Charlotte Simmonds is an autistic Wellington translator, technical editor and hobby academic and a writer of poetry, theatre and short prose. Simmonds’ creative work has appeared in theatres, comedy clubs, radios and podcasts in Wellington, in literary journals in New Zealand such as Landfall, Sport and Hue & Cry, in literary journals in the United States such as the Iowa Review, Mid-American Review and Painted Bride Quarterly, and in Australia and the United Kingdom. Simmonds’ 2008 collection of poetry and lyric prose The World’s Fastest Flower (VUP) was a finalist for the 2009 Best First Book Award for Poetry. For Simmonds’ academic work in the history of research into Asperger’s Syndrome, autism and autism-like conditions, see the European Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.
Simmonds comments: ‘Back around 2006 or 2007, a flatmate told me a story about a design for Te Papa that had been rejected. He said it would have been almost entirely made of glass, with the glass designed in such a way that the whole building would fill with rainbows as the clouds over Wellington lifted and the light entered. It was incredibly beautiful, my flatmate had told me, but it was rejected due its author being an overseas architect instead of a New Zealander. The architect, the flatmate continued, had then taken the design to Denmark, who loved it, and so it became the Danish Fairytale Museum instead.
‘I wrote this poem during the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11. That weekend I read W. H. Auden’s “Moon Landing” and Roger McGough's “The Way Things Are” to a data analyst and planted a lithops. I exchanged emails with Harry Ricketts about “Moon Landing”. I wrote this poem, but needed to factcheck the architecture. Later I went to a moon landing party and watched The Dish. It’s no “Moon Landing” (“Unsmudged, thank God, my Moon still queens the Heavens”) and it’s no “Sonnet 130”, but people seem to like it anyway.
‘Strangely, there is no public record of the losing designs for Te Papa or even of the losing entrants. (You’d think this would all be on their website.) Te Papa Archivist Jennifer Twist did a lot of work for me locating various designs she thought might be related to the story, but in the end, I concluded it was entirely made up, a fairytale…
‘I don’t cry when people die. This doesn’t mean I don’t care about them or love them or am indifferent to them. People are going to die. I cry when buildings and crockery die, the objects that signify people and which we could have kept for almost forever if we’d been careful, beyond the point when Earth has lost its atmosphere and become unfit for air-breathing life.’
Links
Charlottte’s Victoria University Press author page
Photographer credit: Daniil Ivshin