Liz Breslin
Cowboy Geniuses
Liz Breslin and Eliana Gray trot south for the 2024 NZ Gold Guitar Awards and find maybe all that glitters is gold after all. Eliana: “We haven’t quite finished the renovations.” An email, approximately a week before Cowboy Genius saddled up to ride through the Gold Guitars like an outlaw wind, or a trio of…
Absolutely fabulous
Liz Breslin revisits a hypercoloured Central Otago cinematic classic. There might be 50 ways of saying fabulous, but at letterboxd.com someone called Robino gave the film of the same name two and a half stars and said, “they only said it 17 times.” It’s streaming on TVNZ+ at the moment so I tried to keep…
Poetry review: When I Reach for Your Pulse
By Rushi Vyas (Otago University Press, 2023) When I Reach for Your Pulse is an uncomfortable read, but this is not about our discomfort. This is about Rushi’s sustained generosity in sharing his grief, his anger, his complex responses to living with the life and death of “the man who earned the money mom used…
Of M*A*S*H and mushrooms
The curious case of a puffball named for a famous pair of TV lips. There are many things I don’t know about fungi, but one thing I know for sure: it’s crucial to get a positive identification. Taxonomy is of the ultimate importance. Especially when the guidebook (Geoff Ridley’s A Photographic Guide to Mushrooms and Other…
That’s the spirit
Liz Breslin goes ghostbusting in two of the South Island’s haunted hotels. We are not Kesha in popular reality TV series Conjuring Kesha, who says, in the trailer, “a lot of things have happened that are weird, but I’m like, give us more.” We are not the beloved Ghostbusters men or the flopped Ghostbusters women.…
Our hearts’ desires: We can go our own way
“Lines are created by being followed and followed by being created.” THE LINE ABOVE IS A LINE BY SARA AHMED, AND SHE’S WRITING ABOUT LINES CALLED DESIRE LINES. YOU MAY NOT HAVE HEARD OF DESIRE LINES, BUT YOU’VE PROBABLY SEEN ONE OR WALKED ONE IN YOUR LIFE. Desire lines, sometimes called desire paths, rat tracks,…
watching us, watching them
1. Toroa ingoingo. In 1937 there was one pair on the Peninsula, marked and wrapped by Doctor Lance Richdale, breeding. Better banded, perhaps, than starved, egg-sucked, stuck in ship masts or dismantled for muffs, tobacco pouches, cigarette holders and walking stick handles. 2. Now they flock to the camera like Kardashians and we sit and…
Book review: The Wandering Nature of Us Girls
by Frankie McMillan (Canterbury University Press, 2022) “Those girls are making a scene,” writes Frankie McMillan in ‘The movie of your life’ and oh she sure is. Fifty seven scenes in five sections. Are these scenes poetry, are they prose, are they prose poetry, flash fiction? The lines between these categories are blurry at best anyway…
Isn’t it beyond words: Essie Summers
Between the covers with Aotearoa’s Queen of Romance. IN THE BEGINNING WAS ESSIE. ESSIE SUMMERS. THE MOST FAMOUS NEW ZEALAND NOVELIST YOU’VE MAYBE NEVER HEARD OF. TO VERIFY THIS CLAIM, IN A HIGHLY SCIENTIFIC SURVEY, FOR A PERIOD OF A WEEK, I ASKED EVERYONE I KNEW OR MET WHAT THEY THOUGHT OF ESSIE SUMMERS AND…