Women Authors From New Zealand

"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."

"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."

"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.)"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"“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"

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

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

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

"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."

"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.""

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

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

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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,"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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’."

"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..."

"…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."

"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 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…"

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