Issue 15: Spring 2023
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Food review: Timaru Roast, Invercargill
We are in the throes of myriad crises right now, from the cost of living to the climate emergency to the BTS hiatus. These are all important issues. But also, did you know there is a new roast shop in Invercargill!?! For those of you unfamiliar with the genre, a roast shop is a primarily…
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Book review: At the Point of Seeing
by Megan Kitching (Otago University Press, 2023) At the Point of Seeing is the debut collection from Megan Kitching, who was the inaugural recipient of the Elizabeth Brooke-Carr Emerging Writer Residency in Ōtepoti Dunedin. Megan holds a PhD in English Literature from London’s Queens Mary University, where she has said her interest was piqued by…
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Book review – Not Alone: Walking Te Araroa Trail through New Zealand
By Tim Voors (Bateman Books, 2023) Not Alone is Dutch long-distance hiker Tim Voors’ second book about, well, walking a very long way. It serves as a follow up of sorts to The Great Alone: Walking the Pacific Crest Trail, for which he tackled the 4265 kilometres from Mexico to Canada on foot. This time,…
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Book Review: Strong Words 3: The Best of the Landfall Essay Competition
Selected by Emma Neale and Lynley Edmeades (Otago University Press, 2023) Essays are on the up in Aotearoa. This has in part been fuelled by successes like when Wellington’s Ashleigh Young winning the 2017 Windham-Campbell Prize (worth $230,000!) for her essay collection Can You Tolerate This?. The annual Landfall Essay Competition, which has been running…
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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…
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Roll Cage Mary
Sometimes landscape symbols feel like an ingrained part of ourselves. A cathedral, or a memorial, is solid, concrete and dependable, even when it has fallen. There is an order to the markings of our landscapes that helps us navigate our world. That is until you arrive in Antarctica, when all that solidity goes out the…
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A gig in a hut
On stage and off the grid in the Pisa Range. A single bulb hangs from the roof, casting direct light on the musician below, his eyes closed, his face contorted. The crowd, if you can call it that, sits on wooden benches in near darkness just a few metres away. They are completely silent. At…
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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.…
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The past is a photograph
Travelling times gone by through an amateur photographer’s album. The photos have a quality that tells you they are not from now. The grain is fine, the light natural and the colours vigorous. The compositions disclose something about the photographer; you can hear him thinking, see him learning, his light-caught journey exposed, frame by frame.…