It’s a long walk up between streets, a Wellington short cut, past cabbage trees and damp, tightly-planted agapanthus. […] Stopping to catch their beery breath, turning, they see the city below them. Closer, lights glow in scattered windows of the university buildings, patterning the sky. In ‘Beer goggles’, Warren and Lola take “a Wellington short … Read more…
Other writing
Captain Panic and The Hope Fault: on being anxious in an uncertain landscape
The Belgravia Books / Aardvark Bureau / Gallic Books team asked me to write something for their blog, on anxiety as a preoccupation of my novel The Hope Fault. I wrote about extreme campervanning, family nicknames, and being anxious (and writing) in an uncertain landscape. Like the Worst Campervan in New Zealand, my novel The … Read more…
‘A way with words: Writing as a physical activity’ for NZ Listener
New Zealand Listener has this year been running a regular feature, A way with words, in which they invite New Zealand writers to describe their writing day. I was thrilled to be asked to write a piece, and my contribution was published this week (the issue dated 6 May 2017, on newsstands the week before that) under the … Read more…
At the bay
The kids are busy at the river mouth. … There’s one black dog right in there with them, a mad barker, lolling and lollopping. Another dog, black-and-white, more serious, is hanging back, watching, crouched up the beach on its haunches, front paws out, ears up, attentive, as if it’s watching skittish sheep. The dog glances … Read more…
‘Literary Postcard from Wellington’ for BBC Radio4 Open Book
Prompted by the publication of my novel The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt in the UK this month, BBC Radio4’s Open Book programme asked me to deliver a Literary Postcard from New Zealand, as part of an occasional series they commission from writers based outside the UK. For my Literary Postcard, I decided to focus … Read more…
Do you see what I see?
That two-day hangover was mine in real life. But…home for me, then, was Vancouver, not the New Zealand of the story. Our boozy real-life night ended up…at First Avenue, the Minneapolis nightclub made famous by Prince – the Purple One – and the setting of much of his 1984 film Purple Rain. Life fuels fiction; … Read more…
Viva baby, viva!
They’d started drinking at noon. It’s one o’clock the next morning when Liz finally curls up on the beanbag in the lounge-room. The still dark heat, or some drunk obsession, keeps Jan from falling into bed, makes her start to clean up – wipe the salt shaker’s bottom of its crust of salt and lime … Read more…
The Blind Astronomer
It was Aunt who taught me not just to look, but to really see. She taught me to look with an artist’s eye, and that’s what I’ve done in my work. I’ve seen the planets with an artist’s eye, charted their courses with a sense of the beauty their paths carve through space. Connecting memory, … Read more…
Surface Tension
The roads have changed, the houses of Helen’s childhood gone, and she is always shocked when she visits to come this way, to see the great walls of roadway where the little dark houses used to be. She turns the car into North Street, pointing straight at the sea. In ‘Surface Tension’, two long-ago lovers … Read more…
Once Had Me
The car winds between steep fields that sweep down, green, to meet the road. The high sides of hills make corners you can’t see around. The sun’s out, but everything’s still soaking, the road steaming. Lucy presses the button and the window glass moves down, widens the gap, lets in damp fresh air. ‘Go right, … Read more…