrid and Nestor Paz with a little cameo of me playing the Colombian gaita, and Lilián’s booktrailer Bestial, which we filmed at night in the streets of our neighbourhood in Madrid with the dancer Marisa Camara and the poet Artemisa Semedo.

'It's a wrap'. After filming 'Whispering Wind' in Alconaba, Soria.

Poetry and writing

After over 15 years in Spain I finally met not one, but two amazing poets from New Zealand in Madrid, Joan Fleming and Hinemoana Baker. Joan introduced me to a writers workshop which was a new experience for me and something I’d like to return to in the future. I’m also grateful to her for submitting my article On Being Sanguine: Two Years of Panic and a Response to Terror in Christchurch to the May edition of the Cordite Poetry Review in Australia. In it I explore a period in my life shortly after finishing university in London when I suffered acute panic attacks. I look at how they started and also the things which helped me move beyond them. A number of friends have responded saying they recognise themselves in elements of my story. I’m also working on a Spanish translation that I hope to publish here. A few years ago I invited Hinemoana to choose five words for my Spanish poetry project Palabras Prestadas and translated two of her poems into Spanish, so it was great to finally meet her in person. I found it interesting reading her story alongside other writers from New Zealand in the recently published Headlands: New Stories of Anxiety (VUP, 2018).

In February I had an article Life as a Kiwi in Spain published in Kea and my translation of ‘The End of the Sixties’ by Miguel Ángel Arcas was published in the Poetry NZ Yearbook 2019, and then in March was the launch in Wellington, New Zealand, of More of Us (Landing Press), which includes two of my poems related with migrating. This led to a collaboration with Landing Press and some of the poets in More of Us, who selected words for the Given Words poetry competition as part of New Zealand’s National Poetry Day on 23 August. This year I received 200 poems and it wasn’t easy choosing which poems to select. I was very grateful to my fellow judges Mikaela Nyman and Clare Arnot who had different viewpoints and insightful comments. There are more writing projects in the pipeline, but to round the year off one of my poems When you least expect was published in the Italian poetry journal Almanacco dei poeti e della poesia contemporanea n. 7 along with a selection of contemporary New Zealand poetry, and it is also included in Medium Poesia alongside poems by Emma Shi and Elizabeth Morton.

Keep on trying!

The last few years I’ve been applying for writers and filmmakers residencies at universities in New Zealand without success, but it’s helped me put together my artistic and literary curriculum which gives the lie to my feelings of not getting anywhere, and has no doubt helped with recent application successes here in Spain. In June, Lilián and I were selected to participate in a meeting of Creatives from Castilla and León in San Rafael for four days of sharing ideas and projects (where I also recorded a poem for the NZ Poetry Shelf audio spot), and then in the summer we received the wonderful news that we have been awarded a Visual Arts Residency on the theme of ‘Childhood, Play and Public Spaces’ in the Centre for Artistic Residencies of the Matadero Madrid, which is a year-long residency beginning in January 2020.

Recording a poem in San Rafael for NZ Poetry Shelf

“Holidays”

Apart from four days relaxing by the beach in Almenara, Valencia, our “holidays” have been short visits related with our projects such as the meeting in San Rafael. We’ve visited Barcelona where we performed in the Black Barcelona festival with Palabra Azul (Blue Word – poetry of water) and did a poetry workshop in the Llar d'Avis Geriatric Residence thanks to our friend JacQueline QuiNob. In August we presented Palabra Azul again in the wonderful theatre Palacio de la Audiencia in Soria as part of the poetry festival Expoesía 12, where I participated in a presentation of the past and present recipients of the Antonio Machado Poetry Residency, Lilián presented her book Bestial, and we filmed the aforementioned Whispering Wind. We also made a flying visit to Zaragoza to present Bestial and we squeezed in a photo session with the fantastic photographer Indio Juan Moro, who has a passion for New Zealand.

With Lilián and Tala. Koru Photography Juan Moro, November 2019

Festivals with Lilián

Back here in Madrid we organised a theatre festival in the Sala Maldonado 53 in October and November for the Progress and Culture Foundation with three wonderful pieces. It’s been great being able to share these adventures with Lilián and also see her making her own way with Bestial and participating in the Madrid poetry festivals PoeMad (Musa a las 9), with a performance of Colombian poetry together with the anthropologist and essayist Carlos Granés and cellist Raul Platz; Griots es Poetas with recital and discussion by Afroféminas in Casa Encendida; and Festival Eñe, in which she presented her show Afrolyrics with Shango Dely and Alvaro Llerena. I’m also very excited for her as she has been chosen for a part in the Cuban zarzuela Cecilia Valdés. She is currently in the middle of rehearsals and the zarzuela opens on 24 January.

Raul Platz and Lilián, Festival PoeMad, Conde Duque, Madrid

Family and the big 50

In May I had a visit from my Uncle Charlie who was travelling through France and Italy and popped down to Madrid. We had a lovely day wandering Segovia together and I also took my parents, Marion Olsen and Barry Olsen, there when they came over to celebrate my 50th birthday with me in October.

Photographing with Charlie, Segovia, May 2019

We celebrated with lunch together in one of my favourite restaurants in our neighbourhood, Badila, with another new friend this year, Spencer Reece, who invited us to join him in the afternoon for a service in the Reformed Episcopal Church, where my father gave a blessing in Māori and the congregation sang Cumpleaños Feliz (Happy Birthday) to me! Spencer also co-produced Madrid’s first anglophone poetry festival at the end of May as part of the Unamuno Author Series 2019, and has invited Lilián and me to teach poetry in the ‘Our Little Roses’ orphanage for girls in Honduras in 2021.

Marion, Barry and Spencer on the way to Badila

And so I can’t wait to see Lilián in the Zarzuela Theatre in January, and start our arts residency in the Matadero. I am also working on a new poetry film project in New Zealand and a collaboration with a USA poetry film project, and I’m looking forward to the next National Poetry Day. A big thank you to everyone who has accompanied me this year. Here’s to more parks and lakes, piano, painting and poems.

Charles, Madrid, 28 December 2019