Messages from the roller coaster

June 26, 2010
Prize-winning short story writer Adrienne Frater faced a vast challenge to produce a book of her work. Geoff Collett reports.
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When things aren't going well - during an especially sleepless night, or when the struggle of illness is becoming too much - Adrienne Frater writes a story in her head. "I might forget it in the morning, " she says, but in the moment, she knows where the lifeline lies.
When things are going better, she still writes, committing these stories to word processor and paper in her Atawhai home. The lifeline runs through all her days.
Ten years ago, she got serious about her writing, taking advantage of some new-found spare time to devote herself to it more determinedly. She took six months out to study under South Canterbury-based writer Owen Marshall. She was finding outlets for her work - publishers for her children's writing, competitions, anthologies and broadcasters for her adult short stories. Encouraged, she threw herself into it fulltime.
Then her health betrayed her. But the writing never has, and now, after what she calls (with spectacular understatement) "a really roller-coaster ride", she has compiled her best pieces into a collection called Hole in the Sky.
While Frater does not suggest what messages her audience might take from her stories, she acknowledges one common thread, of how "life can change so quickly - life can turn completely on its axis in a millisecond, and we just don't know when it's going to".
She does not relish talking about the upending of her own life with an extremely rare form of leukemia, diagnosed in 2004. She especially doesn't want to be defined by her illness.
"I like to think I'm a person who writes who has to put up with a fairly precarious health situation, " is her take.
Long before it became her lifeline, writing was her passion, and the roller- coaster ride hasn't changed that. Even as the illness made her increasingly vulnerable to infection and restricted other activities, she could still write, whether in her head or on the keyboard.
It helped that she had already gravitated to short fiction, winning competitions and getting many of her stories broadcast on Radio New Zealand.
A novel might have demanded more of her than she could give. "Whereas short fiction, I get an idea for a story and I can work on it in a shorter time frame, and they're portable - I can take it with me."
It was in hospital that perhaps her most ambitious writing project presented itself, when a friend visited her last November.
"She said, 'How's your writing?', and I said, 'Well, I've been looking at these blank walls looking for my novel and it's not there'.
"She said, 'What do you really want to do?', and I said, 'Publish my short stories - and I'd really like to donate the proceeds to the Cancer Society'.
"I'd been thinking about that for a while because I've had such help. There wasn't much I could give [back] and I thought this was something I could do. And she said, 'Well, just do it'."
She did, and getting the project to fruition became perhaps the ultimate expression of writing's place in her life. Over the next few days, she told her family - husband Garry, son Chris and daughter Cathy - what she wanted, and they figured out a plan. Knowing they did not necessarily have the luxury of time, they formed their own publishing imprint, Atawhai Press, and called on industry professionals Quentin Wilson (formerly of Hazard Press) and Christchurch editor Anna Rogers to help.
Owen Marshall helped to select the stories. Others in the Nelson writing community pitched in. Cathy looked after the design. Chris was the business adviser. Garry spearheaded the project.
"My energies had to be kept for editing stories and that side of it, " Frater says. "Sometimes I was fine and sometimes I didn't have as much puff, but we've got there and, amazingly, in six months, we had a book."
If it's a minor miracle, her family were the miracle workers, she insists.
If people have been in danger of relating to her in terms of her illness, the book should help to change that. Even her own family, she says, see her anew.
"They haven't sat down and read a collection of my work before. I think they're kind of seeing a different mother from the one they thought they had, " she says, with a hint of mischievousness.
The finished book, stylishly presented and released to the world today - with all proceeds going to the Cancer Society - is palpably dear to her.
Some sense of the journey she has been through is revealed in an article she wrote for nursing magazine Kaitiaki last year. A theme was the loneliness of suffering such a rare form of cancer.
Elaborating on that is difficult, but she tries to explain. "The loneliness is like I don't know the road ahead of me and I can't talk with anyone who's been there. It's taken some really strange twists. Sometimes I don't know what lies ahead. I feel like I'm on a tightrope, and I think the loneliness is the loneliness of not knowing where I'm going."
But at least she knows that, whatever lies ahead, she has her writing to travel with, and now a book of it to prove where she has been.