page_title: Gary Jeshel Forrester
section_title: Novels, poetry, biography, memoir, and stories
hierarchical_section_title: Gary Jeshel Forrester / Novels, poetry, biography, memoir, and stories
caption_attribution_description: English: Photograph of Gary Forrester at the tomb of French novelist Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, Paris, 2012
context_page_description: Gary Jeshel Forrester is a musician, composer, novelist, poet, short-story writer, biographer, memoirist, academic, and historian based in Rotorua, New Zealand. He was profiled by Random House Australia as one of the major figures in the Australian music scene during the 1980s and 1990s, and in New Zealand by FishHead: Wellington's Magazine as a "modern Renaissance man." In a 2018 interview with New Zealand's leading newspaper, Forrester was described by the Sunday Star-Times as "a Native American descendant, on his mother's side ... who settled in New Zealand in 2006. [He is] a published author and poet and has released three solo albums in the past three years."
  According to Fishhead, in addition to his teaching fellowship lecturing in legal ethics at the Victoria University of Wellington Law School from 2008 to 2016, Forrester had published "three novels and a book of poems, [was] a successful bluegrass composer and musician, an advocate for indigenous rights, and a father of six children."
context_section_description: Following the demise of the Rank Strangers in the 1990s, Forrester turned to writing novels and poetry, with a focus on music and family. Houseboating in the Ozarks (Dufour Editions, 2006), which includes fictional accounts of a bluegrass band, is the story of a circular journey through the American Midwest, with reflective detours to Australia, South America, Japan, and Italy. Houseboating in the Ozarks meanders through tribal and Western spiritual traditions, including those of Aboriginal Australia and Lakota sundances in Green Grass, South Dakota, led by Yuwipi medicine man Frank Fools Crow. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch found Houseboating in the Ozarks idiosyncratic but engaging: an autobiographical "extended meditation on the difficulty of preserving familial and social memory, and sustaining and transmitting values and culture in our mobile, throwaway society."
  A 2012 review of Houseboating said that "one of the many wonders of the book is that [the main character's] two kids become real people capable of influencing the outcome of the trip. They grab him by the heart and throw him around.  They are bright, funny, and embody their own kind of irony that meshes with Dad's . . . a wonderful, smart, sad book."  Lawyers and Poetry described Houseboating in the Ozarks as "autobiographical in the sense that Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is about the life of Robert Pirsig."
  His second novel, The Connoisseur of Love, was published in New Zealand in 2012. This novel contains 12 meditations – a dozen episodes from the endgame of Peter Becker, Wellington's self-styled "connoisseur of love."  Peter is not quite at home in his adopted city of Wellington, but there is no place on earth he would rather be. He is a creature of routine, an eccentric public servant, estranged from his only child Katrin and his ex-wife Sylvia. Alone, he stalks Wellington's second-hand shops and cafés, bicycles through its streets and lanes, battles on its tennis courts, and performs his music – never quite connecting with anyone or anything.
  FishHead: Wellington's Magazine described The Connoisseur of Love as a "comprehensive love song" to New Zealand's capital city, which "exudes Wellington." According to FishHead, "it's not just a novel about Wellington, it's a novel for Wellington." A review in the Emerging Writers Network declared Connoisseur to be "smartly written in Forrester's straightforward clear sentences which have always had the echo of Vonnegut", and that the novel created "a unique point of view that is so broad it is at once a Gordian knot of irony, a psychological landscape, and a state of mind."
  In a feature article in Wellington's Dominion Post newspaper, Forrester was described as "a lawyer, public servant, bluegrass musician, and author of a novel set in Wellington.  But on paper it's being a writer that counts." The Dominion Post article captured Peter Becker's sense of alienation, observing that Forrester "made Peter Becker up and planted him as an outsider in Wellington, stumbling through familiar places and unsatisfactory relationships – Peter Becker is an alien in Wellington.  He doesn't pretend to be a Wellingtonian.  He has his nose pressed against the glass."
  The Germans have a word for Peter Becker's underlying sense that all is not well: Torschlusspanik – literally, "gate-closing panic" – or in Peter's case, the quiet angst of aging as life's options narrow. Not that long ago, he seemed to have all the time in the world; now his world is shrinking, and grace has not arrived.
  Begotten, Not Made, Forrester's third novel, recounts the travels of a wandering musician and his deaf sidekick, shuffling along on a doomed walking marathon from New York to San Francisco in the 1920s. A lengthy extract from Begotten, Not Made was published in 2007 by the University of Nebraska Press, in Scoring from Second, an anthology featuring the works of "thirty accomplished writers" from North America, including Michael Chabon, Andre Dubus, and others. Begotten, Not Made is written "entirely in free verse in the voic
caption: Forrester at the tomb of French novelist Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, Paris, 2012
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