Helen Moffett

One of the most frustrating things imaginable for an author, especially in a global village, is when would-be readers can’t find our books. I hear over and over, “Where/how can I buy your books? I can’t find them in my nearest branch of Exclusives or Wordsworth.” Getting them to potential readers abroad often presents major logistical challenges. In theory, you should be able to get them all online by clicking below the covers arranged down the side of this page, but I often get a broken link when I try this — or once I click through, I find the site says “unknown”.

So here’s a guide, designed to make it as painless (and hopefully inexpensive) as possible.

Getting hold of my debut poetry collection, Strange Fruit, can involve a few hoops. There ARE branches of both Exclusives and Wordsworth that stock it (in Cape Town, both the Waterfront and Cavendish branches of EB have it). You’ll need to be very firm with those that don’t: order it, and refuse to take “No” for an answer. Supply all the details: title, my name (spelled correctly — I have lost count of the times bored sales-clerks, bullied by me into searching their databases, have announced triumphantly: “We have nothing by Moffat/Moffit/Mrrfitz on the system”) and ISBN/EAN if possible.

I realise this involves more determination and organization that most are prepared to invest, so take the easy route: send wonderful super-duper where-would-we-be-without-them Book Lounge an email, or give them a call. They will promptly send a copy anywhere in the world, hassle-free. What’s more, they’ll send you a signed copy if you ask for one. Alternatively, you could try www.kalahari.net — Strange Fruit isn’t on their system at the moment, but this is apparently being rectified. Kalk Bay Books, another grand indie bookstore, stocks it AND lets you order online. If all else fails, write to me or Colleen Higgs, my publisher — here the advantage is that we really, truly, deeply want you to buy the book. Americans have the advantage of the Scribd/Little White Bakkie system that enables them to buy the e-book. But (marketing ploy alert) the hard copy, with its fruity pink and dark chocolate cover, makes a great Valentine’s Day pressie — plus it contains erotica (it’s a Very Rude Book, according to my mother).

And while we’re talking about erotica, a word in favour of a much-loved stepchild book in which I have a story: Open, an erotic anthology by South African women writers. With a rather retiring cover, this glorious book never really got the kudos it deserved, although it did have a glittering and glam launch. It’s a literary tour de force, with a host of prize-winning writers contributing, including Caine Prize winners Henrietta Rose-Innes and Mary Watson. But this doesn’t compromise the raunch. Or the fun: male readers reported laughing their heads off, as well as taking notes. Use bulldozer tactics when ordering it from your local bookshop, or order it direct from Random House Struik. Or click here to get it from loot (at a rather nice price); and here to get it with ebucks via kalahari. Also a good Ballyhootine’s Day present.

And now a word for my beloved orphan book, Lovely Beyond Any Singing: shortly after it came out, the imprint was mothballed. The memory still causes hair-tearing. Nevertheless, while the books doze mostly undisturbed in a large warehouse in Ottery, sales limp on (it sells very sparingly but steadily to homesick Saffers abroad), and two bookshops in the entire country — Clarens’s The Bibliophile and our very own Book Lounge — keep it in stock. I strongly suspect it might be in line for pulping, but here’s some good news: it’s currently available from kalahari at an impressively low price — so low as to preclude me getting any royalties, so I have no ulterior motives in encouraging you to buy it. Everyone who has ever lived in this incredibly beautiful country, or who plans to travel to it, NEEDS to buy this book. Really.

The cricket book, aka Bob Woolmer’s Art and Science of Cricket, is perhaps the easiest to get hold of, with its own dedicated website and independent distributors in the UK, North America (including the Caribbean), India, Australia and New Zealand. Amazon does a steady trade in it, at a discount that once again pretty much precludes the authors getting any royalties, but what matters is that this labour of love and incredibly special memorial to Bob gets around. This is also the only book of mine that’s generally available in most bookshops. The price might give you pause — but remember it’s a hardcover illustrated behemoth of nearly 700 pages, and is a very good deal, esp as a Christmas or birthday present.

For those who want something they can pick up without straining, cricket-lovers in the UK can now buy paperback versions of the batting and bowling chapters: these will be released as separate books in March and can be pre-ordered via Amazon. (Ignore the dreadful descriptions of the books — I have been promised that these will be replaced with the final book blurbs, although Amazon seems to be taking its sweet time about updating them.)

I assume that anyone who wants to get Seasons Come to Pass, my university-level textbook on poetry, can do so fairly easily, and indeed, you can get it here, here and here. I’m very fond of this book, and non-students say they also enjoy it.

My academic stuff is more specialist, and I doubt whether many of you will be banging on counters demanding these titles, but here are some web links nonetheless:
Partners in change: Working with men to end gender-based violence, a UN-INSTRAW publication in which I have a chapter (this was so badly edited as to compromise the content, so on the off-chance anyone is interested, you might want to ask me for the original version);
Advancing Refugee Protection in South Africa, published by Berghahn Books and available as an e-book — I’ve co-authored a chapter on women refugees;
Women’s Activism in South Africa, for some reason much cheaper at loot than anywhere else online, plus I spotted a stack of copies at the Book Lounge — or you can just read my chapter here;
New South African Keywords, in which I wrote the section on gender (surprise). This is indeed a handy addition to your library, and packs a lot of punch for a such a little book. Very sharp, but not so academic as to be intimidating.

PS: In researching this post, I found that book websites do some rather weird things. According to kalahari, the readership for Lovely Beyond Any Singing (a book with something for everyone) is “undergraduate”, which is news to me. And to my annoyance, Amazon has downgraded me on all the cricket books from “author” to “contributor”. I imagine this is a reflection of the deep-rooted assumption that a woman can’t possibly have written a book about cricket, encapsulated when radio presenter (and usually flawless interviewer) John Maytham announced on Capetalk radio: “Tom Eaton did a great job of writing this book with Bob Woolmer and Tim Noakes, and Helen Moffett helped with the editing.” Er no, John, it was the other way round, and I’d spent quite some time on air explaining this to you.

Twenty years ago – is it that long? – the entire political landscape shifted. The political system of apartheid – for so long apparently graven in stone – suddenly looked rather sandy.

I’ve been meaning for two decades to write down the parallel events that took place in my life on that day. A Jozi friend had put me on a Greyhound bus the evening before, calling anxiously, “Phone when you get there so I know you haven’t crashed.” I was an innocent in those days: “Whoever heard of a Greyhound bus crashing?” I said gaily (a stupidly portentous thing to say if this was a work of fiction, which it isn’t).

Round about 4am on 2 February, I woke to a loud bang and a lurch. One muffled scream, then I was hurtling through the air along with flying bits of overhead luggage. Then I hit my seat again, and for a long moment of disbelief, assumed we had a flat tyre. Then the sobbing began, and I realised the bus was leaning at a peculiar angle.

I got up in the dark, peering round for the cabin attendants. Next I called out, asking if there was a doctor on board. No response. A nurse? No response. Okay, surely there was a first-aid kit on board? I began to inch my way down the tilted aisle in the dark. Broken glass crunched underfoot. I got to the doors, twisted closed, and began to realise the enormity of our predicament – we’d need an axe to get off the bus. Plus I was starting to worry about fire.

I found one of the Greyhound stewardesses crouched in the stairwell. I asked her what the procedure was for emergencies: where was the first-aid box, the fire extinguisher?

“Don’t talk to me about fucking Greyhound, I’ve resigned as of this minute,” she wailed, crystals glinting in her hair. We both thought it was glass – later we realised it was sugar. She’d been making herself a cup of tea when nemesis struck.

Then someone in uniform stepped forward. Friedrich was in the Air Force. In all that chaos, he was a vision of sanity, the braid on his uniform and cap gleaming along with his white-blond hair. “We have to get these people out of here,” he said. A wiry, dark-haired guy rose from the ruined seats. He was an officer with the Paras, and was bending the rules by travelling back to camp in civvies. His name was Rolf, and he wanted to help.

It goes without saying that Friedrich and Rolf were white, but not everyone on the bus was. The tides of the old South Africa had been creeping out imperceptibly, and a third of the passengers were black. Next, Brandon, who was coloured, joined us, also impeccably turned out in uniform. He was part of the Presidential guard, and deeply worried that he might not reach Cape Town in time to march at the opening of Parliament.

For the next aeon, the four of us cleared people off the bus, carrying some of them when necessary, literally posting them through the windows, now gaping empty. That’s probably what caused most of the superficial cuts and bleeding. The moon had set, and we couldn’t see to avoid the jags of glass still in the frames.

I was a member of the End Conscription Campaign, and I had never expected to be grateful for army training, but in the early hours of that morning, I was beyond thankful. Rolf, Friedrich and Brandon worked like automatons, firm, practical, swift.

We found the other stewardess weeping under a seat, with what seemed to be a broken arm, but she was able to tell us there was no first-aid kit on board. No axe, no emergency protocol, no fire extinguisher either. We ended up tearing the little onboard pillows into strips for bandages. We did it so easily then, but you try tearing up a pillow-slip.

We kept expecting to find horrors, but no-one seemed to be terribly injured. Shock was the biggest problem, especially among the more elderly passengers. We were constantly detaching hands that clutched, at us, at seats, at anything stable.

When everyone was out, we clambered out the windows into a scene from Dante’s Purgatorio: moaning people rambling around in the blackness. This was a pre-cellphone era. We were alone in the middle of the Great Karoo, at an ungodly hour of the morning. Help was a very long way off.

Friedrich and I went round to look at the front of the bus: the driver’s section had concertina-ed into a crumple of metal maybe two foot wide. Worse, black liquid seeped from the area. We looked at each other in horror: we knew we had to try and get the driver out. Friedrich stuck a hand in gingerly – another indicator of how times have changed, the risk of HIV-infection never even crossed our minds. He couldn’t feel a body, so we decided to try again when it was lighter – dawn wasn’t that far away.

What we discovered when the blackness began to lift was that the driver had been thrown clear, and was lying unconscious in the veld. Meanwhile, a bakkie stopped – the first car to pass in the 45 minutes since the crash. The driver, appalled by the scene he found, agreed to drive hell-for-leather to the nearest town and rustle up the police and ambulances. Brandon begged a ride – he had six hours left to get to Cape Town and Parliament – and shook hands with our small team before disappearing into the grey.

As it got lighter, we were able to organize people into groups, placing more competent and uninjured people in charge, sharing out fruit juice and water salvaged from the wreck. Unbelievably, few seemed to be seriously injured, but there were some nasty cuts and people were becoming extremely emotional as the shock wore off. We were worried about concussion and internal injuries – it was impossible to tell whether crying or catatonic people were badly hurt or not.

I had my first physical reaction when the rising sun revealed the state of the bus. It lay across a donga at a 60-degree angle, with the entire undercarriage peeled back. It had rained earlier that night, softening the soil, so that the donga had acted as a brake into which the bus had sunk, instead of somersaulting. I was suddenly desperate to vomit, but then Rolf set up a glad cry. The doctor from the nearest small town had arrived, slewing his car to a stop, and running towards us with his medical bag.

As the light became more pitiless, more and more help arrived, including the ambulance (all the way from Beaufort West, 150 kms away), police from three Karoo towns, concerned citizens. The driver, the stewardess with the suspected fracture, a backpacker with a horrible scalp wound, some students with bad cuts and contusions, and the more distressed elderly folk were whisked away first. The rescue fleet made four trips back and forth, gallantly taking the non-injured on a “ladies first” basis. But I refused to be parted from Friedrich and Rolf, my comrades in blood and arms: “We’re a team,” we declared. Everyone was eventually decanted at the local hospital, in the nearest small town, where the seriously injured were stabilised before being sent on to better medical facilities further on down the N1.

But now we had a new problem. The hospital was racially segregated, and the seriously injured driver was being carried round to the “Nie-blankes” ward. We were outraged. One tannie with a tight perm was particularly incensed: “We were all in this together, how can they separate us now?” The local hotel owner had no such strictures: we were all welcome back at the hotel, hot food would be served, we could take baths and rest until a replacement coach was sent.

Friedrich, Rolf and I went from bed to bed collecting phone numbers and messages. We agreed that I’d place the calls. Unbelievable as this may seem to the Twitter generation, no-one knew about the crash yet. Greyhound had no 24-hour emergency number, and I had to wait till office hours to call them, getting the runaround first from the switchboard, then from a dragon secretary: “He’s in a meeting, can I take a message?”

The tiny town had a manual exchange. There were no public phones. The hospital let me use their single phone on condition all the calls charges were reversed. To make a call, I would pick up the receiver and crank a handle until I raised the operator. They then had to call the operator in whatever town I was trying to reach, and persuade them to make a call to a specific number, where whoever answered had to agree to accept the charges before I could be connected. Most of the people I was trying to reach were already at work, so I was trying, via operators, to place reverse charge calls through switchboards, some of which hung up the minute the request was made. Remembering it, I take back every nasty thing I’ve ever said about cellphones.

Friedrich and Rolf were proverbial towers of strength. They didn’t slacken so much as their postures until everyone was comfortable, their relatives informed, the seriously injured en route to hospitals in bigger towns, and everyone else ferried to the hotel. At some point, one of them pointed out a huge bump on my head. I probed and yelped, but didn’t want to harass the already swamped medical staff. I decided, with a casualness that appalls me in retrospect, to wait until I got back to Cape Town before going to a hospital.

At last we were done. The local constable drove us to the hotel, where round-eyed staff cooked us a mammoth late breakfast. The three of us were high, babbling. We kept toasting with tea and thick moerkoffie in even thicker cups.

We also found the townsfolk had driven to the bus, cleared out all the luggage they could find, and brought it back to the hotel lobby. Some things were missing (including my handbag), but this act of kindness meant a great deal. In a quiet, dusty room with an elderly porcelain bath, I realised for the first time that my clothes were splashed with blood. Bending to open my rescued suitcase, a spasm shot through my back, the first intimation that something was wrong.

Back in the musty lounge with Marmite-coloured walls, I became aware of the burble of the radio coming from the bar. A student at Wits, a tiny intense Jewish girl, asked if I wanted to come and listen to the news. Quite a few passengers were keen to know if our accident a news item yet, but the bar was dense with smoke, and I was finding it hard to move. Rolf and Friedrich stayed with me, solicitous, bringing glasses of water.

There was a commotion from the bar. I assumed we’d made the lunchtime news. Maya, the Wits student, burst into the lounge, her face alight: “FW’s unbanned the ANC!” she screamed. “He’s going to free Mandela!”

Our trio was on its feet, roaring. I was ecstatic, weeping, my new comrades seized with rage and dismay. Friedrich, aghast at the enormity of the betrayal, kept shouting “No way! The fucking verraier!” Rolf, face twisted, was yelling, “It’s a good thing! Now we can kill the fuckers openly! Now we can go to war properly, not with one hand behind our backs.”

There was a long moment when we all looked at each other. There was still blood under Friedrich’s fingernails. They drew together, then away from me as if I smelled bad.

All through the long day we waited for a replacement coach, all through the long journey back home, my back now frighteningly sore, every jolt a knife, they refused to speak to me again.

In the papers the following day, the headlines, in enormous fonts, read ANC UNBANNED. Our accident was relegated to a paragraph somewhere on an inside page. The driver, who saved our lives by keeping his head after a tyre burst, had a ruptured spleen, along with multiple fractures. I was told he was doing well following surgery.

I suffered a compression fracture that turned my fifth lumbar vertebra into a handful of fragments, and spent the next decade shuttling in and out of doctors’ and physiotherapists’ offices. Greyhound offered no compensation whatsoever for medical expenses incurred. I grumbled until Tim Noakes explained the mechanics of my injury: I had hit the roof of the bus head-first so hard that the stress of the impact had travelled down my spine, finally imploding my vertebra and exiting that way. Apparently, if I hadn’t been asleep and completely relaxed, either my skull would have caved in, or the impact would have escaped via one of my cervical vertebrae, rendering me quadriplegic. I stopped whingeing after that. But I still wonder if Greyhound now has seatbelts in its coaches.

That day, the ANC was unbanned, along with the PAC and the SACP. That day, this country turned in its path and set its feet another way – and Nelson Mandela began packing a suitcase. That day, Brandon marched to a session of Parliament that would lead to his getting the right not just to die for his country, but to vote for its government. That day marked the end of my youth, and the beginning of something huge, new and still unfolding.

Cape Town bloggers, the Great Coma is officially over, schools are about to start, the uitlanders are winging their way back to Germany, Jozi and other points north.

And to get the year off to a fine and sparkling start, we are gathering at Caffe Neo (remember? opposite the Mouille Point lighthouse) to honour the achievements of Book SA’s very own Sophy “Imago” Kohler. Who now holds the degree of BA with distinction, and also gained a distinction for English. Yay Sophy!

It has been pointed out that failure to mark this milestone with cake and bubbles would be remiss in the extreme. We also need to drink to Sophy’s meteoric rise as a Young Whippersnapper.

So — yes, we are springing this on you — leap down to Neo’s THIS THURSDAY at 4pm. Bring vuvuzelas (well, maybe not) and other items suitable for singing Sophy’s praises. The wearing of academic gowns is optional, and there may be speeches. It depends on how much champagne is consumed.

RSVP via this thread, please!

“We’ll meet again, we know where, we know whe-en…”

This piece was first commissioned by Phakama Mbonambi, and published in WORDSetc No. 5. It incorporates a lot of spleen accumulated in nearly fourteen years of freelancing, and I want to thank Phakama for giving me such a free rein. You’ve heard most of it before, but it’s hopefully still a handy reference for editors and those who employ them. A piece as polemic as this deserves a decent rebuttal, and I’m grateful to Megan Hall of OUPSA (and author of Fourth Child) for the letter she wrote in response, which gives my piece some necessary balance. She’s said she’ll put her response up on her microblog, and I’ll link it as soon as hers is available.

Several years ago, the poet Ingrid de Kok, who polishes her own work with something akin to wave action, told me she believed that eighty per cent of South African fiction, both by newcomers and established writers, was under-edited. As an experienced freelance editor who trains other editors, I agree. I seethe with frustration when clearly talented, even brilliant writers produce work unnecessarily marred by flaws as a result. And by flaws, I don’t just mean the typos and grammar mistakes that more and more reviewers grumble about. I mean confused arguments and rambling descriptions and irrelevant characters and thin research and plot holes and repetition and dénouements that rely on amazing coincidence. I’m fed up with reading local fiction and non-fiction books that look like drafts, and thinking: “This shows such promise – what a pity it wasn’t properly edited.”

I hear this lament from colleagues and reviewers all the time. South African writing is currently experiencing an extraordinarily fertile boom (it’s arguably a victim of its own success, as an astonishing body of emerging talent explodes into print), and we’re doing it a disservice by not supporting it with professional standards of publishing.

But this is not necessarily because there’s a shortage of good editors. The reasons are both crassly obvious and a great deal more complex. In the first category, I have two words: time and money. (more…)

I’ve been trying for two weeks to write something about my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. Surprisingly hard: everything either comes out trite and sentimental, or like I’m taking the mickey out of my folks. They are what a friend once called “individual’s individuals”, and it’s easy to tease (an Olympic sport in our family), when in fact I am in awe of their quiet insistence on marching to a different drum. I am also just so bloody grateful they are around, that they made it this far, that they’re pretty healthy for a couple well into their 70s. Everything I know about swimming upstream I learnt from them.

They are the oddest couple. My father is a devout Christian; my mother a proselytising atheist. My sisters and I grew up to cries of “When we die, we rot!” (Bertrand Russell) as my father packed us into the car to take us to Sunday school. My mother manages to say something simultaneously wicked and wickedly funny every five minutes; my father says something mildly derogatory about once a year, and then we all faint with shock. (more…)

Thanks to Ingrid Andersen, for permission to post here: these originally appeared in Incwadi, an online journal of poems and images — to find out more, click here; to read the latest (very lovely) issue, adorned with a handsome gecko, click here. Well worth a visit, and you’ll meet old and new friends.

I submitted a clutch of poems — all written in the last five years, and subsequently stringently edited (I hacked out all the undergrowth) — and it interests me that Ingrid chose three that are all memorials in some way. At the moment, I’m trying to write an essay on the experiences I had working with Bob Woolmer and Tim Noakes, and what they taught me about sport as drama, narrative, art and even tragedy; and only as I was editing the last poem for Ingrid, originally written after my trip-cum-pilgrimage to the Cricket World Cup in the Caribbean, that I realised it was for and about Bob — if it ever gets included in another collection,* I’ll dedicate it to him.

*Another poetry collection? Curses curses wot am I saying… (more…)

How exactly does the Helenometer operate? What constitutes H-rated reading, and what doesn’t? I feel the need to try and clarify this in my sometimes bumpy quest to read local writing, the krimi brigrade in particular. I must confess I myself find the criteria very confusing. The only clear, absolute rule: in non-fiction, the suffering of animals may not be described; in fiction, no animals may suffer. I’ll close the book (or any other medium) the minute an author expects me to engage with a narrator who deliberately hurts an animal, even if it’s “just” kicking the dog. (I remember the flashpoint of rage that made me chuck that awful Tuscan Sun woman’s book across the room: sitting in a piazza, she revels in the authentic sights and sounds of Italian life going on around her — including a pack of picturesque children “tormenting a kitten”.) The reasons for this go back to childhood traumas, which I am not going to get into at this point, although I strongly recommend that you do not allow your six-year-old to read Steinbeck’s The Red Pony.

I can also pretty much guarantee that I’ll loathe any “hero” who pants to get into the pants of children or teenage girls half his age (Lolita, which I couldn’t finish, made my skin crawl). And I can’t see the point of novels about heroes/anti-heroes who sexually harass their students/colleagues/servants/slaves, commit statutory or any other kind of rape, or resort to prostitutes.

For the rest, it gets very blurry. (more…)

… but my excuse is that the second birthday of my beautiful furkids also marks the first anniversary of my debut into the world of the blogosphere and BookSA in particular: remember? I was such a cyberklutz (still am) that I uploaded the most ginormous picture file, which still takes forever to download (but it’s worth it, folks), soaking up a third of my permissible space in this here microverse. Have been meaning to fix this for a year…

It’s a strange thing, being besotted with two little sentient beings with non-opposable thumbs and hunting instincts. Even stranger that I continually want to parade them in all their gorgeousness for the rest of the world to see. It was their first birthday that prompted me to post my first blog piece. And it was the thought of being able to put up an entire album of their first two years that tipped the balance in favour of Facebook. (Yes, I succumbed. But when you see this album, you’ll agree it was worth it to launch this much beauty into cyberspace.)

Without my cats, I would be a much lonelier and far more isolated person. And I’m not just referring to the glad welcome I get when I come home, the hours they spend curled up at my feet when I’m meeting deadlines, their purring presence in the night, their uncanny radar when I’m distressed. Because of my desire to share the objects of my affection with others, I have gone out onto the interwebs. Where I have found people — real, live, flesh-and-blood ones. Heroes and friends and even catsitters.

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If you go down in the woods of Cavendish tomorrow, visit The Tea Emporium at 10.30. No teddy-bears’ picnic, but the most glorious teas (and tea-ceremonies) and elegant cakes will be served as I read poems from Strange Fruit — which is rapidly becoming inextricably linked with baked goods in my mind. The cost is a very modest R30, and proprietor Hajira does gluten-free and sugar-free bakes if you are feeling virtuous. Call her on 021-674-6066 by lunch-time today to let her know your requirements.

The Tea Emporium is on the lower ground floor, and the link has a handy map (what did we do before the Internet?) for those who, like me, are directionally challenged. Oh, and I’ll have a few books for sale. And I’m trying to persuade Sindiwe to come and be a double act with me. Will keep you posted on this one. As always, I will be pathetically grateful to see you there…

PS: Thanks to Tania van Schalkwyk of Hyphen fame, for setting this in motion.

Some of you have heard this story before – of the first time I met Sindiwe Magona. It was back in the days when the Mail & Guardian was still the Weekly Mail (known by many as the Meekly Wail), and it hosted a Book Week at the Baxter Theatre – a week of events mostly featuring men, most of them white. Back then, women in the literary world still belonged in the “trot-them-out-for-show” ghetto, and black women barely featured at all.

I was a green graduate student when I got the call from Rhoda Kadalie, then still setting up the Women’s Studies Dept at UWC. She was in charge of a panel featuring Ellen Kuzwayo and Sindiwe Magona, and needed a co-interviewer. Was I interested? I nearly chewed my lips off telling her just how interested I was – for me, busy with a PhD on the PreRaphaelites, this was a signal honour. My colleagues tended to assume I had no interest in contemporary local writing, which was far from true. Rhoda was clear about why she wanted me: she believed I’d ask interesting questions from a feminist perspective (the f-word was still a pretty dirty one).

I got my first ever freebie books from the publisher (David Philip) – Kuzwayo’s Call Me Woman (which she signed, and which someone borrowed – if you are reading this, and you have it, please return it – no questions asked) and Magona’s To My Children’s Children.

(more…)