S1E5: Kate Camp
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In our second guest interview episode for Bad Diaries Podcast, Tracy talks with poet, essayist, reviewer and five-time Bad Diaries Salon reader Kate Camp about diaries, the slipperiness of memory, and noticing what you notice.
Kate and Tracy dig down into the experience of reading at, and returning to, Bad Diaries Salon – what that means, what it brings, and what it feels like. Kate very generously talks about and reads from the treasure that is the little red diary she kept every day in 1986, the year she turned 14, “the best possible year of your life”.
Kate Camp is one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s finest and most loved poets, with awards and plaudits and seven collections of poetry to her name, from her 1998 debut Unfamiliar Legends of the Stars to 2020’s How to Be Happy Though Human: New and Selected Poems.
Last year saw the publication of Kate’s sharp-edged and quietly magnificent memoir, a collection of disarming true stories titled You Probably Think This Song Is About You. The pieces in the memoir are familiar but unsettling, disturbing but also somehow joyful – qualities shared with Kate’s readings at five Bad Diaries Salons at Wellington’s Verb Festival since 2018.
Content warning: this episode includes brief mention of sexual assault, drug use, abortion, and negative self-talk.
In this episode:
In the audience at the first Bad Diaries Salon that Kate read at, in 2018, was artist Tara Black — see Tara’s live drawing of the salon below, reproduced with permission (Tara is a comics maker, graphic novelist and prolific visual chronicler of bookish events in Wellington, and has a fab Substack — find and follow Tara at Tara Comics)
The origin of “leather & chains” — possibly Mike TheCoolPerson on The Young Ones?
Kate learns off by heart the poem ‘After Apple-Picking’ by Robert Frost — here it is at Poetry Foundation
“Notice what you notice” is a line from Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Cosmopolitan Greetings” — find it here at the Allen Ginsberg Project
We talk about Kate’s memoir, You Probably Think This Song Is About You (2022, THWUP) — head to The Spinoff to read the final section of the essay “Why Are There So Many Songs About Rainbows”
In “Remembering Menton” (on the blog of The Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi, November 2018), Kate talks about her experience as Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellow in 2017
In “Author Kate Camp on writing her memoir” (Woman magazine, 20 June 2022), Kate spoke with Susanna Andrew about the process of writing her memoir
Kate’s most recent poetry collection is How to Be Happy Though Human: New and Selected Poems (2020, THWUP, NZ; House of Anansi, CAN, US) — read the title poem here
Author photo in the gallery below is by Ebony Lamb, taker of beautiful photos, maker of beautiful music
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Bad Diaries Podcast is recorded and produced in Naarm Melbourne, Australia, on the lands of the Kulin Nation; and in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, on the iwi lands of Taranaki Whānui, and Ngāti Toa Rangatira. We pay our respects to Mana Whenua, and to Elders past, present and emerging, of these lands.
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