A progress report from the nation's most beloved novelist
When I went to Waimangaroa Primary School one of my teachers used to reward well behaved students with a cardboard box. It was a big refrigerator box and she cut it open so it could wrap around one student’s desk, giving them a dark, enclosed cubicle. It’s one of my favourite memories of Waimangaroa Primary School. I liked to be in that box, writing stories, or doing sums from a text book, or practicing my handwriting. Even in that highly impermanent space – on those cardboard walls - I would sellotape notes for myself.
The first thing I did when I got back to Dunedin from a recent trip home to Westport was type a letter, print it out, and pin it to the door of my office where I am writing my second novel as the Robert Burns Fellow at Otago University. The office is halfway down a hall on the South Wing of the Arts Building. On the door there’s a little sign with my name on it, which I Snapchatted to most of my friends when I arrived here in an impulsive and shameful act of skiting. Walking from here to the staff/student room to get my coffee I notice a number of the other 10 doors will be slightly ajar. This might be academic speak for nau mai, haere mai. I like seeing doors ajar, because you get to glimpse the densely packed bookshelves, pot plants, desks of course, and sometimes you even see the people there at their desks.
Today I printed off some work I recently had published and tacked it to the board to prove I had completed a thing. Hotere is written on the board. I think Ralph Hotere must have put his name on there. My desk has names too, Rawiri Paratene has written "Kia ora" and 1983 Burns Fellow. Victor Rodger, Paddy Richardson, Sue Wooton, Craig Cliff, and Majella Culliane’s are all among the autographs permanently marked onto the wood. I will eventually mark my name there too, but I haven’t yet because I feel like it will actually mark the end of my settling in time here.
This office had two desks in it when I arrived. One for writing, the other was maybe for stuff to go on. I thought that a couch would be a nice replacement for the extra desk, so my husband and I went op-shopping and I bought a two seater couch for $60 from the Salvation Army for the office. I hoped my kids would skateboard to me after school and I could make them hot chocolates in the staff room and they would play on their devices and sit on the couch while I wrote. I kind of thought it would be a nice thing to have you know, a place I could invite people to sit. My kids have come to my office about three times since I started the fellowship in January. I lie down on the couch sometimes, uncomfortably. It’s not made for lying down on.
It is a lovely modest office, and I can already predict my coming nostalgia for it. On one of the whiteboards I have my pepeha and on the near the door I have written a karakia so each morning I can ask the gods for māramatanga, aroha, kaha and rangimārie for my work and my day.
But for the last two, maybe three weeks, I haven’t progressed on the novel I am using the fellowship to write. We went to Westport for the school holidays and there was a flood while we were there. It’s a terrible situation in Westport. So many people displaced in a town already struggling under a housing shortage. There are people who had no insurance and lost everything. A few days before coming back to Dunedin I walked my dog along Derby Street and looked at all the red and yellow stickers on the houses. I saw an old woman moving slowly about inside one house with a yellow sticker on it. My friend had told me that he was volunteering, and he arrived at a house that was flooded, and two elderly people were sitting in chairs aggressively smoking cigarettes. Their hands were trembling, and they said: the phones are still out, the phones are still not working. They probably didn’t have cell phones.
The letter I have pinned to my office door points out that it is August (omg!) and confesses to staff I worry I have missed an opportunity to connect with people while I am here. It confesses to missing an opportunity to help with some students because of my failing to reply to one of the lecturers, which made me feel a bit rubbish.
It says: "I do like people, and to kōrero, and to listen etc." The etcetera just almost makes that sentence an oxymoron, I think. But the letter’s printed now so the etc. is there on the door with the other words.
And the other words tell the people who might read it I’m going to work with my office door open (and no headphones on) most Tuesdays. "If you want to chat," it says, "or I can be helpful somehow (maybe you have a student who would like to talk to me… I dunno), or you want to invite me to listen to a lecture you think I might benefit from then please do so."
The letter finishes a bit gushy, but its truth: "I am so very happy here in Ōtepoti, and I have done so much work on my new novel. If you are reading this and you are one of the people who helped me be here, ka nui te mihi ki a koe! This has been one of the most wonderful growth experiences of my life. Mauri ora."
I’m thinking I might leave the $60 couch here when I have to go.
Auē by Becky Manawatu (Makaro Press, $35) is available in bookstores nationwide.
