In this episode I talk with romesh dissanayake.

romesh's amazing novel when I open the shop (Te Herenga Waka University Press) was launched about a month ago.

I was really grateful that romesh and I were able to have a chat. I asked romesh to bring along an object as a way into a conversation about his book and this stage of its publication. romesh suggested Água Viva by Clarice Lispector.

It was such a great conversation.

Here are some links about some of the things we talk about:

Trying to Keep it Sacred: A conversation with Olive Nuttall & romesh dissanayake in Starling

Louise Wallace – On poetic form in romesh dissanayake’s novel When I open the shop in The Poetry Shelf

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In this episode I talk with Sylvan Spring about their incredible book Killer Rack.

https://teherengawakapress.co.nz/killer-rack/

In this episode we talk about a few things, so here are some links:

Sylvan spoke with kitten author Olive Nuttall in what is probably the best thing you'll read this year - thank you to The SpinOff:

‘So gay, thank you for noticing!’: Olive Nuttall and Sylvan Spring in conversation'

In the week leading up to our conversation Wellington-based singer-songwriter Vera Ellen and Georgia Gets By (Georgia Nott) announced they were pulling out of SXSW in protest at the festival's partnerships with tech companies RTX (formerly Raytheon), Collins Aerospace, and BAE Systems, which have been linked to manufacturing and supplying weapons to the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). You can read more here

You can also support both these artists through Bandcamp:

• Vera Ellen https://veraellen.bandcamp.com/
• Georgia Gets By https://georgiagetsby.bandcamp.com

We also talk about the terrible acts of censorship happening at State Library Victoria. You can read more about that at this link

Last night RNZ published this amazing essay by Henrietta Bollinger and I wanted to put a link to it here:

Why we cannot let the disability support changes happen

Thanks again for listening to the podcast.

In the most recent episodes I've been talking to people about where they are up to in their creative projects. I've asked these people to bring along an object they are 'using' for this stage of the project. 

This episode was recorded at Randall Cottage while Rachel O'Neill was resident there.

You can read more about Rachel at their website:

https://rachel-oneill.com/

I have set up a Buy Me a Coffee for Better off Read. If you are able and willing you can make a donation here to help support the podcast: 

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/betteroffread

Last Thursday, Whiti Hereaka was kind enough to come into Wellington Access Radio and have a chat with me on the occasion of the end of the year.

I love talking to Whiti and I always learn heaps from her.

Whiti has amazing recommendations. I thought I’d list them below along with the songs Whiti chose, which I can’t play in the podcast for copyright reasons.

Whiti has a great Instagram

Songs chosen by Whiti:

Short and Roung by The Bug Club

Passionflower, Paperbacks and Woodlice by The Bug Club

Read the Room (feat. Laetitia Sadier) by Pearl & the Oysters

Books Whiti talks about:

You Should Have Left by Daniel Kehlmann

Movies Whiti talks about:

Godzilla Minus One (2023)

The Boy and the Heron (2023)

Saltburn (2023)

TV Whiti Talks about:

After the Party (2023)

Deadloch (2023)

Homecoming (2018)

Pushing Daisies (2007)

Over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to be sharing some short chats I’m having with some of my favourite people. These are recorded at Wellington Access Radio and first appear on the Friday Drive show which I host with Amy Delahunty.

In this, the first of these chats, I talk to Kerry Donovan Brown. 

I asked Kerry about what they have been up to this year, what they have enjoyed and how they are feeling about 2024.

In this recording, Kerry talks about two songs. Due to copyright I can’t play these in the episode and I was thinking of taking out the reference to them but they are such great recommendations I thought I’d keep Kerry’s descriptions in the recording and include a link to the music here:

https://youtu.be/EDKcbW0XDk0

https://youtu.be/cmDeCKY9XFU

On 28 October 2023, City Gallery Wellington hosted an event to celebrate the opening of Angela Lane’s amazing exhibition Phosphene

As part of this event Joan Fleming and Aaron Lister wrote and read responses to these works. 

Joan wrote a beautiful description of their work:

I read a short, strange essay about awe and the beauty experience with its inevitable fringe of disgust, and about withness and terror and the sun. Aaron Lister read something about Mary Shelley, the year without summer, and Frankenstein as the first climate change novel.

In this episode Joan and Aaron generously recorded these essays at Massey University.

I hope you enjoy these readings.

I’m incredibly grateful to Jared Davidson and Verb Festival for letting me podcast this amazing event.

Jared’s book Blood & Dirt: Prison Labour & the Making of New Zealand (Bridget Williams Books, 2023) is an outstanding work of scholarship and creativity. I am a huge fan of this book and I feel very grateful to Jared who trusted me with this conversation.

At the end of this talk, we took questions from the audience. Unfortunately, my recording didn’t pick these up very clearly, so I’ve recorded and inserted summaries of the questions in my own words. I hope that is okay with the people who asked them. I was so excited by how many questions were asked - the event felt like a conversation and it was really great.

Thanks also to the amazing team at Verb. Every year they build this incredible ‘city’ made up of communities who are interested in ideas, writing and reading. It is an amazing thing to be involved with and I love it so much.

As I mentioned in my last post, I am at a really strange moment - without a project, unsure if there will be another one - and in this series, I am speaking to people at various stages of a project to talk process. I’m interested in talking to people about what activities they’re doing and what is useful.

In this episode I get to talk to one of my best friends and someone who inspires me a lot Whiti Hereaka. We talk about Whiti’s latest project.

I’m asking everyone to offer an object that is somehow helping them at this stage of their work. Whiti suggested we use the art works created by a central character in her novel. These works are imagined at the moment, but Whiti is an amazing artist and it wouldn’t surprise me if these don’t come to life in some way.

Whiti sent two photos and said I could use both. I love the way these photos could be ego and alter-ego. Both images were taken the amazing Tabitha Arthur. 

I’m so incredibly grateful to Whiti, for this conversation sure but also for all the time and support she’s given me over the years and for all the work she’s done which has produced such amazing work.

Where I’m up to.

I’ve had a really nice week, book-wise. Yesterday Rebecca Priestly and I got to talk to some folk who are doing MA’s up at IIML. It was really exciting to hear about Rebecca’s new book End Times which launches next week. You can read more about End Times at this link

Also yesterday I got to speak at the launch of Emma Ling Sidnam’s amazing novel Backwaters. It was a really great night with lots of my favourite people in the room. I had a great chat with I. S. Belle whose work, and practice I really love.

Here’s a link to learn more about I. S. Belle’s work

Here’s a link to Backwaters by Emma Ling Sidnam

When I ask people on this podcast what sustains them, they often say community and I really felt that last night. It is really nice to see celebrate other people’s success. I found it really motivating and talking to everyone about their projects was also really great.

I still haven’t written anything. I keep saying this but what I mean is I haven’t written any fiction. I’m actually writing an essay for HEAT about writing violence and I’m writing a list of books for someone. So I am writing - and I’m writing this. I am thinking about the novel. And I wrote an application for some time to work on the novel, so that was a really nice way to think about it and also go over what I have written to send a writing sample.

I’m rewatching VEEP which is blowing my mind. It’s all come true!!!!!

This is a photo of me not writing in my End Greyhound Racing New Zealand T-shirt. You should totally check out this amazing compilation album which raises awareness and support to end greyhound racing - here’s a link

I have been not writing for months now. It is the first time in a long time I have felt like I am ‘not writing’. I am totally surrendered to the fact that I may not write again but also, I really wanted to talk to some writers about writing, some artists about art-ing. A bit selfishly to try and see if I could explore a bit more deeply my relationship with the practice of writing - I kind of want to make any re-entry meaningful. I don’t want to waste this stasis. But also cause the state I’m in at the moment - where writing seems like something impossible and foreign - seems like an interesting one to talk to people about their projects.

So here is the new series. At first I thought it would be a neat series of talking to people at the start of a project, others who are in the middle and others who are at the end of a project. I’ve now recorded an episode and I realise these neat phases don’t reflect the actual process of writing.

I am hoping this series will be quite fluid - maybe as my relationship to writing changes the structure of the series will change.

At the moment, I’m asking guests to bring an object they are ‘using’ at this phase of their work. Then we’ll have a chat about what this phase looks like.

So yes, this is just to let you know this series, with no name, which may change, starts next week with an amazing conversation with Whiti Hereaka.

Thanks again for all your support.

For this episode I wanted to share a story that I’ve revisited recently after a question that Jane Arthur asked me at a recent event at Good Books.

Jane asked:

Even before reading Audition, I’d clocked that your inspiration for it was basically ‘prison abolition’ and you’ve talked openly about this in interviews and in the book’s acknowledgements. 

I am so freaking interested in this, personally, as it is increasingly hard for me to separate out work and values and living and politics and creative work as I go about things. 

Correct me if I’m wrong (please!!), but it seems to me that you haven’t been quite so blatant about your own values in your work before, or at least in the framing of your work. What has changed? Are you simply braver now? Why is (your) art political (mwahaha)?

This question sent me back to this story ‘Zero Hours’ which was published in Overland in 2015. I thought of this story mainly because it signals a shift in my writing toward the didactic.

For years I had been interested in ambiguity. In leaving space for politics to sit there but not overtly. I was obsessed with the idea that fiction was a mirror and if I made my fiction as accuarte as possible people would see society in a new way and it would prompt change. I remember being incredibly angry at the time I wrote this story. John Key’s government had been elected, overwhelmingly, a year before and I remember the morning after the election walking down my street and not really recognising the city I lived in. The election had been so decisive that I was in a very small majority.

I owe a lot to Giovanni Tiso and Jolisa Gracewood who were editing a New Zealand issue of Overland and had asked me to submist a story. I am also incredibly grateful to Overland journal which provides a space for radical literature.

These things all came together, my anger and the opportunity to write some for a journal that celabrated the radical and I remember thinking, The time for ambiguity is over. And I remember one very clear question replacing this, How didactic can I get and still be be writing fiction?

It's starnge reading the story now. It's so pre-Trump. Pre-COVID. Roseanne Barr appears as a largely uncomplicated character. I thought about re-writing the story to take her out but I kind of like how hindsight re-writes this part of the story without me doing anything.

What's not funny is how little has changed. Workers are still fucked over. There are still political parties calling for self responsibility.

It’s slightly heart-wrenching revisiting this story, written during a right-wing government, a few days after the desolution of the left wing party with one of the largest majorities of my lifetime and waking up to the fact none of the promise of transformational change thatg majority held was realised.

It’s a good reminder that politics is what we do in our communities away from law and government but also that its a privilege to say, Government doesn’t matter, when it matters most to the most vulnerable.

So yeah, I offer this story because I was thinking about it and thanks largely to Jane Arthur.

This is a recording of an event that took place on a very rainy and cold Sunday afternoon at one of my favourite places, Book Hound book shop, with one of my favourite people, Annaleese Jochems

It was such a wonderful afternoon with excellent people. It was really nice to meet some folk from People Against Prisons Aotearoa who I hadn’t meet before.

Thanks again for everyone who came and thanks to Annaleese for such a great chat and such great snacks and for letting us meet in the wonderful Book Hound.

I’m giving away a copy of Audition so if you’d like a copy just leave a comment here or DM me on Instagram

Also, just wanted to announce that Tara Black is the winner of the Murdoch Stephens books. Woohoo. Thanks Tara and everyone else who entered.

Stuff and Things

The second season of Below Deck Down Under has started and the SpinOff have published this amazing interview with my work hero and life-coach Aesha Scott

I’m very excited to be speaking with Dougal O’Neill and Tīhema Baker on the 7th August. Tīhema’s book is amazing.

Other Worlds

Pip Adam's Audition features three giants: Alba, Stanley and Drew, who are squashed into a spaceship hurtling through space, and must talk to keep the spaceship moving. Tīhema Baker's Turncoat is set on a distant future Earth, colonised by aliens, where Daniel –a young, idealistic Human–is determined to make a difference for his people. These works of speculative fiction are exciting, inventive and compassionate in their exploration of systems of power. Dougal McNeill will talk to Pip and Tīhema about these other worlds in fiction, and the mirror they hold up to our world today.

Also, if you are in Ōtautahi in August, the WORD Festival has lots of very cool events. I’ll be there facilitating a workshop and having a chat.