Travelling beyond the Literary Horizon:

An Encounter with a New Zealand Writer

An interview with Ingrid Horrocks: New York and Atlanta, 2004.

By Kevin McKenzie

It is an interesting experience, being a New Zealander at large in the world. I have been living in the Atlanta area for over seven years, and my experiences have shown me that here, my country, its history, its cultural traditions, even its geography, are largely off the map. It is true, as a visit to the Atlanta Botanical Gardens confirms. There, outside the Fuqua Conservatory, is a large metal-frame globe. A visitor may find Britain and Japan, both island nations of comparable size to New Zealand, but upon even casual examination, the area of ocean to the southeast of Australia is disturbingly empty, as if some cataclysmic seismic event has returned the New Zealand islands beneath the waves, from which they emerged in isolation.

I say “emerged in isolation” because that is how New Zealand remained for most of history; isolated, geographically cut off from rest of the world, with its own unique flora and fauna: the most famous example of the latter is the flightless kiwi, named by the Maori people who settled the islands just over one thousand years ago. It wasn’t until settlement by British colonists from the 1840s that New Zealand began its own literary tradition, which remained British in nature for many decades. To this day, New Zealand’s most famous literary writer, internationally, remains Katherine Mansfield, who died in 1923.

Since the middle of the twentieth century, the appearances of New Zealand writers upon the international literary consciousness have continued to be like sporadic seismic events themselves: Keri Hulme’s, The Bone People (1983), the Oscar winning movie, The Piano (1993), the film adaptation of Witi Ihimaera’s, Whale Rider (2003), and of course the hugely successful adaptation of Lord of the Rings, by Peter Jackson (2001-2003) – an event of such magnitude that it has spawned a new form of literary tourism in New Zealand. Ian Brodie’s The Lord of The Rings: Location Guidebook Extended Edition (2002), has been a huge New Zealand publishing phenomenon, selling over 200,000 copies, making it one of the country’s greatest bestsellers.

It is against this distinctly antipodean backdrop that many New Zealand writers work: in relative isolation, dependent upon grants, largely unknown, and indeed unknowable, to the rest of the world. But young New Zealanders are wide-ranging travelers. The great New Zealand cliché is to undertake overseas experience, not unlike that which saw so many Americans travel to Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is to a young New Zealander who travels in the world, and writes, that I now turn: Ingrid Horrocks.

Published in numerous journals and anthologies, and the author of two books that reflect her overseas travel experience, Ingrid Horrocks has been successful at blending genres, combining scholarship with observation, and reaching favor with the critics of New Zealand’s literary establishment. Her first published book is a collection of poems, Natsukashii, (Wellington: Pemmican, 1998). The poems recall her experiences while living and working in Japan; the collection itself was one of the first publications to come out of Pemmican, a small and newly established press. Her second book, Travelling with Augusta: 1835 & 1999 , ( Wellington: Victoria UP, 2003) was published with the aid of a grant from Creative New Zealand Funding. Travelling with Augusta is a distinctive blend of generational memoir and personal travelogue, as with journals in hand, Ingrid retraces the journey of her great, great, great aunt Augusta through Slovenia, Croatia, and Italy. She has been described as “a wonderful new talent” and her writing has been praised as “astounding.” [1] A doctoral student at Princeton University, Ingrid Horrocks presently divides her time between New Zealand and the United States. I was able to locate her with the help of Chris Orsman, co-founder of Pemmican, and we exchanged a series of emails in the autumn of 2004.

KM: I am so glad that you are prepared to work with me. When I first thought about this project, I immediately jumped to the idea of interviewing a New Zealander.

IH: I'm certainly happy to be interviewed by you, although I'm not entirely sure I count as a 'professional writer' right now, as the main thing I'm working on (and living off) is my Ph.D. dissertation. Nonetheless, it would be interesting to throw some ideas around with you. I'm wondering what comes next for me as a ' New Zealand writer', if indeed that is what I am.

KM: You have written short stories, poetry, nonfiction. Which genre do you find the most interesting, which the most comfortable, and which the most challenging?

IH: I sometimes think that once I’ve worked out an answer to this question I’ll have grown up: I’m not there yet. As a reader, it’s short stories and novels all the way. I read poetry but in more of an on-off way, whereas I need to read fiction.

KM: What motivated you to write about your experiences in Japan?

IH: I think I chose to draw on my experiences in Japan because I felt that they were ‘real’ experiences. I wasn’t sure I had anything else to write about. In To the Is-land [Janet] Frame talks about feeling that she couldn’t be a writer because writers needed to have had something ‘tragic’ or ‘important’ happen to them. Of course she realized she was wrong, and I used to remind myself of that, and that anything could be turned into stories. Despite this, though, it took me a long time to learn to believe that an ‘exotic’ setting wasn’t necessary to give a sense of importance. Although I think that some continuing notion that New Zealand wasn’t the kind of place in which literature happened probably influenced my choice of material, it most likely had more to do with the sense of any young person that their own everyday life simply wasn’t that interesting. And there is certainly some reality in the idea that placing someone in a foreign setting sharpens their perceptions.

KM: When did you write your poems – while you were there or when you went back to New Zealand?

IH: I wrote the poems a few years later, once I was back in New Zealand and studying at Vic. [ University of Victoria, Wellington]. It would have been all far too raw to have written them at the time, although I did keep meticulous diaries – in part because I was lonely – and I went back to these when I wrote the poems.

KM : How did you come to be published, especially by Pemmican? How did they find out about you?

IH : I feel as though I’ve been very lucky on the publishing front. Harry Ricketts was one of the readers of the portfolio I wrote for Bill Manhire’s writing course, and a year or so later he started up Pemmican along with Chris Orsman. They wanted a young voice as part of their first set of books, and Harry suggested me. It was great timing for me, as I used the Japan-inspired poems which I’d written the year before, and developed a few more. It had been suggested that I wait until I had a bigger collection, but I didn’t have a bigger collection, and the poems in Natsukashii feel very much part of a discreet series. If I’d waited, I’m not sure I would have published those poems at all, or indeed published anything.

KM: What kind of editorial process was involved?

IH: I think Chris worked through the poems with me at a late stage, but I don’t remember the changes at that stage being significant. I have a good friend, Richard Smith, who is trained as an editor, and we spent one long sunny Wellington afternoon on his deck, bashing the poems about.

KM: Did you reject any poems from inclusion in Natsukashii?

IH: I rejected anything which didn’t fit in with the ‘narrative’ of the book. So anything that was not about Japan, or about my coming and going from there was excluded. Some poems – ‘ Kamakura’ is an example of this – I developed from shorter poems once I had the shape of the book worked out.

KM: Could you tell me how you came up with the idea of traveling and writing Travelling with Augusta?

IH: This is kind of explained in the first chapter, but not very specifically as I’ve realized from the questions people ask me:

. . . the journal came back to me to be re-worked, the map of Europe in my head - still a maze of borders and colours - and my abstract plans to wander across that map, had begun to center around the more concrete image of Augusta. I felt that if I went to Gorizia and to Venice, and saw the houses where she had lived, her story would thicken with description, with other stories, with trees and the colours of the flowers, with the feel of stone and skin and the sound of water. Her entries were so short. If I could see the Palazzo Attems where she had lived, and climb Monte Santo which she had climbed, then I might be able to both fill out her story and continue her story with my own. And I might come to understand travel better – both travel in her time and in mine. [2]

KM: Travelling with Augusta has been described as unusual. Why do you think this has been a reaction?

IH: Hmmm, has it? I guess it depends in what sense it is meant. It’s certainly an odd book genre-wise, as it’s not exactly an action-packed adventure book or any other genre in particular. But I don’t think the blend of history and travel is that unusual these days, and in fact the ‘footsteps’ book is now pretty much a genre unto itself.

KM: To what extent do you feel that Augusta was a companion in your travels and a collaborator in your writing?

IH: I obsess about this in the book. In a sense the book itself is the process of working out precisely this question. I think ancestors are both burdens and supports, and perhaps Travelling with Augusta is at once a homage to, and an exorcism of, my ancestors’ claims on my life. It is a collaborative project in a way: I had to work around a story someone else had already written, and I certainly felt that I had plenty of arguments with her.

KM: I am interested to learn how you write. Do you write at a particular time of day?

IH: I wrote the first draft of Travelling with Augusta while I was writing my MA thesis at York and I had a very strict routine of writing for one hour every morning before I did anything else. This worked well in getting me towards having a draft I could work with, but I think in the future I’d like to have more time to dream about what I’m writing, especially if it’s a long prose work. In order to actually turn Travelling with Augusta from a draft into a book, I spent six months back in New Zealand working on it full-time. I was living with my parents and I tried to do a 9-5 day, just like anyone else. When my parents got home, that was the end of work. I would often re-draft in the mornings, and read or research in the afternoons. I love the research associated with writing – reading random books, and doing mad internet searches.

KM: Who did you have as an editor for Travelling with Augusta?

IH: Fergus Barrowman read drafts from a very early stage. I’m a writer who depends on many drafts, and I remember the first time I showed it to him, he said he was puzzled because he didn’t think the prose was finished: it wasn’t. Fergus was already interested in my work, having been another reader of my portfolio, and having published work of mine in Sport, and so was very generous in helping me to develop the book. He was the one who suggested, for instance, that I break it into chapters. I’d been working with five long sections which were awkward to handle. He also gave me advice on how to set up scenes.

KM: I’d like to imagine that Travelling with Augusta would make a wonderfully contrasted generational travel story on film – a mix of Merchant Ivory and something else. What do you think?

IH: Wouldn’t that be nice? And what do you think – can Merchant Ivory be combined with something else? I’ve given this some thought without coming up with an answer. Perhaps it’s too ‘thinky’ a book for film – not much really happens. Could be spiced up though. It’s being serialized for Radio NZ and I’m really intrigued to see what they do with it. Fergus warned me that they usually include only ten percent of the book, and that the ‘thinky’ stuff will be precisely what is cut.

KM: Are you in anyway involved in the serialization for Radio NZ?

IH: I’m not, and I’m not too worried about it. Travelling with Augusta was finished for me when it was published, and I want to think about other things now. I’m very curious to see what they do with it, but it feels as though it will be a very separate thing from the book I wrote. In a way, though, I like the idea of other people possessing my stories, and making them their own.

KM: Most writers, I imagine, would like to reach the widest possible audience. What particular challenges do you think face New Zealand writers, in reaching out to a wider audience?

IH: This is a big one, I think, and a huge challenge for NZ writers. One of the things that puzzles me is why we (myself included) are still so focused on England, when NZ work still seems to hardly make it into Australian bookstores, where surely we have a more natural place. I think it’s great that NZ has such a thriving local writing world of writers and readers, but this does run the risk of insularity. It’s still difficult to get NZ books to England. I now have an agent in London, but I don’t know how many times I’ve been told that it’s difficult to find an ‘angle’ from which to launch a book such as mine, written by a New Zealander in England. I doubt the agent will manage to sell it: I don’t know how they’d market it. And it’s certainly a difficulty that even if a writer were wildly successful in New Zealand alone, they’d be unlikely to be able to make much of a living out of royalties, which leads to a dependence on grants every few years.

KM: Given the dependence of many New Zealand writers on such sources of funding, how difficult is it for aspiring writers to actually get grants for their writing projects?

IH: I may regret saying this, but my sense is that in New Zealand we’re quite lucky in that it is relatively easy for the kind of writers who are likely to get published to get grants as well. I have so many friends who have had grants, but that said, the fact that all my friends who are writers have had grants at some stage is suggestive. The problem is that a grant of [NZ]$9000 or so every three or four years, which is what many people end up with, is fabulous, but it isn’t a living wage. Most writers have to do other things as well. (Which I don’t think is always a bad thing for their productivity.)

KM: The New Zealand book market has been described as very small, and in world terms that is a fair assessment. Does this affect how you write?

IH: So far, I don’t think it has affected how I write. On the other hand I know that writers such as Elizabeth Knox, Catherine Chidgey, and Sarah Quigley have decided that setting their novels outside NZ is certainly a good idea for expanding their potential markets, and at some stage I might decide a similar thing. Unfortunately I think they’re right, although it does seem a shame that readers can’t get beyond setting: in New Zealand we don’t need our fiction to be set in Auckland or Wellington. The lives of New Zealanders tend to be international, anyway, so perhaps it makes sense that New Zealand writing should be as well. I don’t think NZ writers are stuck in a provincial backwater – or a self-enclosed world – any more than any other group of writers. I do think, though, that the smallness of the market can make literary experimentation difficult. In New York or Berlin or London there are enough people for communities to grow around many different kinds of writing. That overarching term ‘ New Zealand writing’ can be limiting. And I think this can mean that some good writers, unless their work makes it overseas, can find themselves without an audience despite the quality of their work, or the reviews it gets.

KM: Do you feel at all genre bound by having had two books published, both based on your travels?

IH: No, although I find that in everything I do I’m interested in movement, and about how place influences people’s experiences. I don’t think that’s going to change.

KM: I am particularly interested in the phenomenon of collaborative writing: Have you done much collaborative writing? Is it something you would consider doing?

IH: I’m very open to editing of my work, but I think I need the actual writing process to be solitary. The collaborative development of ideas appeals to me more than collaborative writing itself. A friend who is an artist, and I, have a long-standing plan to do a children’s book together.

KM: You said earlier that you have a need to read fiction. Is fiction writing something you see yourself returning to more seriously? Are there any novels buzzing around inside your head?

IH: I would like to turn to fiction writing more seriously, and I always have fragments of short stories on my computer which I’m ‘working on’. I don’t have a novel in mind yet, although I have a couple of short stories which might develop. I imagine that I’ll know when I have a novel to write – all my other projects have arrived before I’ve known that they were there. I’d like to avoid writing a novel just because that’s something I want to do in my life. I’ve read too many novels like that.

KM: You have been living here in the US during some pretty interesting times. Can you imagine a book coming out of your experiences here?

IH: I think only indirectly. I have been working on some poems which have tried to capture some of the post-September 11 atmosphere.

KM: I see that you are speaking at The International Conference on Romanticism next month.

IH: I’m giving a paper on some radical (both formally and politically) gothic novels from the 1790s, written during the extremely reactionary, repressive period in Britain which followed the French Revolution: the preface to one of them, ‘Caleb Williams’ by William Godwin, was dated with the date on which habeas corpus was suspended in 1794. I’m not going to talk about this, but I do see this period as in some ways analogous to the current environment in America, with people living in a culture of fear, in part perpetrated by their own government . There were a couple of new laws introduced in the 1790s which went by the nickname ‘The Gagging Acts’, and which ‘The Patriot Act’ always makes me think of. Anyway, what I’m going to be talking about is the kinds of split narratives which these novels develop in order to talk about something they can’t address directly.

KM: What are your goals once you have completed your doctorate?

IH: At this stage, I’m thinking of returning to New Zealand or Australia in the next couple of years. My ideal would be to split time between teaching lit. at a university and working on other projects. It might happen, but probably not for a while. One can only hope! I tend to think of my life in terms of projects: at the moment it’s the doctorate; I have a collection of poetry developing which I’d like to focus on sometime in the next couple of years; and teaching would also be a project.

KM: Thank you so much for taking the time to think about and answer my questions.

IH: No problem. It was interesting.

KM: Good luck with your PhD, and indeed with all your future projects.

IH: Good luck to you too. Hope the project goes well.

Note: At the time of writing, Natsukashii was out of print and unavailable from the bookseller I had contacted in New Zealand. Ingrid very kindly emailed me a copy of her poems. It is an impressive collection that evokes memories of my own. Travelling with Augusta disappeared en route from New Zealand and the bookseller is resending my order. I can’t wait for it to arrive. KM

References

[1] Bill Direen, New Zealand Book Council, http://www.bookcouncil.org.nz/writers/horrocksingrid.html

[2] Excerpt from chapter one, Travelling with Augusta, reproduced by permission.

Posted with the permission of Kevin McKenzie and Ingrid Horrocks. © 2004, 2008 Kevin McKenzie.