Contributors
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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…
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Poetry Review: Tung
By Robyn Maree Pickens (Otago University Press, 2023) The immediacy of the body in nature is the root system from which Robyn Maree Pickens’ debut collection of poetry, Tung, springs. The book’s first acknowledgment goes to a tiny cottage and surrounding nature in Ōtepoti’s greenbelt, where Pickens lived while writing this excellent and engaging collection.…
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Recipe: Food for walks
Eliana Gray shares a few trail-tested tramping recipes. We started the Rakiura Coast Track fresh off the morning ferry, by turns elated and nauseous from the late September strait. Beginning the morning wide-legged and wind-whipped on the deck, keeping pace with the gulls and pretending to be old-timey sailors fresh with adventure, we were ready…
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Elsie’s Dream
A winning story. This year, the Queenstown Writers Festival team held a mini festival featuring author talks workshops, as well as, for the first time, a writing contest. The Anna-Marie Chin Writing Competition saw writers from Otago and Southland given a range of prompts and 48 hours to write an original response, either fiction or…
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The shadow side of inspiration
Fear and self-loathing in the mountains. I’m balanced on a rock, my hand sweating against the granite. There’s a 14-kilo pack on my back, a scramble and a jump ahead of me, and an eye-watering incline beside me. If I slip and fall, I won’t stop falling for some time. Legs aching, two days’ worth…
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Taking shape
Counting the real cost of a surfboard with Aotearoa’s most inland board builder. It’s as far from the coast as you can get. Yet, thirty minutes’ drive west from the country’s most inland town, Cromwell, there’s a persistent noise that is often mistaken by neighbours for an out-of-tune weed-whacka. It’s the sound of Paul Roach’s…
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Push, push, roll
Nat Halliday revisits the time he skateboarded (yes, skateboarded) from Cape Reinga to Bluff. It’s 2008, and I am 31 years old. I’m in the Auckland Airport with a huge bag, some cash savings and a plan to travel the 2000 kilometres to the southern tip of New Zealand by skateboard. I should probably have…
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For the record
What’s an international music writer like Fraser Lewry doing in a place like Ōamaru? Writing about music, mostly. Peer through the window at the Business Hive coworking space on Ōamaru’s Thames Street on any given day, and you’ll likely see a kind-looking, bespectacled guy in a band tee-shirt (Canadian rock’n’roll revivalists The Sheepdogs, say, or…
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Green Mind
A grassroots history of sowing and mowing in Aotearoa. I left Wānaka in my little white Toyota campervan, bound for the North Island. The trip was equal parts long and tedious, novel and exciting. There were windy sections and straight sections, narrow mountain passes and expansive valley floors. As I drove and drove across our…