Book Launch
The Writer's Diet was launched on 24 August 2007 at Strata Cafe, Auckland.
Speakers included Master of Ceremonies Michele Leggott, Pearson Education NZ publisher Bronwen Nicholson, and University of Auckland Distinguished Professor Brian Boyd.
For larger images, click on the thumbnails below.
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Excerpts from Brian Boyd's speech:
Helen takes a mighty sword to blubber. Yet she rejects colossal linguistic liposuction, she doesn’t offer lexical Xenical, she provides no extreme verbal dietary makeover, proteins only from breakfast to nightcap; instead she breezes in as your new personal stylistic trainer. She’s firm, she’s taut, she’s tough; you’ll get to love the crack of her whip....
Helen ... slices through blubber, she flenses endless sentences relentlessly, but she has eased her prescriptions and encourages not just fitness but fullness, flexibility and flair. And she serves up the food and fitness and body images with such verbal verve, such ad-dictive delight, that she makes us want to play too. A less talented writer and teacher could make her dietary and fitness metaphors ponderous. She just struts style and pumps us up into playing along.
Three things impress me most in The Writer’s Diet:
- first, the ease, efficiency, objectivity, clarity and sheer fun of Helen’s Wasteline Test for our verbal fitness. We can’t preen any longer to hide the paunch of our prose or reassure ourselves that from a certain angle or with enough protective layers the flab won’t show. Helen instructs us how to measure ourselves honestly and unflinchingly in private, see what we need to tone, and train fast.
- second, the economy, speed, effectiveness, clarity and wit of her exercises, explanations and examples. Even someone who couldn’t tell a noun from a frown or a preposition from a proposition can colour-code their own writing or anyone else’s to see what leaps out to the eye and mind. And Helen can take a vivid passage from a gifted writer and turn it into sublime stodge by reversing her own recipe; or transform a bloated toad croaking insufferable and almost incomprehensible business-speak into a princely paragraph, a third the girth and infinitely less uninviting....
- third, Helen shows her fitness to train us not only in her own writing but in her testing, her explanations, her demonstrations, her examples, her advice, her encouragement, her knack of breaking down what look like stiff challenges into a series of whacky workouts....
Before she became a personal trainer, Helen had been a scholar of modernism. Ezra Pound famously entrenched modernism by hacking waste words off poetic Edwardianism, and equally famously sliced and trimmed even T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Line. Helen too promises to take her pound of verbal flesh off anyone who pays good dollars for her Wasteline Test. Now is the instant to make this instant classic instant.
Brian Boyd, 24 August 2007