Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita
I first read The Master and Margarita when I came across it in the Tawa College library. It must have gone deep into me because I didn’t realise until I reread it many years later how much it had influenced me. It comes at its main story by two debonair flanking movements. The devil […]
Brothers and Sisters: A Grimm tale
I wrote this for a Grimm’s fairytale Bicentenary event. It was published in Sport Magazine in 2012, and I think it deserves another outing. Stargazer is running the meeting. He unlocks the room and puts a fresh bag in the coffee machine. Hansel arrives with muffins. Stargazer is a pretty smug fellow. Things worked […]
Why Horror?
This essay first appeared, in a slightly less finished form, in Canvas. I sat on it awhile before posting. Horror has been called the most moral of the genres, perhaps because it deals in calamity, in inexorable events and the experiences of small human victims, witnesses, collaborators. Because human existence is prone to repeated visitations from monstrosity […]
My History with Horror
I will begin with withered leaves blowing through an empty fairground, tent canvas gulping and gulping, and the seats on the dark Ferris wheel creaking, rocked by ghostly fairgoers. By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes. My first encounter with horror was a book of ghost stories I sneaked […]
Where Wake Came From
Note As a blogger’s introduction to Wake I’ve decided to transcribe what I wrote in my journal some months into my writing the novel. I had returned to it after a break, finally seeing what it was doing and what it might be for. I have used letters or a long dash to replace some […]
Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries
This is my speech for the launch of Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries at Unity Books in Wellington, 3 August 2013. ‘Fergus’ is Fergus Barrowman, my husband, and Ellie’s New Zealand Publisher. I was honoured that Ellie asked me to launch her novel. I have a habit from my student days of writing page references and […]
My Interview for YALSA
This is an interview I did for The Hub website. Julie Bartel provided the questions. It is mostly about my teenaged self. One Thing Leads to Another: An Interview with Elizabeth Knox
Letting in the Ghosts: Why certain things are in Mortal Fire
I keep producing blogs that are highly finished pieces of writing, like essays. Which isn’t to say I labour over them, more that I keep feeling each has to be a thing in itself. But that’s not what blogs are for. So this one is just a few thoughts about how I came to write […]
My Workspace
I guess this piece could be titled ‘How I came to change the way in which I do everything’. It could go two ways—and I’ve decided it’s better to resist neither, to do both, even if one is personal and might seem beside the point of workspaces, and the other will make me sound like […]
Next Big Thing
Margo Lanagan tagged me for this chain interview—her responses to the questions are here Margo’s Next Big Thing is her magnificent novel, Sea Hearts. I’m tagging Dylan Horrocks. His answers should be up a week after mine. Dylan is in the home straight of his graphic novel Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen. Yay! Here […]