Dear diary…
In 1986 Wellington poet Kate Camp kept a diary for a year, the year she turned 14. In that year, her parents divorced, she had sex for the first time and learned to use a microfiche. She’s published Leather & Chains, which features over 100 of those diary entries with current-day commentary. She’ll be in town as part of Queenstown Writers Festival, dissecting the book.
Camp first dusted off her old diary eight years ago when she read excerpts as part of LitCrawl Wellington’s Bad Diaries Salon. This is where writers are invited to read their old, bad teenage diaries, unedited. Surprisingly, she said she didn’t find it hard to read those entries in their raw form.
“I actually quite like that rule because I think it’s very tempting to give a lot of explanation or just, kind of, apologise or cringe at your teenage writing, but in a way I think it’s more fun for the audience if they just encounter it – complete with all of its weirdness and its cringiness.”
Camp’s readings were a huge success each year, described as hilarious, outrageous, dramatic and raw. No stranger to writing, she’s released many poetry books including How to be Happy Through Human and Makeshift Seasons. She also released a memoir in 2022, You Probably Think This Song is About You, so this book was a natural next step.
“I wrote the book on my teenage diary, which is something I’ve managed to keep all these years,” Camp says. “I never kept a diary except that one year, so I thought it would be interesting to do some sort of project based on it. A couple of years ago I realised it was going to be 40 years since the diary was written, so I decided if I was going to do something, I should publish it 40 years on.”
She's still surprised that she managed to keep a diary consistently for that “scatty” time of her life, and the process of writing the book made her realise that she might have more in common with that 14-year-old girl than she realised. Although she doesn’t remember thinking about wanting to be a writer at the time, she says reading back it does read as the diary of a wannabe writer.
“I’m definitely experimenting with different types of pretentious literary styles in my writing,” she laughs. “There’s poems in there and poetic bits – I’m definitely trying out a lot of different writerly flourishes.”
While Camp saw the book as really funny to read aloud, she also looked at it as being quite a sad document. She describes her teenage years as taking risks, getting into some not-so-great early sexual experimentation, trying drugs and her parents divorcing. Overall she describes it as a positive experience, looking back on her teenage self positively rather than with self-consciousness and embarrassment.
“I’d always looked on it as a bit of a sad indictment of teenage risk taking, but actually reading back on it now in my 50s, I’ve found a lot of joy in it and a lot of intense melodramatic energy. I actually really liked the girl that I encountered on the pages a lot more than I expected to.”
She’ll be interviewed by Debbie Jamieson, festival trustee and a mother to teenagers, who has described the talk as an excuse to indulge her passion for reading and enjoying the company of like-minded people. Jamieson will dive into the book and get answers to many questions, including why her entries are signed off ‘Leather & Chains’?
“I’m really looking forward to it, and really looking forward to going to some of the other events while I’m down there – just hearing from the other writers. That’s always a really fun part of being in a festival,” Camp says.
Kate Camp will be in conversation with Debbie Jamieson at Te Atamira on Sunday, 8 November at 4pm. She'll join fellow memoir-writer Charlotte Grimshaw as they discuss the joys and pitfalls of writing their own story. You can grab tickets and find more information at qtwritersfestival.nz/
