New Zealand Writers
PLUMB, Vivienne
Her writing takes an engagingly mobile line between realism and a humorous, fairy-tale-like fantasy.
Author entry from The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, edited by Roger Robinson and Nelson Wattie (1998). About the Companion entries View list of Companion contributors
PLUMB, Vivienne (1955– ), is a playwright and fiction writer, who won the 1993 Bruce Mason Playwriting Award for Love Knots (performed 1993, pub. 1994) and the Hubert Church Award for a first book of fiction for The Wife Who Spoke Japanese in her Sleep (1993).A professional actor of extensive experience in Australia (where she was born) and New Zealand, she was a founder member of the Women’s Play Press in 1992. She lives in Wellington, took Victoria University’s creative writing course in 1990 and a BA in 1998, and has edited three collections of new poetry and prose.
She was 1996 president of the New Zealand Poetry Society. Her writing takes an engagingly mobile line between realism and a humorous, fairy-tale-like fantasy where women’s activities, especially baking, assume magic powers, the inexplicable occurs in commonplace settings (the wife who unaccountably recites Japanese), people appear and disappear and men are two-dimensionally goofy or ogreish. Love Knots was praised for its ‘swoops from the mundane to the miraculous’ (Susan Budd) and the short stories for ‘surrealistic imagery and deliciously ironic humour’ (Sandra Arnold).
At her best, in ‘Coral and Zetta’ or ‘Mrs Gittoes’ Compleat Art of Baking’, the surface naivety can encompass both a comic deflation of human passions (‘Zetta felt hot and melty all over, like cheese on toast’) and a suggestive glimpse of darker experience—fraught friendship or forlorn childlessness. A second play and a first novel are in progress.
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Plumb has published two collections of poetry, Salamanca (1998) and Avalanche (2000), and a novella, The Diary as a Positive in Female Adult Behavior (2000).
Her poem "The Tank" won the 1998 NZ Poetry Society International Poetry Competition.
A theatre piece Fact or Fiction: Meditations on Mary Finger was produced in New Zealand in 2000. With the support of a grant from Creative New Zealand, Plumb took up an invitation to perform the play at the 5th International Women Playwrights Conference in Athens in October 2000.
Meditations on Mary Finger is included in Red Light Means Stop: Six super solos from Aotearoa New Zealand (2003).
During 2001 Plumb held the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship.
During 2002 Plumb was a guest reader at the 9th World Poetry Reading in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. During 2003 she will be a guest reader at Vilencia 2003, the annual literary festival of Slovenia.
Secret City, Plumb's first novel was published in 2003. "This mischevious and entertaining contemporary novel about imagination and the science of memory is original, funny and unexpectedly moving." Pat Baskett writes in the Herald 24/5/03 " Rivers to my knowlege, are never blue, but one exists on the first page of this novel. Despite my doubts, I was riveted by Plumb's writing..."
The Diary as a Positive in Female Adult Behavior (2000) is to be translated into Italian and published in Italy in 2004.
Plumb's third collection of poetry, Nefarious (Headworx, 2004), crackles with a tinder-dry humour. The poems are little bridges, spanning the chasm between the minutae of everyday existence and the miraculous and marvellous.
"Brittle, self-conscious, wounding and extremely funny." Review by Stuart McKenzie in The Evening Post.
Scarab: a poetic documentary (Seraph Press, 2005) is a new chapbook collection that is a celebration of the poet’s son’s courage in the face of the illness that eventually took his life.
Plumb also contributed one short story to the new anthology Myth of the 21st Century (Reed, 2006).
Plumb had a poem included in Shards of Silver (Steele Roberts, 2006), a book investigating the interplay between photography and poetry.
The 2007 inaugural Rotorua Writers’ Residency has gone to Plumb, who plans to work on short stories while there. Plumb’s new play ‘The Cape’ has productions scheduled for Wellington, Auckland, and Christchurch during 2007 and 2008.
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