Pip Adam

"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."