The fourth recipient of the Seresin Landfall Residency is writer Pat White, who plans to use the Residency to work on a collection of ‘Watershed Stories’: essays about our landscape and environment. He will think and write about people – such as H.D. Thoreau, Bashō, and Annie Dillard – who may have lived alone in huts, often near water. Waterfall Bay in Marlborough, where the Residency is located, will be the ideal place to do this.
‘I have been researching this idea for a while now, and can think of no better place to be when I start the writing,’ Pat White says. The collection will be a loose follow-up to his book of essays How the Land Lies: Of Longing and Belonging (VUP, 2010).
Pat also expects to write some poetry – on a previous residency, while working on a life of the West Coast author Peter Hooper, he wrote a suite of poems that will be published in a limited edition by Wai-te-ata Press in October.
‘I am particularly grateful to Seresin Estate and Landfall for the opportunity to spend my time writing in a place where other tasks do not intrude. Such times are valuable, as they are a rare gift. I shall be able to devote myself to the new work, uninterrupted, for weeks on end.’
Michael Seresin says ‘Pat White is the deserved winner of this year’s award. Waterfall Bay, surrounded by water & calm, is ideal for his writing project. I wish him well.’
The inaugural Seresin Landfall Residency recipient was C.K. Stead, who spent six weeks in Tuscany in 2009 completing his memoir South-west of Eden. To celebrate the award’s establishment, an additional residency was made available that year to Jenna Shaw, who completed her first novel while at Waterfall Bay. The second recipient was Wystan Curnow, who worked in Tuscany on his forthcoming book on Colin McCahon. In 2011 Serie Barford stayed in Marlborough and worked on a short story collection based on the concept of ‘teu le va’, the notion of taking care of the relationships within and between the visible and invisible worlds.
Entries for the 2013 Seresin Landfall Residency close on 31 January 2013.