GOOD START FOR WRITER

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31330, 29 March 1967, Page 2

GOOD START FOR WRITER

Although it has never appeared in print, “the great New Zealand novel” has already become a legend. To Miss Rachel Bush, who recently made her literary debut in London, the search for “the great New Zealand novel” has become a mythical quest enkindled by “imaginary ideas.”

Miss Bush is a potential writer who will not write, with “the great novel” in mind. “I think it is really a bit presumptious to set yourself up as writer with this idea,” she said in Christchurch yesterday.

Now an assistant lecturer in English at the University of Canterbury, Miss Bush had her first two stories published in a Faber and Faber of London collection, called “Introductions.” "Introductions” which was first published in 1960, was

originally intended as a regular publication, devoted to introducing new writers under the age of 30, but it is really for writers who have not had their work published in hard-covered editions, Miss Bush said yesterday. Miss Bush’s stories appeared in “Introduction 3,” along with creative prose works by four other young Commonwealth writers. By Chance She heard of the existence of the publication “by the merest chance” and had not seriously attempted to market her work in New Zealand before she attempted publication in England.

From her earliest years, she has “always been writing something” including a very early attempt at a novel in the Enid Blyton tradition—“l think I had read my Enid Blytons too zealously,” she said with a laugh but she has always been reticient about approaching a publisher.

Miss Bush is not concerned that the short story form is currently unfashionable. “It is a natural and appropriate level for me. Poetry does not come so easily. “My ideas about what I want to express are rapidly changing. So much so, it would be a physical impossibility for me to write a novel at the present time,” she said. Doing a job where reading and writing were part of the routine might use up part of the creative energy that could be put into a novel but it also provided stimulation. “It helps keep you interested,” she said. Local Setting Both her short stories were set in local “well-remembered settings” but were not directly autobiographical “more distant from me than that.” Parts of any story come easily, she agreed. “But I like to revise my stories and you can’t really rely on the muse to do the work. You have to keep going when the muse is not communicating.”