Houdini, Mata Hari, and Lynn Jenner's imagination

Lynn Jenner was guest speaker last week at the L'Dor va Dor session at the Jewish Community Centre, and I was asked to introduce her. I knew little about Lynn Jenner, her book, Dear Sweet Harry was published after I completed my essay on New Zealand Jewish Writers in Jewish Lives in New Zealand. I checked her out. She started writing late in life after a career as a psychologist and school counsellor. She completed a Master's degree in creative writing at the International School of Letters at Victoria University, and Dear Sweet Harry was the product of that programme. To the uninitiated like me, who has not kept up with trends in modern literature the book immediately raised questions about the nature of poetry. Is a collage of anecdotes, documents, hearsay poetry? Whatever it is, the book is compulsive reading. In an interview with Guy Somerset in the Listener Lynn explained that 'I am usually writing in order to find out what it is about this thing that is drawing me to it and fascinating me'. She wrote about Houdini, Mata Hari, Katherine Mansfield and her grandfather, Harry. What fascinated her was getting inside the skins of these people, putting flesh on the bones, expanding the details we know about them, without imposing her own explanation on these, It is the juxtaposition of real and invented historical evidence in a way to provoke questions and elicit insight that make this collection fascinating. This is a goulas of biography, history, fiction and documents that make up this collection, which as one reviewer said, is greater than the sum of its parts.