'A million tiny questions refracted through the text and back onto the reader' – Jasmine Sargent launches kluge by pip adam
Part of the lovely crowd at the launch of kluge
On Friday 14 August, we gathered at Aro Valley Community Centre with pip adam, Book Haven, the Freedom Shop and a big crowd of people who love pip. We ate hot chips and vegan-deep-fried things, and launched the phenomenal new novel kluge. Here is the speech that editor Jasmine Sargent gave on the night.
---
Kia ora koutou,
I’m Jasmine, an editor at Te Herenga Waka University Press, and I’m so stoked to stand here tonight on behalf of the press to celebrate pip and her brilliant book.
I’ve been waiting for this moment for some time.
When I first came to publishing 8 years ago, I started out with a two-week work placement at what was then Victoria University Press. God knows why, but on my final day, I was left alone in the building to lock up. As I went around turning off the lights, I glanced one last time into the store room, and spotted, high up on a top shelf, a row of The New Animals by pip adam.
The New Animals had won the Acorn that year, and I was desperate to read it, and I was a student. I’d also clocked that VUP’s inventory management was less ‘stocktake’ and more ‘take stock’. So I climbed up on a chair to take one. And the karmic retribution was swift – as I reached up the chair swivelled out from under me, and I tumbled to the ground, and the entire shelf of books came crashing down on top of me.
So this is the story of how I damaged a baker's dozen of VUP stock, but it's also a meet-cute. That stolen copy of The New Animals would be the first of pip's books I read.
The funny thing is, if I’d read pip before that point, I would have understood that there was no reality where I didn’t fall off that chair on the way to that book – and I was, in fact, merely a body working through the physical manifestation of a pip adam experience.
The Wellington fault-line shifts. Elodie walks into the sea. Peggy and Greta become Margaret. Alba, Stanley and Drew step off the spacecraft audition. The story you think you’re reaching for untethers itself, disperses and reforms along a new horizon that runs perpendicular to the one you know.
Needless to say, by the time I finished reading The New Animals, I had a new favourite author and a singular goal for the career I was about to embark on: one day, I wanted to work with pip adam.
And then, eight years later, I was handed the manuscript of kluge, and the massive privilege of realising that dream. And I learned that my ability to be endlessly surprised, to be constantly unseated, by pip’s work did not end once I was helping out backstage.
Time and again, I'd find myself noticing something and wondering whether it needed attention, only to discover that pip had already anticipated the question and was using it to achieve something I hadn’t yet seen and couldn’t conceive of.
I would scratch at the surface of a word and uncover, instead, a world. Layers of intention, complexity, critique, connection, social history, in-jokes, pop culture references. Humanity, vulnerability, rage and grief. A million tiny questions refracted through the text and back onto the reader. Rules that you can follow only to the point where they mutate, duplicate and dash off in different directions.
As an editor, I was transformed over the course of this book. I started out by reaching for the tools familiar to me and came away with those tools abandoned, a new understanding of what writing and editing could be, a style sheet that sprawled over pages, half of which was obsolete, as well as the ability to spot a kluge =’word’ maybe 80% of the time. My new specialist skillset.
And it almost doesn’t need to be said that through it all, pip was generous, patient and unfathomably humble.
pip’s work has been called ingenious, imaginative, inventive, startling, extraordinary, boundless. In the same breath it’s also been called confusing, frustrating and challenging.
In response to which I turn to a moment during editing where, in answering one of my queries, pip said, ‘I want the story to be in the wrong room always . . . I am fine if people think this is a mistake or bad writing.’
pip gives us the grace to mistake intention for error, but she refuses to cushion us from that mistake. It feels like a kind of faith. Faith that we’ll look again, or look further. And it's up to us to confront the possibility that some of the frameworks we use to understand the world might be inadequate.
Perhaps we need to work on feeling comfortable in the wrong room. Perhaps, instead of stepping out, instead of turning off the lights, we need to pause and take stock.
pip, thank you for this, for everything, for everything you do for all of us, every day. For your vision and your fight. Thank you for kluge. Ngā mihi, e hoa.
