Damien Cave

<h1>(Profile): EAGLEHAWK NECK, Tasmania — By the time Matt Zurbo plopped on the couch to write his 282nd children’s book, he’d worked all day at an oyster farm, laughed with his daughter on the beach, gone for a swim in the frigid waves and cooked a vegetarian feast.</h1>

It was just after 10 p.m., and his eyes were drooping. But not for long. Assisted by whiskey and a Venezuelan ballad, he finished the tale of a girl who loved to dance and published it online at 1 a.m., leaving just 83 stories to go before completing his 365-day challenge.

“The more kids love stories and love books, the better the world will be for my daughter,” Zurbo said. “Imagination trumps violence and ignorance, and always will.”

Many of us who are parents experience a similar flush of love for stories with the arrival of our firstborn. Some people (Hoda Kotb, Kelly Clarkson) even produce books inspired by their offspring. But Zurbo’s challenge, named after his 20-month-old daughter, Cielo, is a case study in creativity.

He’s not just a writer with four published novels, an oral history of Australian-rules football and eight children’s books. He’s also a hard-living adventurer with hands he can’t close into fists after 30 years clearing trails and replanting forests in the Australian bush.

Oystering at sunrise is his form of settling down. As for marriage and fatherhood? “Never expected it,” Zurbo told me. “I was waiting around to die.”

His book project, then, is best read as a burst of daily celebration — what might happen if an Australian Jack Kerouac had the child he’d always wanted, at age 50, with a Venezuelan architect who showed up at a logger’s pub one night.

Zurbo’s stories range from the joyous (Day 168: “Bare Feet”) to the absurd (Day 144: “Backwards With Billy Hanging”) to the lyrical (Day 7: “The World’s Smallest Sound”) and the personal (Day 133: “For Cielo”). None of them have been published, nor is there any marketing behind the project.

“That’s what’s so beautiful about it,” said Matt Ottley, who has illustrated award-winning children’s books such as “Luke’s Way of Looking.” “It’s generally just floating there in the net. It’s like coming across a really rich secret garden that nobody knew existed.”

That it comes from a bloke without a college degree, with a reputation for wilderness forestry and the occasional fistfight on the footy pitch, makes it all the more astounding.

“The sensitivity and poetic beauty of some of his texts is hard to fathom,” said Helen Chamberlin, a retired Australian children’s books editor who worked with Zurbo on his 2015 picture book “Moon.” “He’d strike anyone who meets him as a rough diamond.”

I spent a few days in rural Tasmania with Zurbo, who usually goes by Salty (at work) or Old Dog (a football nickname). He is 52 but looks younger, with the slightly hunched walk of an athlete perpetually leaning forward.

When we arrived at his wood-slat home, a neighbor’s chickens running free in the yard, he carried his Macbook in one hand and oyster-stained pants in the other. Inside, he eyed the shiny sea-blue linoleum, the orderly kid's room, and apologized for the lack of a lived-in vibe.

“It’s not normally like this,” he said.

Leaning against the kitchen table was a black-and-white photo of a crowded pub. His sister, a music photographer who goes by Zo Damage, shot it at the Tote, a Melbourne venue for raucous bands ignored by pop charts.

“It’s a beautiful mess,” Zurbo said. “A place where people who believe in things go.”

His first novel, “Idiot Pride,” published by Penguin in 1997, was born in grotty places like that. Written for young adults but full of sex, marijuana and alienation, it was shortlisted as book of the year by the Children’s Book Council of Australia. “It was about trying to find pride in going nowhere — idiot pride,” Zurbo said as he chopped a sweet potato for dinner.

The front door creaked open. Cielo burst in with a squeal and Zurbo spun her around while singing “Cecilia.” Over vegetables and rice, while Cielo played with a book, Zurbo and his wife, Elena, explained their unexpected domesticity.

They met three years ago, when he was on a break from the forest and she was on vacation after splitting with her husband. Having fled Caracas and an architecture job where she was pressured to support the government, Elena, 38, was trying out interior design and working on a novel. He was frustrated with his last book and had given up on love.

“I was in the mountains just living a hard life,” he said. “Everyone said this is going to change everything, and I said, ‘Thank Christ.’”

Their daughter arrived after a scary trip down Tasmania’s country roads, Elena having gone into labor three weeks early with pre-eclampsia. They got engaged that night. A golden-haired extrovert, Cielo (“heaven” in Spanish) is their surprise beginning.

Zurbo said the 365-day story project is meant to be a gift to her, though he also wouldn’t mind a publisher picking a tale or two to add to the family’s meager income. Ultimately, he said, he’s trying to be a good parent, building on what his father, an illustrator, and mother, a doyenne of Melbourne’s avant-garde theater the Pram Factory, did for him: inspire a love of creativity.

“My mum and dad split up when I was 2. So what?” he said. “Mostly, they cut me loose, which was great for my imagination. I was free to roam.”

His own urges, Zurbo admitted, still push in the same direction. With everything, he seems to work fast, as if wasted time and energy are evil.

Four hours after publishing the story about the dancing girl, he was in the kitchen mixing dinner’s leftovers with eggs to carry to work for lunch. By sunrise, we were out on Boomers Bay and he was in the muddy shallows, guiding a boat alongside a Pacific gull he’d named Sphincter.

Oystering is mostly lugging baskets from one place to another. Zurbo admitted he didn’t love it as much as the forest, and he worried that the wages of around 23 Australian dollars an hour ($16) were not enough for a family, but he attacked every task.

“As a worker, he’s great,” said Phil Glover, his manager at Blue Lagoon Oysters.

Stories, even at work, seemed to rise like tides. At one point, Zurbo told me he had an idea for one inspired by the previous day’s tale of the dancing girl.

“She’s dancing with a monster no one can see,” he said. “And her brother, he doesn’t know it, but he’s making the monster laugh.”

Some of the stories in “Cielo” come from these kinds of iterations. But a lot of them start with people he’s met and what they tell him about their children.

Day 102: “The Best Skier in the World” is drawn from a friend whose son broke his leg skiing and needed cheering up. Day 209: “Austin’s First Game” is for Dave “Wally” Cusic, the club captain of his Aussie-rules football club, the Dodges Ferry Sharks.

“He had his first child recently, loves his footy, obviously,” Zurbo told me. “I did this the day Austin was born, as a present.”

And that dancing girl? She’s my daughter. The first night I met Zurbo, he asked me what my two kids were into. Thinking nothing of it, I told him.

When I showed the story to Amelia, who is 8, she was thrilled, insisting we get a copy of the book when it published. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that might never happen.

That’s the thing with “Cielo.” It’s free. Online. Stories for the love of stories, a project as impractical and relentless as its creator.

“We’re jumping from rock to rock,” Zurbo said the last night I stayed with him, “just trying to get across the stream.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/11/books/matt-zurbo-cielo.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

He's Writing 365 Children's Books in 365 Days, While Holding Down a Day Job

It was just after 10 p.m., and his eyes were drooping. But not for long. Assisted by whiskey and a Venezuelan ballad, he finished the tale of a girl who loved to dance and published it online at 1 a.m., leaving just 83 stories to go before completing his 365-day challenge.

He's writing 365 children's books in 365 days, while holding down a day job

Within a few hours of the terrorist attack that stole the lives of 50 people at two mosques here, there was a mountain of flowers and handwritten messages filled with anguish.

“This is your home and you should have been safe here.”

“Our love and prayers and sympathy are with you.”

“Christchurch, Christchurch, what will we do?”

The memorial was the first thing I saw when I arrived outside the first mosque the gunman targeted. Like many others, I snapped a few photos of the memorial and posted one to Instagram. But then immediately, I had a moment of déjà vu. I’d taken a very similar set of pictures in 2016 when I was covering the aftermath of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida.

The Pulse attack had seemed like such an American nightmare — a mass shooting driven by hate — and now that nightmare had found its way to the other side of the world, to a laid-back country where violence is so rare that there isn’t even any airport security when you fly to regional hubs.

From the vantage point of this city of 375,000, the signature U.S. exports of our age were not freedom and Hollywood fantasy but rather a cocktail of gun culture, white supremacy and Facebook, where the killer livestreamed the attack with a camera that gave it the look of an American video game.

And while the causes have spread along with Instagrammable memorials, the question emerging here a week later is whether potential solutions can be globalized, too.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is doing what she can to lead the way. She announced a ban on military-style assault rifles and ammunition Thursday. She has hammered social media companies for allowing and amplifying extremism. She even went to a high school this week, which lost two of its students in the attack, and told the children they need to fight prejudice.

“Let New Zealand be a place where there is no tolerance for racism,” she said. “That’s something we can all do.”

And yet, it’s hard to see how places like New Zealand can ever feel safe without some changes internationally. “We need to understand American laws because they affect us,” one commentator said on Radio New Zealand this week.

Indeed the lack of legislative effort by U.S. lawmakers on the issues that helped spawn the Christchurch attack — guns, racism and tech platforms — is no longer just a frustration in the United States. Now it wounds the world.

There’s hard work to be done for that to change. The solution is not praying for victims or praising Ardern on Twitter. What New Zealanders want is for Americans to learn from others, for globalization to go the other way, even if it means limitations on fundamental U.S. freedoms.

On guns, countries like New Zealand have less to confront: Of the 3.9 million New Zealanders of gun-licensing age, 238,000 — just 6 percent — have a firearm license, according to the website GunPolicy.org. In the United States, 3 in 10 adults say they own a firearm.

Tech companies are another challenge. Despite a growing body of research showing that the algorithms of YouTube, Facebook and other social media platforms push people further into violent extremism, getting those companies and their employees to dial back their self-regard and shift their priorities may be as hard as persuading gun owners to give up their AR-15s.

And let’s be honest: Those are the easy things to fix compared with racism and white supremacy.

Some Muslims in Christchurch are hoping that the unity of the community and New Zealand officials will set a new standard.

“If we can use what happened here to say enough is enough, if we can promote what we call in New Zealand ‘aroha,'” said Mustafa Farouk, president of the Federation of Islamic Associations of New Zealand, using the Maori word for love, “maybe the people behind these shootings will change.”

But according to others, the changes will need to become more common, below the ranks of public figures.

Here in Christchurch, one of the first people I contacted when I arrived was Kumar Yogeeswaran, senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Canterbury who studies diversity and received his Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts.

We discussed the deep societal problem of not just violent racism but also the casual racism that feeds it. He said many of his nonwhite students in Christchurch have come to him with stories of ethnic slurs hurled at them or colleagues at work mocking their accents. In the aftermath of the attacks, he said some students have heard white New Zealanders express anti-immigrant sentiments, asking why they’re here and why they’ve come.

“When an earthquake hits, the whole community grieves together,” Yogeeswaran said. A mass shooting that killed mostly immigrants — all of them Muslim — has not quite done the same, some New Zealanders said, noting that the unaffected have been quicker to move on while others fear additional violence from extremists across the ideological spectrum.

In 2008, I wrote an article about Derek Black, who was then trying to run for local office in Florida as a white supremacist. He later renounced those views, and we were in touch this past week, emailing a bit about how New Zealand and the world could accelerate and expand the shift he made from hate to inclusion.

“When Ardern says that the people who were attacked ‘are us,’ that has to become a sentiment that does not sound surprising or untrue to people,” he said. “This is a long process of people, particularly white people, redefining their in-groups and national identity.”

Black thinks the only way to do this is for people not to isolate themselves.

The memorials I saw were perhaps a baby step in that direction, our shared emotions made visible in lilies and words that linger.

But some people did not stop there. On Thursday, I met Michael Tarren-Sweeney, a professor of child and family psychology, as he was leaving the funeral of Junaid Ismail, one of the victims. Tarren-Sweeney told me he worked with Ismail’s sister, and when I shook his hand he had dirt on it from participating in the Muslim tradition of burial, in which mourners toss handfuls of earth into the grave.

Just behind him, leaning against a concrete pole at the cemetery’s edge, was Caitlin Phillips. “I’m just paying my respects,” she said. She had an iPhone in her hand. Had she seen news of the funerals on social media? Had she gone to the memorials?

“No, I live around the corner,” she said. “I just wanted to come because I’ve lived here 18 years, all my life, and I’ve never seen anything so wrong.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="b3413428-d0d6-41cf-abfe-9ec9a0aa5aec" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/22/sunday-review/new-zealand-mass-shootings.html">The New York Times</a>.

(Sunday Review): CHRISTCHURCH, New Zealand — The ad hoc memorial at the police cordon spread out across a wide area.

Mass shootings, an American export

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Damien Cave

Articles written by the author

He's writing 365 children's books in 365 days, while holding down a day job

Mass shootings, an American export