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We’ve just had National Poetry Day. Landing Press, together with Escalator Press, ran a competition at the National Library, around Keel and Drift and Rob Hack’s collection of poems Everything is here. With a  giant origami boat as the eye-catcher, and a free biscuit and a poem as a bribe, we got 235 entries in a competition. Very easy to enter – just one word about the sea – and you went in the draw to win dinner on a boat, or books.  It was all about making poetry something for everyone. At the end of the day, as well as announcing the winners, 3 of us (Mary-Jane Duffy, Trish Harris, and I) made all those 235 words into a poem – a very long poem – and sent it out to all the entrants, along with names of the winners.

Reading with other poets in Best New Zealand Poems 2016 at Writers on Mondays at Te Papa was also a great way to mark National Poetry Day.

In some other countries, poetry is very much part of everyday life. That’s my idea of what poetry could be.

The Curioseum: Collected Stories of the Odd and Marvellous was  published by Te Papa Press in 2014 (go to the Books page to read about it). It’s a wonderful door for kids into looking at objects in a museum very imaginatively. Having edited it, I’ve always seen it as having great potential for all sorts of spin-off activities. So we – Margaret Tolland, Education Co-ordinator at Pataka Art and Museum in Porirua, and I – ran a writing workshop for kids and some of their parents. Everyone wrote a story that came from some strange or wonderful object in the Pataka collections. We’ve made our own little Curioseum out of these great stories! One of the special things about it was having kids and their parents writing alongside each other.

Last year a report from the NZ Book Council and an article in The Spinoff ignited a debate about elitism and exclusiveness in the New Zealand literary community. Inclusiveness has been a driving passion for me – how to include people who otherwise don’t get opportunities, in education, in writing, in many parts of life, so I wanted to contribute to this debate. I wrote an article for the New Zealand Author, the journal of the New Zealand Society of Authors, and I’ve included it here.

Why inclusiveness counts

Poetry is alive and well in all sorts of places – at the Fringe Bar in Wellington where Mary-Jane Duffy and I read poems in April and the audience helped us along, and at Featherston Booktown. Escalator Press authors had a series of sessions, and Landing Press sneaked in on one of them, where Rob Hack and I read a bunch of poems together. Featherston Booktown brought together an amazing range of workshops and readings – I’d absolutely recommend it.

I’ve been writing two articles for educational publishing company Lift Education. One is on a climate-change initiative in a village in Samoa, for the science series Connected; the other is about an Assyrian family who have been in New Zealand for 18 months now, for the School Journal. One of the best parts about writing is getting to talk to a wide range of people, in this case a NIWA scientist, a Wellington architect, a Samoan matai in Samoa, and an Assyrian family. Very lucky to have these opportunities.

Michael Wilson of Access Radio in Masterton (formerly Radio NZ) is working on a documentary about migrant taxi drivers, and is interviewing some of the drivers from Migrant Journeys. It’s a great initiative to support – the more ways in which we hear these stories the better. Immigration is a much-debated topic at the moment, and it’s not only about the larger issues, it’s also about the ways we live together and understand each other.

I was really delighted, and very surprised, to find Keel and Drift in the NZ Herald best books of 2016. I was surprised, because I’d deliberately made it a broader-appeal collection of poetry, rather than a literary collection – a bit risky, I thought, when I thought about reviewers (which I don’t usually think about much at all). So I was very pleased that one reviewer thought well enough of it to include it in the best books of 2016.

And equally pleased that a tiny new press, with one book to its name, was noticed.  A great endorsement of small presses!

I’ve just had the launch of Keel & Drift, a new collection of poetry. Grace, who is four, (who features in one of the poems) was asking her mother if I actually made this book. Then she said, “Did she cut out all the poems and stick them into a book with glue stick?” That’s the best way to make a book! Anyway, we’ve launched this glue stick collection, which I hope will be a collection for people who love poetry and those who don’t.

October was also a month for speaking about Migrant Journeys, both at the Kapiti Literary Festival, and with Liz Grant at the national oral history conference in Christchurch. Each time, it’s a chance to revisit these powerful stories, which I think can shift our heads a little, make us see things just a little differently.

In October Keel and Drift, my third collection of poetry, is being published. Emily Fletcher is the cover designer. She’s provided about 6 different designs, and there are opinions about all of them! The discussion around covers is interesting: what cover will make a person pick up the book in a bookstore, how does it reflect the nature of the book, will it appeal to a range of readers (important for this book), and which cover do I love? The problem is that I love several. Emily is a great designer. Wait and see which cover makes it through!

I’ve just had a few weeks in Europe, and took a couple of days in Bulgaria to research a character in a new novel (which is a kind of sequel to The Score). With the help of a small tour company, a pre-arranged itinerary, a driver, and a guide, I created the imaginary life of a boy growing up on Sofia and returning there as an adult. I spent a couple of hours with a very eminent violin professor at the National Academy of Music, visited a small monastery, and spent time in various neighbourhoods in Sofia. This new novel is primarily based in New Zealand, but understanding where characters come from is so fundamental. Now I just have to finish the novel!