Friday was a lovely and sunny almost spring day, and a lovely day to go to the beautiful Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū and see two great writers talk about why and how they write
There was a great midday crowd (and some other interested Library staff) in attendance, and after a great introduction from emcee Kiran Dass, calling this session “one of my personal favourites” in the 2024 schedule, we got under way.
After Pip gave a lovely and heartfelt acknowledgement to the mana whenua, and to the very recently passed Kingi Tūheitia, we got underway with the first big question: why do we write?
Why do we write?
Pip’s answer was thoughtful – the answer changes often. Writing is not something natural for her, but it’s a great way to make sense of the confusion. By writing a microcosm you control, you can help work through the confusing questions of why this is happening, why did they do that. She gave a great description as well of writing as comforting — “emotional sudoku”.
Jared agreed with the answer being a changing one. He came to history later – he didn’t study history, rather graphic design and printmaking, and it was through this and his radical activism that he came to writing about NZ history.
Pip posed the question – why writing, why not something else? Writing is difficult and reading and writing wasn’t something normalised in her upbringing. But the difficulty was the motivation.
Jared talked about the difficulties in writing ‘outside the archive’ for his work and especially when looking at the 19th and early 20th centuries, and the importance of reading “against the grain” — using what is there to interpret and infer what is not to tell the stories not being told by the records. The silences are always active at various points and knowing the context of a source and its production is vital, and having experience in using source materials in a way that’s not what they are specifically intended for and talking about, it’s a challenge but a fascinating one.
Why write in this way?
Moving from the big questions, Jared asked Pip to talk about a particular scene in Audition, where the characters think back to the ‘classroom’ and food –—why did she write this in this way?
Pip responded, saying that it was built from her own experiences – being at a university on residency and feeling completely out of place and being ‘wrong’ and too big in the space, and inspired by the absurdity of breaking a container of cookies trying to open it. But it was also linked to her experiences visiting prisons and seeing mealtimes and the same feeling of being out of place and the absurdities of the food, and the wider absurdities of an incarceration system that isolates people without thinking about what happens afterwards.
Jared pointed out similar attitudes at play with ideas of “poor people always breaking shit” and community views about Kainga Ora housing and built on this to talk about his own book focuses on the idea of the ‘productive being’.
19th century corrections and ‘rehabilitation’ was focused on making people useful to society whether during or after their sentence, and the use of men as prison labour was “improvement” of them and what they were working on.
Improvement was fundamentally tied to capitalism and profit, and how the 19th century colonial state saw land as “wasted” and so improving this idle and disorderly land would also improve those idle and disorderly people working it. Through his research, he was amazed at how much this affected the geography around us every day, and so was I reading his book. So much of old Lyttelton and even the older parts of Christchurch involved prison labour — the very river I can see from the windows of Tūranga.
Writing and life
Both authors made great comments about how their writing links into their lives and experiences. Pip talked about how in her writing, she seeks to acknowledge her place in this land, and to recognise this and her motivations. She read from her acknowledgements to Audition, and how she wanted to make clear her place compared to tangata whenua, and about how other stories were not being written while hers was. Jared talked about how his work was based in everyday life — understanding politics and experiences and how having a family changed him to see the importance of embedding change in everyday life.
Choosing the format
Jared asked Pip why fiction writing? We choose our format of writing and why fiction for her? Does art have to be political and explicit with these choices?
Pip answered saying she loves a polemic, and quoted Jordy Rosenberg in saying a novel can have an argument just like an essay, even if it’s not as concerned with being ‘right”. She chose science fiction for Audition because it allowed her to move outside existing power structures and imagine and explore ideas to bring a solution back, and the opening of the mind through acts of imagination.
Pip asked Jared to talk about his prologue and how he began with the story of one man and a particular situation. Jared answered that it comes from the inspiration of narrative non-fiction and radical histories and trying to write in an appealing way.
We relate to people and personal stories, and the story of the person in his prologue was a striking way to start and move away from a strict chronology, as this situation came around the end of the period covered by the book.
Audience questions
After some fascinating discussion, there was just enough time for the audience to ask some questions.
The first was about how the authors navigated Te Ao Māori as Pākehā and on the centrality of Māori in their work. Jared noted the massive shift of Māori into incarceration through the 20th century, but also the role of prisoners of war from the New Zealand Wars as well. He made clear that he wanted to include this in his book, but also recognise these were not his stories to tell, and that you must consider what knowledge is yours to share.
Pip understood being Pākehā was part of the ‘problem’, but that she wanted to use the first contact scenario in Audition to understand her place as part of a colonising population. Audition never quite comes to an answer but writing it helped navigate this.
To the second question on some big themes about dyslexia in prisons, and if we can survive capitalism. Pip and Jared both agreed on the importance of realising the first and how capitalism restricts those ‘other’ because its need for productiveness. Pip said the powerful have a big stake in capitalism as it is, and incarceration was part of this.
For the third and last question, both authors were asked about how they chose their narrative structures. Pip answered that for her, often a problem causes the structure of the book — she wanted the reader to meet the prison system before knowing the prisoners and finds playing around the structure is fun – it’s harder to break the English language in writing than others.
For Jared, he noted certain conventions with history writing. History is often very specific and structured in how it is written and still sticks to the idea of some objective observer who can convey the facts to the reader (guilty as charged). But it was also about readability and how if someone like his own Dad, who was not a typical reader of history, was happy to read it and maybe take something away from it, then his job was done.
The end
It was a shame to have to stop there as we were running out of time, but it was a real joy to have the opportunity to hear two great writers speak about their work, how and why they write. Walking back to Tūranga, I even started mulling over my own writing and some of the themes of my thesis from 2021. Learning about writing and exploring what you can do with it never really ends, but I was privileged to hear two great wielders of the pen.
More Pip and Jared
- Books by Pip Adam
- Books by Jared Davidson
More WORD Christchurch
- WORD Christchurch website
- Follow WORD Christchurch on Instagram, Facebook and X FKA Twitter
- Our WORD Christchurch 2024 page - event reports and books by Festival writers
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