Women authors from New Zealand

"Would you not like to try all sorts of lives — one is so very small — but that is the satisfaction of writing — one can impersonate so many people."

"To acknowledge the presence of fear is to give birth to failure."

"To work — to work! It is such infinite delight to know that we still have the best things to do."

"It's a terrible thing to be alone — yes it is — it is — but don't lower your mask until you have another mask prepared beneath — as terrible as you like — but a mask."

"If only one could tell true love from false love as one can tell mushrooms from toadstools. With mushrooms it is so simple — you salt them well, put them aside and have patience. But with love, you have no sooner lighted on anything that bears even the remotest resemblance to it than you are perfectly certain it is not only a genuine specimen, but perhaps the only genuine mushroom ungathered."

"I'm a writer first & a woman after."

"I have made it a rule of my life never to regret and never to look back. Regret is an appalling waste of energy, and no one who intends to become a writer can afford to indulge in it. You can't get it into shape; you can't build on it; it's only good for wallowing in."

"Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change. So suffering must become Love. This is the mystery. This is what I must do."

"It's an infernal nuisance to love Life as I do. I seem to love it more as time goes on rather than less. It never becomes a habit to me. It's always a marvel. I do hope I'll be able to keep in it long enough to do some really good work. I'm sick of people dying who promise well."

"Whenever I prepare for a journey I prepare as though for death. Should I never return, all is in order. This is what life has taught me."

"The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books."

"Looking back, I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all."

"By health I mean the power to live a full, adult, living, breathing life in close contact with what I love — the earth and the wonders thereof — the sea — the sun. All that we mean when we speak of the external world. A want to enter into it, to be part of it, to live in it, to learn from it, to lose all that is superficial and acquired in me and to become a conscious direct human being. I want, by understanding myself, to understand others. I want to be all that I am capable of becoming so that I may be (and here I have stopped and waited and waited and it’s no good — there’s only one phrase that will do) a child of the sun. About helping others, about carrying a light and so on, it seems false to say a single word. Let it be at that. A child of the sun."

"Warm, eager, living life — to be rooted in life — to learn, to desire to know, to feel, to think, to act. That is what I want. And nothing less. That is what I must try for. … This all sounds very strenuous and serious. But now that I have wrestled with it, it’s no longer so. I feel happy — deep down. All is well."

"Were we positive, eager, real — alive? No, we were not. We were a nothingness shot with gleams of what might be."

"When we can begin to take our failures nonseriously, it means we are ceasing to be afraid of them. It is of immense importance to learn to laugh at ourselves."

"Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinion of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth."

"By health I mean the power to live a full, adult, living, breathing life in close contact with what I love — the earth and the wonders thereof — the sea — the sun, all that we mean when we speak of the external world. I want to enter into it, to be part of it, to live in it, to learn from it, to lose all that is superficial and acquired in me and to become a conscious, direct human being. I want, by understanding myself, to understand others."

"I want so to live that I work with my hands and my feeling and my brain. I want a garden, a small house, grass, animals, books, pictures, music. And out of this, the expression of this, I want to be writing (Though I may write about cabmen. That's no matter.) But warm, eager, living life — to be rooted in life — to learn, to desire, to feel, to think, to act. This is what I want. And nothing less. That is what I must try for."

"When I say "I fear" — don't let it disturb you, dearest heart. We all fear when we are in waiting-rooms. Yet we must pass beyond them, and if the other can keep calm, it is all the help we can give each other."

"This all sounds very strenuous and serious. But now that I have wrestled with it, it's no longer so. I feel happy — deep down. May you be happy too. I'm going to Fontainebleau on Monday and I'll be back here Tuesday night or Wednesday morning. All is well."

"Could we change our attitude, we should not only see life differently, but life itself would come to be different. Life would undergo a change of appearance because we ourselves had undergone a change of attitude."

"I always felt that the great high privilege, relief and comfort of friendship was that one had to explain nothing."

"The world to me is a dream and the people in it are sleepers. I have known a few instances of intensity but that is all. I want to find a world in which these instances are united. Shall I succeed? I scarcely care. What is important is to try & learn to live, and in relation to everything – not isolated. This isolation is death to me."

"I am treating you as my friend, asking you to share my present minuses in the hope I can ask you to share my future pluses."

"Once we have learned to read, the meaning of words can somehow register without consciousness."

"Some couples go over their budgets very carefully every month. Others just go over them."

"The more you are motivated by love, the more fearless and free your actions will be."

"I want to recall her as she was day by day as a woman friend and neighbour, gay and gallant and wonderful."

"If I had to describe her in one word I would choose the word exquisite. She was exquisite in her person: soft, fine, shiny brown hair and delicately grained skin, not tall and not small and not thin nor stout, just right. When we went bathing I thought her pretty as a statuette. She was always scrupulously groomed."

"I think that in some abstruse way Murry corrupted and perverted and destroyed Katherine both as a person and a writer. She was a very serious writer, but her gifts were those of an intense realist, with a superb sense of ironic humour and fundamental cynicism. She got enmeshed in the sticky sentimentality of Murry and wrote against the grain of her own nature. At the bottom of her mind she knew this, I think, and it enraged her. And that was why she was so often enraged against Murry."

"[On 2 June] I lunched with K.M. & had 2 hours priceless talk—priceless in the sense that to no one else can I talk in the same disembodied way about writing; without altering my thought more than I alter it in writing here."

"…It feels like leading a double life sometimes because it’s not like I wear my Twitter bio around when I’m walking about campus or going to class, so Student Chloe and Author Chloe are very much two separate people. I think the closer I get to publication, the more that these two sides of me start to merge into one, especially when my college friends find out about my books. It’s definitely something I struggle to get used to, to stop myself from brushing off my books and be all “oh, it’s nothing, just a hobby” if it comes up among the college crowd and on the other end, to not invalidate myself as a student like “oh, I just go to class” among the author crowd."

"One of my ultimate pet peeves is when people falsely equate experience with age, and nothing drives me up the wall more than established authors declaring all young writers are trash because they themselves were trash when they were younger. That may be true for them – I don’t know everyone’s life stories! But I think waiting to take the plunge into publishing isn’t about the writer’s age but the writer’s experience. If someone starts writing at age 20 and immediately tries to get published, chances are they’re going to meet some failure – but not because of age because of experience..."

"…I think a lot of professionals in this industry genuinely believe young people can’t write, and others believe that if we’ve made it, it’s only because our age is so shiny and interesting, and that alone is what pushes us through. I hesitate to say that it’s been a complete barrier because for marginalized writers there are certainly other barriers that are a lot worse. But when it comes to age, I’ve seen agents openly declare they would never sign a college or high school student. I’m really happy to have an agent and editors who believe in me regardless of my age and furthermore take my age into account as just another facet of who I am as a person – like how other authors are full-time mothers/fathers/caregivers…"

"Although there are so many barriers when it comes to the publishing industry – for young people, people of color, and queer people – the large majority of the community is kind and wonderful. It’s so easy to get jaded, and I’m oftentimes jaded, but at the end of the day, my time in this industry has not only given me some of my best friends but introduced me to people that hardly know me, yet don’t hesitate at all to offer help when it’s needed. As a whole, we need a lot of work, and I hope that we never stop improving, but my experience so far has shown me we have such good people working toward it and so many young people ready to spring up and transform the scene for the better."

"I would just look over to the officer, flutter my eyelashes and say ‘Do you want to search moi?’ and they would laugh flirtatiously, ‘No Mademoiselle, you carry on’."

"I hate wars and violence but if they come then I don't see why we women should just wave our men a proud goodbye and then knit them balaclavas."

"In my opinion, the only good German was a dead German, and the deader, the better. I killed a lot of Germans, and I am only sorry I didn't kill more."

"The pandemic has fundamentally altered every part of our lives, not least the time we spend on digital devices. For young people in particular, the blurred line between recreational and educational screen time presents new challenges we are only beginning to appreciate."

"With lockdowns and social restrictions now a new normal, it is increasingly difficult to disengage from screens. Children are growing up in a digital society, surrounded by a multitude of devices used for everything from social connection to learning and entertainment."

"Digital devices have the potential to enhance learning, but there are few situations where this happens currently and many in which learning may be hindered."

"We need to focus on integrating technology that makes a difference and enhances learning. Students learn best when they are actively engaged and create and drive their own learning."

"For example, rather than students simply watching a YouTube clip to learn about the solar system, they might create their own augmented reality simulation, requiring them to apply their knowledge to correctly place, size and animate digital objects. Rebalancing screen time in this way will help avoid the more negative consequences of these ubiquitous devices and highlight some of their unique advantages."

"The boundaries between recreation, communication and learning are becoming less distinct. Screen time that may seem on the surface to be purely recreational can in reality be important for learning, supporting mental health and driving awareness of important issues."

"Banning technology from schools can be legitimate if technology integration does not improve learning or if it worsens student wellbeing … [and mitigating risk] may require something more than banning."

"Beyond the learning impact, the second issue most often cited for banning cellphones in the classroom is the negative impacts of mobile use on wellbeing. The access to and reach of harmful contexts (such as porn) and acts (like bullying) is certainly a serious and significant issue. The pervasiveness of cellphones heightens the risks. Banning cellphones does not solve this issue and rather just enables schools (and the government) to absolve themselves from dealing with the problem, pushing these complex issues into the hands of parents and whānau to deal with."

"“I heard someone explain once why people buy books. They said when people buy a book, they are not just buying that book, they are also visualising that they are buying the time to read it. So when you hold that thing in your hand you are not only anticipating the story between the covers, you are picturing the kind of life that allows space for you to lie about and read. Those unread volumes on your shelves represent a glorious future moment when you will spend time with them"

"I had thought, as many parents do, that ‘one day I am going to sit down and talk to you about this, but right now, we need to get you to dance class, then I have to go to a show or we have to go to school,"

"And then it turns into, ‘Another day I will talk to you about tattoos or pay equity – I’m sure that day will come.’ But then she was gone."

"It resonated with them as they were or had been on the same journey,” You have this idea of what parent-hood is going to look like. Then it comes along and you haven’t even been able to finish a sandwich without someone taking a bite out of it. Being a parent is busy."

"It was kind of strange, really, seeing it all unfold,, who lives in Auckland with husband comedian Jeremy Elwood. “These were a lot of issues that I talk about in my book, the gender pay gap being one of them. And now we’re finally saying, ‘Actually, we know what fair is and this isn’t it."

"I always love having Holly in the audience because I’ve always done stand-up about her. My first stand-up set in 1993 was about giving birth and breastfeeding."

"I don’t know if you’ve met anyone to whom nothing bad has happened. They are the most tedious people in the world."

"I’d like to be a primary school teacher one day, but right now, I am happy being a mum"

"I have to thank a writer friend called Kerry Donovan Brown. I was trying to create this world from top principles, based on what worked for the story. They helped me with this idea of going back. There’s a point in evolution where we went from one-celled amoeba that kind of just floated around doing our own thing to growing a mouth and becoming predatory. What Kerry helped me do was go right back to that moment and imagine a world where a species never became predatory. I needed to find all these solutions to invasion, to eating. I needed to find solutions that weren’t hunting or soldiering or defending physically."

"I did a workshop with Jordy Rosenberg maybe five years ago, and he was talking about this idea that a work of fiction can have a thesis statement, just like an essay, but it isn’t necessarily interested in answering that thesis statement. That helped me heaps. I write to try to understand things that confuse me. The form emerges as I try to answer questions. The shape of a book also comes from problem solving and constraint. You make one decision and that cuts off twenty decisions and you’re stuck with two decisions, that kind of thing. And life too. The body that I’m in and the life that I’ve lived lead me to write this particular book in this particular way. That’s why it’s so important to live around the writing. I need to be in political action, I need to be in family action. These things lead to structure. And sometimes it comes really late. With Audition, it was drafts and drafts and drafts."

"My first book came out fifteen years ago, and it was a very different world. In those days, I felt I had to be cool and calm and detached. (And when I say cool, I mean in temperament, not in, eh, Fonzie.) I read mainly detached, kind of cool writers. The opposite of who I am. You can probably tell, I talk too much, I’m angry, I’m messy as far as emotions go. But I was trying to be that calm person when I wrote. I still feel that pressure now. But the thing is that, while I spend my time writing, no one’s waiting for it. It takes a lot of sacrifice from my family. I need a lot of support from my friends. So I want it to count. Not that purely escapist work isn’t important because I think it is, but there are issues I’m interested in. We have a terrible government here in New Zealand at the moment, lots of unemployment, high levels of unhoused people, incredible poverty. And they keep telling us not to get upset. There’s pressure from all directions to be “reasonable.” At events where people might’ve spoken out, everyone’s being a little bit calmer. It worries me a lot."

"I live in Aotearoa/New Zealand as Pākehā, Tangata Tiriti, which means I’m part of the colonizing group. A massive part of living here is working out how to be the best guest, and how to be aware of the harm that I do just by being here. In Audition, tied into questions about the carceral system are questions of land back. We’re pretty much all living on stolen land in New Zealand and that makes a major difference to me as a writer. If I write, how much space do I take up or how little space should I take up? But the amazing thing about living in New Zealand is that if I can widen my understanding to Te Ao Māori, the indigenous world of this country, this is a place where land is a relative of the people. Rivers are citizens. There is a way of thinking about relationships outside of the transactional, imagining work as relational. A writer’s relationship to the land that they’re on is huge. The places that we walk make up a kind of psychic map in our heads. It’s absolutely inseparable from the work."

"Work is the most interesting thing to me. I’m the first person in my family to go to university, and work was always the way you showed your worth. My dad, until recently, asked why I don’t go back to hairdressing. It’s the best job I’ve ever had. It was a way to be with people, to hear conversation, to see things. This is what I love about work: we’re suddenly put in relation to people that we wouldn’t seek out. We have these personas that we put on. It’s such a rich space. I feel a bit self-conscious that I’ve cycled through so many jobs, but it’s the nature of being an artist and working. It’s difficult to find a job you can put everything into and still have time and energy for writing. There always comes a point in the day job where they’re saying, don’t you want to do more? and I’m like, No, not really. When I first started working, which is a hell of a long time ago, there wasn’t this thing about passion. You didn’t have to be enthusiastic about doing your job, you were just there to do it. And that’s why I love the trades; I feel a sense of accomplishment. You do a haircut and there’s a haircut."

"One of my friends, the writer Laurence Fearnley, got me in the habit of writing 500 words a day, which works for a first draft. I’ve also done things like book myself cheap motel room down the road so I have 24 hours to write. Another friend, the writer and photographer Anna Sanderson, says everything is art, and I really like that. Whether I’m washing the dishes or yelling at a protest—it all feeds the work. There are different ways of composing. When my son was young, I would put on a character and go for a walk with him and be like, Oh, what would the character think of that tree? But I don’t want to make out like balancing work and writing is easy. It’s the hardest thing. And as work becomes more precarious and funding becomes less, we’ll end up with this weird class thing where the only people who can write are the people who can afford to write."

"My writing is always autobiographical. I live in a body that I don’t understand. I have a lot of trouble moving through the world for all sorts of reasons that are inside my skin and inside my brain. But I’m not a life writer. I can’t write essays; I’m not good at them. I also spent a lot of years in the wilderness of alcoholism and drug addiction and hurt a lot of people. Part of my amends is to not hurt them further by glorifying my life, saying, “Yeah, I was a tough, hard bitch, and I did this.” So I really want to write the imagined, but I can’t do that without having some link to lived experience. Damien Wilkins, one of my teachers, once asked someone, “What do you have to do to a real experience to make it fiction?” I hope I never find an answer, but I’m reaching for it every day. Audition got started because I got stuck in a cupboa."

"There are worse things than having behaved foolishly in public. There are worse things than these miniature betrayals, committed or endured or suspected; there are worse things than not being able to sleep for thinking about them. It is 5 a.m. All the worse things come stalking in and stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse and worse"

"It is 5 a.m. All the worse things come stalking in and stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse and worse."

"But now that I am in love with a place which doesn’t care how I look, or if I’m happy,happy is how I look."

"I stopped writing poetry when I stopped smoking.... It was more complicated than that."

"I write in praise of the solitary act: of not feeling a trespassing tongue forced into one's mouth, one's breath smothered, nipples crushed against the ribcage, and that metallic tingling in the chin set off by a certain odd nerve: unpleasure."

"Somehow we manage it: to like our friends, to tolerate not only their little ways but their huge neuroses, their monumental oddness: "Oh well," we smile, "it's one of his funny days.""

"My verse forms are relatively traditional (traditions alter). In general they have moved away from strict classical patterns in the direction of greater freedom — as is usual with most artists learning a trade. It takes courage, however, to leave all props behind, to cast oneself, like Matisse, upon pure space. I still await that confidence."

"Perhaps relationships work more powerfully when there is absence and tension and a lot of heartache. I can't live with people."

"Poetry is a search for ways of communication; it must be conducted with openness, flexibility, and a constant readiness to listen."

"All poets, all writers, are terrible parasites. We use people and experiences."

"Being a lifelong poetry reader, I know there are many more published poems about death than any other subject."

"As I’ve collected the poems, prose pieces and quotes for This is Farewell, I’ve come to understand how they help us to articulate the unspeakable, unthinkable reality. The death of a loved person. Our own inevitable death."

"We know we are going to die. We know that every person now alive will one day die. It is one of the great paradoxes of being human, that, armed with this awareness of our own mortality, we continue to behave as it will not happen."

"Mother Suzanne Aubert, founder of the Sisters of Compassion, gives us comfort in her practical wisdom: “Following the miracle of our birth, the only sure thing is our death when our life is complete. Though awesome, it is not to be unduly feared… We do not fall suddenly into death, we advance towards it step by step every day. Our last hour is not death by itself but it consummates it."

"Well, she was not so bad. Her body was long and round and shapely and with a noble squareness of the shoulders; her fair hair curled diffidently about a good brow; her grey eyes, though they were remote, as if anything worth looking at in her life had kept a long way off, were full of tenderness; and though she was slender there was something about her of the wholesome endearing heaviness of the draught-ox or the big trusted dog. Yet she was bad enough. She was repulsively furred with neglect and poverty, as even a good glove that has dropped down behind a bed in a hotel and has lain undisturbed for a day or two is repulsive when the chambermaid retrieves it from the dust and fluff."

"Well, one sounded the bell that hung on a post, and presently Margaret in a white dress would come out of the porch and would walk to the stone steps down to the river. Invariably, as she passed the walnut tree that overhung the path, she would pick a leaf and crush it and sniff the sweet scent; and as she came near the steps she would shade her eyes and peer across the water. “She is a little near-sighted; you can’t imagine how sweet it makes her look.” (I did not say that I had seen her, for indeed this Margaret I had never seen.)"

"She was then just a girl in white who lifted a white face or drooped a dull gold head. And as that she was nearer to him than at any other time. That he loved her, in this twilight which obscured all the physical details which he adored, seemed to him a guarantee that theirs was a changeless love which would persist if she were old or maimed or disfigured. He […] watched the white figure take the punt over the black waters, mount the grey steps and assume their greyness, become a green shade in the green darkness of the foliage-darkened lawn, and he exulted in that guarantee."

"Wealdstone is not, in its way, a bad place; it lies in the lap of open country and at the end of every street rise the green hill of Harrow and the spires of Harrow School. But all the streets are long and red and freely articulated with railway arches, and factories spoil the skyline with red angular chimneys, and in front of the shops stand little women with backs ridged by cheap stays, who tapped their upper lips with their forefingers and made other feeble, doubtful gestures as though they wanted to buy something and knew that if they did they would have to starve some other appetite. When we asked them the way they turned to us faces sour with thrift. It was a town of people who could not do as they liked."

"When she came back into the parlour again she was wearing that yellowish raincoat, that hat whose hearse plumes nodded over its sticky straw, that grey alpaca skirt. I first defensively clutched my hands. It would have been such agony to the finger tips to touch any part of her apparel. And then I thought of Chris, to whom a second before I had hoped to bring a serene comforter. I perceived clearly that that ecstatic woman lifting her eyes and her hands to the benediction of love was Margaret as she existed in eternity; but this was Margaret as she existed in time, as the fifteen years between Monkey Island and this damp day in Ladysmith Road had irreparably made her. Well, I had promised to bring her to him."

"Then, one April afternoon, Chris landed at the island, and by the first clean quick movement of tying up his boat made her his slave. I could imagine that it would be so. He was so wonderful when he was young; he possessed in great measure the loveliness of young men, which is like the loveliness of the spry foal or the sapling, but in him it was vexed into a serious and moving beauty by the inhabiting soul. […] [F]rom his eyes, which though grey were somehow dark with speculation, one perceived that he was distracted by participation in some spiritual drama. To see him was to desire intimacy with him so that one might intervene between this body which was formed for happiness, and this soul which cherished so deep a faith in tragedy."

"As the car swung through the gates of Baldry Court she sat up and dried her eyes. She looked out at the strip of turf, so bright that one would think it wet, and lit here and there with snowdrops and scillas and crocuses, that runs between the drive and the tangle of silver birch and bramble and fern. There is no aesthetic reason for that border; the common outside looks lovelier where it fringes the road with dark gorse and rough amber grasses. Its use is purely philosophic; it proclaims that here we estimate only controlled beauty, that the wild will not have its way within our gates, that it must be made delicate and decorated into felicity. Surely she must see that this was no place for beauty that has been not mellowed but lacerated by time, that no one accustomed to live here could help wincing at such external dinginess as hers."

"It was a huge learning curve, to be honest. I never pictured myself writing a novel, so when my husband suggested I take some time off work and do some writing, I thought I’ll have a go at some short stories. And then I discovered this story, and it just wouldn’t fit within the form of the short story, so I enrolled in a fiction course – I had joined it for short stories, though it was generally for beginning fiction – but I had to figure this out a lot quicker than the course offered, so alongside that I bought about thirty books on ‘how to’, and how other authors have done it, and really threw myself into figuring out the structure of a novel. With poetry you can’t just ‘dip in’ – the poems are a complete little story on their own, they are like little starbursts. But this story took two years, and I couldn’t write poetry that whole time, because it just felt like a completely different discipline. What I did learn was to try and bring the poetry through with me, so I still felt like a poet writing this book. So in a way I think I’ve been able to have the best of both worlds."

"Yes I hope so – I want to continue to write fiction, I really have the fiction writing bug, but I hope I haven’t lost the knack for writing poetry. I’m going to keep plugging away at it every now and then, because I do love it. It’s a very difficult art form, and I admire the people who have done very well at it."

"Yes, I’ve been quite overwhelmed actually. It’s really not what you expect, especially for a first novel, so I am absolutely thrilled that people are connecting – not only to the family side, the interest in chasing your own roots – but also to the history of Pakeha in New Zealand, and what it was like from that side too. I’m really intrigued to see what people find in it – they all find something different, and I’m liking the layers that people are seeing. So I’m thrilled, you couldn’t ask for more."

"Yes, the names were right at the top of the tree, the four Finnegan family members, with a note saying “murdered” on it – “Otahuhu murders 1865” – with the murderer’s name and the date he was hung. Everything else was just standard on that family tree, with little dates, and arrows, no information at all apart from that, so I thought ‘that is rather interesting.’"

"No, not at all. The family tree came to me in a peculiar way – my mother and my father’s second wife are cousins, so their family trees are the same – so it was my father’s second wife who did the tree, and I never got hold of it until she died. Both her and my mother are unfortunately no longer with us, and my brother had the family tree, and I saw it there and swiped it. So I’d never seen it before that – I’d known it existed and I had tried to get it, but was unsuccessful. So I went home and unravelled it, because it was all in this funny little scroll, and it was the first time I saw it. Then I was researching straight away and I thought this would be a short story. The interest wasn’t initially around the family thing, but the story – I wanted to know who these people were and their times. Both James Stack and the Finnegan family were Irish Catholic, so they had come out from different parts of Ireland – one south, one north – and I wanted to know what brought them out here, who they were and what it was like here for them; that really was the basis of my research."

"No, again I sort of stumbled along. I was writing form the perspective of James Stack initially – I had tried writing it from the mother’s point of view, but it didn’t work. So I was halfway through the novel with James Stack, when I discovered the story of the ghost of John Finnegan, and I started looking into that. Then I went to the site and found the old cottage and got talking to an elderly neighbour who had lived there forever, and he was telling me about the ghost, and as the house was abandoned for two years the neighbours would dare it each other to stay overnight to see if the ghost appeared. And this elderly gentleman had done it himself, but he said ‘it was all hoo-ha, he didn’t appear.’ But I kind of felt something while I was there – I really felt this connection to the little boy – it really intrigued me why he was still there. And so I went home and I left the second half of James behind and I wrote John’s section all in one go, and then wove it throughout the story. John became the hero from there. So it was all sort of piecemeal, it all came together as I discovered things."

"Yes, definitely, and you think about all the different branches and stories that must be in your family. I have since discovered that there is Jewish and German heritage as well, and I’m thinking, ‘what other stories are there’? I think it’s really important to know where we’ve come from, because now I can actually identify with my Irish-ness, and I can understand."

"I had the help of a fellow from the Dublin historical society – he was sending me pictures and information and I did a lot my own research – so it wasn’t hard to imagine what it was like."

"It’s all come through stories that I read of the time. The young girl being arrested for stealing a handkerchief and being put on the ship – that was a real twelve year old girl. And the famines, and the cottages being bowled over to make way for new crops and sheep while it was all going over to England – that was all happening at the time. And the same in New Zealand. The character of Abel is a ‘Pakeha Maori’, he didn’t actually exist in the story with James, but my research on Pakeha Maori – I based Abel on one particular fellow – they intrigued me. And this one that I researched in depth actually did become a mediator in the Maori land court in Auckland, and to me that was just too much richness to leave behind. There was a whole parallel going on between the Irish and the Maori, and I wanted this affinity to be shown, and also the different perspectives of these two Irish guys that came out, and the way it changed them and how they reacted to it – perhaps not as you would expect they would. And at the time someone like Abel would have been perceived as being lost, gone off the rails – but he wasn’t. He had that sprit ritual call. And again, while researching that time, the Kingitanga, there was that spiritual call that was much wiser than a lot of the European ways. In the research I also came across one of the men who was in charge of the 65th, and he resigned because he refused to accept the way the Maori were being treated – so that really was there too. There was a lot going on."

"No, and I don’t really think it was like that back then, in the early nineteenth century. I think the two sides at times really did reach out to each other – especially the lower class Europeans."

"Exactly – we can put people inside a box and say ‘your this sort of person for doing this, you’re that sort of person.’ I don’t like that at all, so I think you’re right – there is this whole middle ground that people forget, that we all move between."

"Yes, very much so. I wanted to know what made him do what he did – because there is always a story. Maybe some people are born bad but a lot the time its circumstantial, and I can kind of understand. But in the end we are formed by the choices we make."

"No, I was quite isolated from that part of the family. My mother was an only child and her father died quite young, so there was no contact. My grandmother went on to have many more children to her next marriage, as they did back then, so that was the family. But having said that, there is a relative I have been in contact with recently, just through the novel coming out, and she has described how members of her family were horrified at her delving into this, as they didn’t want the dirty linen brought out. But I haven’t really gone there – the family was much more notorious than I have written, I knew about that."

"Of course they are both Irish Catholics, so they would have had this sense of purgatory, and praying loved ones out of purgatory. But again, there is that whole grey area, and I really wanted to play with that whole idea. I have this quote from Pope John Paul, which says “heaven and hell are primarily eternal states of consciousness, rather than geographical places of later reward or punishment”. I thought that means that in life we are able to put ourselves into a state of purgatory, because it’s a state of consciousness – and therefore the punishment and reward can be cause and effect. I overlaid that on James – he has placed himself inside a state of purgatory and try as he might he just can’t seem to get himself out, whether through his own choices or through circumstances – really it’s a bit of both – and in the end he chooses his ultimate fate. And for John, still being here as a ghost, to me it made sense that he was in a state of purgatory too. Maybe for him it was choice, maybe it was literally that he was anchored to the ground somehow – to the cottage that he was born in. Then I started looking into Maori mythology, and how some return to watch over their mokopuna as birds or trees, and I thought that that was really very beautiful. They have the choice of going home – and with the Irish, home was either going back to your original home, or heaven – whatever that is for you. And so to me, that whole place of purgatory opened up opportunities, rather than being restrictive. And I thought, ‘what if we have a choice?’ We could become the brightest star in the sky so that our family could know that was us, or we could become an owl that comes to visit, or we could go home– they are all beautiful stories – why not choose?"

"Yes, and it’s also that ghostly side – it’s not a scary thing, or death not being a scary thing, it’s just a part of everyday life, that perhaps we are not aware of as much. So to me there were all these openings that I could play with, and explore. For personal reasons too – so I really enjoyed it."

"I didn’t. It was originally called ‘Mother Mary under a Bed of Carrots’ – that was my working title. But my agent thought it was too whimsical, and he gave it the title ‘Purgatory’, which I struggled with for quite some time – because it was so serious, and scary, and a bit daring – but I absolutely love it now, absolutely couldn’t imagine another title – so thank you Michael!"

"You do become quite ritualistic as a writer, and very precious about your time. Because I have no office in our house I write from my bed – so it’s a crazy little set up – I have my bed and my shelves all around me and I get up very early, kick my husband out, feed the dog, then I come straight back to bed before doing anything. I close the blinds, shut the door so it’s a darkened room, and I find that helps me focus because if it’s a beautiful day, or the wind is blowing its very distracting. So the dog usually snuggles next to me and I do this sort of head clearing thing, which seems to be a necessity, which I never realised I was doing until half way through the book when I was sort of breathing and feeling something starting to percolate – and then I would start. And I would start by reading what I had written the day before, and maybe editing. And there is always this push into the new prose – I don’t know if other writers feel that, but I actually sort of have to kick myself up the bum and say ‘go!’ It’s almost like you have to be brave and say ‘just go!’ and then you’re off."

"I just write and then I go back – and I am hideously painful at going back and back and back, and then I give it to my husband to read, and he will go “hmmm” and so then I go back again. But initially I just let it out. And I cut big sections out, where you’ve just ‘walked into the forest to pick daisies’ – after a while you become more disciplined at seeing those parts and chopping them out. Then when I’m done I feel great – there is no other feeling that equates to that."

"Yes, I have a few favourites. Tim Winton is a favourite; I just love the way his language is so beautiful and the way he crosses that line too into magical realism, where you are in this normal place and this strangeness will waft in, whether it’s a ghost or whatever – I have much respect for that. At the time I also read Hamish Clayton’s Wulf and that inspired me a great deal – again the language and the story – I found him to be extraordinary. And I’ve always loved Janette Frame, and she does similar things. At university I tended to lean more towards sort of gothic novels, so it will be interesting to see what my next one is like. I’m not planning it to be dark or scary in any way, but definitely explorative – just see where it takes me. It’ll be interesting to see whether this dark, slightly gothic thing is me – I’m not sure. Maybe it was just this novel."

"Apparently we Kiwis are really bad at that, not sticking to genre! We must have a real creative freedom – I like it."

"Yes, I have a story pretty much mapped out, but again they change as you are writing it. It’s centred around another murder that I know of, and that I’m quite intrigued with, and its more contemporary. So it think possibly I will explore contemporary issues through it – I’m quite looking forward to it."

"Back to the bedroom, very soon! As soon as all this settles I will be incognito again – for the next two years!"

"My biggest fear has always been that someone would be trapped back here and couldn't get help. No ambulance or police would be able to get through. It's good to know that after all of these years, my family will be safe. I've been stuck many times from the outside and couldn't get home and I've been stuck on the inside and couldn't get out."

"He's been in the Coast Guard his entire life, and one of the things he does and does well is what the Coast Guard motto is, be always prepared. He takes every new event and gets down and starts working and sees it to its end."

"& so I bring my journal writing & sit amongst / the ferociously chic at Cafe Flor (which I call / Cafe Voyeur) in an era when everyone has a therapist & no one has a lover. and I have a slice of carrot cake / and a frothy mochachina, sprinkled generously with nutmeg / & cinnamon, sitting there pondering "The Convolution of Desire / & Terror that is the paradigm of human sexuality." And I write / it down completely impressed with myself, smug with the glow, / wondering if anyone-man or woman, or middle aged transsexual / with bad makeup from the nether twilight world of the Tenderloin-- / would stop by to cruise me. YES, EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE / I HAVE AN OUTSTANDING MOMENT OF OBSOLETE HAPPINESS."

"Sybil was now banging on about how hard Humph worked and the havoc caused by boarding school fees for seven. Jack refrained from telling her that you would expect seven children to be more expensive to raise than one or two and that no one had an electric cattle prod on either her rump or Humph's as they herded their offspring into private schools."

"Later that evening, he sat in the bar, pint in one hand, pipe in the other, with good food beneath his belt and listened to the natural harmony of the Welsh fishermen singing their songs of Wales and the sea"

"When you face tough times but keep on going; when you're discouraged and doubtful, but still show up; when you are not sure of what to do, but you give it you best anyway--you will, in the end, succeed. Just be willing to do whatever it takes."

"I feel the word iconic is overused and inappropriately attached to lesser events or items than is deserved. However, I am going to use it to describe this book. A River Rules My Life was first published in 1963 and reprinted 9 times. Why? Because it is engaging, entertaining and captures a world within our nation but apart from the normal Kiwi experiences. To add to this, 50 years on, we can include a view of times past, when battling the elements and life without technology was a possibility."

"Before I was married I knew nothing about station life," she said. "I could have distinguished between a cow and a sheep and I could sometimes tell the difference between a lamb chop and a pork chop, but that was the limit of my experience, and I was determined to keep my ignorance to myself"

"The river was my Rubicon', Mona said. 'I had heard stories about the terrible Wilberforce: so many people had been drowned in it. I tried not to think about the time when I could have to cross it. But the road had come to an end at a corrugated iron shed. Somewhere beyond it I knew we would find the station, Mount Algidus, a green, high-country oasis amid the snow and the tussock."

"Wellington, with its hills and fault lines and glittering sea, is like a perfect espresso cup of culture and energy. It’s also home to a lot of quiet minorities, like the Greek community I come from, who carry stories that might be less well known than others. I can’t wait to return"

"In the story of the Trojan Horse, after a ten-year siege, the Greeks pretend to sail away and leave a “gift” of a wooden horse on the doorstep of the city of Troy. The Trojans pull the horse into their city. But, under the cover of night, a select force of men creep out of it, torching the city, and thus winning the war for the Greeks."

"I am a Greek-New Zealand writer and I am building a horse like this — or, more accurately, I’m allowing it to build itself."

"But, in this story, the Trojan Horse is a non-fiction book that I’m writing about the media in Aotearoa — and the warriors are writers. Māori writers, Pasifika writers, French and Chinese and “other” writers. Any writers that haven’t been identified by the press as part of a Pākehā mainstream."

"And the city of Troy is Pākehā culture, which I envisage in this book as a walled fortress. In front of this fortress, the horse is taking shape. There are voices clamouring inside it, about to be let out."

"The voices belong to some of Aotearoa’s foremost writers: Tusiata Avia, Tina Makereti, Chris Tse, Paula Morris, and Karlo Mila, among many others, who I’ve interviewed for my upcoming book, The Outliers: Who do we want to be?"

"My interest in the way these writers are portrayed in the media began * when I started a PhD in creative writing at Victoria University, in 2009. I realised that even though some of them were challenging ethnic stereotypes with their work, they were often completely exoticised in the media around them."

"I discovered that — contrary to what I’d expected — in the 40 years since the publication of Witi Ihimaera’s first book, the mainstream media’s representation of these authors has not become more nuanced, or less racist. Instead, the racism has gone underground, coming out as a kind of simplistic “celebration”, and keeping all such authors firmly on the outside: nice, exotic additions to “New Zealand Literature."

"It's a strenuous job every day of your life to live up to the way you look on the screen."

"I guess I became an actress because I didn't want to be myself."

"I am not an adult, that's my explanation of myself. Except when I am working on a set, I have all the inhibitions and shyness of the bashful, backward child . . . unless I have something very much in common with a person, I am lost. I am swallowed up in my own silence."

"The fact that I did not marry George Bernard Shaw is the only real disappointment I've had."

"[on Hollywood] I hated the place - not the work, but the lack of privacy, those terrible prying fan magazine writers and all the surrounding exploitation."

"If people don't like your work, all the still pictures in the world can't help you and nothing written about you, even oceans of it, will make you popular."

"(on doing interviews) Quite frankly, I'd rather have my throat slit."

"I bumped into every kind of disappointment, and was frustrated at every turn. Roles promised me were given to other players, pictures that offered me a chance were shelved, no one was particularly interested in me, and I had not developed a strength of personality to make anyone believe I had special talents. I wanted so desperately to succeed that I drove myself relentlessly, taking no time off for pleasures, or for friendships - yet aiming at the stars, I was still floundering."

"First I played ingénues and western heroines; then I played western heroines and ingénues. That diet of roles became as monotonous as a diet of spinach. The studio wouldn't trust me with any other kind of role, because I had no experience in any other kind. And I didn't see how I was ever going to acquire any other experience if I couldn't get any other kind of role. It was a vicious circle."

"It's hardly fair for women to do the same things at the same hours every day of their lives, while men have new experiences, meet new people every day. I felt that way as a little girl, with two older brothers around the house. It seemed to me that they led adventurous lives, compared with mine. I felt cheated and frustrated. I became a tomboy in self-defense. I decided that I was going to do things that were exciting, or at least interesting."

"[speaking in in the 1930s] I've never had a single close intimate girlfriend in all my life. I never had a chum to whom I could confide my secrets. I suppose that accounts for the fact that now it is so painfully difficult for me to open my heart and confide in people who are, so often, almost strangers. You have to learn so very young to open your heart."

"[on her early acting days] My very "naturalness" was my undoing. I had to learn that to appear natural on the screen requires a vast amount of training, that is the test of an actor's art. It would be more spectacular if I could say that out of the hurt and humiliation of that failure was born a determination to success, to prove I had the makings of an actress. But it wouldn't be true. That urge came later."

"[on her first marriage, which only lasted a day] Julian [Julian Anker] looked a lot like Abraham Lincoln, and that's probably why I fell in love with him. One day we were out driving and he suddenly said, "Hey, why don't we get married?" So we lied about our ages and got married in a sheriff's office. You should have heard our families' reactions - all sorts of screaming and shouting and carrying on about suicide. Well, neither Julian nor I had enough income to make it possible for us to live together, so our marriage lasted one day."

"[on making Only Angels Have Wings (1939)] I loved sinking my head into Cary Grant's chest."

"[1977 comment on Gary Cooper] I loved working with Gary Cooper. Gary was my favorite. He was so terrific-looking, and so easy to work with."

"[on director George Stevens] George Stevens started out as a cameraman with Laurel and Hardy, and he learned so many wonderful tricks, like having us walk forward while looking backward and then bumping into something. George was a darling man, so great with comedy. It's too bad he got serious."

"[In 1940] Those two and a half years on Broadway were the happiest years of my life. I loved the stage. I think every girl who wants to become an actress should put in some years on the stage."

"[About her first marriage] There was nothing tragic about it - it was a case of willfulness."

"I wanted to become a really accomplished actress, but I didn't know how to act, and had no chance to learn. In those days the studios didn't have coaches or drama schools and it was almost impossible to get on the sets to watch the older players. I finally decided there was only one thing to do: go back to New York and try to get into some plays there."

"[About her early career] I was all right in long shots, but when it came to close-ups, sustained emotion was beyond me. I knew nothing about acting and often wondered why I had not continued with my plan to become a teacher of modern languages."

"[While she was a model] Someone in the studio noticed me sitting in the background. They asked me whether I would pose for girls' hats, and with some diffidence I consented. My first posing was terribly self-conscious. The photographer liked my type, and employed me steadily that summer. I got $5 an hour and sometimes had five or six sittings in a day."

"You must be true to yourself. Strong enough to be true to yourself. Brave enough to be strong enough to be true to yourself. Wise enough to be brave enough, to be strong enough to shape yourself from what you actually are.”"

"So often I have said in the past, when a war is over, the statesmen should not go into conference one with another, but should turn their attention to the infant rooms, since it is from there that comes peace or war.”"

"the more violent the boy, the more I see that he creates, and when he kicks the others with his big boots, treads on fingers on the mat, hits another over the head with a piece of wood or throws a stone, I put clay in his hands, or chalk. He can create bombs if he likes or draw my house in flame, but it is the creative vent that is widening all the time and the destructive one atrophying, however much it may look to the contrary. And anyway I have always been more afraid of the weapon unspoken than of the one on the blackboard"

"Sorry guys, the thing is, when I write a poem I become a werewolf."

"My views become exactly the same as “those expressed in Germany”. What I mean is, I’m the whole of Nazism and the entire Second World War."

"When I write a poem “sexual and racial violence” burst out of me like wolf-fur through the rents in my smooth brown skin. I start howling at the moon and “inciting racial violence” all over the place."

"My daughter locks me in the bathroom and says through the door: Mum, stop that “racist violence dressed up as art”, because, Mum, “poor white people disaffected by the effects of globalism” couldn’t say those things."

"My daughter slumps down outside the bathroom door in tears and whispers: I’m tired of my “acceptable ethnicity”. We brown people have all the privileges now. We can say anything we like and get away with it."

"When I am under a full moon, I start writing a poem about colonisation, which is exactly the same as “inciting murder”. Writing a poem is the same as a “manifesto” justifying terrorism and massacre."

"Now, I’m howling and ripping off my clothes and writing a poem which is “inciting violence” right through the walls of my house."

"The neighbours hear me writing a poem about colonisation and they yell: Stop that “race-baiting”, our kids are trying to sleep."

"Later, my white neighbour will come over to my house and say: Let me explain something to you, Tusiata. “Racism is like a scab on your knee”, and “if you pick it”, what will happen? “Leave it alone and it will heal”, otherwise I fear the “wound will get infected”. And what will happen to me then? Huh? What will happen to me then?"

"When I write a poem it turns into a “hate crime” right then and there. It springs up off the page, and marches out into the street like an army of ten thousand colonial soldiers armed with guns."

"My poem steals my neighbour’s land, and everybody’s land. My poem steals 94 percent of all the land in New Zealand. It steals millions upon millions of acres of land."

"My poem kidnaps children, puts them in state welfare institutions, abuses them and stops them speaking their own language."

"In the space of a few generations, my poem has traumatised the people who originally owned this land and their language almost disappears."

"My poem is no accident. My poem does all these things on purpose. My poem has a plan to take over everyone and everything."

"When I write a poem, my “moral compass is marginal” at best and the consequences of my poem “devastate” innocent people all over the country. Look at my poem, causing the “radicalisation of people” and ruining “social cohesion”."

"Oh no! Here I go again, with my pen and my exercise book, inciting “hate speech” and “dehumanising” people."

"Now, I want you to listen closely because I’m going to tell you something very important: Brown women are so privileged now, we can get away with anything. If I was a “white male I would be taken apart!”."

"That’s honestly how simple it is."

"It is not complex."

"No colonisation. No genocide. No intergenerational trauma. No two centuries of white privilege."

"There is truly nothing more to think about."

"Damn this poem! It is making my jaw grow long and shaggy, fangs grow from my mouth and my eyes turn red. Here I go, on all fours now, with a tail growing out from under my skirt like a wild dog. Here I go, writing a “racist rant about one of history’s greatest explorers”."

"She groaned as her face turned to press against the rosewood floor. "Welly, remind me to order a better mattress for my bed. This one is far too firm.""

"Oh, Eliza," Wellington gasped, now remembering why he was in these lush surroundings. "No broken nose, I hope.""

""S'all right," Braun slurred. Her voiced dropped to a whisper. "My ample bosom broke my fall."

"Mortals were such fickle creatures. They called into the dark, demanded answers and attention from forces they could not comprehend, and yet when they had that attention and those answers, they complained about them.”"

"Be that as it may, we were--and no doubt, still are--held under scrutiny, with that whole Phoenix Society brouhaha. It is imperative we remain on our best behaviour, a feat that you did not exactly manage effortlessly with your shenanigans in Edinburgh"

"I think you will agree the sign of a civilised society is a regular dining schedule."

"She sighed heavily before whispering, “I’m still a bit confused as to what we are waiting for.” “We are waiting for one of the constants in our world, Miss Braun,” Wellington assured her. “At the end of every opera, there is the grand finale, where the music continues its gradual crescendo, the tenor and tempo rising ever so gradually for that pinnacle of dramatic tension, that moment of anticipation—” “Welly, are you talking about opera or about sex?” His next words caught in his throat. For a woman of higher tastes and seeming refinement, this woman could be utterly crass."

"Nay, you attract mayhem, chaos, and anarchy wherever your delicate feet tread. Around you there is no such thing as a coincidence.""

""Why do you think it is always me, Director?" Eliza protested. "It could be Books. My father always told me to beware the quiet ones"

"Humans don’t like correction,” Father’s sub-routine reminded her. “Especially by our kind"

"“The only dream worth having is to dream that you will live while you are alive, and die only when you are dead. To love, to be loved. To never forget your own significance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and vulgar disparity of the life around you."

"Books are escape hatches from conventional temporality. They are portals. Flight co-ordinates to elsewhere. The best thing about reading is turning pages to unlock minds and worlds. Reading takes me on journeys where I encounter the familiar and the unimaginable. It transports me beyond my geographical location, but can also ground me in my neighbourhood"

"I’m not a proponent of the Dewey Classification system. It was created in the 1870s and is based on a system that classifies knowledge according to Western perspectives and cultural bias. It doesn’t accommodate interdisciplinary subjects or emerging fields. What I consider nonfiction might be shelved in the fiction section of a library. I just enjoy books"

"The bootprints of history tramp through my children's veins. I hear my father telling me about the great road that ran above his village right along the Adriatic. Napoleonova Cesta he called it proudly. Napoleon's road. It was built by Marshal Marmont when Napoleon made him governor of the Dalmatia that the Emperor renamed Illyria, giving it back its ancient name. Was Marshal Marmont the Duc de Dalmatie who signed with a flourish the document giving the Nanto-Bordelaise Company the charter for French settlement in Akaroa ? I like to think he was.”"

"I don’t think I have one - I like a lot, and we cook a lot with Asian spices like lemon grass and fish sauce."

"What is your favourite food?"

"I have a twin sister whose name is Anne, and as we live in the same city I’m constantly getting mistaken for her, and people are always asking ‘Are you Helen or Anne?’ And I’m so bored with the question, and I’m not listening, and I say ‘Anne’ without thinking. And then I realise and is it better to say, I’m sorry, I made a mistake! or to try to brazen it out, hoping no-one will realise?"

"I read a tremendous amount. But I also ride a mountain bike round the Wellington hills and on bike tours, and sail and tramp."

"I really like learning, and I liked learning when I was small. I guess I was one of those model pupils - except in one subject - see below."

"Can’t bring it down to one. Which part of childhood, anyway? When you were little and my mother used to read Beatrix Potter and the Winnie the Pooh books? Or when I was older and used to sneak read Enid Blyton (my mother didn’t approve of those!) No, better to say I read a vast amount, and on all sorts of subjects, and I loved historical fiction, and The Wind in the Willows, The Hobbit, The Fellowship of the Ring (and the rest of the Trilogy), Drovers Road, the Narnia books, Kate Seredy books about Hungary before the First World War, Patricia Lynch books set in Ireland - all sorts."

"I started writing as a child, and then it got lost, and it was only when I began reading to my own children that I thought ‘I could do as well as this person’. Now one of the great rewards of writing is having characters constantly in your head, and seeing the world through their eyes and thinking about how they might respond to things that happen to them, and being aware of yourself in them."

"Writing is not about inspiration! In the main it’s about hard work and frustration and rewriting and rewriting. But there are moments. The best are when you’re writing and suddenly, words seem to flow from your fingertips and ideas happen that you haven’t had to work for and you don’t know where they came from."

"The worst is when you can’t think where to go in your writing, and an idea won’t get written."

"Write! (See the first sentence above - ‘best and worst thing about being a writer’)"

"Phil Cooper was eleven years old when he began to understand that his father meant to bend him to his will."

"our little niece came tearing out to meet us."

"The story begins as the Pilgrim family, along with the rest of the Whanganui branch of The Children, move south to Nelson, to join with another branch. The reason for the move is unclear, but the teenagers assume it has something to do with needing to match-make, as many of the young females are approaching marriageable age – 16. Rebecca has lived her entire life within her family group, though she and the other children had to attend a ‘worldly school’ in Whanganui. It is a frightening prospect, then, when she is sent with her twin, Rachel, to sell produce at a farmers’ market on Saturdays in Nelson. This interaction with people who live their lives in freedom proves an eye-opener for both sisters."

"At no stage in the book does Beale let up on the tension, as we follow the sisters through impossible situations with regards to the Rule regarding every aspect of the Children of the Faith and how they manage themselves. The sisters must abase themselves each time they need to tell their Father something, for fear of earning hours of prayer. The tension builds, with death, bad marriage matches and new babies adding to it, until Rebecca begins to doubt, finally, the wisdom of her elders."

"cv_I_am_not_estherOne of the factors that contributes to Rebecca’s doubt is the not-insignificant fact that she, along with the rest of the family group, are meant to act as though their older sister and brother are dead, as well as her “trouble-causing” cousin, who she is continually required to stand up for. I am not Esther tells the story of the siblings and cousin who left the group – which to the family unit means they must be treated as ‘dead’. Rebecca is determined, in her own way, to remember that they existed, but not without guilt over this."

"While I won’t tell you what happens, I will say that Rebecca is a strong and admirable character. You feel that Beale really lets you into the mind of somebody who has grown up within a strict environment such as The Children of the Faith. Beale’s books have dealt with cults several times previously, but always from the outside looking in, so this is a refreshing point of view."

"The thing is, Neil, you are all of us’ is one of the first parts of the book I wrote, back in 2011. I had known Neil Roberts’s story for some time and it had occurred to me it would be interesting to write a long poem about the incident. One of the things that struck me early on in my research, from reading various anarchist/ libertarian communist web entries, was the sense of ownership amongst these radical left communities for the story. It was as though each person who had re-told the story, while not endorsing Neil’s act, could identify with the way he must have felt. In this poem I drew on my own experience within the Wellington anarchist scene – although not every detail is ‘true’, the characters in this poem do approximate real people, myself included."

"Within this poem the ghost of an accentual meter can be heard, and the metrical scheme, while loose, is something near the traditional 4, 3, 4, 3 ballad stanza. And it is off-rhymed, xaxa. Perhaps the ballad was lurking behind the scenes all along. It has been mentioned that Dear Neil Roberts is rhythmically close to prose. I think this is true (as it is for a wide range of contemporary free verse), but I also think that writing to a regular stanzaic shape can lead to some interesting effects. For instance, rhymes frequently occur at line-ends. And there are lines in the book that are straight iambic pentameter. It has to be remembered that poetry is a genre, and can be written in verse, prose, or any combination of the two. Writing Dear Neil Roberts as a poem allowed me to present, juxtapose and interpret information in a different manner, than if I had set out to write an extended essay or a work of New Zealand history."

"Established’ is a good word, much used in garden books,"

"‘The plant, when established’ . . Oh, become established quickly, *quickly, garden For I am fugitive, I am very fugitive – – –"

"Those that come after me will gather these roses, And watch, as I do *now, the white wistaria Burst, in the sunshine, from its pale green sheath."

"Planned. Planted. Established. Then neglected, Till at last the loiterer by the gate will wonder At the old, old cottage, the old wooden cottage,And say ‘One might build here, the view is glorious;This must have been a pretty garden once.’"

"Storytelling is an art deep within human nature. Good narratives not only tell us about ourselves; they tell us about the beliefs of others. Stories are the essential way by which we expand our empathy and our imaginations; stories are the means by which we communicate across time and across cultures."

"The historians’ craft is to tease out the larger narratives from … competing versions, missing parts, and conflicting ‘truths’."

"Biographies are essentially personal histories… [yet] they may tell us more than the story of one life: they may reveal the struggle for the survival of an entire community."

"Oral history is transmitted by narrative, by song, by proverb and by genealogy. We who write down our histories in books transmit our chosen perceptions to readers rather than to listeners, but both forms are structured,interpretative and combative."

"I want to take you to the river that runs behind my house"

"There is such a narrow window"

"Often I look at the world"

"It’s like falling in love for the first time for the last time"

"The past is a bad invention that keeps on happening:"

"Keats is dead so fuck me from behind"

"I enjoy words that sparkle, whether they be in Māori, my mother tongue, or English. What a privilege it is to inherit and to appreciate a language, and to enjoy another equally."

"I’m in love with that girl,” she said out loud in amazement, because she knew that this was a life-changing thing and life-changing things should be said aloud, should have a moment in time, and a place in the air, some molecular structure to make them real. I’m in love with that girl, she heard as it reverberated inside her head. And it was truth, she realised, as things are which you don’t think, but discover have always existed.”"

"Well, Louie, you’ll know then that Leviticus also tells us not to cut our beards, not to wear linen and wool together nor to eat crayfish or frogs or snails. I’m afraid that if we adhered to Leviticus the entire French nation would be an abomination in the eyes of the Lord"

"I am in love. It just happened, I never sought it, but I couldn't turn away from it"

"How lucky you are, to love and to be loved in return.”"

"So far it has worked by imagining you in all the places I would like you to be"

"this is the one I love.he is not here but the air is still warm from where he might have been"

"we have spent hours circling each other with words-thinly vowelled embraces"

"how to translate these words into silences or the silences into words"

"when I cannot fix you behind my eyes I carry your absence like stars on the blue roof."

"Oh it's terrifying, yeah: you come up to publication day and you suddenly realise 'right that's it, it's out in the world'. I remember when my publishers were telling me that it was starting to get on the bestseller list, and I was thinking 'Okay, well I've got a lot of family and a lot of friends, so okay that accounts for the first week'. And then I started realising that absolute strangers were gonna be reading it and...yeah it is quite terrifying actually."

"...all those other 'How To' books were just about people that knew about this thing. This is different, because he's not a bird-watcher; this is his journey into that world . . . I'd like it hardbacked and leather, because it's a lovely book. It's one you'd want to treasure."

"Hers was the first voice like hers that I had discovered in literature before. I was good at English . . . I had never come across a voice like hers before. She was a black woman from the States, and she just blew my mind..."

"The fact that he can focus so deeply on a dinner, or a conversation at a beach, or you know, the impending non-consummation of a marriage, was really wonderful. It had all the depth. But I was quite captivated by the food, the English food, and how kind of unappealing it was. It was just so banal and humdrum."

"A great deal of my fiction deals with extreme violence erupting in normal lives."

"I never decided that I would; I was just never able to stop."

"The way Doyle paints it is that the brotherhood, the Sinn Féin became the home for all these poor — you know, the woebegotten souls who were like trying to find their way."

"It's not a world that I know but I came to know something about it though the book which was good, but I see...when I look at literature, when I look at books I look at the structure of them and ... I saw a fairy tale actually, when I think about it you know the traditional princess who becomes a maid who rises to become a queen and all these mad people inbetween on that journey..."

"I have a new scarlet coat and I look like a fire engine and I don't give a damn..."

"I'm always happy because your definition of 'young" is elastic..."

"He taught me everything. He just used to say, and I'll never forget that, he said 'it's not big words and adjectives — that's boring'. And I thought 'ah yes' . . . I learned from that. Simplicity is the art of writing."

"It's typically Jamesian because in a way its an unambiguous story: you know exactly what's going on, but it creates these ambiguities of feeling in you, because you want her protected, yet you can't like the father who's protecting her..."

"...I wouldn't really be interested in writing a biography about someone who was obvious and straightforward. It's the enigma of a particular personality, I think, that drives your interest as a biographer. With someone like [John] Mulgan, someone like [Ralph] Hotere, there is a core there which is truly enigmatic, and which obviously fuels the work."

"...I have a problem with historic novels, I think that they tend to become history lessons and this book at times becomes a history lesson"

"...a lot of really bad books, like just shit books, are written with really great plots that really move along, and why should the devil have all the good tunes you know? I like a good story in a book. It's not very fashionable to say that, because people associate good stories with the kind of books that are a cop-out: books that are like bad middlebrow popular fiction. But what's bad about being entertained?"

"Part of that shorthand is the way that she works as well. I mean she's got this very reduced, very spare kind of style, which I loved. But more than anything I found it so compelling because of this fantastic unconsummated love, that really acts as a huge narrative pull."

"Writing didn't really get a look in until we had children. I made the decision that I was going to stay home and bring the kids up myself, and oddly enough that gave me the opportunity and the time to write finally. I say time very loosely there..."

"Some phrases you have to say out loud. it's like someone has poured warm milk into your skull, you know? It's just beautiful — I loved it."

"...of course it wasn't called Lord of the Flies to begin with; it was called something awful like A Cry of Children. And it took 22 goes to get the manuscript actually on the desk at Faber and Faber for someone to accept it. All these stories come out . . . the professional book reader who looked at Lord of the Flies and said 'rubbish, dull, pointless'."

"...legends are not only necessary to us, but however strong the legend, even if you try to demolish it, you can't. In fact you end up reinforcing it . . . We writers are mythmakers, whether we like it or not. The moment you write a book, you are very often adding to and sometimes creating a myth, and I've done both and I'm very happy with that."

"...what I liked about it is . . . you never know if you're nuts, you know? And he had no idea, until they started finding the bodies..."

"It was just extraordinary from the moment I started reading it. It doesn't have any chapters, and you just don't want it to stop. It's like that feeling of being a child again when you're reading a book and you honestly stay up all night reading it."

"For me, the idea that people in the past can be present, is not a very strange idea when you've had a lot of experience with people that feel that way. Being with [knowing] elders like Eruera Stirling for 20 odd years . . . he looked at the ancestors as if they were just in the next room."

"If someone was to tell me that I'd be raving on TV about a book about Diana, that's pink, [reading on] the bus, as a straight male, I'd tell you that 'you're wrong'. Let me just tell you that it's one of the most compelling books I've read!"

"I love the title, I loved it. in the same way that the stories take on extra meaning after coming after the other stories. What I love about it is the way the title 'Opportunity' takes on so much meaning coming after the novel's provocation..."

"The place is the context of the poetry. It's not that I write about the place, but the poetry comes out of my life in the place. So in that way it is tremendously important To me, and I'm sure i wouldn't be writing what I'm writing if I weren't in Bluff."

"...she's not a sentimental writer. There are times when she's as referential as a nun. At times she leaps into a comic, clownish dance. And times when she thunders like an Old Testament prophet."

"The mind of a child is a very different thing, and getting into that mind and just seeing the way the mind works...my younger daughter says 'you know if you stand on your head, you don't blink'. Now I don't know if that's true or not, but what a great line and I'm going to use that in a book that I'm writing at the moment..."

"You can read it with a perfectly straight face but kind of chuckle inwardly; that's what I like."

"Molly's from his series Dance to the Music of Time, in episode ten"

"In fact her writing reminds me of your writing actually . . . it's insightful and it's layered. And it's a bit like intellectual quicksand"

"Go and do something else. Have a rest from it for a while - could be an hour, could be a week. The answer usually shows itself and I'm away again."

"The writing! The ideas and where my characters take me. That eureka moment when you've been stuck with something and BAM! the answer hits me."

"Read lots and find out the stories you like to read - which will be the stories you'd like to write, more often than not. Practice your writing like you would practice and instrument or sport, constantly looking for a better word or description of something."

"I am working on a new story set on an island. A boy has come to the island with his father to look for his sister who has disappeared.... It's in two viewpoints - the other being a native of the island who wants to leave as soon as she's old enough - just like her elder sister. Or did she?"

"I used to worry about not having ideas to work on, but found the less I worried about it and kept my eyes and mind open to things around me - the ideas came all on their own. I love people and thinking about how they tick, why they do things and what happens next!"

"Trouble in Time came about when I was visiting my Poppa with my son who was about 3 at the time. I remembered my Poppa hooning around on his motorbike on his small farm, helping people in his little rural town here in New Zealand and being on the go. My son saw a frail elderly man sitting in his chair in the sunshine. Grandparents have done cool things in their lives - just ask them!q"

"There is a duality to South Africa, as in all of life itself, that is evident, and as stark as the inequality among its citizens"

"Then I close my eyes, and I imagine a world where I sabi and you sabi that we are okay, as we are"

"Perhaps all South Africans need to embrace the mirror of yesteryear, and fear it not, for it holds the answers to the questions that we seek today. Questions that, if left unanswered, will still be asked by generations yet to come.”"

"In the stillness the voice inside is louder, much louder, and cannot be ignored"

"Our stories are important and need to be told"

"If there is a pure space inside of us that can access the eternal source, and give rise to great acts of kindness, create masterpiece artworks, inspire life changing technology, and drive a man to risk his life to save a woman and her baby in a flood, where then does that space exist inside us that gives rise to great acts of horror and pain?"

"Guilt isn't in cat vocabulary. They never suffer remorse for eating too much, sleeping too long or hogging the warmest cushion in the house. They welcome every pleasurable moment as it unravels and savour it to the full until a butterfly or falling leaf diverts their attention. They don't waste energy counting the number of calories they've consumed or the hours they've frittered away sunbathing."

"Cats don't beat themselves up about not working hard enough. They don't get up and go, they sit down and stay. For them, lethargy is an art form. From their vantage points on top of fences and window ledges, they see the treadmills of human obligations for what they are - a meaningless waste of nap time.”"

"“People persuade themselves they deserve easy lives, that being human makes us somehow exempt from pain. The theory works fine until we face the inevitable challenges. Our conditioning of denial in no way equips us to deal with the difficult times that not one of us escapes."

"Cleo's motto seemed to be: Life's tough and that's okay, because life is also fantastic. Love it, live it - but don't be fooled into thinking it's not harsh sometimes. Those who've survived periods of bleakness are often better at savoring good times and wise enough to understand that good times are actually great.”"

"Then there was the realisation that I didn't actually feel that much better when I was thin(ner). In fact the 'thin' version felt worse because I lived with hunger clawing at my stomach all the time, and in fear that I was going to get fat again. After years of neuroticism I'd finally understood those who loved me would continue to put up with me fat or thin, and those who didn't ignored me. As a middle-aged woman I was pretty much invisible anyway. To pass unnoticed through an image-obsessed society is surprisingly liberating"

"One of the many ways in which cats are superior to humans is their mastery of time. By making no attempt to dissect years into months, days into hours and minutes into seconds, cats avoid much misery. Free from the slavery of measuring every moment, worrying whether they are late or early, young or old, or if Christmas is six weeks away, felines appreciate the present in all its multidimensional glory. They never worry about endings or beginnings. From their paradoxical viewpoint an ending is often a beginning. The joy of basking on a window ledge can seem eternal, though if measured in human time it's diminished to a paltry eighteen minutes."

"He'd also developed his own version of making the most of every minute. "Through Sam I found out how quickly things can change. Because of him I've learned to appreciate each moment and try not to hold on to things. Life's more exciting and intense that way. It's like the yogurt that goes off after three days. It tastes so much better than the stuff that lasts three weeks."

"If humans could program themselves to forget time, they would savor a string of pleasures and possibilities. Regrets about the past would dissolve, alongside anxieties for the future. We'd notice the color of the sky and be liberated to seize the wonder of being alive in this moment. If we could be more like cats our lives would seem eternal.”"

"“I used to wish I had an easier life," he mused. "Some families sail through years with nothing touching them. They have no tragedies. They go on about how lucky they are. Yet sometimes it seems to me they're half alive. When something goes wrong for them, and it does for everyone sooner or later, their trauma is much worse. They've had nothing bad happen to them before. In the meantime, they think little problems, like losing a wallet, are big deals. They think it's ruined their day. They have no idea what a hard day's like. It's going to be incredibly tough for them when they find out.""

"My very first job was teaching the JAWS screen reader when I was in college to another college student at the University of Central Oklahoma. That was all the way back in 2004!"

"I have worked at Vispero since June of 2018."

"I have always been excited about new technology, and it naturally led me to explore assistive technology I could use as a blind individual. Over time, I discovered that I also love teaching. I discovered this through teaching braille, which was my second job. Those combined passions brought me to where I am now. I also love working with people and thrive as a part of a team."

"I wanted to do something with animals when I was a kid, which does not really compare to what I do now. Still, animals remain a big part of my life, and I adore them. When I was younger, I pictured animals as my career and technology as my hobby. Now, it is the opposite: assistive technology is my job, and caring for my animals is a hobby."

"I take a lot of joy in seeing people learn skills they can apply in their lives, and I am fortunate to experience that regularly in my current role. When I look back on my time at Vispero, and even in my previous roles, what really stands out is the ability to empower others through learning. Helping people gain skills that make their lives easier or more independent is incredibly rewarding."

"Recently, I felt particularly energized by the recent conclusion of our second annual Next Big Thing contest and Sharkvember celebrations, a project I am actively involved in and really enjoy. Also, the release of FS Companion has been incredibly exciting. The team all worked hard on development, spreading the word, and ensuring our users know about it. Seeing that effort begin to pay off has been thrilling for everyone."

"I have had several opportunities to mentor people at Vispero, including interns and new team members. Mentoring is a humbling experience—it is usually less about teaching and more about learning together, and I truly value those connections. I tend to gain fresh perspectives and insights from the folks’ I mentor."

"Do not hesitate to reach out. We function like a well-oiled machine, which can feel intimidating at first, but everyone here is incredibly kind. The team is fueled by passion—we are all here because we want to be, which creates an amazing environment for growth and learning. Even though we mostly work remotely, we are always available to help, so don’t be afraid to connect and ask questions."

"I love reading and cooking, especially experimenting with different recipes and methods. My high school-aged kids keep me busy as they prepare for the next stage in life, but I also enjoy taking care of my pets and my backyard chicken flock. Even though I do not get to water ski or hike as often as I’d like, both are favorite ways to enjoy the outdoors when the weather cooperates. I feel blessed to have a job I love, and when I want to relax, I often unwind with a good Netflix series or documentary."

"I am not sure if it’s a hidden talent, but I play a mean game of Pinochle, and my family is fiercely competitive about it. I am a high energy person, so I keep busy. I also have two dogs, two cats and, of course, a flock of eleven chickens that I enjoy caring for."

"“People only care how much you know when they know how much you care.” A mentor teacher shared this with me, and it turned out to be both wise and true."

"Professionally, I am exploring how AI and data can help us make better decisions. It is amazing how quickly this technology evolves and how it can empower us all. On the personal side, I am always reading something new, and I am excited to try my hand at using a pellet smoker. I am looking forward to experimenting with different flavors—maybe even smoked cheese, as my smoker has a cold smoker box."

"I do not always remember every single word, but the energy and essence of Theodore Roosevelt’s quote has stayed with me since my teens:"

"“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”"

"It reminds me that showing up and trying is what really matters, mistakes will always be a part of life."

"I am not very interested in seeing the future, but I love diving into history, especially when it’s told from lesser-known perspectives. You can learn so much from the little details that mainstream stories often miss. I would travel back in time just to be a fly on the wall, not to change anything, but to understand the nuances that shaped our world. Also, let us be honest, to see some of the more dramatic moments that are not fully known, the part of history that happened behind closed doors."

"My poems don't start from ideas, but from bits of language, maybe a turn of phrase that's like a tune that plays over and over in my mind. A poem can often be like a game in my head where I want to think about something I don't fully understand. Recently a child said to me, 'I'm not me. I'm someone else. I'm very strong. I'm Richie McCaw.' It's easy when you're four years old to play this sort of game. Writing is one way that as an adult I can take on a different persona. Some of these poems may suggest I live in rest home and that I have won the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship and lived in Menton. I did once spend a happy weekend in Paris, but I've never been to Menton and I have never won the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship. That doesn't stop me wondering what it would be like to be selected for a magnificent prize and live in a remote city. I also wonder what it may be like one day to live in a rest home.'"

"I don’t have a favourite genre. I try to ready widely."

"There’s almost always a book of poems that I’m reading and I keep it by my bed or in my handbag if the book is skinny enough. At present I am still reading Essential New Zealand Poems and I am also reading Horse with Hat by Marty Smith. I’ve also read some of Milton’s poetry, particular a verse drama called Samson Agonistes that for some reason I never got round to reading when I studied Milton as a university student. (Paula — these books aren’t children’s books in case you think they are."

"I’m reading a novel too – it’s called Concluding by Henry Green. It first came out when I was 6 years old but of course I didn’t know anything about him then. He was talked about a bit when I was at university but was never in any of the English papers I did."

"If you want to write in a particular genre it’s likely you’ll read that genre. At the same time I sometimes find that the books that really get me writing are a surprise. It’s not necessarily books of modern poetry that make me want to write poems."

"I don’t often feel inspired. I try to keep writing and sometimes something unexpected happens and I find I’m writing more easily and confidently than usual. It’s wonderful when that happens."

"Things that make me want to write vary."

"What I read is often helpful. Sometimes first lines of very good writers make me want to write my own poem almost as a response to theirs. Janet Frame and Anne Carson have done that for me."

"Sometimes being under a particular pressure makes me write easily. Which seems strange. Pressure might be a time constraint, like to write something in 20 minutes. Or it might be a set of ‘rules’, like ‘Write a poem that consists entirely of untrue statements’. I think the hardest thing to do is probably to be told to take as long as you need to write the best poem you possibly can about whatever you think is important. If there are constraints you can always blame them if your poem isn’t as terrific as you would have liked it to be."

"Walking helps me to write. I’m pretty sure Fiona Farrell has written about how how walking helps her to write."

"Yes, I almost always do this."

"I mentioned earlier that I always have a notebook. Usually this is where I draft poems and then maybe weeks later I read back over this notebook. Some things I’ve written look a bit feeble but often there’s something I can use and develop further."

"After a gap of time, I can often look at a poem a bit more objectively and see what needs doing to it. I would hardly ever send a poem I’ve just written away to a literary magazine because I am so likely to see things I want to change if I look at it after a few weeks"

"Yes, I suppose sometimes I do feel the opposite from inspired and can’t think how to begin or continue anything."

"Sometimes I find that to think of it as being like having a bit of a headache is useful. Okay, it’s there, and I can either retire to bed feeling sorry for myself or just go on doing what I do as best I can. But if I decide I am suffering from Writer’s Block and stop writing then there is no chance of my writing well."

"Michael Harlow once said at a workshop that if you write a word another flies to it. That’s mostly true for me. So if I can find a word or a phrase from anywhere and write it down then there is a chance some writing will happen. It may not be very good, but at least its writing."

"If I was feeling flat about my writing, I used to return to a book called Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg and it helped me to forgive myself for often writing rubbishy, dull stuff. (And it also has some really good suggestions, about daily writing practice that I found useful.)"

"I don’t think I can answer this very well. There’s no single thing that is particularly hard for me."

"I have learned to accept that alternating between thinking I have just written a Truly Terrific Poem and thinking that I am an Embarrassing Disaster of a Writer who will never manage an even halfway decent poem doesn’t help me at all. I’m gradually realising that nothing I write will change the world and knock its little cotton socks off, but also I’ve come to realise that there’s no need to be ashamed of what I write."

"Just keeping going, I guess, is hard. There are lots of other wonderful things to do. How do you balance these different aspects of your life? I’m busy, as most people are busy. I don’t write as much as I would like to write. I also need to work on regularly finishing poems and sending them away to literary magazines."

"Sometimes writing can seem a bit lonely. But having a group of people you trust and with whom you can share your writing helps."

"Nobody has to be a writer. But when it’s going well it’s good fun and satisfying."

"I am in my last year of study at Brandon University, toward a Bachelor of Arts Degree, majoring in Creative Arts (writing and theatre), with a double minor in Philosophy, and Gender and Women’s Studies."

"I am proud of my struggle to cultivate a creative spirit while independently raising my daughter, who at 20 is herself a strongly vocal, creative, and independent spirit. I am proud of participating in the creation and maintenance of a community which is healthily bound by actively loving, honestly communicative, and mutually supportive relationships."

"I have also gratefully engaged in many interesting experiences over the past decade: attending several births (including homebirths) while training as a doula; working as a nanny and family support; sitting on the board of the Brandon Folk Music and Art Society as the co-acting Chair and Festival Director; volunteering through Westman Immigration Services as a teacher’s assistant in an E.A.L. classroom, and as a personal language development tutor; teaching theatre for several years to a large group of youth with the Treasure Chest Theatre Group; writing several original dramatic works for young actors, and directing and producing their performances; collaborating with friends and fellow artists in the production of several shows."

"In May, 2009, in an attempt to raise awareness of the migrant’s plight, I travelled with a group of B.U. students (led by B.U. professor, and Latin American historian, Patricia Harms) to the Sonora Desert to participate in the 75-mile Migrant Trail March between Sasabe, Mexico, and Tucson, Arizona. I have written and presented creative works on the migrant experience."

"I was awarded the Lauralei Cederstrom Award for academic excellence in the Gender and Women’s Studies department at Brandon University. My creative non-fiction work, “River Stitched”, was awarded second prize in its category by Prairie Fire Literary Journal in its annual literary contest, and was subsequently published in the Autumn, 2010 quarterly edition."

"I am currently working on a thesis in creative writing."

"When I was a younger woman searching for role-models, I would look upon various women of achievement and wonder how they came to be in the place that seemed so far from the one where I stood. I dropped out of high school during a tumultuous adolescence in which academics were not my priority, and became a mother at a young age. When I first entered University at age 21 (for a degree which I eventually left to focus on raising my daughter, and to care for personal health issues, until my return to formal studies in 2007), I was so anxious and shy that I could not meet anyone’s gaze in the halls. Compared to many of my fellow students, I was relatively poorly read and I saw myself as being culturally out of step and confused inside of an institutional academic setting, due in part to my particular class and education background. Like many young students, I was terrified to speak out in the classroom. Although I desired to learn, I was not sure if I deserved to be in University. I did not know exactly what to do to become a good student, or how to take advantage of the many opportunities waiting for me. I know better now!"

"I am moved by Beauty and strange stories, by a love for the earth, by suffering, and by empathy for others. I loathe class/cultural/ethnic/gender/sex/ability-based inequities, and whatever other unjust and oppressive power guises are perpetuated and keep people from an authentic expression of their full being. I see ‘reality’ largely as a story that we tell ourselves about what is happening, and believe that all truths are situated within various narrative structures."

"Poetry has always helped me to frame and connect to the world. I have always been drawn toward artists and story-tellers—by brave, brilliant, and outrageous souls—the Outlaws and Outcasts. I am inspired by people for whom even speaking or being comes at a cost, by people striving to make sense of themselves and their lives, to make sense of others and their lives—by those who struggle to make sense of Life. These people have been my models and teachers, and I will continue to endeavour to learn their wild shapes, and speak after their name."

"One often writes after questions, I believe, and not in light of bold-faced answers. Curiosity is the ultimate driver, and it leads me nearly everywhere I want to go. Studies in Philosophy and Gender History provide various maps to explorations. Writing also is an attempt at connection. The theatre is a place of connection. The necessity of my own healing, and of my desire to understand and connect with myself and others, directs me continually into artistic expression."

"At some point I became audacious enough to believe it would be a good idea to follow my passion. Since returning to B.U. to complete my degree I have been inspired, assisted, encouraged, and pushed along this course by several generous professors and other helpers. It is good to be led in this way! I have discovered here that much happiness is the product of risk and dedicated effort."

"To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is…at last, to love it for what it is, and then to put it away."

"This Virginia Woolf quote lately resonates with me. I think that existence is worthy of great inquiry! How hard it is to love life and to speak to that love in a world that can silence and hurt. Yet, what a wonderful opportunity one lifetime offers for the exploration of love."

"I think it takes a fight to recognize and manifest one’s gifts in this world, and to learn to value education as a means of developing not only a career, but a richer existence. If one’s gifts are recognized by others then this process may be accelerated. It is good and strengthening to challenge and celebrate ourselves and one another! That this challenge and celebration can occur within a formal academic setting elevates study, and the status of being a student. This is a place of privilege and possibility."

"It is great for one to return to the world that which is at least equal to the gifts one has been given! I believe in following the flow of good fortune, and that privilege must be accompanied by responsibility. I attempt to offer to others what I receive by way of love, support, guidance, training, and nurturing. We all need to take care of one another as we make our way through."

"I intend to continue studying and learning. My short-term goals include continuing my mentorship, and developing a theatre/story-telling program based on Theatre of the Oppressed methodology to offer to students on a workshop basis, as a hired artist in rural public-school settings. I also plan to pursue a Master Degree in creative writing. In short, I want to teach, write, dance, collaborate on creative art projects, and ideally spend as much time as possible in a little cabin by the lake—enjoying the rewards of friendship, and the satisfaction that comes from doing hard, good, and meaningful work."