Fleur Adcock: 1934 – 2024

From Sarah Quigley:

The poet Fleur Adcock, who died in October at the age of ninety, leaves a remarkable body of work that spans more than five decades. Delicate yet dark, tender yet wry, laidback and conversational yet sharply observational: the balancing of opposites in her poetry symbolises all she was as an artist. Fleur’s multilayered poems won her high acclaim not only in her birth country New Zealand but also in England, where she lived for most of her adult life. She was noted for her work translating medieval Latin and contemporary Romanian poetry, and edited several significant works, including The Oxford Book of Contemporary New Zealand Poetry (1982) and, with Jacqueline Simms, The Oxford Book of Creatures (1995).

Fleur was born in 1934 in Papakura to English parents: Cyril Adcock, a teacher, and Irene (nee Robinson), a music teacher and writer. When Fleur was five and her sister Marilyn (later Marilyn Duckworth, the acclaimed novelist) was four, the family relocated to London so Cyril could study at Birkbeck College. The outbreak of war meant that Fleur and Marilyn were evacuated to the countryside and moved multiple times, which may account for the unsentimental resilience that was ever-present in Fleur’s personality and her writing.

After moving back to New Zealand and studying classics at Wellington Girls’ College and Victoria University of Wellington, at the age of eighteen Fleur married the poet Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, who was also educated in classics and was a member of the informal ‘Wellington Group’, along with James K. Baxter, Peter Bland and others. Fleur and Alistair had two sons, Gregory and Andrew, before divorcing in 1958. Four years later, Fleur married the already well-known comedic writer Barry Crump. The marriage lasted only five months, whereupon Fleur left for England. It seems to have been a homecoming of sorts, as she remained there for the rest of her life, although visiting New Zealand regularly. The dislocations of emigration – in both directions – permeate many of her poems: there is often a deep unease underlying seemingly calm domestic settings, and an intense examination of the relationship between personal identity and place. Fleur’s first collection of poetry, The Eye of the Hurricane (1964), was mostly written before she left for London, but many of its poems have no specific setting, suggesting an ambivalence towards the landscapes of New Zealand.

Often in her poetry Fleur drew on memories of her English childhood, recreating vivid scenes in her inimitable, intimate voice:

 

And what was the happiest day I remember?

It was when we went to the Mill Stream –

my sister and I and the Morris kids.

We wore our bathing-suits under our dresses

(subterfuge), crossed the live railway lines

(forbidden), and tramped through bluebell woods.

 

Her second collection, Tigers, was published by Oxford University Press in 1967 and marked the start of an illustrious and prolific writing career that resulted in more than twenty books. Fleur won numerous awards, including the 1977/78 Arts Council creative writing fellowship in Ambleside in the Lake District (a landscape she fell in love with). She also worked as a poetry commentor for the BBC. In 1979, she resigned from her job as a librarian at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, took up the Northern Arts Literary Fellowship at the Universities of Newcastle upon Tyne and Durham – followed by a long line of distinguished writers including Jo Shapcott, Barry Unsworth, and Jackie Kay – and began focusing fulltime on her writing. Other prestigious awards followed, including an OBE (1996), a Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry (2006), and the Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to literature (2008).

It can be difficult for New Zealand-born writers living away to avoid the tag of ‘writer in exile’, but Adcock always transcended national pigeonholing. Like Katherine Mansfield, she developed both an intense attachment to, and a sharp-eyed detachment from, the country of her birth. One gets the sense that it took Fleur many years to know how to – or to want to – tackle that topic. She claimed that she could ‘never write’ when she was in New Zealand, but by 2014, she was ready to base an entire collection around her New Zealand ancestry. The Land Ballot is a poetic sequence recounting the story of her grandparents, immigrants from Manchester, who won a hundred and fifty acres of ‘unbroached bush’ at Te Rauamoa. In a compelling mix of fact – ‘things turn folkloric if you wait too long’ – and conjecture, Fleur recreated one of the most fascinating and strange periods of colonial history: small isolated communities establishing determined pockets of Europeanness in an alien environment. The historic could equally be read as the personal – a parallel to the way she and her New Zealand contemporaries felt in the 1950s and ’60s, looking towards Europe for subject matter and form, all the while searching for ways to interpret where they were actually living.

Just as themes of cultural identity and displacement recur throughout Fleur’s oeuvre, so do the preoccupations central to ‘humanness’: love, sex, ambition, illness, cruelty, kindness. Who can forget the lines from ‘For a Five-Year-Old’, in which the poet helps her son rescue a snail:

 

… your gentleness is moulded still by words
from me, who have trapped mice and shot wild birds,
from me, who drowned your kittens, who betrayed
your closest relatives and who purveyed
the harshest kind of truth to many another.
But that is how things are: I am your mother,
and we are kind to snails.

 

This is pure Adcock: unsentimentality yoked with deep emotion; the seemingly casual tone countered by finely wrought rhyme and form – and the searingly understated denouement, which has the finality and force of a blow or a kiss. This is surely what Carol Ann Duffy referred to when she described Fleur’s talent as being like ‘a razor blade in a peach’.

Fleur’s friend C. K. Stead, in his exquisite poem ‘An Horatian ode to Fleur Adcock at eighty’, described her as ‘that princess of quiet fire / from a southern city’, who collected lovers – ‘too many to remember’ – and then turned her back on it all in favour of ‘her family’s fables / and deftest celebrations / of the life of things / with feelers and wings’. It was, in fact, in her eightieth year that I visited Fleur in her North London house, and I witnessed these celebrations of nature and domestic life firsthand. She welcomed me into her characterful old house, where we drank tea in the kitchen and chatted about New Zealand poetry, mutual acquaintances, writing – and not writing. In the decade from 2000 to 2010 Fleur had published nothing, but now she was writing again at full strength, with no diminishment in her energy, empathy, and wit.

Later in the afternoon, we wandered in the nearby woods. Fleur stopped frequently, stooping to examine minute plants half submerged in leaves, or gazing through the latticework of branches to point out cloud formations that towered and then toppled. For someone like me who’s always in a hurry, the crisp sunny afternoon felt miraculously sealed off from the bustle of ordinary life. Fleur had the ability to live completely in the moment. Yet far from losing herself in it, she actively engaged with it; absorbed it (nothing escaped her curious interest, from the pattern on a bone-china teacup to the blazing grandeur of an English oak); and then, in a kind of poetic alchemy, transformed it with a sleight-of-hand casualness that never eschewed elegance.

Fleur continued to write into her eighties. In 2019, she marked her eighty-fifth birthday with the publication of her substantial Collected Poems: she had become ‘embarrassingly prolific’, as she quipped in an interview with RNZ’s Kim Hill. On 10 February 2024, on the occasion of her ninetieth birthday, Te Herenga Waka University Press simultaneously with Bloodaxe Books in the UK published an expanded version that included twenty new poems. The poised, often ironic tone is as present as ever in the new work, as is Fleur’s deep, empathetic insight into the plight and privilege of being alive.

It’s hard to sum up a writer whose reputation is as large, whose oeuvre is as substantial, and whose creative talent is as magical as Fleur Adcock’s. Perhaps we need only look at her name for a summary of her talent, her last name bringing to mind the qualities of an adze: the hard integrity of stone, a clearcut vision slicing through layers of artifice to reach the heart of the matter. And then her first name: the delicacy of a flower, the lightness of touch that seems so natural one can only wonder: How did she do that? Now that she’s gone, we’re still entranced, still in awe, still wondering.

Fleur is survived by her sons Gregory and Andrew; six grandchildren, Oliver, Lilian, Julia, Ella, Cait and Rosa; seven great-grandchildren, Charlie, Ash, Seth, Alexandra, Jean, Ella and Mira Fleur; and her sister Marilyn.

Fleur Adcock, poet, born 10 February 1934; died 10 October 2024

 

 

Read Emma Neale‘s interview with Fleur Adcock here.

From the edge of the sky

Number 35 Arapito Road, Titirangi, West Auckland is now a listed Category 1 Historic Place. The Going West Trust plan to restore the house and open it as a writers’ residency. But if you asked any writer under the age of 40 why this is, I doubt if any would come up with the right answer. This presents an object lesson in why some dead authors are remembered and others not only forgotten but consciously blanked.

The modest, undistinguished property below the road was the home of Maurice Shadbolt from 1964 to 2000. During the second half of the 20th century, Shadbolt was a constant, ubiquitous presence in our literary world. He published 15 novels and short story collections, ten non-fiction books, a seminal play. He won the Wattie Book of the Year award twice, was published regularly in the US and UK and his work was heavily translated. He even had a story published in the New Yorker before Janet Frame. So why have Shadbolt’s work and opinions been studiously ignored since his death 20 years ago?

In the context of the current debate and furore surrounding the Treaty Principles bill and Māori-Pākehā relations, it might be useful to look at what he wrote that is relevant, at least in order to help understand where we once were and what may be of remaining value in understanding who we are now.

Born in 1932, Shadbolt grew up in Te Kuiti in relatively poor circumstances during the Depression and war decades. Many school mates and neighbours were Māori, and he attended events at Te Kooti’s meeting house. This early experience, of communities and landscapes, strongly influenced his writing throughout his life. The short story that the New Yorker chose to publish from his first collection The New Zealanders in 1959 was ‘The Strangers’ which revealed the conflicting attitude towards life and work between a Pākehā farmer and his Māori employee. ‘There were the two of them, neither understanding the other, and I stood between, only knowing that of all the strange and terrible things in life the strangest and most terrible was that of two people not understanding each other.’ The ‘I’ of the young boy between was Shadbolt the author who repeatedly wrote between the two worlds in the belief they could and should come together, even that they were together.

 

 

The activating incident of his first novel, Among the Cinders (1965), is the death of Sam Waikai from a fall when his Pākehā mate young Nick startles him on finding ancient bones in a cave. Shadbolt later wrote that he and his Te Kuiti school mates explored caves that were everywhere in the Waitomo landscape. ‘Some were rumoured to be ancient burial places heaped with old Maori bones.’ His childhood was ‘never short on rumour, terror, and death in sorry form.’ He avoided some caves after learning of the ‘violent consequence of violating tapu … Your hair went white overnight; your teeth fell out; you went mad and were dead in a week.’ A sense of superstition and the power of the supernatural were enduring.

Although Māori characters continued to be included in much of Shadbolt’s fiction, they did not become central until his major trilogy of novels located in the New Zealand Wars, beginning with Season of the Jew in 1986. It told the story of Te Kooti’s ‘rebel’ Poverty Bay campaigns of the late 1860s, following his escape with Ringatu followers from Chatham Island banishment, and concluding with the scandalous execution of Hamiora Pere for treason, pour encourager les autres. Shadbolt’s sympathy with Māori and their charismatic leaders during the wars was original for a Pākehā novelist, partly stimulated by the awakening to Māori perspectives of the period expressed in contemporary historical narratives by historians like James Belich. Season of the Jew’s best-selling importance was marked by Shadbolt gaining his second Wattie Award in 1987.

 

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In his trilogy, Shadbolt used Pākehā soldiers for his entry into the warrior world of the Māori. But where George Fairweather in Season of the Jew was fictional, Kimball Bent of Monday’s Warriors (1990) was a real, deserting soldier who, as a captive, assisted Titokowaru in his campaigns against Pākehā settlers in south Taranaki. In Monday’s Warriors, and the other novels of the trilogy, Shadbolt based his stories on the historical record and acknowledged the research of Belich and the value of ‘walking the ground’ of battle sites with military historian Christopher Pugsley. The sense of authenticity is strongest in Monday’s Warriors, and weakest in the third novel The House of Strife (1993), which was set in the 1840s wars in the north.

Season of the Jew ends with an imagined late-life reconciliation between Te Kooti and his Pākehā adversary, soldier-painter George Fairweather, a figurative gesture of mutual forgiveness between enemies, between cultures, that Shadbolt idealised. Despite this, and his long friendships with Māori creatives like artist Selwyn Muru and master carver Pine Taiapa – whom he claimed as a key inspiration in his own artistic development – Shadbolt became disenchanted with the rise of Māori activism and the trends towards separatism. The beliefs and structures that had underpinned most of Shadbolt’s work, and especially the Wars Trilogy, seemed under threat from a once-homogenous society that was steadily factionalising with the growth of what became known as ‘identity politics’.

His anger erupted in a damning review of the 1991 collection of contributed essays, edited by Michael King, Pakeha: The Quest for Identity in New Zealand. Shadbolt wrote that the book was for the ‘chattering class’ in the ‘Peter Pan land of the politically correct: all things Maori good, all things European bad. No one questions the concept of “Maori culture” or suggests that it may be a much-thinned, post-Christian version of the real thing, about as authentic as the Scottish kilt.’ He rejected the term Pākehā as of no use in an increasingly multi-cultural country and that the use of the word ‘argues that white New Zealanders exist only in relation to Maori.’ His review, in fact, focussed on only one of the essays in the book but it struck a nerve, generating much correspondence in the columns of the New Zealand Herald, both for and against.

Shadbolt’s strong feelings arose not only from his friendships with and support of Māori from childhood, but also from his own sense of belonging, of his family being rooted in the land. His criticism had been reinforced by his concurrent exploration of Shadbolt family origins in New Zealand, beginning in 1859, which resulted in his much-reprinted memoir One of Ben’s (1993). In the 1991 debate, he declared he was no Pākehā. ‘I’m a New Zealander thank you, a pale-skinned Polynesian. New Zealanders are my iwi, Titirangi is my turangawaewae.’

 

 

Shadbolt’s declared identity went back almost 30 years to his text for that eulogy to New Zealand, Gift of the Sea, powerfully illustrated by Brian Brake’s photographs. It was a celebration of what the country had achieved by the early 1960s, its pioneering heroes, its Māori heritage, its future as a country of mixed-race Polynesians. It sold close on 100,000 copies, reassuring the dominant culture that all was well. Shadbolt projected this image overseas with his books and international magazine articles; more than any other writer of his time, he took New Zealand to the world. His belief in the image of New Zealand he promoted resulted in what was probably his best novel, The Lovelock Version (1980). It was a complete mythical reimagining of New Zealand history that historian W.H. Oliver described as a ‘comic epic with serious social purpose.’ It was a ‘lament for the loss of a better possibility than the option in fact chosen.’

How much of Shadbolt’s sense of being a New Zealander survives now, especially following the political and cultural changes pushing towards Māori sovereignty since his death 20 years ago? Is his vision a wreck on a forgotten shore? When I returned to New Zealand in 2014 after a research trip to the UK, a customs officer at Auckland airport, as he was going through my hand luggage, asked me what I did for a living. ‘I’m a writer,’ I said, expecting a quizzical look that suggested, ‘Tell me another one.’ But he asked, ‘So what are you writing?’  After I said that I was researching for a biography of Maurice Shadbolt, I waited for a frown and a shake of the head.

Instead he said, ‘Well I think One of Ben’s is the best New Zealand book ever written.’ I nodded and smiled and said, ‘Oh, right,’ although I did not agree. I was taken aback but his response seemed to indicate the lingering influence of Shadbolt’s novels and non-fiction books, so many of them best-sellers, on the psyche of Pākehā New Zealanders, and of how they thought about themselves and their country. Shadbolt thought of himself as much tangata whenua as Māori. Perhaps many Pākehā believe the same.

 

 

Shadbolt’s insistence on himself as tangata whenua may be one reason why his work has been largely ignored since his death. Perhaps the rise of identity politics around ethnicity and gender mean that younger New Zealanders are not interested in 20th century images of New Zealand history and identity from a dead white male, especially one with a reputation as a notorious philanderer. This further complicated his legacy during the first years of the #MeToo movement. The first volume of my biography of Shadbolt, Life As a Novel, was published in 2018 to excellent reviews, but I was not invited to take part in any literary festival (save in my home town), even to Going West.

This raises the chronic, thorny question of how much knowledge of authors’ private lives should influence a reader’s approach to their work. In recent times, there has been a tendency to reframe appreciation of an author’s work through the lens of extra-literary judgments. Life and work are intertwined but Shadbolt was essentially a storyteller, and his writing is best approached without moral complication. Perhaps when 35 Arapito Road, with its bush studio, finally becomes the location for an inspiring writers’ residency, Maurice Shadbolt’s stories and myths, created from ‘the edge of the sky’, will be better understood and appreciated.

 

 

Philip Temple is the author of the two-volume Life as Novel: a biography of Maurice Shadbolt.

 

 

 

 

 

The Best of Vincent O’Sullivan

Vincent O’Sullivan’s last book, the poetry collection Still Is, was published in June. The poems, writes James Norcliffe, ‘are marked with O’Sullivan’s indelible signature: they are wry, witty, with conversationalist titles and tone belied by the layered irony and all but subterranean passion.’ We asked ten other New Zealand writers to choose their favourite book by O’Sullivan – a difficult task, given his prowess in poetry, fiction and nonfiction.

 

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Owen Marshall

Vincent was a true polymath with talents spread over so many creative fields, yet each work rich in depth and understanding.  Like so many others I was fortunate to have his friendship and support.  The book of his I choose to mention here is the biography of John Mulgan Long Journey To The Border (Penguin Books, 2003). It displays Vincent’s rigorous scholarship, his psychological insight, his command of language and especially his empathy and support for others on the journey of life. Mulgan was a highly intelligent and accomplished man, yet conflicted in subtle ways.  How well Vincent is able to understand and explain him. I re-read the biography recently and was comforted to hear Vincent’s voice again. He is never obtrusive in his works, but always discernible, and that compounds their worth.

 

 

Kirsty Gunn

Vincent’s novel Let the River Stand (Penguin Books, 1993) is on my list of favourite novels ever. I love it for its dense sense of atmosphere and landscape, as though the fiction has simply followed the contours of the place of its setting. From the moment it was published and I read it, I could feel the way this book was made slide straight into my soul.

 

 

Elizabeth Smither

My favourite has to be Us, Then (Victoria University Press, 2013) which won the Montana Book Award for Poetry in 2014. Favourite because I had the pleasure of presenting it to Vincent at the awards ceremony. I can still feel the warmth of his handshake and his softly murmured ‘Thank you’ which I repeated back to him as if we were playing ping pong. There were brilliant entries that year but when I reached the end of Us, Then I knew that Vincent could go to places that others couldn’t. He had techniques up his sleeve, a flexibility that extended itself with each new poem. I can’t say it better than Michael Hulse: Vincent had ‘a tireless affectionate scrutiny’ that never failed.

 

 

Stephanie Johnson

Vincent never ceased to surprise and break new ground. His very last book of short stories, Mary’s Boy, Jean-Jacques and Other Stories (Te Herenga Waka University Press) was published in 2022. It is a delight: measured, subtle, cerebral, mature and erudite. Control of language and elucidation of the most subtle human emotion and impulse is second to none. The volume consists of six long short stories, a now neglected form, and concludes with the startling novella ‘Mary’s Boy, Jean-Jacques’. From beginning to finish, the master is at work. Vale, Vincent. You are missed.

 

 

Chris Else

The book that best represents Vince for me is his last collection of fiction, Mary’s Boy, Jean-Jacques and Other Stories (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2022), the novella that gives the book its title, in particular. This splendid riff on the tale of Frankenstein is at once a fond pastiche, a moving love story and a subtly subversive comment on modern cultural debates, all done with the skill of a master craftsman still, at 84, at the height of his powers. The scholarship, the wit and the great humanity of the man are there for all to see.

 

Majella Cullinane

For a year or so before Vincent published Mary’s Boy, Jean-Jacques, I used to meet him at Otago Museum cafe for lunch and we’d talk about what we were working on. At one such lunch, I discovered our mutual love for Shelley’s Frankenstein, and also that we both thought the book’s ending was pretty ambiguous. When he told me his idea for a story where the monster turns up in Fiordland I thought it was brilliant. The style of the novella’s language, the depiction of the landscape, and the deep empathy Vincent has for Jean-Jacques, was, in my opinion, the perfect sequel to the classic. He not only expands on the original but makes it his own, and uniquely kiwi.
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Cilla McQueen

Apart from his poetry books, worlds in themselves in which I tread with awe, my favourite book of Vincent’s is The Dark Is Light Enough (Penguin Books, 2020), his biographical portrait of Ralph Hotere.

Both artists of the highest calibre, each spoke his natural chosen language of paint or words. They approached their work with humanity and humility. It seems to me that there was a similarity between them.

I think the poet and the artist saw themselves as workmen, just getting on with it in the best way they knew how. In a poem from The Movie May Be Slightly Different (Victoria University Press, 2011) I can hear them both in Vincent’s voice:

 

Shaping Up

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Most of one’s life – the better part,

let’s say – we’re up to our wrists

in clay, liking that potter’s image

for what we’re handling, the glaze’s

rare shimmer defining it ours.

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A lifetime’s, is that what we said?

The whirr between our palms. Get

the feel of it right.

And the word one

evening, ‘This is it, then. This

is the shape you’ve worked for. This

has to be it.’

Never enough stones handy

to pelt the thing.

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I feel that Vincent’s work is true to the Ralph we knew. In its pages Ralph comes alive again, for me, as does Vincent himself via the ‘rare shimmer’ of his words.

 

 

Gregory O’Brien

Of Vincent’s poetry collections, Blame Vermeer (Victoria University Press) has a special significance for me. It was published in 2007–two years after I spent a week with Vincent (and Tusiata Avia) as guests at the Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam. During that time Vincent and I struck out for galleries and museums thereabouts, visiting Amsterdam and The Hague as well as making numerous visits to the Boijmans Museum, not far from our hotel in Rotterdam.

We rendezvoused one day at the Mauritshuis in the Hague, having arranged to meet in front of Vermeer’s ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’. It was plain to me then, as it is now: Vincent’s poems can be like Vermeer paintings… Many are interiors in which the space between figures (or around a single figure) is carefully evoked, the tone, light and mood are masterfully adjusted and fixed in place.

Time is transfixed in Vincent’s poem ‘Blame Vermeer’, as it is in the painting that inspired it: Vermeer’s ‘The Milkmaid’ (aka ‘The Kitchenmaid’), 1657-8. Vincent was a great observer–of paintings as he was of people, of painterly technique as he was of human nature. He was also a brilliantly attentive student of narrative, as it pertains to paintings, poems, fiction and life itself. His writing was infused with a sense of wonder, as well as knowledge gained. So much to be carrying on with…

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Blame Vermeer

A woman of thirty pours the inch or so of milk
left in a jug, sets the jug high on a shelf
inside a small cupboard because the children
from next door are to stay the night, she’ll
not risk their picking at its precious glaze.
She takes her ring from beside the tap,
slips it back onto her third finger.
She hears steps on the path.
Something
will happen after every painting for a long
time yet. It may have been war,
a sudden wrenching of implacable grief,
diseases arrived from the unburied,
children clattering in only days until
they are shunted east.
And the stranger
announcing, ‘There is something here,’ and her hand
on the lip first then the jug’s smooth curving,
it was lifted, so Jug & Woman
may have been the title again as it was and was
how many hundred times in that small
kitchen, its imagined canvas, the deluging back
of ordinariness so lovely, to what can one
compare it? And the steps always arriving.
It will happen next.

 

 

Fiona Kidman

I found myself poring through all of the Vincent O’Sullivan books I own this morning, and there are many, with a mounting sense of frustration. The poetry collection of his that I love the most is defined by a single particular poem, and I cannot find it, or remember the title. I know it is about a woman standing at a window and waiting. But I know this is irrational. I have most of Vince’s books because I love the work, plus he insisted generously on sending me copies before I could buy them, so each one is a gift in itself and each to be treasured.

I have settled on Nice Morning for it, Adam (Victoria University Press, 2004). Straight away the title speaks to you, in Vince’s wry, laconic voice which echoes the common vernacular which he loved and understood.  There is a love poem in it ‘As though’, which I like a great deal, but it’s not quite the one I’m after. But the book also contains another of my favourites, ‘River Road, due south’. Here the poet is on a bus, in the dark; the reader senses the movement forward, the figure in the night seeking answers, watching the familiar landscape through a particular lens, especially the river that has informed so much of his writing, ending with that quiet tenderness that was so often overlooked in Vincent’s work, an acknowledgement of love. It’s pure O’Sullivan.

 

River Road, due south

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Much of my life it seems I have been on a bus

not so long after the late evening smeared

its flaring rag across the mirror of the river

and the glint that follows of water lying

heavy, and a house on the far side

with a light that burns on the back porch

and a flag of expanding yellow pouring

from the side of a window without a curtain

is as lonely I suppose as a house can seem

as you watch from the river’s far side

and it comes up from the reflecting distance

and holds level there across the water floating

its spilled silence, and drifts back and behind

so it’s night again, night so you can take on trust

the current’s muscling twenty yards off

and the house and the house’s reflection

and the kitchen smells like words you wish

you could easily remember, they are there

as your own sitting in the bus’s hollow

pulse, the dashboard a distant altar

the driver believes in, believes will charm

us past Rangiriri and Taupiri and into

the string of lights that thicken to suburbs

and into the clatter of someone else’s music,

and the house and the river and the dark

either side of the house and it’s lights floating

more important than any star, is back there,

taken by night, and where you were.

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Glenn Colquhoun

I have chosen a poem, rather than a collection – ‘The Child in the Gardens: Winter’.

Vincent always reminded me of my pop. He had the same happy-sad eyes. And he spoke in the same tones too, and with the same hint of old time sorrow.

It was as though he understood and loved the vernacular of my pop’s world — a time when Pākeha were growing into themselves, caught between Europe and somewhere else — long before they had any thought of being Pacific.

Listening to him again his voice is full of hedges and lanes and vegetable gardens in the back yard. He gave these things dignity, raised a glass to their ordinariness, and to their longing. At the same time he always seemed to wonder (ever so gently) how they could be more.

Moe mai e hoa. Ngā mihi nui. Ngā mihi aroha.

 

The Child in the Gardens: Winter from Nice Morning for It, Adam (Victoria University Press, 2004)
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How sudden, this entering the fallen
gardens for the first time, to feel the blisters
of the world’s father, as his own hand
does. It is everything dying at once,
the slimed pond and the riffling of leaves,
shoes drenched across sapless stalks.
It is what you will read a thousand times.
You will come to think, who has not stood
there, holding that large hand, not said
Can’t we go back – I don’t like this place.
Your voice sounds like someone else’s. You
rub a sleeve against your cheek, you want
him to laugh, to say, ‘The early stars can’t hurt
us, they are further than trains we hear
on the clearest of nights.’ We are in a story
called Father, We Must Get Out.
Leaves scritch at the red walls,
a stone lady lies near the pond, eating
dirty grass. It is too sudden, this
walking into time for its first lesson,
its brown wind, its scummed nasty
paths. You know how lovely yellow
is your favourite colour, the kitchen at home.
You touch the big gates as you leave,
the trees stand on their bones, the shoulders
on the vandaled statue are huge cold
eggs. Nothing there wants to move.
You touch the gates and tell them, We
are not coming back to this place. Are we, Dad?

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘Across the Divide of Death’

Selina Tusitala Marsh farewells Caroline Sinavaiana-Gabbard.

 

Across te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa we mourn the death of Caroline Sinavaiana-Gabbard, the acclaimed and influential American Samoan scholar, poet, teacher and environmentalist.

Sinavaiana was born on Tutuila island and grew up in the American South. After she graduated from Sonoma State University she returned to Sāmoa to teach high school. ‘At twenty-three,’ she wrote in Alchemies of Distance (2002), ‘I began to learn about being Samoan.’ After thirty years she returned to the US, awarded an MA in folklore from the University of California Berkeley, and a PhD in American studies from the University of Hawaiʻi. She became a professor of creative writing and Pacific literature at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

 

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Damon Salesa, Vice-chancellor of Auckland University of Technology and author of An Indigenous Ocean, says that ‘Caroline was a powerful and authentic voice, whose work as a scholar was both pathfinding and enabling, bringing literary criticism and indigenous Samoan criticism and culture into intersection.’

Selina Tusitala Marsh, the first Pacific Poet Laureate of New Zealand, was in Sydney when she received word of Sinavaiana’s death. She describes her as ‘a groundbreaking Samoan poet and activist who set the Pacific literary world ablaze with her powerful words and tireless pursuit of social justice. To me and countless other Pacific writers, she was our first literary Nafanua, a fierce warrior goddess wielding the pen to fight for Indigenous rights and to give voice to our people’s struggles.

‘Sinavaiana fearlessly confronted the painful legacies of colonialism and diaspora that have shaped our communities. Her poetry wove together deeply personal reflections with sharply political messages, inspiring us to find courage and resilience in the face of adversity. With every line, she affirmed the beauty, strength and mana of our Samoan heritage.

‘Though we mourn Sinavaiana’s passing as a profound loss, her spirit and impact live on through the many lives she touched. She reminded us that we all have a voice to stand up for our beliefs, speak truth to power, and work towards a more just, equitable future for Pacific peoples everywhere.

‘As I reflect on her legacy, I hear her rallying cry echoing through the generations – urging us to raise our pens and our voices to carry on her life’s work. May we honour Sinavaiana by celebrating our cultures and beliefs, asserting our rights, and lighting the way for others, as she so brightly lit the way for us.

Ia manuia lau malaga, Sinavaiana. Fa’afetai tele lava, thank you, for your inspiration, mentorship and enduring gift of language. Thank you for lighting the way.’

In Alchemies of Distance, Sinavaiana said that poetry ‘has taught me something about distance, about crossing the divide. One thing I’ve learned is that distance has implications, among them, loss and journey.’ She described the symbolic ‘Ua alu atu le afi – passing the fire’ ritual at Samoan gatherings: ‘We call out to each other and the other side answers. We pass the fire back and forth. If the ancestors are with us, this is how we pass it across the divide of death.’

Writing of the sudden death of a former student, Sinavaiana spoke of how during ‘her journey from the earthbound world I will cultivate my vā with her with a tangi, a poem of lament’.

The poem we publish here is a tangi written for Sinavaiana by Selina Tusitala Marsh.

 

Resurrection

for CSG

 

Running along the banks

of the eeling river

glistening under

Morten Bay Figs laden

with flying foxes

black with orange collars

hanging like fat furry mangoes,

where flocks of cockatoo

nest, squawking ivory eggs

high in the branches

of gum trees shedding leaves

and bark like curling skin.

Under the veil of soft morning

light in Parramatta park

I saw a crumpled pizza box

lying in the dewy grass.

 

The ripped cardboard box

spoiled the perfect view

and I tut tut tutted running past:

thoughtless picnickers

where were the cleaners?

It’s been three days already

I’d pick it up myself

but I’m running for time

training on my off day

and there were no bins in sight

how long would I have to carry

someone else’s blight

in an otherwise

serene landscape?

 

2Ks later I run past bins

surely no one would’ve expected me

to have carried someone else’s rubbish

that far?

 

Meantime

my beloved friend’s body

has been found

hammered, cut, and crumpled

in a locked bathroom

in Samoa

in the home of our mutual friend

whose unmedicated

Bipolarism must have pulled her

into its pit

and she couldn’t,

or wouldn’t,

get out of it

instead

she pulled those around her down

into hell

 

No one can believe

the Police report

a hammer and small knife

used to end the life

of my beautiful friend

who in Edinburgh

just months before

gave me the Buddha beads

from her wrist

to ease my troubles

she helped me think through

a friendship that had for too long been heavy

she did an I-ching reading

‘Sister, cut her free.’

 

When we spoke of our mutual friend

likewise she said

‘I’ll keep her at arm’s length to save my strength’

yet

months later I saw

she was helping run

creative writing workshops in Samoa

I wrote her “Be careful”

Meaning be careful with your energy, time and money

I never foresaw danger to her body

 

Headlines blast:

‘Playwright charged for gruesome murder’

our mutual friend’s photo

frontpage, centre

And we are filled with blue grief

And we are filled with black rage.

Insane fucking bitch. Crazy evil witch.

 

And yet

 

I ran by a crumpled pizza box

this morning

for the third day

in a row

waiting for resurrection.

 

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Ockham NZ Book Award Winners 2024

 

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Winner of the General Non-Fiction Award was Toeolesulusulu Damon Salesa’s An Indigenous Ocean: Pacific Essays (Bridget Williams Books). Salesa is vice chancellor of Auckland University of Technology and a leading Pacific scholar. The convenor of judges for this category, Jim Tully ONZM, describes the book as a ‘seminal work’ that is both scholarly and ‘highly accessible’.

An Indigenous Ocean ‘weaves together academic rigour, captivating stories and engaging prose to reframe our understanding of New Zealand’s colonial history in the South Pacific,’ he says. ‘Grounded in a deep understanding of Pacific history and cultures, Salesa addresses the contemporary social, political, economic, regional and international issues faced by Pacific nations.’

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The Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry was won by Melbourne-based Grace Yee for Chinese Fish (Giramondo Publishing), a verse novel that has already won AU$125,000 of prizes at the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. Illness prevented Grace from attending the Ockhams in person, but in her speech she wrote she was thrilled that Chinese Fish – ‘a story about a family that travelled across the seas, arrived in Aotearoa, and had the audacity to call it home’ – was being ‘acknowledged here, in the country where I grew up’.

Poetry judging convenor Erik Kennedy says Chinese Fish blurs genres, dances around the page and crosses languages by fusing Cantonese-Taishanese and English, both official and unofficial. ‘It displaces the reader, evoking the unsettledness of migration. In Chinese Fish, Yee cooks up a rich variety of poetic material into a book that is special and strange; this is poetry at its urgent and thrilling best.’

 

     

 

The Booksellers Aotearoa New Zealand Award for Illustrated Non-Fiction was awarded to Gregory O’Brien MNZM for Don Binney: Flight Path (Auckland University Press). O’Brien is a poet, curator and biographer and in this book, category convenor Lynn Freeman says, he ‘achieved a near impossible task … He has encapsulated the artist’s full life, honestly portraying his often contrary personality, and carefully interrogating a formidably large body of work and its place in Aotearoa New Zealand’s art history.’

Don Binney: Flight Path  is ‘a complete picture of this complex and creative man,’ says Freeman. ‘Equally compelling are the book’s faithfully reproduced artworks, exemplifying the best in design, layout and reproduction.’

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The $65,000 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction went to Emily Perkins MNZM for Lioness (Bloomsbury). Perkins last won the top fiction prize at our national book awards in 2009 for Novel About My Wife. The other three finalists, Pip Adam, Eleanor Catton and Stephen Daisley, are also past winners in this category: Adam for The New Animals (2018), Catton for The Luminaries (2014) and Daisley for Coming Rain (2016).

The Fiction category’s convenor of judges, Juliet Blyth, says that at first glance Lioness ‘is a psychological thriller about a privileged, wealthy family and its unravelling. Look closer and it is an incisive exploration of wealth, power, class, female rage, and the search for authenticity.’ The novel is disturbing, ‘deep, smart, and funny as hell’ with multiple plotlines, its characters rendered ‘in vivid technicolour’ with a ‘razor-sharp wit’.

 

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The 2024 Te Mūrau o te Tuhi Māori Language Award was awarded to Tā Pou Temara KNZM (Ngāi Tūhoe) for Te Rautakitahi O Tūhoe ki Ōrākau (Auckland University Press). Tā Pou is a scholar, Waitangi Tribunal member, and one of Kīngi Tūheitia’s ‘Council of Twelve’. This book on the Tūhoe men and women who went to fight with Ngāti Maniapoto in the battle of Ōrākau during the New Zealand Wars is based on oral sources through the stories told to Tā Pou by his grandfather, great-grandmother and other kuia and koroua when he was young.

Judge Paraone Gloyne (Raukawa ki Wharepūhunga, Ngāti Maniapoto) describes Tā Pou as ‘one of Aotearoa’s leading Māori public intellectuals’ and said ‘Aotearoa is fortunate to have in its canon a book of this significance.’

The first-book awards, sponsored by the Mātātuhi Foundation, are some of the oldest in New Zealand, one established in the late 1930s and another in the 40s, with a long tradition of recognising stellar emerging talent.

 

  

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The E.H. McCormick Prize for General Non-Fiction was awarded to Emma Wehipeihana (Ngāti Tukorehe, Ngāti Porou) for her memoir There’s a Cure for This (Penguin Random House). Memoir is a frequent winner in this category, including Noelle McCarthy’s Grand (2023), Dead People I Have Known by Shayne Carter (2020); We Can Make a Life by Chessie Henry (2019);  Driving to Treblinka: A Long Search for a Lost Father by Diana Wichtel (2018); and My Father’s Island by Adam Dudding (2017).

 

     

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The Jessie Mackay Prize for Poetry is the oldest of any award at the Ockhams and this year was won by one of the finalists for the Mary and Peter Biggs Poetry Award: At the Point of Seeing (Otago University Press) by Megan Kitching. In a category dominated by university and independent presses, this is the first win for Otago University Press here since Feeding the Dogs by Kay McKenzie Cooke (Kāti Mamoe, Ngāti Kahungunu) in 2003.

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The winner of the Judith Binney Prize for Illustrated Non-Fiction was Ryan Bodman for Rugby League in New Zealand: A People’s History (Bridget Williams Books). This is the newest of the best-first-book prizes, introduced in 2016, and its awards to date have been wide-ranging in subject matter: music, food, films, Māori carving, art, architecture, geography and the natural world. Bodman’s book is the first on sport to win in this category.

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The Hubert Church Prize for Fiction was won by Emma Hislop (Kāi Tahu) for Ruin and Other Stories (Te Herenga Waka University Press). Four of the last five Hubert Church winners have been Māori writers: Hislop, Anthony Lapwood his story collection Home Theatre (2023), Rebecca K Reilly for Greta & Valdin (2022) and Becky Manawatu for Auē (2020).

 

 

Book Awards: a brief and personal history

By Paula Morris

Tonight is the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, our annual celebration of local books, writers and publishers. I’ll be there at the Aotea Centre, although I’m no longer on the NZ Book Awards Trust, which organises this – along with the NZ Book Awards for Children and Young Adults and National Poetry Day, for which I was, for some years, a reluctant and inept spokesperson.

Although my family were avid readers, I grew up largely oblivious to our national book awards. In 1985, a month after my twentieth birthday, I left New Zealand to study at the University of York in England, and with one eighteen-month exception (Wellington for an MA with Bill Manhire and then Auckland waiting to go back to the US) I lived overseas for thirty years. The first book awards event I attended was in 2003, when my first novel, Queen of Beauty, won the Hubert Church Prize (for best first work of fiction): I flew in from the U.S. where, at 38, I was the oldest person in my class at the Iowa Writers Workshop.

It was a long night. Sixteen awards were given out, including three for best first books, a Readers’ Choice Award (poet Glenn Colquhoun), and awards for best review pages (the Listener) and best reviewer (David Eggleton, who wrote for the Listener). We were in Christchurch, and it was cold. The awards weren’t open to the public then: it was part of the Booksellers’ Association conference, and involved a conference-style fancy-ish dinner with big round tables. Steve Braunias, then editor of the Books pages of the Listener, was there; he kept going outside to smoke. He was one of the few people I knew there, sort of, because I wrote occasional reviews for him. None of my family or friends attended, because they lived in Auckland and would have needed to travel, as well as pay for the fancy-ish dinner.

Stephanie Johnson won the fiction prize for The Shag Incident and then she won an even bigger prize, the Deutz Medal for Fiction or Poetry. Glenn Colquhoun was the poet who missed out on this, but then, he did win the People’ Choice. The rest of the awards were for nonfiction: History; Biography; Environment; Lifestyle and Contemporary Culture; Illustrative; and Reference and Anthology. Six categories of nonfiction, plus an even bigger prize for one book, the ‘Montana Medal for Non-Fiction’. Michael Cooper’s The Wine Atlas of New Zealand won that, as well as the Lifestyle category.

I attended a few other awards ceremonies during the Montana years: definitely 2006, when I was home in Auckland for some reason, and possibly a contender for reviewer of the year. Because of wine, I don’t remember much of the event. Maurice Gee won the Deutz Medal for Blindsight and gave me his giant bottle prize rather than carry it on the plane. I used it later that night to knock against my sister’s front door, stage-whispering that I was too drunk to get the key to work. In 2008 the awards were in Wellington and I was there again to lose the reviewer-of-the-year award. By this time the ceremony was very long indeed, with seventeen awards (including the new Māori Language Award) – eight of which were for nonfiction. When New Zealand Post took over the sponsorship in 2010, the nonfiction categories were slashed to the three of the four we have now: General Non-Fiction, Illustrated Non-Fiction, and Best First Book (Non-Fiction).

At this point I was still overseas: this was the year I moved from a good job at a university in New Orleans to a terrible job at a university in Scotland (my worst job ever, including waitressing and working at record companies and doing piece work in my teens for my father, a printer). It’s possible that New Zealand Post didn’t want to spend so much money on so many prizes. When some people complain now – wanting larger amounts of prize money to match the endowed fiction prize, wanting more nonfiction categories to reflect current publishing trends, wanting to bring back some version of the Peoples’ Choice award to (in theory) recognise more ‘commercial’ titles – they rarely suggest ways of coming up with the cash.

The reset of 2010 still offered many more prizes than our original national book awards. In 1968 the Goodman Fielder Wattie Awards gave out three prizes only: first, second and third. All three that year were nonfiction: The New Zealand Sea Shore by John Morton and Michael Miller; Field Guide to the Alpine Plants of New Zealand by J. T. Salmon; and God in the New World by Lloyd Geering – suggesting that the word ‘new’ was essential to win a prize, and the words ‘New Zealand’ the most compelling. (In 2003 I saw three books with ‘New Zealand’ in their titles win nonfiction awards.)

Fiction and poetry got a foot in the door in 1971 with Margaret Orbell’s anthology Contemporary Māori Writing (second prize). C.K. Stead got third place the next year with Smith’s Dream, and 1973 was all fiction: Shadbolt, Frame, and Ihimaera, for his debut story collection Pounamu, Pounamu. Ihimaera won the following year for Tangi, the only fiction title to be awarded a prize, and the following year returned to all nonfiction.

Perhaps this is why, in 1976, the national awards split into two rival camps: the all-nonfiction GFWs and the more anarchic New Zealand Book Awards, which that first year gave out one nonfiction prize – to a book not in GFW’s top three – as well as two to poets (Stead, Louis Johnson) and two to fiction writers (Gee, O.E. Middleton). On the two awards ran for several years, without any titles in common. In 1978 the GFW gave third prize to a novel (O’Sullivan) but the NZBA fiction prize went to a novel by M.K. Joseph.

Occasionally the two awards agreed – in 1979 (Plumb by Maurice Gee); 1981 (The Lovelock Version by Maurice Shadbolt); 1982 (The South Island of New Zealand from the Road by Robin Morrison) and 1984 (An Angel at My Table by Janet Frame). Because, I suppose, of rules and submission deadlines, Sue McCauley’s Other Halves managed to win at the GFWs and the NZBA in different years (1981 and 1982), as did Janet Frame with The Envoy from Mirror City (1985 and 1986) and Patricia Grace with Potiki (1986 and 1987).

On the two awards rivers flowed, rarely crossing, even when Montana took over from GFW in 1994 and put an end to its gold, bronze and silver medals. Instead it had three categories: Fiction, Poetry and Nonfiction, just like the NZBA – except the latter had added Book Production in 1981, possibly to make sure books with ‘New Zealand’ in their titles continued winning something. (I counted them: there are ten.) Then, in 1996, the awards proliferated (see above), along with the giant bottles of wine.

In the NZ Post Years, some things continued: the fancy-ish dinners, the ‘big’ prize for a book which had won in another category, People’s Choice. In 2012 I spent hundreds of dollars on tickets to attend the event at Auckland Museum with four members of my family (two of them in rented tuxes): Rangatira won the fiction prize. My mother, who had cancer, was too sick to come. (‘Remember,’ she said to me that afternoon, ‘that even if you don’t win, we’ll all know you were really the best.’)

The NZ Post years ended too soon, and so abruptly that there were no awards in 2015. This is the year I moved back to New Zealand: my mother had died, and my father was in the last two years of his life. I needed to be home. I didn’t need to be on the NZ Book Awards Trust, but there I was, on the Book Awards Trust. By 2016 a generous new funder, Mark Todd of Ockham Residential, had stepped in to make national book awards possible again. In that first year of the ‘Ockhams era’, the event was open to the public rather than held at an exclusive ticketed dinner, and run in conjunction with the Auckland Writers Festival. That first year it was held in Auckland Town Hall, which some people complained made it feel like a school prizegiving. (I don’t know what kind of schools they went to. I went to Rutherford High School in Te Atatu.) It wasn’t black tie, though Chris Tse did wear black feathers. Since then the awards are usually held in the Aotea Centre, unless they are online (Covid) or in Q Theatre (post-Covid). Last year about 600 people attended, which means Q Theatre is too small and the Kiri te Kanawa Theatre in the Aotea Centre is too big. Most of these attendees are members of the public who buy tickets and I salute them. It’s easier to denigrate the relative smallness of our awards ceremony, especially if you have never attended a scholarly talk at a university or given a reading in a library, than to support and join in.

Because of my five years on the NZ Book Awards Trust, I know certain things about the ‘Ockhams era’. One is that the show worked best when it was ‘called’ by Jonathan Alver. Another is that Jonathan’s suggestion of a disco ball, enthusiastically supported by me, was transformational. It made such a difference to the lights show that one writer was heard grumbling, on the way out, that the awards had gone ‘too Hollywood’. Another thing I know: for four years, the flower arrangement on stage was harakeke, woven by Hazel Grace – my teacher at Te Wananga – because even after a year of study I am not that good a weaver. The flowers this year will be fresh because too much carting-around of the harakeke arrangement has made it lopsided.

I know how much depends on funders like Ockham Residential, and like the late Jann Medlicott, introduced via the Acorn Foundation, who gave enough money to fund a prize for her passion, fiction, in perpetuity. It’s been suggested that this money should be divided up among all the categories to be more ‘fair’ – but it can’t be. Jann donated it for the fiction prize only. Other donors have stepped up, like Mary and Peter Biggs, who fund the Poetry prize, and Booksellers Aotearoa, which funds the Illustrated Non-Fiction prize. Someone else is needed to step up for General Non-Fiction, currently without a donor. Our awards for best first books have long histories: the Hubert Church Memorial Prize, now for fiction, was established in 1945. The Jessie Mackay Prize, given to poetry, was set up in 1939. (In 1951, the year she turned 27, Janet Frame won the Hubert Church for The Lagoon and Other Stories.) These prizes did not shimmer into being in some golden age of literary support: PEN New Zealand, now the NZSA, raised the initial funds to launch a prize in Mackay’s name, and used a bequest from Church’s widow for his prize. They’re now supported by the Mātātuhi Foundation – an initiative driven by Anne O’Brien when she was director of the Auckland Writers Festival. I am a board member, and will be handing out the cheques to best-first-book winners at the Ockhams tonight.

For the last four of my five years on the New Zealand Book Awards Trust, my chief job was identifying and securing judges for each of the panels. I read, recently, that the Ockham judges are ‘volunteers’, a literary version of a Brown Owl or Akela, mucking in to help for the good of the community. This is not true. Each year we wanted a range of backgrounds and experience, so no panel of judges was all one thing – all writers, all scholars, all curators, all booksellers, say. We wanted geographic diversity, so no more than one judge in any given category was from Wellington or Auckland. I wanted at least one Māori judge in every category.

All of this was difficult to achieve, and usually took me two months of emailing, flattering, cajoling, fibbing and guilt-tripping. In my first year of recruiting judges, I tried the Brown Owl approach, i.e. ‘service to the literary community’, but this wasn’t particularly successful. Often someone I saw as an ideal judge was too busy – writing, working, travelling, living, dying – and some of them fobbed me off, year after year, promising that they would have more time in the future. Often prospective judges had too many conflicts of interest: they had served as editors, advisors, mentors, first readers or manuscript assessors. They had contributed to a book in contention. They were best friends with people who were publishing that year; they were ex-wives or ex-husbands going through bitter break-ups with authors in contention. Some walked away because of feuds, usually with other prospective judges.

The Trust suggested an open call for judges in addition to the usual method, but we were hardly bombarded, or even pelted, with candidates. I followed up with one person who self-nominated, sending them the judging timeline, but they had a change of heart because they decided that the judging fee – advertised in the open call – was not enough. I left the Book Awards Trust at the end of my five years of service and someone else took over the fibbing and cajoling, the trawling for names, the seeking of recommendations. Although I wasn’t happy to see two Wellington judges on the Gang of Three fiction panel this year, I understood: it is hard to find people willing and able to do the work. Even if I disagree with their decisions, which I often do, I know the judges have been serious and thoughtful in their approach to the process. I was a judge for an Australian award a few years ago, and know how many hours you spend reading, discussing, arguing, considering. (We were dealing with 180 books overall and an incredibly strong top 20.) Our national book awards are not a lottery. They are sometimes – usually – contentious, but they are not random.

They’re also both important and unimportant. Writers like winning prizes even if they don’t ‘need’ the money because book prizes are seen as recognition, for better or worse, of your talent and your creative practice. This means that every year one ego will be flattered and others will be flattened, just as they are by reviews and book sales and invitations and commissions. And if you win, someone will be there to tell you that you got the award simply because it was your turn, and that the whole thing is just a lottery.

For those of us who need the money, prizes are windfalls: we cry when we get them, we cry when we don’t get them. Winning prizes or getting grants can make a huge difference to our lives. I have wept over various letters, emails, phone calls. I have felt defeated and overlooked and depressed. Often my own creative work is sidelined so I can earn money to pay bills. I don’t own the place where I live and probably never will. There is no Utopian future in New Zealand for artists holding out for generous patronage from the state or private sector, because we’re not that kind of country. I don’t know where that kind of country exists. Certainly in the US, which has much vaster sums from non-government funders to dispense in prizes and grants, the majority of writers I knew had day jobs. Toni Morrison had a day job. She probably needed health insurance.

Writers who despise the whole circus of book awards should ask their publishers not to submit their books. It’s not mandatory to enter a book for an award, or to have social media accounts, or to appear at festivals. Some writers don’t want any part of it and they’ll accept the consequences, which may be lower sales and/or obscurity. All of us writers must write the thing we absolutely want to write, to the best of our ability, and accept the consequences. Some of us will sell more books than others. Some of us will win more awards. Some of us will take a long time to publish. Barbara Anderson turned 63 the year she published her first book, a story collection. She won a GFW award – first prize! – in 1992 for her third book, the novel Portrait of the Artist’s Wife, but she won nothing that year at the NZBA. One set of judges loved her; the other set did not.

In my past lives, I attended other awards ceremonies, including the Booker Prize twice and the Grammys three times. Most of the Grammy Awards aren’t televised because there are dozens and dozens and dozens of them. The first time I went, the awards were held in Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, and we had to arrive at two in the afternoon. A few hundred of us sat wherever we wanted; some people milled around in the side aisles, waiting for their category to be called. Most people there were record company staff, like me, or artists – pop, rock, rap, classical, jazz, gospel, Latin, world music, reggae, polka. Hours later the televised ceremony would begin and I would have to sit much higher up in the auditorium and much further back, watching a distant Bruce Springsteen or Sheryl Crow perform, in a seat that cost my employer US$750. But in that smaller afternoon ceremony Sheryl Crow was one of the people hanging out in the aisle, waiting – hoping – to hear her name called.

Back then I hadn’t written anything in years; I was five years away from getting a short story published, seven years away from publishing a novel. I had no idea that some day I’d be one of the nervous, excited, dread-ravaged people at an awards ceremony, trying to look nonchalant. I had no idea that awards would come to mean something personal rather than purely professional, that I would exchange a well-paid, stupid life for something poorly paid but vital to my happiness. Sometimes, in my darker moments, I wish I had stayed in a job that kept me in the shadows of the auditorium rather than stepping into a disco-ball spotlight, where my need and disappointment and illusions are all too visible. But a writer’s life and work are all about trying and failing, venturing forth, retrenching. Sometimes book awards recognise what we’ve achieved and sometimes they overlook us. They say what all awards for art forms say: that making art is important and skilled artists should be celebrated. In New Zealand it’s the rare time we’ll see TV cameras at a book-related event, waiting to interview writers. The disco ball will spin and we’ll be seen and, however briefly, heard.

Ockham NZ Book Awards: Poetry Round Table 2024

The finalists in the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry are Talia by Isla Huia, At the Point of Seeing by Megan Kitching, Root Leaf Flower Fruit by Bill Nelson, and Chinese Fish by Grace Yee. Nelson’s book is his second; the other collections in this list are all debuts.

Erik Kennedy, convenor of this year’s poetry judges at the Ockham NZ Book Awards, says the finalists’ books ‘blur genres and disrupt preconceptions of poetic form, they re-vision landscapes and histories, and they deploy languages other than English in distinct ways that encourage multiplicity.’

Talia by Isla Huia (Te Āti Haunui a-Pāpārangi, Uenuku) is a tribute to the poet’s late friend, the artist Natalia Saegusa. ‘Natalia’s artwork graces the cover and reflections on her passage from friend to ancestor reappear throughout the book, ‘ writes Erena Shingade on Reading Room. ‘The voice of the poet is clear-eyed and thoughtful as the text explores belonging and loss.’ 

Linda Collins, reviewing At the Point of Seeing for the Aotearoa NZ Review of Books, praises Megan Kitching’s ‘tenderly written, quietly powerful debut collection’ for its ‘contrast, wordplay, rhythm, and variations in form’ and exploration of ‘the complex inter-relationships between the environment and people’. 

Bill Nelson’s verse novel Root Leaf Flower Fruit ‘draws us deep into the heart of experience,’ Paula Green writes on NZ Poetry Shelf, ‘ fracturing and continuous, observational and reflective, imagined and lived, so utterly refreshing the page of being human.’

Chinese Fish by Grace Yee is also a verse novel: it won both the poetry prize and Victorian Prize for Literature at this year’s Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. Chinese Fish explores the lives of various generations of a Hong Kong family who emigrate to Aotearoa New Zealand. The VPLA judges praised the way Yee ‘switches between lyric, dramatic and documentary poetic form’ and ‘tells this story with sparkling humour, wit and stylistic verve’. 

This virtual conversation took place in late April and early May, with Grace in Melbourne, Isla in Ōtautahi / Christchurch, Megan in Ōtepoti / Dunedin, and Bill in Te Whanganui-a-tara / Wellington. Paula Morris (in Tāmaki Makaurau / Auckland) asked occasional questions.

 

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Paula: Three of you are shortlisted for your debut collections. For each of you, does your book represent the culmination of a long period of work? Where does it fit with what you’ve written (and/or published, possibly in another genre) before?

Grace: I wrote the first draft of the book for my creative writing PhD about settler Chinese women’s storytelling in Aotearoa, so the poems were very much inspired by the critical research. It took maybe 12–18 months to complete the first draft. After I graduated in 2016, I didn’t seriously consider submitting the manuscript anywhere. Because it’s so experimental and eclectic, I assumed that no publisher would be interested, so I let it sit for a while. 

Then in 2020 I applied for the Peter Steele Poetry Award, and that motivated me to re-work the manuscript over a few months. But in the years the story sat in the top drawer I was still thinking about it – the characters, the histories: they all simmered on the backburner. When the time came to put pen to paper again, I found I had a pretty good sense of how it needed to evolve, how it could be cut and sharpened and rearranged. I feel like I held and nurtured Chinese Fish for a long time, even though not all of that time was spent actively working on it. Since 2019 I’ve been working on my second collection, which is inspired by the histories of settler Chinese in Australia, so the research and drafting of these poems informed my revisions of Chinese Fish.  

Bill: I started working on Root Leaf Flower Fruit in about 2017 after I had an accident that resulted in a bad concussion. I wanted to write about the weirdness of the whole experience, but it was a really difficult thing to get into and it took me a long time to find the right way to approach it. There were several false starts, and a classic lyric poem or two that did a reasonable job but didn’t quite go deep enough. To be honest though, even when I sent it off to the publisher I was still sceptical that it was even readable let alone something that would end up being published. 

But also, I’m stoked that there are three debut collections here! That’s incredible and amazing that you’ve all written such accomplished material on your first go! My debut book was both naive and too wise, too overworked and too loose, too scary and a bit safe all at the same time. It was good to get that out of the way. Also, I’ve noticed people who do creative writing PhDs always write amazing books out of it. I really hope creative writing PhDs keep going as long as possible.

Megan: Yes, it’s a lovely surprise to see so many debuts on the list. I’m honoured to be in the company of all of you! My collection is a culmination in retrospect, in that I didn’t set out to write a book. I started working more seriously on poetry when I moved back to Dunedin in 2017. Most of the poems in At the Point of Seeing were written from 2020 on. It took time to build up a body of work, and—to be honest—to find the confidence to believe that publishing a collection was possible. I’d published a little academic writing, and there are some echoes of that in my poetry. What I’ve read in other fields and genres has definitely been the biggest nourishment for my creative work.

Isla: Talia is absolutely a culmination of a long period of work, because like Megan, I never set out to write a book. I collected poems and snippets of ideas and thoughts across the span of around a decade, including some poems that I used in spoken word competitions and wrote for different journals and events, and then in the end, those old pieces became a really large part of what makes up the book. 

At the same time though, the connection with my publishers and the offer of publication came at a time when I was using writing as a means by which to process the death of my dearest friend (the book’s namesake), and so the other crucial element of the book is that particular selection of poems, and that underlying kaupapa (which now feels like the backbone of the book). I had only a few months between meeting the publishers and the manuscript deadline date, and so Talia feels like a very equal mixture of old work re-edited and re-ignited, and very new, quickly written work that speaks so clearly to what was happening in the year I wrote it and who I was.

Grace: I think experiencing the death of someone close can sometimes bring elements of your work into sharp relief. In 2021 my father passed away suddenly while I was revising Chinese Fish to submit to publishers, and the manuscript for months afterwards felt like a whetstone for all the grief I was processing. My long-term memories of him became so much clearer, and I ended up incorporating some of the details from those memories into the book. I recall sitting at my laptop revising poems and sobbing! It was a strange time – very painful yet productive. 

Paula: Would you all talk about your approach to form in your work, and how you decide on or arrive at a form that suits a particular poem or sequence?

Megan: I love form! It’s one of the great drivers of my love of poetry – the possibilities are so exciting, and it’s such a beautiful tight-rope walk balancing those wide-open options with constraints. My feeling for form is quite physical, as if I’m making something with my hands. 

Buckminster Fuller has a term I like to borrow when thinking about poetic form: ‘tensegrity’, a portmanteau of ‘tensional’ and ‘integrity’. There needs to be some tension in the lines or shape of the poem that’s holding it together with just the right amount of pressure or lightness that it stays true to its subject or heart. That’s the ‘integrity’ part, which for me means that the form shouldn’t distort or overwhelm what the poem is really getting at.

I’m naturally drawn to more regular forms, so I tend to edit back towards whatever shape a poem is taking, no matter how loose the first attempts might be. Sometimes I decide in advance what I think will suit the poem best but more usually it comes out of the process of drafting and playing around on the page and screen. 

‘Herb Robert Sonnet’, just as an example, wasn’t originally in that form, but the plant and its folklore had so much energy that I wanted the challenge of trying to wrangle all that into 14 lines. There’s so much craft that goes into the more established forms like sonnets. That’s exciting but daunting to me—to have to think so hard about each word, weigh each element.

Of course, I look a lot at what other poets are doing, often as a way of pushing myself to try something new. There’s so much fresh and experimental work out there that I admire, but that feels very much beyond me at the moment. I do try to vary the shapes and forms I use. It’s a learning process, and extremely fun.

Grace: I find that decisions about form usually involve a lot of play and experimentation, and are not only intimately tied to content, but voice and scene or situation. In Chinese Fish, the different narrators’ poems take on different forms – for example, the narrow poems portray the Chinese woman character Ping’s habit of self-minimising in public spaces, and the italics emphasise the significance that it’s remarkable that she gets to speak at all; Cherry’s intrusions into the omniscient narrative are protected with well-spaced brackets; and there are numerous conversation poems set out as dialogues. 

In other standalone poems, I do still find the main deciding factors are voice and pace and rhythm: reading drafts out loud helps me to figure out where the line breaks and pauses go – if there are any. I work with traditional forms only very occasionally, and then often only using them as scaffolds in early drafts. I find that the form of a poem needs to evolve organically.

Isla: I’d say I’m a bit like you, Grace, in that the form of my poems definitely seems to develop somewhat organically. Although I want my poems to be multifaceted in how they’re interpreted by the reader, there’s definitely an element of wanting to help the reader navigate and understand the piece through the form as well. It feels like I’m giving them little hints: pause here, stop here, etc.  

Sometimes I find that I can’t even explain why I’ve chosen a particular layout, other than that it feels like the only natural way for the poem to be put out into the world. In saying that though, I definitely resonate with Megan too, in that I’m constantly inspired by the way different writers play with form and that definitely influences me to try to be a little more experimental as well. 

Bill: It’s never quite the same twice, but I’d say in general the form is possibly the most important thing for me and it’s one of the exciting things about writing poetry instead of prose. I find the form often drives the rhythm, the voice and the visual tone of the poem, and like the others said, happens organically. It rarely arrives from the first line, although sometimes after a couple of stanzas it seems pretty locked in. For some reason I often end up writing in four line stanzas and I don’t really know why. I certainly find myself resisting that urge. And then eventually the poem wins out and I give in.

Paula: Poetry – like all art – has the ability to provoke, confront and unsettle. As you know, a political party here has led an attack on a poem and its writer, leading to abuse on social media, threats to the writer and (unsuccessful) complaints to the Media Council. What do you see as subversive and/or unsettling in your own work?

Bill: Firstly, my heart goes out to anyone who has to deal with that kind of vitriol. It makes me sad that excellent poetry about an important issue is used for political mis-information. That sucks. 

As for my own book, I don’t think it’s very politically subversive, although some people might find parts of it challenging. One reader said it was a ‘commentary on the ways in which Pākehā reach for connection to place and people but sometimes miss’. Which I love but wasn’t something I was consciously doing. I do like to mess with expectations of what a poem is, or can be, although I tend to think of that as a bit of fun more than anything subversive.

Megan: Bill, I also love that commentary on Root Leaf Flower Fruit – it’s very much what I felt too as a Pākehā reader of the book. I don’t think my work is subversive in a political sense, either. At least, like Bill, I don’t consciously set out to provoke or challenge readers. I was intrigued that the Ockhams shortlist blurb for my book mentions ‘difficult social and political questions’, and it’s true that issues like climate change, environmental degradation and colonisation are present in many poems. It’s also true that there are more brilliant, outspoken poets out there tackling these questions full on. I think that, if my work is unsettling, it’s probably in a quieter way.

Bill: Yes. I feel the same way about others addressing any particular issue better than me. One thing I was thinking about while answering this question is that, whether someone is challenged or even provoked by something is completely dependent on them. One person’s conservative viewpoint is another’s extreme position. It’s hard to predict how anyone will take your work.

Grace: I don’t see my book as unsettling or subversive – at least I didn’t intend it to be. I didn’t self-censor the writing much, though. I didn’t think Chinese Fish would be published, felt I had nothing to lose, so wrote it very much for myself. The book has been variously described to me as ‘confronting’, ‘triggering’, and ‘provocative’ (among other things), and some readers have felt ‘unsettled’ by what they perceive as the characters’ ‘unsafe’ lives (!) These comments have come from readers across the board: from the white mainstream, as well as diverse ‘minorities’. 

But I think ‘unsettling’ is a good thing for poetry – or any writing – to be; it means it’s had an impact. One of my favourite reviews is a conversation about Chinese Fish by two white men – both poets, who talked about how and why they were so unsettled by the book, how they saw parts of it as a mirror. I admire that they had the courage to reflect on themselves and articulate their vulnerabilities on the page. ‘Unsettling’ is good!

Isla: Knowing the author you’re talking about, Paula, and listening to her personal experience, has been both a scary reminder to me of the backlash that can come from people who feel like your work is targeting them unjustly, and a beautiful reminder of why we have to say what must be said regardless. I see my work as unsettling in the sense that I like to write in a way where the bones are bare, and I often find that the kaupapa I’m compelled to write about most often are those that have the ability to create discomfort. 

I feel courageous enough to write these things down, to publish them and to share them; but I do find myself censoring my choice of poems when it comes to reading aloud at events. The lack of fear I have about putting pen to paper and talking about colonisation, or mental health, or death – that doesn’t always translate into being brave enough to make my audience uncomfortable, even if I believe it’s important for them to feel those things. 

Paula: A final question. If you had to choose one poem from your book that you’d like someone to read (someone coming fresh to your work, knowing nothing about it), what would that poem be and why? And if you could ask that person to read a poem by another writer you admire, which poem and which writer?

Megan: This is a tricky question! From At the Point of Seeing, I’d pick ‘A Bee Against a Window’, because I think it manages to get close enough to its subject to capture the character and perhaps even some of the lifeworld of a non-human being. It’s also a poem about the persistence of nature. Then I’d urge them to read Sue Wootton’s spectacular ‘Ōwheo’, which is a beautiful, skilful, living evocation of an entire river ecosystem – a paean to place that reminds us of our connections to the earth and waters.

 Bill: I love the extreme closeup scrutiny in that poem, Megan. It’s the little things that often draw me in to poems and your poem does that so well. My book is a verse novel, so obviously you have to read the whole thing from start to finish. But if you were short on time I’d recommend the first few pages, or the part where the main character has to  figure out how to jumpstart a tractor. 

And a good poem after that would be ‘Date line’ by Morgan Bach. It’s so intensely written it feels like it’s burned into the page. 

Grace: Bill, I agree you do need to read your whole book from start to finish – I’ve read it and once I started, I couldn’t put it down, you get caught up in the rip of the story! I read it so fast, I will need to read it again, more slowly. My book is also a verse novel, and I don’t think I could extract one poem from it. Perhaps the short sequence of post-wedding poems on pp 102–3, because these three brief poems juxtapose many of the story’s multiple voices and portray many of the book’s themes and tensions – mother-daughter, pressures to assimilate, orientalist attitudes – yet ends on a ‘triumphant’ note in the voice of one of the female protagonists. 

I don’t think I could recommend one poem by another poet. What I enjoy most is reading poems as parts of narratives – i.e., verse novels, or cohesive collections. I highly recommend Bhanu Kapil’s Incubation: A Space for Monsters, which is about a woman who hitchhikes across America. Anything by Bhanu Kapil is brilliant and utterly captivating.

Isla: Probably ‘Karakia’ –  simply because it covers so many of the kaupapa that exist throughout the book, but all at once. I think that of all of the poems in Talia, it represents the book as a whole the best, and also represents me as a writer most accurately and honestly. 

I would urge anyone who hasn’t already done so to delve into Hone Tūwhare’s work. His writing has been so formative for me as a kaituhi Māori, and for Aotearoa as a whole in regards to our collective ability to be a good audience, and good listeners, to Māori voices. My favourite poem of his – and of all time – is Haiku (1): 

 

Stop your snivelling creek bed,

Come rain, hail and floodwater,

Laugh again.

 

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The Ockham NZ Book Awards take place on Wednesday 15 May in the Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre, Aotea Centre, Auckland. The event starts at 7 PM. You can buy tickets here or watch a livestream of the ceremony on YouTube.

Ockham NZ Book Awards: Fiction Round Table 2024

This year’s finalists for the $65,000 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction are novelists Pip Adam (Audition), Eleanor Catton (Birnam Wood), Stephen Daisley (A Better Place) and Emily Perkins (Lioness). Juliet Blyth, convenor of judges for the fiction panel, calls these books ‘four singular and accomplished’ novels that ‘encompass pertinent themes of social justice, violence, activism, capitalism, war, identity, [and] class.’

Audition, ‘a blend of space opera and social realism, is a fine example of Pip Adam’s ingenuity and imagination,’ Angelique Kasmara wrote in the Aotearoa NZ Review of Books, adding that ‘Adam’s world-building is its own precisely constructed and glorious reimagining of our universe.’

Dwight Garner in The New York Times describes Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood as ‘a big book, a sophisticated page-turner, that does something improbable: It filters anarchist, monkey-wrenching environmental politics, a generational (anti-baby boomer) cri de coeur and a downhill-racing plot through a Stoppardian sense of humour.’

In A Better Place, set during World War II and its aftermath, Stephen Daisley ‘writes fiction with the economy and clarity of a poet and with deep empathy for the impact of violence,’ contends The Age. The novel ‘contrasts brisk and often confronting accounts of military action and experience during wartime with elegy for a personal aftermath ghosted by trauma and loss.’

Lioness by Emily Perkins explores ‘femininity, wealth, inequality, pretence, seduction and family,’ writes Josie Shapiro in Kete. Perkins’ fifth novel about a family with a ‘Succession-like sensibility’ is a work of ‘powerful insight which lures readers into a beguiling tale of a woman unravelling.’

This conversation took place in April and early May 2024, with Paula Morris contributing occasional questions. Sadly, Stephen Daisley was not able to join us, but we all look forward to celebrating his work at the Ockham NZ Book Awards ceremony on Wednesday 15 May.

 

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Paula: Welcome to our 2024 round table. All four nominees are past winners at various iterations of your national book awards — Emily in 2009 for Novel About My Wife; Ellie in 2014 for The Luminaries; Stephen in 2016 for Coming Rain; and Pip in 2018 for The New Animals. In what ways has your fiction changed and developed in recent years?

Pip: I think there are elements of Audition that the writer I was in 2018 would think were an incredible step backwards. I value things today that then I would have thought were ‘bad writing’. I think Audition is louder about its politics than The New Animals was. I used to worship ambiguity and now, as things become more desperate politically, I think I say a lot more things straight when in the past I might have hinted at them.

I often say that with The New Animals all I really wanted to do was write that last third, but I felt like I needed to earn it with a more conventional ‘plot’ in the first two thirds — this book is a loosening of that constraint. I often think Audition was written largely ‘out of sight’. I felt like I was writing a book that would never be published and I think this gave me certain freedoms to challenge things I thought about writing. It’s also a reflection of a change in ‘taste’. I feel like my taste had largely been formed by other people and it’s another thing I started challenging – this idea of what I’d been taught was ‘good writing’. I found this whole new world of writing that made me feel uncomfortable, off-kilter, horny, frightened and it made me realise there’s a narrative that’s written in and for the body. Audition represents the completion of my turn to a conversation with the messy, weird, often embarrassing vessels we live in.

Ellie: I found publishing a third novel to be unexpectedly self-revealing. I had always thought of The Rehearsal and The Luminaries as quite different books, but looking at them next to Birnam Wood, their differences suddenly seemed only like variations on a pattern that previously I hadn’t been able to see. I was quite surprised to realise that all three of my books share an interest in fictions, particularly in fictions of identity, and that all three involve narratives that are deliberately limited or incomplete.

I have always been fascinated by the problem of how to reconcile form and plot — I love them both! I want them both! — and although each book tackles that problem in a different way, Birnam Wood is unique in that I had a clear formal model in mind: Jane Austen’s Emma, which I’d adapted for film around the time that my first ideas for Birnam Wood were taking root. I had come to understand Jane Austen as the heir to Shakespearean comedy, and I wanted to see if I could imitate her perceptive, funny, deeply empathetic kind of satire, but in the service of a tragic, rather than a comedic, form.

I was also feeling increasingly concerned about the denaturing effects of social media, and I wanted to write a book that behaved anti-algorithmically: rather than flattering the reader, confirming them in the habits and beliefs they hold already, I wanted to deliver on the old-fashioned, emphatically temporal pleasures of tension, seduction, and surprise — to be entertaining, first and foremost, but also, to be a work of moral ambivalence and irony. My ambitions for my first two books were more specific to the books themselves. I just wanted to finish them, and I wanted them to work.

Emily: I feel like my fiction develops as I live more life — what I understand and appreciate about human experience keeps expanding, and hopefully this leads to more nuance, flexibility and depth in the work.

The technical game with Novel About My Wife was aligning the unreliable narrator with the unfolding plot. For Lioness this was a more subtle task. The tightrope I was walking felt a lot more delicate. It was important for me to remain in good faith with the characters — one of the things the book is about is complicity — and I wanted to keep turning over actions and implications, to feel like ‘we’re all in this together’ even as I was writing about a world in which many don’t share that view. So as the story unfolds and Therese’s voice begins to change, we’re inside her and outside her at the same time. I hope this allows for a kind of doubled or tripled readerly experience of the novel.

And Lioness probably also draws on the importance of bodily experience that I was exploring in The Forrests, and binds that more tightly to the story. Not that it’s any kind of fusion of my previous books — it’s very much its own thing — but when you start a novel, even if you feel stark naked you’re probably carrying tools you’ve developed before.

Paula: Pip talks about Audition as  ‘louder about its politics’. In what social and political worlds do your novels exist?

Pip: One of the things I find most compelling about science fiction and fantasy as a genre is their political potential. This is why I love your idea of ‘social and political worlds’. I wrote a story about a person in prison which was published in Everything We Hoped For. It was a realist story based on some of my own experience. In my head the protagonist was Pākeha, but I didn’t say that because I was still quite ignorant about my own whiteness and racism as a whole. Everything We Hoped For was adapted for radio, and this was the only story in the book that was read by a Māori actor. As you can imagine this made me think hard about the responsibilities I have as a writer. It made me realise that if I left an information gap in a ‘real’ setting it would be filled by the dominant narrative. In Aotearoa this means a colonial, white narrative. There are power structures and narratives I find very hard to escape when I write in a realistic way about this country or this planet. Don’t get me wrong, I think it can be done, very successfully, just not by me.

Also, I totally realise that setting something in another world doesn’t free you completely from dominant bigotry. But this is why my work has departed further and further from realism. The social political world of Audition is one I imagine evolved from a pre-Cambrian ancestor — the last iteration of life on this planet with no predation. I was keen to write a world with a different physics, ecology and biology because I believed this would make possible ways of thinking about crime and justice that aren’t available to us here. I thought a lot about Ursula Le Guin and Samuel Delany’s work, particularly one quote which speaks to the dominant idea that fiction must have conflict. LeGuin said, ‘Conflict is one kind of behaviour. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing. Change is the universal aspect of all these sources of story. Story is something moving, something happening, something or somebody changing.’

Ellie: I love this quote! And I loved the way in which Audition challenged my sense of what is imaginable and unimaginable, not only in terms of literary conventions, but also socially and politically. It’s interesting that when we say something is ‘unspeakable’, we’re usually talking about something shameful or horrific, and when we use the word ‘indescribable’, we’re usually talking about something beautiful or pleasurable; as I was reading Audition, it occurred to me that perhaps what we think of as ‘unimaginable’ depends on the degree to which we believe that people, or societies, are capable of change. After all, the first part of changing is believing that change is even possible: it’s an imaginative act before it’s a social or political one. Conflict, to follow Ursula Le Guin’s point, arises when we refuse to change, or believe ourselves to be incapable of it.

The role that fiction plays in all of that is complicated. Change is an inevitable fact of life, since none of us can stop time, reverse it, or slow it down; in a novel, though, time is eminently pliable, and all change, or lack of it, is engineered. As a novelist, you create cause and effect. You control mortality, dreams, coincidence, the weather, the population, along with every other aspect of the novel’s political and social reality; everything is imagined, and everything is imaginable. And yet you’ve also got a responsibility to speak to the real world, to address and entertain and satisfy a living, present-day reader, without whom your fiction can’t really be said to exist. Sometimes it makes sense to depict real-world injustice, because to deny it would be irresponsible, and sometimes it makes sense to refuse to depict injustice, because to do so would make the work complicit in that injustice, which would be irresponsible. Both stances can be legitimate and both can be contested; that’s the beauty and the puzzle of art.

With Birnam Wood, I had political reasons for having made certain artistic choices. Neither of the younger women in the book, Shelley or Mira, is described physically, to use one example; another is that the book begins with a natural disaster that turns out in fact to have been man-made. I believe that every artist should have good reasons for the choices that they make, should know the histories and legacies that go along with those choices, and should trust in the maturity and intelligence of the reader. But I also believe the social and political dimension of a novel depends far more on what it does than on what it depicts, and what it does, or doesn’t do, is something only the reader can judge. So my hopeful answer to ‘what social and political worlds does Birnam Wood inhabit?’ would be— ‘as many as possible, for as long as possible’.

Emily: These are such interesting answers! What you say about believing change is even possible, Ellie, was one of the things underpinning Lioness for me. I wanted to write about this social and political world that’s very recognisable, that has its rules and blind spots, and to hint at the way personal change might be a prerequisite, or a starting point, for social or political change. The story is also propelled by some of the reasons change doesn’t happen — in this case, internal obstacles to do with old hurts, comforts and rewards, deep urges running the show. Also maybe loneliness. I think a lot of writing is in some core way about loneliness. I like what first person narration combined with the presence of other voices can do to suggest the presence of a world beyond the characters.

I’m interested in the political playing out through humour. The world Lioness inhabits felt like it required the lightest possible touch — to play with how small a gesture can be, in fiction, to carry a political charge. (Sometimes very small indeed, I think.) It was a way of paying attention to how freighted and consequential our passing behaviours are, and to wonder, if she changes the way she responds to this, does it follow that she can change something more? I really like this thing a dramaturg told me: that a play can end on a character having a new thought. I’d add that it’s the task of the play or novel to get them to the point of being capable of that new thought — a thought they couldn’t have had at the start of the book. I wanted to allow for that possibility, even though the story is also exploring how change can be slow and hard and imperfect, and always incomplete.

(And just to that incompleteness: I became aware at some point in the drafting process that the novel had its influences in the 20^th century novels about women’s awakenings that I’d discovered as an adolescent in my mother’s bookshelves. The fact that similar problems were still around — and that my 22-year-old daughter could read a draft of Lioness and say, ‘this is some of the stuff my friends and I talk about’ — became part of the writing of it, too.)

Ellie: What you say about humour makes me think of a conversation I had recently with a woman, an actress, who was telling me about her experience living in a part of Berlin where none of her neighbours shared her political views. I asked her how she had managed to forge connections despite this lack of common ground, and she said, ‘Well, making fun of yourself helps.’ I was so impressed by that answer.

One of the details I loved in Lioness was how Heathcote put on a fake Irish accent whenever he was under pressure. I found it very funny and well-observed, but also positively enraging, to a degree that I started wondering, ‘Oh God, do I do a version of that, and that’s why I am finding this person so maddening? I hope I don’t. I’m pretty sure I don’t. But do I?’ Which maybe speaks to the doubled/tripled experience that you were talking about earlier — the sense in which that ‘new thought’ is occurring not just to the character but also, and sometimes just as changefully, to the reader.

Emily: I like that actress’s approach. Also the goal of forging connections despite political differences. And — I’m off topic now — but I completely get the thing of wondering, does that thing irritate me so much because I do it myself. To move this from self-awareness to an awareness of how you might be perceived by others (I guess there’s a Venn diagram here?) — I was talking to some writing students the other day and one of them was trying to figure out, to understand as if from the outside, what her voice was. How did she, as a writer, come across? Her next question was, should she be more this way or that way. The only thing I could suggest that I hoped might be useful was that she forget about trying. But I’d love to know whether you two would have different, better advice for her. Or whether you remember ever having a similar dilemma. (To be clear I think she was talking about how the person behind the work would be perceived, not the effect her work was having in its own right.)

Pip: I think the advice is good — forgetting about things that I’m labouring over is the only way for me to let some space in. I think I am often trying to manufacture some kind of self-forgetting or a way of getting out of myself (I think of this quite literally — sometimes I want to write with no brain and no personality — just a body). That being said, I might be tempted to use this forgetting as space so I can write and therefore get more information to bring back to the concern. So yeah, my process might be — worry, forget, write, worry more intentionally.

I think self-consciousness, shame, worrying about what others will think is one the most useful tools I have in my practice. I think this goes back to some fundamental misunderstandings I have as a reader around the relationship between the author and the narrative voice. That is, I feel like an author’s voice never fully disappears from a work or is never fully transformed completely from their real-world personhood — I have a bit of a failure of imagination in this regard. Often I experience books as the author telling me a story. I always have to think about things like ‘voice’ in a really systematic way — like these are the elements of voice, which dial is wound up and which is wound down. I do the same in real life interactions — what dials does the person I am speaking with have wound up, what is the correct position of my dials to respond appropriately? And this transfers to my writing.

I used to say I didn’t write with an audience in mind but I realise now that isn’t actually true. I’m often testing every word choice, tone, sentence in the same way I do in real-life conversations and I wonder if the aim is the same — to be seen as a decent person. I never feel like I disappear as the author, the book is an extension of me — the me that is typing this — rather than a product of me. I feel like every book is a plea, a demand, so yeah, I’m always thinking about how to make that appeal in a way that doesn’t see me expelled from the communities I cherish and am often trying to be in conversation with in my writing or in ways that make other members of the communities feel excluded.

I really think I have a responsibility in writing. I think writing fiction has real-world consequences, and I think worrying about how I come across, what judgements a reader might make about me through the work, is a safeguard against me doing harm. Although I do talk to other writers about this as a part of practice, I think it applies to me particularly because I often, now and in the past, do things and say things that do harm (often because I get my dials wrong). I know these ideas aren’t revolutionary, and I like the way we have moved away in the last ten or so years from the idea that fiction has no moral duty except to itself. I know also that this is not everyone’s experience or aim. I’m so interested in authorial voice in Birnam Wood and Lioness. Is the divide between narrative voice and your voice (and maybe personality?) something you think about?

I think about this particularly when it comes to humour (if I can circle back to that). Both of you have great senses of humour in yourselves. It’s something I love about talking to you both and it’s one of the things I really like in Lioness and Birnam Wood. I value sense of humour incredibly highly. If I was doing that morals ranking exercise during intimacy week on Married at First Sight it would probably be at the top (an aside — this is probably why I hate Jack and Jono and love Lauren). I feel that sense of humour is so personal, and I wonder if it’s possible to write in a voice that has a different sense of humour to ours? I’m really interested in this with regard to what you were saying about the political potential of humour, Emily. There is this amazing book I read a few years back called That’s Not Funny: How the Right Makes Comedy Work for Them and it made me think if it would be possible for me to write a gag I didn’t find funny —  do I have the skills to do it and could I live with people thinking that was my sense of humour.

Ellie: I know what you mean about the author never really disappearing, but personally I don’t care that much about the author’s personality except insofar as it impacts their choices in the work. If I found out that a writer was racist or misogynistic I would probably give their books a miss, but I have read and loved plenty of books written by people whose values I don’t share. The way that a character’s voice can be heard alongside the authorial voice is also interesting to me; I guess I would say I’m more interested in the way those two voices interact than in the slippage between the narrative voice and the natural speaking voice of the writer.

I’m thinking of a novel like Mrs Bridge, one of my favourite books, in which the narrative invites you to take a perspective on Mrs Bridge while at the same time inhabiting her consciousness completely. (And then the sequel, Mr Bridge, makes that multiplicity even more acute.) If I had to describe what I think and feel about the author, Evan S. Connell, it would be pretty simple: gratitude for having written two great books, admiration for his skill, curiosity about how he pulled it off. I don’t have a sense of him as a person, really; only as a craftsman. I am sure he had anxieties about how he would be perceived through his work, as we all do, but I appreciate the fact that I don’t know what those anxieties were. His books wouldn’t have worked for me, I don’t think, if he had made his own self-consciousness my problem.

When I read narrative non-fiction, though, or novels where the author is a character in some way, I often feel the opposite: I want those books to explore the author’s anxieties and fears, and a lack of self-awareness in those contexts sometimes feels like a cop-out. So I don’t really have an answer for your student, Emily, except to say that my strategy has always been to prioritise the reader’s experience of reading my books above my experience of writing them. The trouble with worrying about how you’re going to be perceived is that the reader is never going to share that anxiety with you to the same extent or in the same way. So you risk losing sight of where they’re at: you’re looking in the mirror when you should have been noticing what they wanted, what they needed, what they expected, what they feared.

There’s also the interesting case of characters who have things in common with the author. I’m always conscious of the fact that characters who are of a similar age, gender and ethnicity as me are going to be automatically identified with me by many readers, and that can feel uncomfortable at times. In one of Mira’s sections in Birnam Wood, she is described as secretly preferring the company of men. This was true to my understanding of her psychology, and I was happy with the passage when I wrote it, but for months, every time I re-read it, I had the same worry: that people would assume this trait was also true of me. (It isn’t, but that’s sort of beside the point — I was afraid that people might think it was.) I actually came quite close to taking the passage out, but then told myself very sternly that I was being a coward, which (ironically? or self-fulfillingly?) is of course exactly what Mira would have done.

Emily: Ha, perhaps there’s no escape. It’s funny that this is the stuff that gives us pause, that we worry people might think we’re telling on ourselves, when as a reader it’s exactly what makes me feel in closer sympathy with characters: their secret flaws. I really like that Birnam Wood tells us this about Mira, and I suppose as I read I register, oh cool, Ellie knows that this is a thing in the world, rather than presuming it’s your preference for male company. I guess there’s a clear, if often subjective, distinction between writing that’s intentional and illuminating, and writing that’s unintentionally self-revealing or gives us that queasy feeling of ‘reading against the book’.

Back to your example, Ellie, I like too the implication that Mira knows this thing about herself and suppresses this knowledge. It reminds me of the incredible scene with Shelley at the safe house after [no spoilers]. I loved her flickering dread — this kind of fluctuating awareness that makes a character feel thrillingly alive to me. Like some of Torren’s most ashamed or unresolved feelings in Audition, Pip, which really pierced me. Her dilemma is awful, and her feelings come from inside it. These are the things that stay with me after a story is over. And just to say my experience of you both is as incredibly moral writers and people!

Somehow related — I’ve just finished watching Steven Zaillian’s Ripley adaptation on Netflix, which I loved, and I really enjoyed what you’ve written about this for The Spinoff, Pip, because I also became obsessed with the degree to which it was about work. And I felt closest to Ripley when he was having to get rid of a body. Objectively it’s a terrible thing to do — but the fact of the task, and his responsibility for it, leapt across the actual content of what he was doing and into my fellow experience of what it’s like to have to clean up an awful mess, even one of your own making. (Also because these are scenes of utmost concentration, and that’s always compelling.)

I’m not saying that creating closeness — or relatability, or empathy —is the sole goal of fiction. But these moments of sympathy, when it feels like you’re being permeated by the book, are a huge part of what I read for. They do the work of carrying everything else. And back to the business of being perceived, generally I feel like I write from a place of such imperfection I could never clean it all up, which probably makes me feel both closer to Tom Ripley and further away.

Pip, to your question, is the divide between narrative voice and your voice (and maybe personality?) something you think about? I think narrative voice comes out of the set of fictional conditions, and that these include more constraints in fiction than in blobby, amorphous life. But it also drives the conditions and it’s impossible for me to separate those actions of generating and responding. I do love first person for this reason — the characterisation of voice — it becomes like another body I can climb into to tell the story (to continue this unfortunate serial killer analogy I seem to be drawn to). I hardly ever read my old work, but if I do, it can be the voice that surprises me. Who’s that? Where do they come from? And there are certain places in the fiction where it’s closer to me as I live off the page. The bad jokes especially.

Ellie: Oh man! The self-knowledge we suppress, the way we feel about our feelings, the way we think about our thoughts — this is my absolute favourite territory in fiction. And in life, for that matter. I haven’t seen the Ripley adaptation yet, but I know the thrilling intimacy you describe: by focusing on a task that simply must be carried out, a story can feel as though it’s trying to suppress its own subconscious, as we all sometimes fixate on tasks or rote procedures when we are trying to avoid confronting something emotionally difficult.

For ages I had David Mamet’s three dramatic questions pinned above my desk: Who wants what? What happens if they don’t get it? Why now? Ripley disposing of a body meets these criteria perfectly. What does he want? To get rid of a body! What happens if he doesn’t get it? He gets caught! Why now? Because the guy’s already dead, already decomposing, and people are going to start looking for him soon, and Ripley’s already on the run! All the other questions — why did he do it? How does he feel about having done it? How does he justify it to himself? — are driven underground and in a sense enriched. Tackling my own body-disposal problem in Birnam Wood, I found Val McDermid’s book Forensics fascinating and very useful. But now we sound a bit like serial killers comparing notes…

Paula: This morning I heard the awful news of Vincent O’Sullivan’s death. He’s a writer so many of us admire, and he was also a mentor and teacher of great perception and wisdom. (He was my mentor-in-chief for the ANZL.) In his ANZL interview with Majella Cullinane he talked about the notion of influence, saying: ‘I think the authors we most admire may not be the ones that most obviously influence us, because they may be the ones we take the most care not to sound like.’

There are some writers who are important in our writing lives even if they’re not a direct stylistic influence. I love reading Salman Rushdie’s work, for example, and Midnight’s Children changed the way I perceived and imagined the world around me, but I don’t know that I would seek to emulate his writing style. Who are the writers with whom you engage imaginatively and/or intellectually, but not necessarily stylistically?

Pip: It was extremely sad to lose Vincent O’Sullivan this week. As I was reflecting on his work, I realised the work of his that I’m most familiar with and that feels resonant in my life is his poetry and music. And I think in a way this responds to your question perhaps indirectly. I started as a poet. It was all I wanted to be — possibly I still would like to be a poet. But as someone said, ‘You can choose what you write but you can’t choose what you’re able to make sing’, and I am probably not a poet. I still write poetry, but it’s something I do for myself and not for anyone to read. So it’s poetry which immediately came to mind when you talked about work that engages me but I will never be able to emulate. I probably read more pages of poetry each year than pages of fiction.

I’m sure this work settles in me, and I’m sure some of its mood or rhythm ends up in my work but, yeah, I love reading for ‘no stated purpose’ except pleasure, if you know what I mean. I’m re-reading Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright at the moment, and I think maybe this is my Rushdie. I love the way the language in Wright’s book means I have to read it slowly. Line-by-line, not thinking about the other 700 pages. I also like that, because I’m not Waanyi, there are parts of this book I’ll never fully understand — they’re not for me, and I find it really tames my entitlement to every book written in English.

I think, as a Pākeha, it’s really important for me to read things where I’m the outsider. Not to learn or take but to de-centre the Pākeha parts of me. On a stylistic level, Praiseworthy is a book I could never write. Anytime I try to write like this it unravels. I think my mind is not made this way. But I love what this book does to my mind, so if my mind is being changed it must be affecting how I write. Wright’s work lengthens the playing field of what a novel can do — which is probably the greatest gift a novelist can give another novelist.

I guess I also am always thinking and reading Geoff Cochrane. I could never write like Geoff — although I think I am always writing about some of the same things that are in Geoff’s work — alcoholism, God, the body — and he is still a massive influence on me; he is just way more well-read and has a deeper understanding of literature and philosophy than I ever will. Geoff died in 2022 and last year his Selected Poems came out so, I think, this is going to be the first year without a Geoff Cochrane book since I started reading him and I feel that gap. I didn’t know Geoff well, but this loss is really acute for me. I have a photo of Geoff above my desk. He always helps me keep the faith. I think he might have hated that.

Emily: It’s hard to properly take in the fact that Vincent O’Sullivan is gone — and, as you say of Geoff Cochrane, Pip – hard to believe there won’t be any more work. It’s a major loss, and Paula, I’m so sorry you’ve lost him as a mentor.

I’m kind of thrilled though to hear that you started as a poet, Pip. I did not know this! It makes a lot of sense to me — the Beckettian aspects of your work have been noted, especially in Audition, and your use of language and rhythm is a huge part of what I go to your writing for. Can we have a book of your poems?

Otherwise, I find this a daunting question because I will say some names, then definitely remember five writers tomorrow who I’d want to talk about instead. The earliest ‘adult’ novels I remember reading were by Kurt Vonnegut and Iris Murdoch, and they each had a big effect on my imagination and thinking, and perhaps the utterly weird combination of those two authors almost has a third effect. I would never attempt to emulate Vonnegut, and I don’t return to his writing; I just know he was part of my waking up to the world. I don’t think the writers I do keep returning to belong to this answer, even poets and playwrights whose style is incredibly different from mine — I seek them out because I want their secret influence.

Ellie: I thought of Alexis Wright as well, for her incredible novel The Swan Book, and also Chigozie Obioma, whose debut The Fishermen I adored. I so admired the way those two books were powered and ensouled, without ever feeling as if their use of Aboriginal and Igbo philosophy was something that I could (or should) imitate. The interesting thing about influence, though, is how unpredictable and often subconscious it is. For me, negative influences are often just as powerful as positive ones. When a book bores me, I just stop reading. But when a book makes me feel angry or betrayed, I always get excited. What can I learn from what the author is failing or neglecting to do?

Emily, I once heard someone say that Iris Murdoch was rubbish at character names and that’s why her books are weirdly hard to remember — because however brilliant they are as novels, the people in them sort of fade away; their names just aren’t memorable enough. That isn’t really relevant to this question, I just thought it was interesting. (And true — I have read quite a few Iris Murdoch novels and can’t name a single character out of any of them.)

I would also like to pay tribute to Vincent O’Sullivan. Rest in peace.

Paula: One final question for this interesting conversation: once I attended some event in Scotland where the speaker said that all poets really want to become screenwriters and all screenwriters really want to become novelists. Novelists, he said, want to become poets. I don’t think any of that is true, and I’ve probably misrepresented it and forgotten what he really said, because it annoyed me so much at the time. Now we know that Pip no longer harbours ambitions in poetry, let me ask you all this: if you had the opportunity – and the talent — to do something wildly different from writing, what would it be?

Pip: The most impressive and important work of art I experienced last year was i.e. crazy’s album Country Justice. To call i.e. crazy a musician seems to only describe part of what they do. This album is a deeply researched argument and challenge presented in created and curated sounds that by-pass the ways we think on the day-to-day, and hits physically, emotionally and intelligently. I will never have the talent to do this, but I think sound is an incredibly powerful art.

Emily: Oh, agree. I’d love to be a singer. I mean, if I could sing. Or a visual artist — so many artists are an inspiration to me —- for Lioness I had Paula Rego images all over my writing room walls. Or I’d love to be a dancer — and this recent interview with the architect Tatiana Bilbao made me think about what a powerful profession that is. Are these things wildly different enough from writing to count? — not sure. When I was young I wanted to be an astronaut.  And Ellie, that could be true about Iris Murdoch and names — her books certainly are hard to distinguish from each other in memory —  though Charles Arrowby is a perfect name for that character… and I seem to remember a character in another book called Rain?? [TM note: Rain is a character in Murdoch’s book The Sandcastle]. Also — the appalling and unforgettable name of a location in The Sea, The Sea — I think it’s a country cottage — Niblets. Yuck! But brilliant.

Ellie: I stand corrected! This is a very respectable Murdoch memory haul!

I’d like to be a joiner and to have my own furniture workshop. I’d also love to be able to sew.

 

 

 

The Ockham NZ Book Awards take place on Wednesday 15 May in the Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre, Aotea Centre, Auckland. The event starts at 7 PM. You can buy tickets here.

Read tributes to the late Jann Medlicott, generous donor of this fiction prize, here.

 

Sir Vincent O’Sullivan : 1937 – 2024

 

From Kirsty Gunn in the U.K.:

The world turns, and since news of the death of Vincent O’Sullivan reached us here in the Northern Hemisphere, tributes and messages of love and memory and respect pour in from across the International Community of Mansfield scholars and writers.

From America, France, Germany, Eastern Europe and Italy and the UK, all those who knew Vincent or his work, the poems, the stories, the novels, the essays and reviews and scholarship …

From Scotland, the academics and writers Graeme and Angela Smith, arts magazine editor, Gail Low and members of the Dundee literary community and beyond … From those writing in from in St Andrews and Glasgow and Edinburgh where his work was known and read and admired …

And from Manchester, London, and from Oxford and Warwick and Manchester, from Michael Schmidt, the translator, from the professors, Peter McDonald and Elleke Boehmer and Peter Davidson, Richard McCabe, and Lyndall Gordon, Helen Small, and still more colleagues and friends across the Colleges of the dreaming spires…

From writer and Guardian journalist Catherine Taylor, translator and poet Michael Hulse of The Warwick Review; from BBC Broadcaster and cultural critic Laurence Scott and members of the Royal Literary Society and Royal Literary Fund, and from Mexico and Greece and France and the US, where fiction writers and publishers and teachers read  Vincent’s work and celebrate it …

The list goes on and the emails keep coming: ‘a legend’, ‘the massive sense of loss’, ‘bottomless’, ‘bereft’, ‘so, so very sad’ and  ‘how we will miss him’ …

As New Zealand goes to sleep the other side of the world wakes up to fresh mourning. ‘Vincent’s voice is in my head,’ writes Michael Hulse. He belonged here too.

Read Kirsty’s portrait of Vincent O’Sullivan here.

Read Majella Cullinane’s interview with him here.

The Interview: Vincent O’Sullivan

An Interview with Albert Wendt

Born in Apia in 1939, Maualaivao Albert Wendt is an iconic figure in Pacific and New Zealand literature, the author of novels, story collections, poetry collections, critical essays, creative nonfiction and plays, and also an accomplished visual artist. In An Indigenous Ocean, Damon Salesa describes Wendt as central to the ‘Pacific Way’ movement of the 60s and 70s, a group that included Te Rangihīroa Sir Peter Buck, ‘Okusitino Māhina, Grace Molisa, Tui Ātua Tupua Tamasese, Konai Helu Thaman and Futa Helu. Along with Epili Hau’ofa and his ‘sea of islands’, Wendt, Salesa argues, ‘was the first explicitly to re-envision the island Pacific as a “New Oceania”.’

Wendt was the first Samoan writer to publish a novel, and the first Pacific Islander to be appointed a Professor in University of Auckland’s English department. Since ‘the rise of Pacific Literature in late 1960s,’ Selina Tusitala Marsh has written, ‘little happened in the field that wasn’t connected to this writer, artist, anthologist, teacher, and scholar. Samoan by birth, Oceanic by nature, Albert has taught in Samoa, Fiji, New Zealand, and Hawai’i. Wave after wave of his creative and critical writings have washed up on the intellectual and artistic shores of Oceania for over five decades.  His writings have changed the way Oceanians think about themselves and how others think of Oceania.  In his wake, Albert has left generations of writer-scholars who have gone on to write, teach and make art throughout Melanesian, Micronesia and Polynesia, and in the global Pasifika diaspora.’

Pala Molisa’s mother studied with Wendt at the University of the South Pacific in Suva, Fiji, just after Wendt’s first novel, Sons for the Return Home, was published. In an essay about Wendt in Nine Lives, Molisa describes the writer in the mid-70s as ‘young, Samoan, fiery and free’, teaching his students to reject ‘colonial boxes by finding their own political voices and pursuing their revolutionary dreams.’

Since the early 1990s Wendt has been based in Auckland, although he’s spent long periods of time teaching, speaking and writing overseas; the four years at the University of Hawai’i he describes, in Out of the Vaipe, the Deadwater, as ‘some of the happiest and most productive years of my life.’ He lives in an old Ponsonby villa – home to Prime Minister Michael Joseph Savage in his trade union days – with partner Reina Whaitiri, with whom Wendt has edited several groundbreaking anthologies of Pacific poetry.

This interview – undertaken by his nephew, Todd Barrowclough – took place in this house, with its lush garden and broad veranda. It was commissioned to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Sons for the Return Home. An exploration of diasporic experience and familial conflict, and the relationship between a Samoan man and Papālagi woman, Sons was a publishing sensation and popular success. The ‘picture of race relations is very authentic and moving,’ wrote Felise Vaa in The Samoa Times, ‘and if the book has managed to bring this to the public’s notice, then it is a landmark novel.’ In Islands, Elsie Locke declared it unlikely that anyone but Wendt ‘could portray the people of the two countries with the honest assessment and generous humanity he brings to this novel.’ K.O. Arvidson, in Landfall, called Sons ‘a story of remarkable complexity’, and recognised what the work of Māori and Pacific writers demanded: ‘a circumspection and a breadth of cultural reference for which New Zealand criticism is largely ill-prepared.’

Sons, James Bertram wrote in the Listener in 1978, ‘sketched a scenario of confrontation that none of us – least of all politicians or government agencies – can afford to neglect. The book set out to shock, but with the justification of strong feeling and a good deal of genuine moral indication.’ A film version was made in 1979 and the novel remains in print fifty years after its debut. Wendt has won many awards during the six decades of his career, including national book awards and international honours. In 2013 he was made a Member of the Order of New Zealand, our most senior honour.

 

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TB: In Out of the Vaipe, the Deadwater you say that your writing life ‘has been a process of learning, through my writing, the depths of Samoan history and culture; the writing has been an attempt to discover it and to shape it in my own way.’ Where did your love for writing come from?

AW: I was lucky to be raised by my grandmother and family and I loved listening to the stories they’d tell. Since I was 13, I’ve more or less been able to do what I want to do. Just to do enough work to get through and have the brains – and having other people pay for my education. I was raised by a father, mother and grandmother who believed that education was the way out of being poor. My siblings and I had a tradition of getting scholarships and going overseas to study. Someone once said of our family: ‘Oh, the Wendts. If you put all their degrees together, you would need a truck to carry them.’

 

 

TB: After gaining one of only nine scholarships available to Samoan students at the time, you came to New Zealand and attended New Plymouth Boys High School (1952–57). What was this experience like for you as one of the few Pacific Island students?

AW: To go straight into boarding school – a very highly regarded boarding school where everything was paid for – was a bit frightening. I didn’t know anything about Pākehā culture then.

I got the scholarship when I was thirteen. I was fortunate and privileged but in some ways I wasn’t. I missed out on a hell of a lot of growing up in Samoa with my family and knowing the fa’a Samoa. Still, I gained a lot. Very few people have had the experience I had.

At school in Samoa and at New Plymouth Boys High School, teachers were always very good to me. I was shy, quiet and withdrawn but my teachers knew I was very bright, so they made exceptions for me. They’d just leave me to do what I was doing. I started to come out of my shell when I went to Ardmore Teachers College [in 1958] because they allowed you to be more open, to be political and anti-racist.

After I finished training college I went to Victoria University to study history. I was a mature student in many ways. I had published writing already and was continuing to publish, so they’d make exceptions for me but did their best not to show favouritism. When I handed assignments in late, they’d tell me not to worry because I had a lot of other work on my plate. I got my degree in history but I ended up getting a professorship in English later.

 

 

TB: Did publishing your writing early on help you find your place in Aotearoa more generally?

AW: Yes. It helped people be more tolerant of me and what I was doing. They would go out of their way to accept that I was only getting Cs for a lot of the courses I was doing. But they knew that I was getting A+s for my answers to questions that I was interested in. I wouldn’t care about the rest of the paper. I’d just do enough to get through.
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TB: You were reading a lot during this time too. There are references in your early work to Chinua Achebe and Albert Camus, among others. A poem in your first poetry collection, Inside Us the Dead (1976) is called ‘To My Son on the Tenth Anniversary of Independence’ – a nod to James Baldwin?

AW: There were many things I was experiencing that found their way into my books. I was very heavily influenced by the existentialists and it came out in my own work. My reading helped deepen the work and make it more complex.
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TB: Did you feature aspects of fa’a Samoa in your work to connect you to your home and your aiga while living overseas?

AW: Yes, I did. I’d come across something and would tell myself I had to find out what it meant. I couldn’t just misrepresent Samoan culture because people would think I didn’t know the ways.

 

 

TB: You wrote your first novel, Sons for the Return Home, over a few years while serving as principal of Samoa College, a post you held from 1965–74. Other than wanting to make sense of your early time in Aotearoa, what motivated you to write the book?

AW: I was compelled to write. You know, the compulsion to write always comes first. Then you sit down and either write a story or poem and it leads to something else. The idea in my head led to this novel.

I wanted to make Sons a romance with a typical plot: boy and girl fall in love with each other. It’s an interracial relationship, so the complications that come with this were there. And I wanted to keep the narration quite straightforward and poetic. I was quite surprised when it became a hit after it was published. A lot of people read it and it’s still in print today which is quite something for a book in New Zealand.
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TB: Hone Tuwhare published his first poetry collection, No Ordinary Sun, in 1964. In 1972 Witi Ihimaera published the story collection Pounamu Pounamu, followed by his first novel, Tangi, in 1973, the same year as Sons. In fact, the Landfall review of your novel described 1973 as ‘a watershed year in the development of Polynesian literature.’ Two years later Patricia Grace published her story collection, Waiariki. Do you think it helped you as a Samoan writer to start publishing at the same time as these writers and others in Aotearoa?

AW: Yeah, it was good coming up with them. Witi tried his best to publish a book before me and he did!
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TB: Sons was one of the first books written by a Pasifika writer to be published in English, along with other works such as The Crocodile by the Papua New Guinean writer Vincent Eri released in 1970. When you were writing your book, did you consider the significance of it?

AW: No. I was just thinking of the story itself. It was going to be a novel and it was going to head in this or that direction. How is the romance going to play out? How will it end?

When the novel was published, my hope was that a lot of people would read it, which is what happened. A lot of people read it because it was a romance – especially young people, even though the material is quite adult. This was probably one of the reasons why the novel was a hit in high schools. Many parents didn’t like their children reading it, and I believe that in some schools the book wasn’t allowed on the syllabus. Kids used to have a copy of the book and would pass it around. After my time as principal at Samoa College, students would tell me privately that they did this.

Years after Sons was published, I remember visiting a girls’ school here in Aotearoa, with mainly Pacific Island students in the class. They told me they really enjoyed studying Sons as a prescribed text, and that it was the first book they’d seen themselves in.

It was one of the first novels to be very honest about Pacific Islanders in New Zealand, about their experiences and the race relations of the time. But it was also a simple love story that just happened to involve a Pacific Islander and a Pākehā woman, which made it different from one featuring two Pākehā or two Samoans. I enjoyed writing it and didn’t really bother with the negative criticism. Well, some of it hurt a bit but I didn’t care. I think the sexual content was way ahead of its time.

 

 .

It was written by a very young man. I wouldn’t write a book like that now. I’m 83. It’d be a different book, a different love story, a different way. It was a young book written by a young man about a love story between young people. It gets complicated because love is complicated. And death and fear and working out complicated emotions and complicated things – you just can’t sit down and treat it like a maths equation where one plus one equals two. Boy meets girl – now what happens? So, you figure how much to put in and leave out.

In most ways, fiction leaves out more than it has in it for the reader to make connections between things. The better you can do that, as a writer, the better [the work] is. Some of the writers I don’t like are the ones who overwrite and talk down to readers.

A lot of people in Samoa and New Zealand attacked me privately but – because of my status or my politics – they wouldn’t do so publicly. They knew I wouldn’t take it and I’d say something. I continued to write what I wanted to write. I had nothing to lose. I felt I had something to say. It was also good to get the feeling that people were reading my work, whether they were valuing it or attacking it!

 

       

 

TB: Some Samoans objected to your depictions of sex in the novel along with aspects of fa’a Samoa related to the Church. In one scene you highlight the politics of fa’alavelaves (obligations) – specifically the way some aiga use financial donations to their churches to one-up others and display their wealth and success. This criticism was as close to home as it can get. How did you navigate this?

AW: When you’re attacking societal institutions in your work, a lot of people are bound not to like it. One intention in writing books is to expose things, to show what people are – all their pretension and hypocrisy. Most societies have double standards: a public standard and a private one. It’s nothing new.
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TB: You’ve said that Sons is your most autobiographical work, as first books often are. How much of the story did you actually take from your life?

AW: It was basically the relationship I had with my wife at the time [Jenny Whyte], but it’s not exactly the way the relationship was. Most writers have to use some of their experience. A lot of people told her they were sorry that I put her in the book. She just told them that they better ask me who the woman is!

All fiction is autobiographical to some extent. You would have had the experience of something vicariously or first hand and know something about it.
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TB: What was the process around getting Sons published?

AW: After I’d published a few short things, my publishers wanted me to write a novel. I told them that they could publish Sons but they had to publish my collection of poetry (Inside Us the Dead) and some stories too – Flying Fox and the Freedom Tree (1974).

They told me my work wasn’t going to sell. I said, I bet you you’re wrong.

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TB: So, you had some idea that Sons and your other early work would have an impact?

AW: Yes, because there was nothing apart from books by anthropologists and sociologists out there. It’s worth reading these but they’re written from another viewpoint, even though they pretend that it’s from the inside, from the culture. Plus, even if you’re from inside the culture you’re still just writing from your viewpoint.

The more individual the book is, the more worthy it is in many ways, for me, because the writer’s not pretending to be someone else.
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TB: In quick succession you also published the novella Pouliuli (1977) and another novel, Leaves of the Banyan Tree (1979). You edited Lali: A Pacific Anthology (1980), a showcase of English-language work by writers from across the Pacific. All this time, you worked first as a school principal and then as a lecturer at the University of the South Pacific. You were married and raising a young family too. How did you find time to write and publish this frequently early in your career alongside these other commitments in your life?

AW: At university, in many ways, you get time to do your own research, and the writing was my research: it was part of the job description. That’s what I liked in my academic job, even though it was a lot of effort. Plus, when I was young, I had a lot of energy and focus.

Universities get a kick out of their staff making a name for themselves because this also gives them kudos. The University of Auckland loved having me and Witi Ihimaera on staff in the English department.

 

 

TB: Because of Sons, and your subsequent writing and editing, you were spearheading the new Pacific literature. Did you feel the pressure of expectation, the pressure to represent the Pacific and its cultures?

AW: The pressure I felt was about how I was going to publish my next book. Being called the first Samoan writer – you know, to be the first one, it was okay. The thing for me though is you’ve got to write books. And it’s good that people liked reading Sons and that young people liked it, but I didn’t particularly care if they didn’t. I never depended only on writing to make a living and to feed my family. So, I was fortunate in that way. But the writing was a lot of hard work.
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TB: Did criticism lessen as your career progressed?

AW: Yes. People got too scared to say anything. But this was bad as well because people hid how they truly felt. Nobody said anything in public when I was around but then I would hear about their feelings later. People used to joke in Samoan: ‘The professor is coming to talk’!

The important thing for me was to get stuff written. If I needed money from writing to stay alive, I’d have written more.
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TB: There are passages in Sons that read as if they’re fale aitu performances. For example, in the scene where the narrator and his girlfriend deliver mail, they put on the voices and airs of colonials to mock them and their racist worldview. You also include passages of myth and sections where a character relays history and stories to another – instances which echo the fagogo style of storytelling you grew up with. Were you surprised when people said what you were writing was a new way to tell stories?

AW: I was quite pleasantly surprised. It was a new way for those unfamiliar with Samoan stories, but our people have been telling stories this way for a long time.

If you can turn a story into something that other people understand and value, you’ve turned it into a sort of myth, a variation of a universal story. People go through the same experiences. Love and death are basic themes, but each culture tells the story differently.

It just happens that I know a lot of the mythology. Stories are about other stories are about other stories, and they just keep going on. It’s like when someone picks up a book and says, ‘Oh, man, I’ve read this before. I know this is about me.’ But the story is set in Russia. We have universal stories. We all live, fall in love and die. We go to heaven or go to hell – or don’t go anywhere.
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TB: You’ve talked over the years about how you need to get the sound of your stories ‘right’ before you show them to the world. How do you do this?

AW: I’d read what I’d written aloud and if it didn’t work, I’d rewrite it. I asked myself how I’d like the narration to flow. If it’s not going well, you can tell.

I read aloud to myself. Very rarely did I read my work out to others – except my publisher. After I’d sent them a manuscript, they’d tell me there’s too much of this or too much of that. But it was totally up to me if I accepted the feedback or not.
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TB: What’s your writing process?

AW: I’m not someone who can write regularly. I don’t have a daily writing schedule. I only write when I feel like it, but once I get into it, I can go for days or weeks.

When my kids were young, they’d have their friends over to the house to play. I’d overhear my daughter telling them to be quiet and go outside because I was busy writing.

When I lose interest in writing one thing I go to the next thing. I’ve never had to make a living from writing, so I could do things this way.
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TB: Is this why you wrote your Commonwealth Writers Prize-winning novel-in-verse The Adventures of Vela (2009) on and off over 30 years.?

AW: Yes. I could have finished it in a couple of years, but I just enjoyed revising it. Finding new things to include. With Vela, I asked myself what would happen if this guy has all these adventures such as fighting the gods. It’s based on the Maui saga. Every culture has some version of the mythology of the hero versus the gods – except in Vela the guy is very well-educated. A lot of people – including Reina, my partner – think it’s my best work.
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TB: This go-with-the-flow approach characterises much of your work, doesn’t it?

AW: With The Songmaker’s Chair (2003) I thought I’d write my first play. I thought it’d be good if I had some music on the stage and build the story around a chair. I’d include symbolic things like the chair, the structured family, how their life changes in New Zealand. Then the play became bigger than I’d thought.

I think there’s a part of The Songmaker’s Chair that my editors wanted me to change because it sounded too much like a university course. I said no. It was aimed at my people so they could understand their culture. The play was deliberately educational. I didn’t care if it didn’t suit the typical staging of plays.

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This is what audiences really loved about The Songmaker’s Chair. Some people who saw it told me that they didn’t know any of this – even the Samoans raised in Aotearoa. They thought they should go home and ask their parents about it. Some of them brought their parents to see the play, and their parents loved it because it was about their generation of migrants.

A lot of this generation was ashamed of their culture and wanted their kids to learn English as fast as possible. They asked why they were wasting their time learning Samoan things, until they regretted it later, when their kids couldn’t speak their own language and started acting like Pākehā kids.

Sometimes I deliberately set out to write a story and sometimes when I start, I then think: oh, this isn’t a good idea. What about making it a poem? Then I hit another line and think I have to go bigger. But of course, the long novels are planned and thought about for a long time.

I’m a bit of a lazy writer.
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TB: Why do you consider yourself lazy?

AW: I could have written more, you know, but I was busy with teaching as well. I never had long stretches of time to write, or had the urgency to write. I think there was still enough time for me to have written a lot more than I have. Though I could’ve written a hell of a lot more and it not have been any good. It’s rewarding that most of the work I’ve done is highly regarded by people – even the people who attack it.

I’ve always been interested in and love reading. So that’s really what it is: you set out to write something you want to read. Before all the Indigenous stuff came out, I read everything: the Russians, for example. When African and Asian writers began publishing books in the Sixties, I read that and taught a lot of it too. After that, work from the Pacific started getting published and I was helping to get a lot of it out there, and encouraging younger writers.
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TB:  You’ve also edited anthologies of Pasifika and Māori writing over your career, notably the poetry anthologies Whetu Moana (2002) and Mauri Ola (2010), as well as Lali: A Pacific Anthology (1980). Was this part of your mission, to develop writers and Pacific literature?

AW: I’ve done my own work, and helped other writers get their work published and get them started. A lot of people looked at the Pacific as an empty space without cultures and literature. You have to get rid of the racism because there’s a lot of it. How can our people have no culture, no literature?

Some particular cultures and communities are very good at nurturing painting; others sports. A lot more of our people are writing and creating art now which is good to see.

 

 

TB: How is your success as an artist impacted the way others see and engage with you?

AW: Everywhere I go in Samoa, as soon as people see me, they think, Oh the professor knows far more [than us] so we better not say anything. They get intimidated until I ask them something like ‘What would you like to drink?’ and they know I’m just joking away.

One time I was asked to speak at an end-of-year prize giving at the National University of Samoa. I was waiting at the back of the gymnasium before I was called up. This young pastor came up to me; he knew who I was. He introduced himself and told me that I used to teach his uncle at Samoa College.

He was speaking to me in English and I kept responding in Samoan until he got the message! See, a lot of Samoans don’t think I can speak the language, so they get a surprise when I start speaking colloquial Samoan.

And then a woman who’d made a speech for the students at the ceremony got up and said, ‘Oh, Professor Wendt used to teach my grandfather. My family have always known him as a member of our family even though we’re not connected in the fa’a Samoa way. We all want to be part of his family.’ I find this kind of attention embarrassing.

One time I made the mistake on a walk to downtown Apia. It was mid-morning and I was heading to a coffee bar that was owned by an ex-Samoa College student; they’d told me to come down. By the time I got there, 20 or so people were walking with me. They were all ex-Samoa College students and saw me walk past their workplaces. So, we all went to the coffee bar together and took over it. People were very happy.

You know, when these things happen it’s very pleasant but I also sort of pretend I’m someone else.

 

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TB: Has the gap between your public and private selves been difficult to navigate?

AW: It was hard. You just got to be careful. Don’t do anything bad, don’t show off. Don’t take it for granted that you’re important.
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TB: Your most recent books – the novel Breaking Connections and memoir Out of the Vaipe, The Deadwater: A Writer’s Early Life – were both released in 2015. Do you miss writing?

AW: I do, yes. Out of the Vaipe contains some of the best prose I’ve written.
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TB: Your poetry collection The Book of the Black Star (2002) features poems and drawings which is an interesting mix.

AW: I just set up the easel then I start doodling around on paper. Sometimes I think about what I’m going to paint before I start. The next day, I go and change the whole painting.

It’s exactly like when I’m writing a novel. You can see the writing and the details in the painting. You make one change and other changes follow; it changes itself.

 

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TB: Are you writing now?

AW: Not at the moment, no. I still write emails and on my Facebook page. But no, I haven’t written something like a poem for a while. But I think I’m close to writing something. I always get a feeling. The urgency to write isn’t there anymore, but hopefully I’ll sit down at some point and write again. I have a few more years left.
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TB: And this new work might be poems, yes?

AW: Yes. The poems will be partly a continuation. All my ideas will always be part of what I’ve already done. If I look back on all my work, I’ve been the same person doing it. There’ll be stuff in all one’s work that one has covered before.
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TB: Looking back on your career, how do you feel about it?

AW: It’s been a satisfactory life. I’ve had a very privileged life. Not many people have the life that I have had. And I’ve earned it through my brains and hard work. I’m lucky that I’m very good at what I do – well, I think I am.

I happen to have been in certain places at certain times; having the scholarship scheme when I was 13, being able to return to Samoa as a school principal when I was only 29, becoming professor of English at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji, among other things.

I’ve been very lucky in my life even though there’s been a lot of pain. I mean, over the years, there have been people in my family who’ve died – my mother, for example. Everybody has pain. It’s been a good life, even though I complain about politics and inequalities. I’ve always been very political.
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TB: You’ve said in the past that you used to be an angry young man before you mellowed in middle age.

AW: Well, it wasn’t me who said that. Other people said that I was the Angry Young Man of Oceania.
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TB: How do you how do you see yourself now?

AW: I’m the Angry Old Man of Oceania.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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