memoir

Volumes for the Heart

September 1, 2021 Leave a Comment

Jessica Thompson Carr

Colouring My Soul by Kat Maxwell (Mākaro Press, 2020), 142pp, $25; Gaps in the Light by Iona Winter (Ad Hoc Fiction, 2021), 110 pp, £11.99

In Kat Maxwell and Iona Winter we have two storytellers who draw on real experience as the source of their inspiration. Both writers share intimate perspectives drawn from their Māori culture, sharpened by their individuality as grown wāhine. While the writing styles are very different—Winter is fluid and dream-like while Maxwell has focused more on storytelling—the two works complement each other, when considered together, for their vulnerability and their mana. [Read more…]

Countering Commonplace Narratives

July 1, 2021 Leave a Comment

Giovanni Tiso

From Suffrage to a Seat in the House: The path to Parliament for New Zealand women by Jenny Coleman (Otago University Press, 2020), 338pp., $45; Crossing the Lines: The story of three homosexual New Zealand soldiers in World War II by Brent Coutts (Otago University Press, 2020), 336pp., $49.95

Two recent books counter commonplace narratives about Aotearoa’s social and political history.

In From Suffrage to a Seat in the House: The path to Parliament for New Zealand women Jenny Coleman traces the stalling of the women’s franchise after the success of the suffrage petition and subsequent Electoral Bill of 1893. From that moment, it took an extraordinary twenty-six years for women to win the right to be elected to Parliament, and fourteen years after that for the first woman to actually win a seat—by which time the country we like to remind ourselves was trailblazing had been overtaken by a number of liberal democracies, including Britain. [Read more…]

Her Father’s Daughter

June 1, 2021 Leave a Comment

Philip Temple

The Mirror Book: A memoir by Charlotte Grimshaw (Penguin, 2021), 320pp, $38

This memoir is from the daughter of someone who has been portrayed, especially in Auckland, as New Zealand’s greatest living writer. C.K. (Karl) Stead, prominent in the local literary world for 60 years, has been given the country’s greatest honour, membership of the Order of New Zealand, primarily for his fiction and poetry. But his uncompromising literary criticism and public disputes with other writers were the agencies that kept him mostly in the minds of the writing community, to the extent that a Metro article in 1990 was headed ‘Blaspheming against the Pieties: Why the literati hate C.K. Stead’. He was also accused of too often portraying himself and his intimates as characters in his fiction. In a 2019 interview for the Academy of NZ Literature, Stead responded with, ‘Stories are stories and create their own reality.’ In fiction, the ‘border between what really happened and what is invented is always open, and if the writer doesn’t put it on record, there’s no way of knowing when and where it is crossed’. [Read more…]

Cartography for the Soul

May 1, 2021 Leave a Comment

Tim Saunders

Map for the Heart: Ida Valley essays by Jillian Sullivan (Otago University Press, 2020), 280pp., $35

The last time I visited the Ida Valley in Central Otago I stopped on the road beside the Idaburn, the river that cuts diagonally across the plains between mountain ranges. The sun was slung low in the sky and the moon was already rising, as if caught in some cosmic game of chase across the heavens. It would soon be dark, and I still had an hour’s drive to where I wanted to be.

I watched a hawk slice the thick evening air as water flowed over river-smooth stones, its dark shape flicking over sheep scattered across brown grass. Magpies sat upright in trees, turning their backs to the sun to catch the last of the warmth. As I looked at these creatures that had made a home here, among the tussock and in the shadows of hills, I had the sudden desire to stay just where I was. There was something there in that limitless landscape that beckoned me to put down roots. [Read more…]