Christchurch! Gosh it’s good looking. Its downtown looks shinier, smoother, more interesting with every visit – it looks a hell of a lot better than downtown Auckland, that shambles of cones and 2m-high mesh barriers, crews digging up the road, streets squeezed into one narrow lane, all of it looking like it’s just been hit by an earthquake. Auckland looks like what you expect Christchurch to look like. But Christchurch has moved on. During my three days at the 2024 WORD literary festival, arriving Thursday night and leaving yesterday, on a hot Sunday afternoon marking the first day of spring, Christchurch was the business, a happy, thriving, eating and drinking, e-scooter-riding, post-quake vision of a city centre reimagined and made better than before.
I stayed at the Crowne Plaza. There were intimate views from my ninth floor room of The Seagull Pit, so-called in honour of the colony of maybe 200 red-billed seagulls which have taken over the flooded foundations of a demolished office block on Armagh St. Their presence is one of the great new natural wonders of New Zealand, a birdland sensation. I tore myself away from staring at it to chair two events at WORD, as well as yapping away about my new book The Survivors: Stories of Death and Desperation at an event chaired by Press writer and X savant Philip Matthews. I attended three other events, two of them actually kind of profound, the third a fascinating glimpse into the mind of novelist Emily Perkins. All up, I was thrilled to experience the most creatively programmed literary festival in New Zealand, thanks to WORD’s programme director, the creative Kiran Dass.
Plus the weather was nice. 19 degrees, sunlight on mountain snow, willows weeping upon the Avon. It made for a happy mood and the downtown precinct was “buzzing”, to quote a WORD volunteer, who reported lots more people than usual on the streets, hoofing along to festival venues The Piano, Christchurch Art Gallery, and Tūranga, the public library. WORD was sponsor’s money well spent: a good festival is popular, a great festival is popular and meaningful, something that makes a valuable contribution to the culture and the times. WORD was a great festival. Its emphasis on indigenous writers offered readers and writers a welcome respite from the current political climate of racist social engineering.
Bravo, especially, to sponsors the US Embassy, the Ngāi Tahu Research Centre and the Christchurch City Council’s Seattle Sister City Committee for bringing out Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe, a poet and essayist from the Upper Skagit and Nooksack Indian tribes. Her event at the library with poet Tayi Tibble was a) the most profound event I saw at WORD b) one of the very best literary events I have seen in my life. Yes, how terrible to praise your girlfriend in public, but Tayi was in sensational form as she guided the First American writer through a fascinating korero about their shared bond as indigenous writers. This was like the world had come calling on New Zealand, opened up our narrow little navel gaze, connected Aotearoa to America by way of something the two hemispheres have in common – the Pacific. They talked a lot about the ocean, about orca, about oyster cocktails. “Kindred spirit,” Tayi said of Sasha; Sasha said of Tayi, “Of course there are similarities. Everything we say is rooted in indigenous feminism.”
Also they were very funny and very beautiful. Emily Perkins maintained the high excellence of WORD’s dress code when she appeared onstage at the art gallery wearing an incredible blue velvet trouser suit with burnt-chocolate ankle boots. Her event was headlined “Strong Female Characters”; she shared the stage with film director Christine Jeffs, and they both kind of scorned the title and its cliched implication of some old scowling sourpuss. They preferred “Complex Female Characters”. Eg, Therese, the rich capitalist running dog and protagonist of Emily’s Ockham-winning novel Lioness.
Session chair Victor Rodger asked her, “Who do you think Therese would have voted for?”
“Jacinda.”
“You’re joking.”
“No, definitely she would have,” she said. “Therese is not living a life that is true to her values.”
Good, thoughtful session. A note on Victor Rodger: I think he might be just about the best literary festival chair in NZ, up there or nearly up there with Paula Morris. He’s so merry, and sharp, and confident; and as an artiste, he gets it, he understands the temperament and the uncertainty of authors. He should chair everything always. I love chairing, the generosity of it and the maintenance of silence – I guess I am describing what it is to listen. Talia Marshall said the most incredible things, and used the most incredible language, when I chaired her at the art gallery to examine her new memoir Whaea Blue. But there was a culture gap between us and as whitey I wasn’t really able to cross it. Oh well! We got an essence of her exhilarating and tormented book, and we got many fascinating glimpses into a mind like no other. Plus she picked out Philip Matthews in the audience and praised something he wrote about poor, doomed Ian Curtis, the singer from Joy Division who died by suicide; it felt like a kind of spooky echo of something I said about her book in my introductory remarks: “Those who came before her live through invocations.” It’s a line from “Blue Monday”, a song by New Order, formed by the surviving members of Joy Division.
I also chaired A Life Less Punishing author and Radio Hauraki breakfast host Matt Heath at Hotel George. Fancy joint! They had framed prints by Ralph Hotere in the lobby. I tried to bring the tone down by describing Matt in my introduction as one of New Zealand’s most successful morons. But I was only kidding. Smart guy, very articulate. The only moronic thing about his book is that it’s oxymoronic: an intelligent self-help book. He opened up about how he dealt with his mum’s death. He didn’t deal with it. He deleted her number from his phone because seeing it made him unbearably sad. Yes, great stuff to discuss over a Sunday morning brunch – the sell-out event included table service of cheese rolls and other delicacies – but Matt was also very funny as well as very touching. Plus he told a story about reading my book The Man Who Ate Lincoln Rd as a bedtime story to his two sons when they were little. It’s a book about eating at each of the 55 fastfood joints on that 3km stretch of road in a single year. He said the boys would ask him: “Can you read the Nando’s chapter again?”
The second profound event I experienced at WORD was a walking tour led by Peter Longlands, author of Foraging New Zealand. About 20 of us gathered outside The Piano. Peter took us around the corner from The Seagull Pit and to the banks of the lazy Avon. It was a revelation. He grabbed at this and yanked at that in his mission to tell us which wild foods were good to eat or drink. Chickweed: good salad green. Stickyweed: place in fridge overnight, good cucumber infusion. Fennel: good with chicken or fish. Onion weed, dock, borage, wandering jew – we ate like kings, for free, the wild world of nature opening up like a fridge. Afterwards I bought his book. I will use it to identify foraged food for years to come.
There were a lot of other events (on organised crime, on unpopular opinions, on native plants). There were a lot of other writers (Airana Ngarewa, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, someone called Dame Anna Crighton). Good old WORD! A literary festival is a writer’s colony. It was great meeting the nicest man in New Zealand letters, poet Robert Sullivan. It was great catching up with Whanganui writer Airini Beautrais, who is more shy irl than on the page but just as thoughtful, just as poised. And I loved the little time I had to relax in Christchurch, e-scootering up to the Botanical Gardens on Saturday afternoon to see the birch trees and the spring daffodils and the pond where seven pairs of shags were roosting in nests above the water. It’s another of the great birdland sights in New Zealand. Good old Christchurch! Garden City, city of literature.
