reviews and essays

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…]

He Whakarite Ataahua/A Beautiful Arrangement

March 1, 2021 Leave a Comment

Gina Cole

Ko Aotearoa Tātou | We Are New Zealand: An anthology edited by Michelle Elvy, Paula Morris and James Norcliffe with art editor David Eggleton (Otago University Press, 2020) 250pp, $39.95

In the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre of 15 March 2019 and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s declaration that ‘We are all New Zealanders’, the editors of this anthology called for creative work that responded to life in contemporary New Zealand. The response wonderfully displayed in this collection was wide ranging and diverse. And after all, portraying range and diversity is the job of anthologies. In an article from a 2020 issue of the New Yorker, writer Clare Bucknell states:

Etymologically, ‘anthology’ refers to a collection of flowers, varied species of blooms selected and arranged so that they look like they belong together. Since the term’s origins in the seventeenth century, multiplicity has always been the form’s selling point: the provision of very different voices and concerns that nonetheless have some kind of collective force.¹ [Read more…]

The Irreducible Self

December 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Emma Gattey

Specimen: Personal essays by Madison Hamill (Victoria University Press, 2020), 232 pp, $30

Stepping into the world of Madison Hamill is a bit like stepping into the crazy life of Patricia Lockwood; Specimen might be considered our homegrown Priestdaddy. Key similarities: this collection of essays boasts an eccentric ministerial father, along with plenty of foibles and faux pas (both the author’s own, and those of a whole host of bizarre dramatis personae)—and it’s downright hilarious. So far, so brilliantly similar. Except—and I’m tiptoeing un-daintily around a massive spoiler, here—for the sex. A counterpart to Lockwood’s heterosexual relationship is nowhere to be seen. This is because Hamill reveals herself, in the aptly titled ‘I Will Never Hit on You’, as asexual.

Specimen is revelatory, maverick and nostalgia-piquing. It’s also a first book. Straight out of the gate, Hamill gives us non-fiction flecked with mad, rewarding moments of magical realism and hyperreality. As Hamill acknowledges in the Author’s Note: ‘Some of it is not true, such as the bit about the woman walking around with an axe in her head … I made that up because sometimes telling the truth requires lying.’ Read: she makes shit up, but only to tell it like it is. Isn’t this the essence of poetic licence, crisply defined? But it’s not just about creatively telling tales. This is nonfiction, after all, and any essay collection worth its salt should have a select bibliography this good, this wildly varied, charting Hamill’s topics from asexuality to avian behavioural psychology through to rural ethnography. [Read more…]

Twinned Roots

February 1, 2020 Leave a Comment

Nina Mingya Powles

All Who Live on Islands by Rose Lu (Victoria University Press, 2020), 240 pp., $30

All Who Live on Islands won the 2018 Modern Letters Creative Nonfiction Prize, and is the latest in a string of excellent creative nonfiction books published by Victoria University Press. Lu’s essays explore numerous subjects including her rural Whanganui childhood, teenage sex, travel and working in the tech industry. Her writing is at once tender and incisive, detailed and expansive, heated and brilliantly funny. [Read more…]