Hello from the tail end

Kia ora from the windy city; I hope you are doing well? It has been so long since I last wrote and everything has changed, as it continues to do, surprising me every time.

The news here is that I am having a short book about sewing published by The Emma Press in October 2024. It’s called Bound: A Memoir of Making and Remaking and I’ve been working on it in some form for the better part of two years. It’s about sewing, mostly. One of the essays in it is this one. Writing the book involved tearing a lot of my hair out at the Kilbirnie Library, a mad scramble to finish a manuscript in the two months before my MA started, and a lot of sewing (still ongoing) in earnest. I hope maybe you’ll read it! I’ll let you know when you can order a copy.

I’ve spent most of the year writing a wholly separate book of essays, which may or may not ever be published. I started the year thinking I would write my MA about doubt, but actually I appear to have written about singing, feijoas, the vagaries of the past tense, Texas, having a crush, my flatmates, the serious business of choosing a cake from a cabinet, and being mixed race. Oops. More to the point, I spent the year trying to figure out how to write a literary essay longer than 3,000 words, and how to write about joy. So much good writing is about difficult things: their emotional knottiness lends itself to a rich and complex prose. But I like to be happy, and I’m still hoping there’s a way to write that experience that isn’t smug or self-indulgent or boring.

It is much easier to write a happy book when you are as happy as I’ve been this year. It’s not often in your adult life that you get to spend a sunny afternoon reading Zadie Smith in the name of research, or forget momentarily about the pressure to pursue a salaried career with clear paths of progression. This time last November I was exhausted, having spent the year churning out 4,000 words of Capital-C Content a week and picking commas out of soup recipes. This November I’m still pretty exhausted and I guess I’ve still been writing a lot, but it hasn’t felt so much like a churn, and this year’s words certainly don’t have the selling power of content. My MA year has involved washing dishes in a bakery, somehow ending up flatmates with a writer I’ve idolised for five years, a life-changing trip to meet my American relatives, two choirs, a bunch of cheerfully penurious student meals, so many runs around Wellington’s South Coast, and, ha, does it ever become clear, figuring out what sort of person I am.

More importantly, it has involved so many wonderful people. I think my favourite feeling in the world is making a new friend. Consider P texting me at 6.18am for an impromptu swim; P with her eyes closed over a bite of canelé; P limp with laughter over a single well-deployed adverb. Or L, kneading the dough for cardamom buns with her particular steady quietness. L dancing around the room to Big Thief in her nana nightie and jandals; L noticing the kōwhai, the ruru, the unlikely clematis. L the triple Pisces. And what about E, who cannot speak a bad word about anyone, who knows that cooking is always giving, who writes beautiful love poems somehow involving mould spores and giant sculptures of fruit? Or J, pronouncing Joe Biden ‘such a dod’ — the technical term, you understand, from ‘doddery’. J in his psychedelic tiger t-shirt, the funniest person at any table, the biggest heart. And then there’s Z, with his thoughts on revolutionary demonology. Z with his carabiner necklace, his earnest pages of notes about his feelings, his tea with honey in it, his gentleness.

It turns out — how did I not know this earlier? — that all I want out of life is love and to write books. This year has offered the opportunity for both. I wish it never had to end.