Content warning: There are brief mentions of sexual assault and suicide in this post.
It's a talkative full house at The Piano on a surprisingly warm Friday night in Ōtautahi where we've gathered to hear tales of risk, and possibly reward from an impressive line-up. Stacey Morrison once again has emcee-ing honours but, as with her turn at last year's event, her responsibilities extend beyond mere introductions. Morrison introduces the four speakers, yes, but she also takes care of them, gets them settled and makes a safe place for sometimes hard topics, and opens with a karakia about women.
There has been a late change to the programme. Initially journalist, Barbara Dreaver was to be one of the speakers but she apparently has the pleasure of spending time with Winston Peters instead. I'm sure it's the right choice for a journalist but I can't say that if I had the option I've have made the same one. Grimshaw, who has stepped in at the last minute admits that she saw the opportunity as "a bit of a challenge... so I better say yes". Which is a good place to start from if you're talking about risk.
Elizabeth Knox - Not taking risks intentionally
Morrison introduces Elizabeth Knox as "the author of 14 novels so far but she probably wrote another one on the plane" which I hope is true but suspect is not. Rather her latest book is a memoir about her relationship with her mother entitled, Night, Ma.
Knox uses her time to talk about several instances of risk, one of which is recounted to her during a particularly windy taxi ride. Her driver, a former Czechoslovakian olympic high jump coach, tells the tale of working on a shrimp boat in stormy weather. Knox is able to tell this secondhand story in a way that makes you think she was there in the rough seas herself - but this is the gift of the storyteller, of course, to imagine vividly and retell in a way that captures the listener's imagination. The seas were so rough, in fact, that the boat capsizes but rights itself and miraculously no one is lost overboard. But the taxi driver never went out on the shrimp boat again.
Later they discuss that Knox herself was a high-jumper in high school but her jumping career ground to a halt when the preferred jumping style changed from the scissor jump to Fosbury flop, the technique that all competitive high jumpers now use. The jumper is required to turn their back to the bar and fling themselves over onto a crashpad but she found she couldn't do it. The former coach/taxi driver suggested that she stopped jumping "because of boys" but Knox contends it was because she started writing.
Of her memoir about her mother, she's been congratulated for being brave. She tries to take this as a compliment but interprets it usually as that the person offering it "would have had better taste and judgement". I tend to agree. In my experience people who tell you you've been brave think they're telling you something about yourself but they're actually telling you something about them. Something you haven't necessarily asked for and don't particularly want. But I digress.
Knox shared a story of unintentionally being in a risk situation that involved a treacherously narrow cliffside path, a hailstorm and their 6 year old son.
"I would never take a risk if I knew I was taking one. Not in life, not in art."
But motherhood - that is the only intentionally risky thing she's done.
Elisabeth Easther - Risking it all on two wheels
Elisabeth Easther will be well known to some as "Evil Carla" from Shortland Street but she is also a voice actor and writer of one completed novel, Seed, and one currently underway.
Easther talks with the speed and energy of a character in The Gilmore Girls, racing downhill through her stories of the bicycling life like brakes don't exist. It's entertaining and dizzying. She covers ground from youthful but risky escapades acting as recumbent pogo stick obstacle for her brother ("I could have been DISEMBOWELLED") to the historical artefacts that are double happies (small explosives for children to throw at each other!) before waxing lyrical (and quickly) about her first bike. It only had front brakes and helmets were not a thing there so is there any surprise really that there was a resulting concussion?
"I have my best ideas on two wheels", says Easther and this is a thing that I can personally attest to. Sections of this post you are reading were "written" while riding into Tūranga (and a westerly). Easther briefly speculates on the number of times she's nearly been killed before breezily pedalling off to the next thing, a recollection of being 12 and riding her 10-speed to a job picking strawberries with no helmet, no lights, vast distances travelled in proximity to large trucks. All good.
There's also a very amusing and twisty story about getting her prized bike stolen in London in the 90s, and sometime later she spots somebody riding it (she'd know her bike-child anywhere) and getting a phone number from the guy so that she could perhaps get the bike back. She makes up some story about how she can't give him money for it because that would be receiving stolen goods and can she swap her current (very cheap) bike for it? Unbelieveably this works, only for her to discover, as she's biking it away that these aren't her handlebars or her seat... Anyway, she still has the bike so it's hers now?
But back to the risk which is partly down to some people who see cyclists as targets and do things like pass aggressively closely - this is called a "punishment pass". What's it a punishment for, I wonder? I suspect the answer is: existing.
But regardless Easther will always take a bike over a car.
Also, she has a very good novel about an entirely different kind of cycle available for purchase in the foyer.
Viva la Velo!
Charlotte Grimshaw - Riskiness as your role
Charlotte Grimshaw has won, as Morrison is happy to point out, so many prizes she can't read them all (so she doesn't try). This is actually true and I don't blame her for begging off. There's an embarrassment of riches in Grimshaw's trophy cabinet (I'd personally love to be that embarrassed).
Grimshaw presents herself as two wildly different people: The serious nerdy one, and the reckless wild child.
"In my youth I took risks all the time... I was always ready for action."
She had no fear of authority or danger. She once drove from Hamilton to Auckland at 3am because the "designated sober driver" had passed out despite being quite drunk herself. Once when she was hitchhiking she was offered a lift by a sort of tweedy guy with a ginger moustache and a faux-English accent who asked her if she enjoyed enemas. She did not. Turns out he was also a cricket umpire called... Peter Plumley-Walker. She once built a raft and paddled it out into the Auckland Harbour to try and stop a US warship, joined in a Springbok Tour-related riot, agreed to go sailing in a tiny yacht with a terrible boyfriend during a cyclone.
"I was cheerfully anti-social but not heavily criminal."
Fair enough.
But a lot of this she puts down to the fact that she didn't have any adults telling her not to do things that were dangerous. Her mother was unconventional and sort of encouraged her in the role of rebellious risk-taker. She feels that she was cast as the character of "incurably wild" daughter despite the fact that she was actually quite studious. It was only once she had children of her own that she realised how strange their relationship was and compares it to growing up in a cult, so she had to juggle these competing identities of "wild non-conformist" and "conscientious student". Says Grimshaw, "my mother could never convince me to abandon my homework".
Writing about this relationship has come with its own risks. It's widely known that her memoir, The mirror book, was not received well by certain members of her family. She acknowledges the risk of being branded "a bad daughter or a delusional fantasist". She also gives a shout out to Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe and the story of one particular IRA mother who didn't discourage her daughter from continuing her hunger strike. She seems intrigued by extreme mothers. And experiencing motherhood herself only showed her how extraordinary her own upbringing was.
Sally Wenley - Risking your life for a life
The first thing that strikes me about Sally Wenley (other than the wheelchair) is that she is wearing the most enviable emerald green velvet jacket and my eye continually returns to it, even when other people are speaking. The veteran journalist (she's worked at both TVNZ and RNZ is currently freelance), is also an emphatic speaker. There's a lot of energy and verve to her which seems to match the portrait she paints of herself as a youngster. Her mother described her as "rip sh*t and bust" and there are youthful, William Tell-inspired hi-jinks and some student egging of a particularly egg-worthy politician. Wheeling along during a Castle Street riot, deciding to ring the school bell in the middle of the night while at boarding school only for the whole school to be evacuated as a result. Wenley, it seems, has never shied away from a risky endeavour.
But her main story of risk is related to her paralysis which is the outcome of a bus crash she was in at the age of 16 (as covered in her memoir, The Crash). Despite having no sensation in her legs she experienced horrendous pain which she described as like sandpaper on her thighs in combination with being zapped by an electric fence. She describes the pain as "all encompassing", and she dealt with this in the textbook ways, addiction to meds, alcohol, sex (she was sexually assaulted while "sh*t-faced" and didn't report it). She took risks in her journalistic career that she shouldn't have. She describes at length the time she went to a gang house to do an interview during a period when tensions between gangs and the resulting violence was high. She didn't tell anyone she was doing it.
The pain, she says, affected everything in her life but she had "an exit plan in a little bottle". A change came though when a pain specialist "actually listened" to her and the possibility of a cordectomy was raised. This procedure was not without risk; it could make it better, it could make it worse, it could be fatal. By this point she was resolved to end the pain one way or another but was pleased when she woke up after the surgery. Initially she still had pain but 2 days post-op it had dissipated. She could sleep and "became a human" again.
She subsequently shared her experience with spinal injury specialists at an international conference. Doctors, she says, need to listen to their patients and educate them on the risks so they can make an informed decision.
She ended her part of the session as emphatically as she began it stating that sometimes risk is fun, naughty, or bad and sometimes she can unsheath her claws and be a tiger. At which point "Roar" by Katy Perry blasted through the sound system like the theme-song of a prize fighter when they enter the ring.
It served as a triumphant outro for Wenley and all the risky women (with a closing karakia from Morrison as the coda).
See more photos of this session in our Flickr album.
Works by the risky women
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