The Randell Cottage NZ Writer in Residence 2009, Kirsty Gunn, joins Randell Cottage Trustee Vincent O’Sullivan as a keynote speaker at the Katherine Mansfield symposium ‘Celebrating Katherine Mansfield’ in Menton in September. Here’s what she will talk about:
‘Thorndon – with its houses and hills, its glimpses of the harbour and its walks and ways – stamped Katherine Mansfield‘s imagination and made the remembering of it a sort of literary project that continued throughout her life. This informal talk will show how that early world of hers has come to surround me during this past winter I have spent living just up the road from where she was born and brought up, and will describe how Mansfield‘s sense of home and away that has always been a great inspiration upon my own writing has actively come to bear upon the work that I have made while I have been here as a Randell resident. I will read one of the short stories I‘ve written while here – ‘The Little House’ – and discuss my own literary project, a collection of journal entries, essays and short stories entitled —Thorndon — all centred around this very particular part of the world. ‘