Latest / The Unmaking / S01E07: Laura Williamson - Writer. Dean’s Bank, Albert Town

Transcript

S01E07: Laura Williamson - Writer. Dean’s Bank, Albert Town · The Unmaking

• 0:00
  [music]
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: So Laura, welcome to The Unmaking.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: Where are we parked and what's the significance of this place for you?
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: Kia ora, good morning.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we're parked at the Alberttown campground at the entrance to the Dean's Bank track.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um, which is a beautiful spot just to come and sit and overlook the Clutha,
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_01: which is such a big feature of our community and the landscape around here.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: And, um,
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_01: the Dean's Bank track,
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: which opened maybe 15 years ago,
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: um, is somewhere where I come and ride my bike all the time.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: And it's one of those awesome,
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: uh, community facilities that you can come and just enjoy at no cost.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: And being a historian,
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm assuming that you understand or know a little bit about the Dean and
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: that history or not?
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_01: No, I don't.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: I found out he was a dean.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: I thought it was somebody called dean was my assumption.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: He was a dean, yes.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: Because my assumption was, okay,
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: this is a bike track, and so somebody called dean used to like riding over there.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: But no, I did some digging,
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: and there is actually,
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: I think he was the dean of one of the faculties at Otago University,
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: and that used to be his favorite fishing spot.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, really?
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, yeah.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: So it was pre-mountain biking.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's an incredible facility, isn't it?
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_01: Have you visited the graveyard here, the graves?
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: No, I haven't.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's just up from where we're sitting right now.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: It's all the...
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: It was the first Pakeha settler graveyard, I think in the region.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: So there were all these old,
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_01: really sad little gravestones that are just rocks that have been carved.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: It sort of got abandoned and over the years they got some of them got washed away
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_01: and a bunch of them got used for like fire, little campfire stones.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_01: So they were sort of scattered around.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: And they maybe I can't remember when it was,
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: but in the 90s,
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_01: a group got together and collected all the stones that were still readable.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_01: And injected sort of a polymer plastic into the carvings and they've made a monument.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's just over there.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: It's really sad.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of little kids.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yes.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: You can imagine some of those long,
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: hard winters and the inversion without really knowing what the inversion was at
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: the time.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: It would have been grim.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: So, yeah,
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think people realize what they're camping next to or over probably
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_01: when they camp here sometimes.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: You've been here for a while now.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: You came, I think, in 1999.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: Came in 1999, yeah.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: Was it just after the big floods?
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: What was that like,
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: coming to a town that was in the middle of what was probably a state
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: of emergency you'd been declared?
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: What was going on here?
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah,
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: it was crazy.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_01: We arrived literally the week of the flood,
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_01: so the water had just receded, I think, the day before we got here.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: So everyone was just cleaning up at the time.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_01: We wanted to work,
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: so my partner at the time and I came looking for jobs,
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: and he got a job in a bike shop taking apart all the bikes that had been submerged.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yes.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_01: It was a bike shop across the street from New World, which is no longer there.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: But the water, I think at New World was almost waist high.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: That's how deep it was.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: So he got this job taking apart all the bikes and greasing them up
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_01: and cleaning them up for sale.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: So we got a bit of work out of it.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: And what did you do?
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: What was your first paid employment here?
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we came here to be ski bums and I had a job on the reception desk at
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: the Wanaka Medical Center.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: Which was a very good way to meet everyone in the community.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: And find out their ailments and what was going on with them.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: It was good.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: I worked kind of the night.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: I worked the shifts that other people didn't want to work.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: So I worked a lot of nights and weekends and that freed me up to go skiing.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: And was that something,
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: was that a sort of a shift model that you came already equipped with knowing,
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: hey, this is the way I want to structure my life?
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: Or was this, it just worked out that way and that was a bonus?
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: That was just a bonus.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think we had any idea what we were doing.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_01: I think we just rocked up and wanted to see what would happen and thought
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: that this seemed like a really good place to live.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: But we didn't have any structured thoughts about career or life.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: We just wanted to be somewhere that was close to snow.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_01: And that seemed like it was a community that had stuff going on beyond your average ski town.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: So one of the things I remember that informed my decision to move here was the Cinema Paradiso.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: So that started in the Old Town Hall with a group of people showing films on,
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was just a bed sheet and bringing, they made homemade ice cream.
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: As part of the experience,
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: and I guess the whole community would go along and watch movies on this bed sheet in
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_01: the old town hall that's gone now.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: And then it eventually moved to its second location,
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_01: which was where the super liquor store is now, near the Caltex roundabout.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_01: And that had the vibe that it has now.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: So there was couches in the movie theater,
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_01: and there was an intermission with cookies and beers and wine and
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_01: That whole feeling.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, man, this is really cool for a town this size.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: Like this means these,
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_01: the people who live here are interested in more than just going tramping
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: and bagging peaks and skiing and biking.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: And did that remind you of somewhere in Canada?
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_00: Because at that point, you'd already lived in quite a few places in Canada, right?
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: Was this a part of a nostalgia?
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: This is the way Canada used to be before it got spoiled.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_00: Or I've looked for this sort of thing in Canada, couldn't find it.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: No, not at all.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: It was that I grew up in cities.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_01: So I lived in cities, big cities, until I was in my late 20s.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: So shifting to a smaller place was actually quite confronting for me.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: And I needed a little touch of what I was missing by moving to somewhere small.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_01: And something like an indie,
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_01: funky movie theater that showed, like,
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: Old French films and Hal Hartley movies from the 90s and things like
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: that just gave me a little touch of what I had lost by moving somewhere small.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: And what were you looking to gain then in terms of what from moving somewhere small?
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: So to take those or keep retain those sort of elements but what were the things
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: that you were really looking to replace?
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it goes back to how I ended up in Aotearoa.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: So I had finished graduate school and I was living in Toronto.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I kind of wanted to work in journalism, but there was really nothing happening.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_01: It was sort of the late 90s.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: There was a recession.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of the work was unpaid internships.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_01: It was really the era of unpaid internships, the 90s.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I couldn't afford to do that.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: So I was just a bit lost.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I was working, I was working for a bank on the help desk for very early FPOS machines.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: So people would call and yell at you when their machine died,
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: usually because it was unplugged on the
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: wall.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: Switch it off.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: It was totally that.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: Turn it on and off,
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: check the plug,
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_01: and they had a line of people at the counter screaming at them
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: because they couldn't pay.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_01: So I was doing that, which was not a super good time.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, where is the furthest place on earth from this bank in Toronto?
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I had come to New Zealand as a child,
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: I was still in the back of my mind and I thought,
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: oh, you know what, I'm out of here.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to go down to New Zealand,
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: do an off season winter and do some skiing and just kind of get my head together
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_01: and figure out what I'm doing with my life.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: And that turned out to be really great.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I actually ended up Working and skiing for 10 years and so it was more
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_01: that it was more that I wasn't specifically looking for something.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: I was just hoping to have a little reset and that reset turned into my entire future.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: I guess as you realize when you get older that these decisions you make
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: when you're young can really inform what comes next in your life.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_00: And when you think it's going to be for a relatively short period of time
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: or what have you and then you look back and wow that was 15 years ago
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: or whenever it was.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: Because that was a long time between drinks though from when you were here as a child.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: That was a long time to be carrying those memories with you.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: What were you doing here?
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: Was that a family holiday?
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: Was it ski training?
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: What were you doing back then?
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: Because it was like 10 or 11 or something around that age?
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: I was nine.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: It was 1979.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_01: I just dated myself.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, that's a funny story.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: So when I was a little kid, I was living in Vancouver with my dad and he
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: Through a series of circumstances involving the shittiness of
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_01: the Vancouver transit system in the 70s,
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: ended up meeting this young couple,
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_01: a Kiwi couple,
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: who had missed their bus and were standing in the rain and through Series
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: of events ended up coming to stay with us for a little while.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: And the woman from that couple ended up sort of doing a little bit of nannying,
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_01: looking after me.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: She used to drive our school carpool.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_01: And they were just really lovely people.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: I remember the first time it snowed, they flipped out because they'd never seen snow.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_01: They were from the north,
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: and I didn't understand that there were people on earth who had never seen snow.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: So they became very close, almost family to us, and they eventually moved back here.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: So when I was nine, we came down to visit them.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_01: Did a big road trip around particularly the South Island.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: I clearly remember seeing the confluence of the Clutha and the Kauru at
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_01: where Cromwell is before the Clyde Dam.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: It was a big tourist attraction because one river was brown and one was blue.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_01: And they made a little stripe where they met.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_01: So I'd actually had been to this area even and it just stuck with me.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_01: I had some sort of golden vision of New Zealand being this kind of wonderful place
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_01: that just never left me.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_01: So when I was stuck in Toronto fixing the FPOS machines, it seemed like a good place to go.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: A long way away and yeah.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_00: And initially, so initially, Mount Hutt, is that right?
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I came, I stayed with that, that family.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_01: They were living in Wellington.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: So I stayed with them there and decided I was going to get a job on a ski hill for the winter.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I ended up at Hutt.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe a step back.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: You mentioned your father.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: He became a judge.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I think your mother was teaching judges to write.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: So it sounds like this is perhaps if not a literary family,
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: but a family where words were very important.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: What sort of role did they have in everyday family life?
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the whole, I mean, everyone in my family are readers.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_01: So a lot of books and a lot of reading.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: But also I was the only child.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_01: And it was like the latchkey era of parenting.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: So I was sort of by myself a lot.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_01: And I read all the time, just all the time.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I had my dad's house, the backyard house.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_01: At the back of the backyard there were some like bushes
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_01: and I actually built myself like a little Robinson Crusoe hut in the backyard
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_01: and it was like a reading nook and I would go back there and read books.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: And what sort of books were you reading?
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: What were the go-tos?
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: Were these sort of the Swallows and Amazons,
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: sort of those kind of adventure-y, kind of outdoorsy kind of things or classics?
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, more classics.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_01: I wasn't like an outdoor kid.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I was in the middle of a big city.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I loved Margaret Atwood, who's such a...
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_01: Foundational Canadian writer.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_01: When in my teens, I read a lot of Russian literature.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_01: I think I was quite emo, Dostoyevsky and stuff.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_01: Make it really hard.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I tried to read Lord of the Rings.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_01: I remember I hated it.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_01: I'm so sorry.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_01: Don't, don't send me out of the country.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um, when I was young,
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: I read all the Judy Blume books,
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_01: which is what young girls in North America read at the time.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I got in big trouble at school when I was
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_01: about 10 cause I was reading Judy Blume wrote books
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: for like preteen girls was really her thing.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um,
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_01: about blossoming adolescence and starting to like boys and all your body going
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_01: through all these changes.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_01: But then she wrote an adult novel that was quite racy.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_01: I got my hands on it and I was reading it at school and I got it taken off me and
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_01: the principal called my dad.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: And how did that go down family-wise with books?
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: That's just literature and it's like, of course, it's like, oh, was this a big deal?
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: Laura, we need to have a talk.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_01: No, my dad said to the principal,
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_01: I think you should be really impressed that a child of that age is reading something
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: of this level.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_01: You must be doing your job well.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: No, good, good attitude.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: And when, so when did you start writing?
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: Was it around a similar, a similar age thing?
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: Because I think you had, you had poems published already as a child, right?
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I had, the first thing I got published was like a little cartoon, a little drawing.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_01: It was like of a mushroom with an umbrella.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_01: And it had a little caption that said summer in Vancouver.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_01: Like I remember that so far.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_01: So clearly it was in like the local newspaper or something.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_01: And then, yeah, all in high school, I wrote poetry.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: I got some poetry published in like, I don't know, youth poetry collections.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_01: And from a very early age, I wanted to be, I knew I wanted to be a writer.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: Like that's what I always wanted to be.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: What was the drive behind that?
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: What was the appeal?
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_01: I think...
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_01: Your way of being present in the world, of sharing something of yourself with other people.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: Like there's a community in writing.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I know when I read, I felt this communion with the writer.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_01: When you read,
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_01: it's like you're having a conversation with the person
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_01: who wrote what you're reading.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I think I wanted to do that from the other side.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I wanted to communicate with the world that way.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: Was that something that you figured out for yourself in terms of, hey,
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_00: this is the process of writing and reading and all with this,
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: from courses that you'd done or things that you'd read that you sort of made
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: the connection?
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_01: It was totally from reading.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_01: I just read voraciously and it's what I wanted to do.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_01: Like I just knew that.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_01: I read a lot of Hemingway.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_01: He's such a jerk.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_01: Like, oh, so complicated.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_01: So many of the writers and artists you love are obviously turn out to be really problematic.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_01: And that's such a long conversation.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_01: But,
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: you know, he wrote a lot of About writing and about his life as a writer and a journalist.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think that had a big impact on me from a young age.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_01: So writers like that who wrote about what they did and their experiences as writers
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_01: and journalists and wrote about the actual act of writing and the craft of writing,
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_01: how they did it, how they thought about it, what it meant to them.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_01: And that,
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_01: that just embedded my,
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_01: it embedded itself in me from a really young age for whatever reason.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_00: As a kind of aspirational lifestyle,
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_00: the sort of mission,
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_00: the difficulty,
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: the challenge of...
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_00: Because I think I know what you mean in terms of thinking about his writing
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_00: or someone like Steinbeck or Kerouac.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: Who was the poet?
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_00: Alan Ginsberg?
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: No, the one that's very crazy and extremely drunken...
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: Ah, I've forgotten his name.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: But yeah, those sort of the wild lifestyle of, yeah.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, Bukowski.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: Bukowski, Charles Bukowski, exactly, yeah.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's it.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, obviously, when you're young, you have a cartoonish understanding of all that.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, for whatever reason, I guess there's an immortality in it as well.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_01: You kind of make a mark that you leave behind.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_01: That is attractive.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_01: Interestingly, and it was, I guess, the time in history, they're all men.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_01: There were very few female writers,
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_01: really, who I was interested in, particularly when I got a little bit older.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_01: Atwood is probably the main one.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: Were you aware of that at the time,
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: in terms of consciously that, hey, look,
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_00: these are all men,
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: or that was just the way it was and those are the people that you aspired
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: to be like?
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_01: It didn't cross my mind,
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_01: and I didn't think in a gendered way,
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think,
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: until I got older and realized that how much gender does impact your space in
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_01: the world and opportunity and how people view you.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_01: At the time, I just thought they were just guys, and I was just the same.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so it's so important that if you can see it, be it, right,
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_00: in terms of understanding that there's somebody that's just like me,
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: including the gender,
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: I think makes things a lot easier now for young women, young girls.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_01: Definitely.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I go back and reread some of the stuff I loved when I was young, and I just go, oh, my God.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: How connected was that ambition to write then with your decision to study history?
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_00: Did you see that as being a stepping stone,
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: as something that you would learn, or what was connected around that decision?
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I actually started university as an English major,
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_01: and I quickly realized that I hated it,
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: that I wasn't interested in fiction particularly,
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_01: or I wasn't interested in the study of fiction, and I didn't want to write fiction.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: But you'd been reading fiction or was it a kind of a mix
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_00: or what had your reading appetite been like up until that point?
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_01: It was mostly fiction.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_01: I think probably because nonfiction was less prevalent back then.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_01: But I realized later the fiction that I really came to enjoy was fiction
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_01: that was based on fact a lot more than,
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_01: I wasn't interested in fantasy writing or romance writing or things like that.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_01: I was interested in historical.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_01: Historical fiction, war stories in particular, political stories, so that side of life.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_01: And I sort of realized after half a year of studying in university,
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_01: that I was interested in Interested more in the real world and in
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_01: the social sciences.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_01: So writing in the context of reality and fact versus fantasy and made up stories.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so were you thinking then, okay,
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: maybe journalism or was there a real sort of a career path or plan at that point?
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, by then I had very much decided I wanted to be a journalist.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_01: I saw all the president's men when I was 14 or something.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, I wanted to date Robert Redford.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_01: And I also wanted to be him in that movie.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: It was just so exciting.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_01: And so cool.
• 21:31
  SPEAKER_01: I watched that film once a year still to this day.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_00: Was that the Watergate scandal?
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's the Watergate.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's the guys,
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_00: it's the
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_01: guys who,
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_01: Woodward and Bernstein,
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_01: it's the guys who broke the Watergate story and it's Robert Redford
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_01: and Dustin Hoffman play them in the film.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_01: Again, the gender dynamics in that film are just, yeah, I'm so sorry, anybody listening.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's very problematic, but
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: Different place, different time.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_01: Different time.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_01: I love that film.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, that's what I want to do.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_01: I want to be Robert Redford.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_01: I want to take down the president.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_01: I want to smoke cigarettes in alleys with sources.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: Break stories.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_01: Break stories.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: And how did that go then?
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_00: What did that look like, that path?
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_00: Was it as easy to get into post-studies then?
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_01: No, it was very difficult.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_01: I worked for the student press when I was in university,
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_01: so I got into kind of student journalism.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_01: But when I finished school, there was just very little work.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_01: And, yeah, it was internship-based, and I just couldn't quite...
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_01: Have you ever had that experience in terms of being in a newsroom, landing up at a major daily?
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_01: Because that was what it was.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: Was it the Washington Post?
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it was the Washington Post.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_01: No, because I ended up moving to New Zealand and then I just kept living in small places.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_01: So I've written for papers like the Dominion Post,
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_01: as it was called, or the Christchurch Press, as it was called.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_01: More in a kind of columnist kind of way,
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_01: but it's always been in a freelance framework because I haven't lived in a place
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_01: that had a newsroom or a magazine publisher on site.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_01: I've worked for community newspapers.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_01: I worked for the Wanaka Sun for a few years.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_01: I worked for the Wanaka app when it launched.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_01: So I've done community journalism, but I've never worked.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_01: I've never lived anywhere that had a big city newsroom.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: Is that something you look back and think,
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_00: I missed out,
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: it would have been great to have experienced that,
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: or you realise now actually what I actually wanted to become,
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: that was also from,
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_00: when was that,
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_00: the 70s,
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_00: when that film was set,
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: and those places don't exist anymore,
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_00: the editors that's got the bottle of whiskey in the bottom drawer
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: of his filing cabinet,
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_00: and the chain smoking in all offices, yeah,
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_01: Those were the days.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know, you just make choices.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_01: And sometimes you end up where you didn't think you'd be.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_01: But I've it's worked out very well.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_01: I've had a very good life.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_01: I'm very lucky.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't I don't regret that.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, the whole industry has been in freefall since the late 90s.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_01: So it was, you know, not a great time to get into that world anyways.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_00: And looking at it now, writing is your vocation, your profession.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_00: You're also very clear about the times where it's like, hey,
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_00: this is the breadwinner,
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_00: this is bringing in, so it's not always a creative exercise.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_00: How do you find that when you have those financial constraints or financial pressures?
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_00: How do you find writing in that situation?
• 24:59
  SPEAKER_00: Does that sharpen you?
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_00: Does it blunt you?
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_00: Does it depend?
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_01: It sharpens.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know what it's like for other people,
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_01: but for me, anything that's sort of desperate or deadline driven comes out better.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_01: I don't work well when I don't have a time constraint or some sort of hard line
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_01: that I have to meet.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_01: I think it makes me write better.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_01: But it's sort of hard.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's a tricky one.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_01: You can't make a living as a writer.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_01: So all of us who write for a living do other things as well.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_01: I don't really know anyone who is just a full time writer and is able
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_01: to live off what they earn.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's very rare now.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_00: Do you put artificial constraints on yourself to be able to bring
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_00: that sharpness around things like setting your own deadlines in a situation
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_00: where perhaps there is no deadline to make sure that you deliver the way
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_00: that you perhaps want to?
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_01: No, there's always a deadline.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_01: There's always a deadline.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_01: You've got to turn out so much.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_00: What about teaching?
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_00: So you taught at Mount Aspiring College for 10 years, and you've also taught skiing.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_00: What are the similarities between those two,
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_00: quite different activities,
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_00: but in terms of working together with young people and trying to get something out
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_00: of them that maybe they don't realise is perhaps in there or that they can do?
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, you, well,
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_01: I retrained as a high school teacher because I had a baby and I needed a job
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_01: that would pay the bills when my child was young in a small town where there's not
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_01: a lot to do other than...
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_01: Be a real estate agent or that's about it actually still.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_01: But it certainly was a job where you felt like you could change someone's young life.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: You could also mess it up.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_01: But it's a job that is incredibly impactful and rewarding when you have success with
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_01: a young person.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_01: And ski teaching was like that too.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it seems like...
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_01: Almost a shallow pursuit.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_01: Going up the mountain, you know, people think of it as a rich person's sport.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know,
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_01: you're just hanging out with a bunch of well-heeled people wearing expensive gear
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_01: and enjoying their expensive holidays.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_01: But actually...
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_01: Sport can change someone's life,
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_01: and seeing someone have success in a way that they didn't believe was possible
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_01: for themselves,
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_01: whether it's in sport or in an intellectual pursuit or a creative pursuit,
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_01: is really rewarding and can be really life-changing for someone.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_01: So I taught a woman in,
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_01: I used to go back and forth between New Zealand and America, winter to winter.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_01: I taught a woman in Utah who had just recovered from a,
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was cancer, a very bad episode of health.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_01: And she was terrified to get back on snow.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_01: She was really worried.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that she might hurt herself or that she couldn't do what she used to be able to do.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I spent a week with her every day and we started like on the bunny slope,
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_01: ginger, ginger, ginger.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_01: And after five days,
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_01: she wrote up like the easy chair and skied down and she got to the bottom
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_01: and she just wept because she felt like at that moment she'd got a little piece
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_01: of her life back and that, that happens.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_01: It is important.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um, It can be very important to an individual.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_00: Did you have any of those experiences yourself as a child,
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: as a young person coming through where there was that sort of mentor or somebody
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_00: that really opened your eyes to perhaps a career path or something
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_00: that became important in your life?
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I remember learning to ski.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_01: So that's kind of why skiing became my sport for such a long time.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_01: So I was a kid learning to ski on the local mountain.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_01: My mom and I went up together and took lessons.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_01: And they put you in a little group and they teach you how to make pizzas
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_01: and you speed up and slow down and start to make turns.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_01: And at the time,
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_01: I wasn't super good at like PE class,
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_01: which I think sometimes is designed to make children hate anything.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_01: Sporting or Athletic,
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_01: so I wasn't good at the rope climbing and the running and all
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_01: the weird stuff we did.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_00: All the things that you could fail at in front of your peers.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_01: Totally.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_01: In Canada,
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_01: it was like a national sports program where you got a badge
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_01: that either was like gold, silver, bronze, or you got a participation one.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_01: And the participation meant...
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_01: That you showed up, but you weren't even good enough for the bronze.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_01: So I was that kid.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_01: I had the participation.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, so I went skiing to do ski lessons with my mom.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_01: And after like the third day,
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_01: they were like dividing the kids up into the ones who still had to stay on
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_01: the rope toe and practice there.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_01: And then the ones who would move on to start to learn to ski parallel.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_01: And the like ski instructor,
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_01: who was probably some gorgeous 15 year old that I was gazing at,
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um, pointed at me and said, that kid's pretty hot.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_01: Let's put her in the next level up.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, Oh, I can do it.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_01: And like, I still remember that moment clear as day, like clear as if it was yesterday.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's amazing, isn't it?
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_00: Validation that,
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_00: and for that person probably didn't mean much to,
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_00: to give that statement or to say that thing,
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_00: but that impact on, on your life at that point.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, I can, I can do sports.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_01: I can sport.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_00: So tell me about your poetry and cycling film rail lines because I think that's sort
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_00: of combining several passions, right?
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I guess an interesting thing was I had moved down here.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_01: I was working in skiing, so I was being like a sports person.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_01: And for a while, I kind of left the writing and the creativity behind.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_01: I sort of felt like you did one thing or the other.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_00: This was your jock phase then, was it?
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_01: I was having a big jock phase.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_01: So I was kind of clinging on to a little bit of my old life,
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_01: but I was definitely focused on the sports.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_01: But then gradually I realized that I didn't want to give that other stuff up.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_01: So I started writing again.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_01: When my child was born 21 years ago,
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_01: I set myself a goal that I would get a poem published by the end of the year.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_01: Which I did in Otago Daily Times.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_01: I was very excited.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_01: So I really started writing creatively a lot during that time.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_01: And then I sort of started to notice that there were examples out there of people
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_01: who were combining sport and creativity in like a really...
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_01: Visceral, obvious, synergetic way.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_01: And actually there were examples of that back from the stuff I used to read when I was young.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_01: So like going back to Hemingway, he was a big skier.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_01: So he has some incredible short stories that are set around ski touring in the European Alps.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_01: So they don't need to be mutually exclusive.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_01: There's a mountain biker called Michaela Gatto,
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_01: who's can't remember if she's Canadian or American.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_01: She's a very good downhiller, but she's also an artist.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_01: And she made these amazing films that were like animations,
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_01: a combination of like film of her riding and like animated swoops
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_01: and swirls following her down the mountain and tracing the landscape and things like
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_01: that.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_01: So I started to really be interested in that idea of combining the two.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_01: And then the other thing I realized is when I started doing a lot
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_01: of cycling is
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_01: sports like cycling where you get into something called flow state,
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_01: which is a term in sport that refers to the point where you're doing something
• 33:52
  SPEAKER_01: that is taxing your body and
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_01: And challenging you mentally enough that you sort of have to pay attention.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_01: So if you imagine jogging on an uneven pathway,
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_01: or riding a bicycle, not down something technical, but along somewhere flat.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_01: We're having to pedal and balance, but you're not having to focus on every moment.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_01: And it's something about that, that allows your mind to relax and open.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_01: And a lot of creatives will say that that flow Low state opens their mind to creation.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_01: And I find when I'm riding my bicycle,
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_01: words start going through my head and I will often write poems while I'm cycling.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_01: So I started to see this kind of crossover between my writing and my cycling.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_01: And then I started to think through, well, what can I do with that?
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_01: You know, is there some way we could present this?
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I was,
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_01: I rode the rail trail,
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_01: which is like a four or five day ride on an old,
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_01: just used rail line through central Otago
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_01: that has all these tiny towns dotted along it that all used to be rail towns.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_01: Have you been on the rail trail?
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_00: No, I've driven past it or along it, but I haven't cycled it.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's really cool.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_01: Like, for example, the houses all face what is now the bike path because it was the railroad.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_01: So people would sit in their yard and wave at the train going by,
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_01: and now they face the trail, the bike trail.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_01: And they all used to be a lot more bustling because they used to be
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_01: on this busy rail line that went from Dunedin through to Cromwell.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_01: And they've got the old like bank building and the old post office.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_01: And so I was cycling on the rail trail,
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_01: writing poetry in my head, stopping in these towns and looking at these cool halls.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like,
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_01: it would be really cool to do a tour where We went and said poems in all the halls
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_01: and invited the whole town along.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_01: And then I was like, yeah, and we should tow all our stuff, make it emissions free.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_01: So, yeah,
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_01: and then I roped a couple of my friends,
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_01: Annabelle Wilson and Liz Breslin, into coming along with me on this enterprise.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_01: And then Liz had the idea that we should film it, make a documentary about it.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_00: What was the lead time from that experience,
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_00: from having that idea,
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_00: thinking, hey, this could be a thing, to actually then doing it?
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was about two years.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_01: Once we had the idea, it didn't take long.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_01: It was easy to set up the tour,
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_01: but we had to get a documentary crew and then we had to try and get it funded.
• 36:46
  SPEAKER_01: So apply for funding to try and get some of it paid for.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_00: And was that a first,
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_00: going through that sort of funding process and for a visual project like that?
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_01: I had done a lot of funding applications through various work I'd done in arts
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_01: and creative space.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_01: So I knew how to do that.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_01: And both Liz and Annabelle are working writers and poets.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_01: And anyone who works in those creative spaces is really familiar with grant makers
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_01: and how to apply for funding.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_01: So that was fairly straightforward.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_00: And cycling itself and the relationship between cycling and writing for you,
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_00: how inseparable are those two things?
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_00: Is cycling one of many things that works for you in that way or that you feel
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_00: the need to write about?
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's certainly, writing is very difficult.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_01: It's something that I don't think people who haven't done it really understand.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_01: And I see it with a lot of beginning writers.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_01: There's this perception that you have an idea,
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_01: you sit down, you write the first It's not like that at all.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's having ideas.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's writing random words down.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's putting something down on the page,
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_01: reordering it,
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_01: thinking about it for a week,
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_01: looking for the exact word,
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_01: trying to decide whether it's a semicolon or an em dash or a full stop.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_01: And all that process I have learned,
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_01: you have to Step away from the page for a while to let it kind of do
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_01: that Eureka thing in your brain.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_01: And something like cycling or going for a walk or skiing or having
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_01: a cross-country ski or anything,
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_01: I found that physical activity or even going to the gym,
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_01: like I do a lot of weights,
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_01: lifting weights takes your head into a different place and opens those doorways.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_01: To allow the answer to come to you.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_01: So for me, the sports side is part of the writing process for sure.
• 39:02
  SPEAKER_00: Can you meditate?
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_00: Are you a meditator?
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's really interesting,
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_00: understanding that flow state,
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_00: and that flow state for you comes from doing things that a lot of people would say,
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_00: hey, that's really quite an active, high energy thing to be doing.
• 39:16
  SPEAKER_00: I can't do that.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_00: To concentrate,
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_00: I need to omit out and sit there and go lotus position and take out all sort
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_00: of stimulus.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_01: I think...
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_01: I know a lot about...
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_01: I don't meditate.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_01: I know a lot about it because I grew up in a kind of hippie environment.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_01: The thing,
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_01: I guess,
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_01: that's different between the kind of flow state I'm talking about and meditation is
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_01: that meditation doesn't hold thoughts.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_01: So I think meditation serves... is sort of a...
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_01: Like getting the high-powered window washer in there and kind of clearing out the corners.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_01: But you know the thing with meditation where you go,
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_01: oh, there's a thought, and then you just watch it pass by and leave.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_00: I think you're supposed to do.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_00: That's what you're supposed to do.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's quite hard to do.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_01: I would describe flow state as more holding on.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_01: It's more that it lets those ideas come in, but you kind of hang on to them a little bit more.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, having said that, like if I'm writing...
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_01: I always have my phone with me and I use voice notes.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_01: If I have a line in my head or I figured out a paragraph,
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_01: a problem that I'm working on with something I'm writing,
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_01: and I get the answer, I'll pull over and say it into my voice notes.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the opposite of meditation.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_01: You're not supposed to do that when you're meditating.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_00: You had,
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_00: I think,
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_00: a very positive reaction from Nathan Withington to your book, The Bike and Beyond.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_00: So I've talked to Nathan about that, obviously, and about that experience for him.
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_00: And he said he heard your voice.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so what do you think was the voice that he heard when he read your book?
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, that's hard to say.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's just not your average voice writing about sport or the outdoors.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_01: I think a lot,
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_01: not to be disparaging about that area of life and that area of writing,
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_01: but a lot of writing...
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_01: Especially about adventure sport, I think can be quite same, same.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_01: So there's a lot of like, my awesome trip or gear reviews or race reports and things like that.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I think when he read this book,
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_01: he was like,
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_01: this person might be slightly unhinged or but certainly takes
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_01: a different views all this with kind of an unusual slant.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I think he really that spoke to him because he's an unusual guy as well.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_00: And what was the slant?
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_00: What is the perspective that you bring to the sport and how you reflect on it as
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_00: an activity that it does for you and has done for you?
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's a little bit of an outsider's perspective.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_01: So I didn't grow up training as an athlete.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't grow up in the outdoors.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_01: That book was about cycling.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't start cycling seriously till I was almost 30,
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_01: which is very unusual, I think, to have taken that sport quite seriously.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_01: I started it very late.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_01: I think I approach it with a lot of humor.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's a lot of ridiculous things that can happen on a bicycle,
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_01: going fast and in mud and going to strange places.
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of poignancy in looking back.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_01: I wrote a lot about when I started cycling,
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_01: I started to think a lot about the bicycle and what it means in people's lives,
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_01: the history of the bicycle as a form of transport, its role in feminism, how
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_01: When women first started riding bicycles, people threw rocks at them.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_00: Because it was so unladylike.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_01: There was quite a bit of concern that the bicycle seat would cause them
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_01: to become aroused and behave inappropriately.
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure there was a church involved somewhere with all this.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_01: It was all one and the same back then.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_01: There was concern that they would ride out of town unchaperoned and stumble across
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_01: a lad in the woods by accident.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_01: Next thing you know, be pregnant.
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_01: There was concern about the clothing.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_01: So you couldn't cycle in big Victorian skirts.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_01: So women started designing these like bifurcated skirts.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, knickerbockers were from that era.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_01: So these big puffy pants that women could wear.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_01: So that they could physically ride a bicycle.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_00: Was there a side saddle invention as well?
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_00: Because he couldn't sit properly, possibly sit like that?
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean,
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_01: there's drawings of women,
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_01: because women wrote horses' side saddle for that reason, right?
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_01: So there's these drawings of women sitting on bicycles' side saddle,
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_01: but they could only roll, they couldn't pedal.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_01: So there's a whole history of that.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_01: That was fascinating.
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_01: And it was all tied up with...
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_01: The right to vote.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_01: So Kate Shepherd was part of a big women's cycling club back in the day.
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_01: There was a big crossover between the cyclists riding off into the moors
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_01: and getting pregnant and wanting to vote.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_01: And it was all equally horrifying.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_01: So like all that,
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_01: there's so many layers to this thing that we just see as a form of transport or
• 45:02
  SPEAKER_01: a sport.
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I looked back,
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_01: although I didn't do a lot of sport other than skiing in a serious way
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_01: when I was young, I did ride my bicycle to school through the streets of Vancouver.
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_01: There was no cycle lanes.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_01: We didn't have helmets like, oh my God.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and being the only girl in the wee posse that rode our bikes to school,
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_01: which again,
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_01: at the time I didn't think anything of,
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_01: but looking back on it, um, Was maybe quite an important thing in my life.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_01: So there's all that.
• 45:41
  SPEAKER_01: I looked into the idea of the narrative of sport, because I'm really interested in sports.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_01: Why we watch sports,
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_01: like why do you watch a rugby game or a baseball game or like
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_01: the Tour de France is starting on Saturday,
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gone for a month, I will be obsessively watching it every day.
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_01: What does watching competitive sport do for us?
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it's because it, it tells us a story.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's got all these elements of life in a A rugby game.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_01: There's rivalries and friendships and fights and there's tension and release
• 46:24
  SPEAKER_01: and there's different acts and there's a narrative arc and there's a framework of
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_01: a history of the team, of the sport, of the individual players.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's all there like wrapped up in this little Game or a bicycle race or a downhill ski course.
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_01: So I explored that in the book.
• 46:47
  SPEAKER_01: So I was like, I was really trying to come at this one topic from every angle I could think of.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I think Nathan thought, okay, yeah, we could work with this.
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_01: Like, this is cool.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of material here.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_00: And then I think he said he told you his plan for the magazine
• 47:07
  SPEAKER_00: and you told him everything that was wrong with it, which was basically everything.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_00: And he thought, yeah, okay, this is my person.
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_01: That's what he says.
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_01: I don't remember clearly what that is.
• 47:16
  SPEAKER_01: But I think maybe my point was how do we differentiate what 1964 is going to be
• 47:24
  SPEAKER_01: from your other outdoor magazines?
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_01: Because New Zealand, there's not a lot of people here.
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_01: But there are a lot of magazines.
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_01: And there are a lot of magazines on one topic.
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_01: So there's a bunch of women's magazines with the royals on the cover,
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_01: and they seem to sell well.
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_01: But there's several outdoor and sport focused magazines,
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_01: a high number for somewhere with such a small population.
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_01: So my thing was like, okay, what are we going to do that's different?
• 47:53
  SPEAKER_01: How are we going to differentiate ourselves from what is already out there?
• 47:56
  SPEAKER_00: And how long did it take to really articulate that around that,
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_00: what is mountain culture and this is going to be our thing and how simple was
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_00: that process, that definition process at the beginning?
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_01: It was surprisingly simple actually and what we did was just lean into
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_01: the word culture and
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_01: because In places like Wanaka, these kind of mountain towns,
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_01: There is a huge amount of adjacent creativity going on.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I've lived in places like this all over the world.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_01: So I lived in Banff in Canada, which is where the Banff Center for the Arts is.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_01: So it's an internationally renowned center for arts,
• 48:45
  SPEAKER_01: theater, music,
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_01: incubation of creativity,
• 48:51
  SPEAKER_01: but set in a really stunning place where everyone around the place is running up
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_01: and down mountains and Running away from bears and cougars.
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, something ate my flatmate's dog in Banff.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not sure what it was.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_01: It was a very small dog.
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_01: I lived in Park City in Utah for a few years,
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_01: which is where the Sundance Film Festival takes place.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_01: So there is something about these...
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_01: Beautiful places where people have come to do things like skiing and
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_01: then attract like high value populations because they're so beautiful.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_01: That kind of wealth of landscape also attracts creatives.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_01: Rita Angus hung out in Wanaka back in the day and did a bunch of paintings down here.
• 49:48
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of poetry written about this area.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_01: That is still here.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I can see it all around me.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_01: There's, there's people making music in the community everywhere.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_01: There are a lot of artists,
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_01: there's a lot of young people writing poetry,
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_01: and then who are working on the Lifts at Cadrona or whatever.
• 50:09
  SPEAKER_01: There's an amazing,
• 50:10
  SPEAKER_01: there's always been quite an amazing open mic scene of music and spoken word.
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_01: So to me,
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_01: it was like,
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_01: let's capture that as well as the outdoor adventure and then the rural living.
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_01: So it's this combination of...
• 50:30
  SPEAKER_01: Capturing rural South Island life,
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_01: the kind of resort town,
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_01: ski town life, and the creativity that runs through both of those things.
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_00: Why do you think that is with mountain towns that they have that sort of byproduct
• 50:47
  SPEAKER_00: of attracting creative people to live there?
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_00: And do you see that they...
• 50:52
  SPEAKER_00: That there's a life cycle to a town in terms of from when it's started and
• 50:59
  SPEAKER_00: when it's perhaps cheap to live there and then as it gets more expensive and then as
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_00: the perhaps less well earning but perhaps more creative people
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_00: then can no longer afford to live there or they have to live somewhere else
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_00: or commuting or what's the change?
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, that's, that's not just a mountain town or rural problem.
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_01: That's a universal problem.
• 51:19
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a problem in cities as well.
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_01: So if you think of like, Paris,
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_01: and again,
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_01: if we bring Hemingway back into it,
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_01: he lived in Paris and The 20s,
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_01: he actually was a journalist and wrote for the Toronto Star as a stringer,
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_01: I guess, would send them stories.
• 51:39
  SPEAKER_01: Like he would send them like one story a month.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_01: And that was what he lived on in Paris with a wife and a baby.
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_01: And the baby got born and Ernest couldn't work with the baby crying.
• 51:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 51:53
  SPEAKER_01: So he had to rent a second space so he could go right in peace.
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_01: And that, I mean, imagine that now, what it would cost to do that in Paris.
• 52:02
  SPEAKER_01: It's true, yeah.
• 52:04
  SPEAKER_01: So where I grew up, Vancouver is the same.
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's prohibitively expensive for someone with a high-paying job,
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_01: much less someone who He's trying to make a living as a short story writer
• 52:20
  SPEAKER_01: a poet.
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_01: So you'll see like this kind of migration of artists communities from cities
• 52:31
  SPEAKER_01: where they have been priced out of into cities that are kind of on the on
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_01: the downward spiral and kind of move into Abandoned warehouses and parts of town
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_01: that have fallen on hard times.
• 52:44
  SPEAKER_01: The artists zhuzh the place up and then it becomes hip and then it gets gentrified.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_01: So it's this cycle.
• 52:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I guess here you'll see,
• 52:53
  SPEAKER_01: like, I don't really know anyone who actually lives in Wanaka proper.
• 52:56
  SPEAKER_01: We all live out in Lagat and Hawia and Hawia flat.
• 52:59
  SPEAKER_01: So that was sort of the migration out of the center of town.
• 53:03
  SPEAKER_01: Anyone I know who does live in Wanaka proper has been here for 30 years.
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_01: What that looks like long, long term, I'm not sure.
• 53:13
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, one thing I'd say about creatives is they're pretty tenacious.
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_01: Even when times are good, we're used to making it work in all sorts of wily ways.
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_01: I don't, I don't know, there's still lots of
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_01: I go back to Whistler sometimes, which is sort of like Aspen outside of Vancouver.
• 53:41
  SPEAKER_01: And there's still quite a strong creative community hanging on there.
• 53:44
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of music and art.
• 53:47
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know where they live.
• 53:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it must be hard.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_00: And seeing,
• 53:51
  SPEAKER_00: as I said,
• 53:51
  SPEAKER_00: seeing the evolution of places and phases in their development and how that changes
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_00: and seeing a place like Dunedin that has all those sort of big old empty warehouses
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_00: or Berlin a few years ago that it was really cheap and easy to live there.
• 54:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's not anymore.
• 54:08
  SPEAKER_00: But as a young creative, that's much more conducive to...
• 54:12
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 54:13
  SPEAKER_00: being able to produce really interesting boundary free work than
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_00: if you're really living in a really uncomfortable situation and really struggling
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_00: to make ends meet.
• 54:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, Amaru has been a big,
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_01: apparently a lot of the young people moving there and it has
• 54:26
  SPEAKER_01: that really cool old quarter.
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_01: All these awesome old buildings,
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_01: grain silos and warehouses and shipping storage units and things and cheapest chips,
• 54:43
  SPEAKER_01: cool environment, easy access to the water and the outdoors.
• 54:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, Amaru, maybe it's the next Berlin.
• 54:50
  SPEAKER_00: Might be.
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_00: Talking about creativity and events, you also ran the Festival of Colour here.
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_00: What was that like coming to that?
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_00: Because you'd already been an enthusiastic participant and fan and then taking on
• 55:07
  SPEAKER_00: a role like that.
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_00: What was that like?
• 55:09
  SPEAKER_00: Was that your first experience of doing something like that?
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_01: It was in the creative field.
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_01: So when I worked in the ski industry,
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_01: I was an instructor, but I also worked in ski racing, running events.
• 55:20
  SPEAKER_01: So I'd run sports events.
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_01: So I knew kind of how to,
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_01: all the little spokes of the wheel in event management,
• 55:30
  SPEAKER_01: I had some experience with, but I hadn't done it in an arts space so much before.
• 55:38
  SPEAKER_01: It was an opportunity that just kind of presented itself.
• 55:41
  SPEAKER_01: I had started working for them a little bit as their school's coordinator
• 55:45
  SPEAKER_01: when I was still teaching.
• 55:47
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a nine-day multi-genre arts festival that's kind of the scope
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_01: of something you would more see In Wellington or Auckland.
• 55:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's quite an extraordinary thing to have in such a small town.
• 56:02
  SPEAKER_01: So I started out running their education program,
• 56:05
  SPEAKER_01: which is where artists and musicians and writers will come into all the schools,
• 56:11
  SPEAKER_01: performers,
• 56:12
  SPEAKER_01: puppetry,
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_01: all kinds of things, and bring those opportunities to young people in the community.
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_00: Is that a standard thing in terms of like for all festivals this is what happens
• 56:24
  SPEAKER_00: or is this particularly important and done differently down here because it is such
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_00: a small community and we don't have those sorts of people here on the everyday?
• 56:32
  SPEAKER_01: Very much so.
• 56:33
  SPEAKER_01: It is standard to a point but it's incredibly important here because that's exactly,
• 56:37
  SPEAKER_01: you're right.
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_01: Young people who are interested in art and writing and music,
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_01: especially classical music, but also contemporary music.
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_01: If you live in Auckland,
• 56:49
  SPEAKER_01: there's a million courses you can take,
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_01: you can go to workshops, you can go see those performers.
• 56:55
  SPEAKER_01: Like, as you said, if you see it, you can be it.
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um, whereas here we,
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_01: we just don't have access to that level of, um, artist, performer, professional.
• 57:08
  SPEAKER_01: So when they come to town,
• 57:10
  SPEAKER_01: we really want to make sure young people, um,
• 57:13
  SPEAKER_01: have access to those experiences and have those opportunities and like network,
• 57:19
  SPEAKER_01: um, And so the famous one was a flautist who was at Mount Aspiring College.
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_01: And she wanted to be a classical performer, I guess.
• 57:31
  SPEAKER_01: And we had a small version of the,
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if it was the New Zealand Symphony or Christchurch Symphony.
• 57:37
  SPEAKER_01: We can't have a whole symphony here because there's nowhere big enough,
• 57:40
  SPEAKER_01: but they have a small touring version.
• 57:42
  SPEAKER_01: And so we got her the opportunity to go hang out with them when they were rehearsing
• 57:46
  SPEAKER_01: and watch it all happen.
• 57:48
  SPEAKER_01: And she was This awesome cool kid and started chatting with them.
• 57:51
  SPEAKER_01: And long story short, she ended up with some sort of apprenticeship with the symphony.
• 57:56
  SPEAKER_01: And she never would have seen classical music live without leaving town.
• 58:04
  SPEAKER_01: So that was what I was doing.
• 58:07
  SPEAKER_01: And then the general manager was leaving the job.
• 58:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I was kind of at the point where I had had enough of teaching.
• 58:17
  SPEAKER_01: I can't remember what I was doing, but.
• 58:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I thought that would look like a really interesting, exciting thing to be a part of.
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_01: Again, back to just being a real estate agent or nothing else.
• 58:28
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there's not a great variety of employment opportunities in a place this size.
• 58:35
  SPEAKER_01: There are more opportunities now, but this was like a few years ago.
• 58:40
  SPEAKER_01: So I thought I'd give it a crack.
• 58:41
  SPEAKER_01: Seemed like a good challenge.
• 58:43
  SPEAKER_01: And I was very passionate about the idea of the festival and I understood
• 58:49
  SPEAKER_01: the privilege of having it here.
• 58:52
  SPEAKER_01: So, yeah, seemed like an exciting challenge.
• 58:56
  SPEAKER_00: And what would you change now in terms of if you were back in that role
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_00: and budget was no limitation, how would you do things differently?
• 59:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 59:09
  SPEAKER_01: I would pay everyone better.
• 59:12
  SPEAKER_01: The arts, like publishing, are wildly under rewarded financially.
• 59:22
  SPEAKER_01: To work in that space, You give so much and you work so hard for not a lot.
• 59:33
  SPEAKER_01: And you work long hours because you're doing everything on a shoestring
• 59:37
  SPEAKER_01: and you can't afford to bring extra staff in.
• 59:40
  SPEAKER_01: And that area of life is so important.
• 59:47
  SPEAKER_01: And it's the old story, right?
• 59:48
  SPEAKER_01: There's always this tension about funding for the arts and Whether
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_01: the arts should be a priority for government funding and in education.
• 1:00:00
  SPEAKER_01: And then everyone goes home and turns on the radio and listens to music.
• 1:00:05
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't matter what party you vote for.
• 1:00:08
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone listens to music.
• 1:00:10
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone goes to weddings and funerals and listens to a poem being performed.
• 1:00:16
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone watches Netflix.
• 1:00:20
  SPEAKER_01: But for those things to exist,
• 1:00:23
  SPEAKER_01: underneath all that,
• 1:00:24
  SPEAKER_01: there has to be work done that is paid to the degree that people can still live
• 1:00:31
  SPEAKER_01: and produce that kind of work,
• 1:00:33
  SPEAKER_01: go through the process of learning to do that kind of work,
• 1:00:36
  SPEAKER_01: hone their skills, gain experience.
• 1:00:40
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, that's the thing I would do.
• 1:00:43
  SPEAKER_00: How much of that is a cultural thing and how much of that is dictated by
• 1:00:48
  SPEAKER_00: the small market size that we have here?
• 1:00:50
  SPEAKER_00: Do you see different things in different countries,
• 1:00:53
  SPEAKER_00: different cultures or is this pretty universal that the arts aren't really valued
• 1:00:58
  SPEAKER_00: or appreciated?
• 1:00:59
  SPEAKER_01: It's universal.
• 1:01:00
  SPEAKER_01: I can't speak, I'm speaking in a Western context.
• 1:01:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's universal now,
• 1:01:09
  SPEAKER_01: in the sense that,
• 1:01:11
  SPEAKER_01: and again, it's a long conversation, but the effect like the internet has had
• 1:01:18
  SPEAKER_01: The compensate compensating the arts financially,
• 1:01:22
  SPEAKER_01: and whether people are willing to pay for their entertainment or reading anymore.
• 1:01:30
  SPEAKER_01: So that difficulty is universal.
• 1:01:34
  SPEAKER_01: Certainly, it's cliched, but Europe, Northern Europe, in particular,
• 1:01:41
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas, which has a, they're highly taxed society.
• 1:01:45
  SPEAKER_01: So there's, there's a lot more public money.
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_01: But there is,
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_01: I guess it's historic,
• 1:01:53
  SPEAKER_01: arts education,
• 1:01:55
  SPEAKER_01: and the arts themselves take a more central space up in everyday life.
• 1:02:01
  SPEAKER_01: So You know,
• 1:02:04
  SPEAKER_01: you talk to young people who are educated in Germany or France or Northern Europe,
• 1:02:08
  SPEAKER_01: and they will have a much broader arts education.
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_01: So they'll learn classics,
• 1:02:15
  SPEAKER_01: for example,
• 1:02:16
  SPEAKER_01: or they'll do art history in high school as part of the regular curriculum.
• 1:02:22
  SPEAKER_01: Music might be a more fundamental subject that everyone takes.
• 1:02:30
  SPEAKER_01: So it's more part of their everyday life in a way that is actively supported,
• 1:02:35
  SPEAKER_01: I think, than here.
• 1:02:36
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's probably just history.
• 1:02:39
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think that will change in New Zealand?
• 1:02:41
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think that's a cultural evolution and perhaps there is becoming
• 1:02:46
  SPEAKER_00: a greater appreciation for an understanding of the importance of the arts?
• 1:02:51
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I struggle a little bit with that term.
• 1:02:53
  SPEAKER_00: I think it has a Perception problem, actually, in terms of from a pure branding perspective.
• 1:02:58
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think it's a particularly because it automatically just sounds elitist
• 1:03:04
  SPEAKER_00: and highbrow and it's immediately ballet and opera kind of thing is the perception.
• 1:03:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, I agree with you.
• 1:03:15
  SPEAKER_01: Well, at the moment, it's going in the wrong direction.
• 1:03:18
  SPEAKER_01: And that that is that's the current state of politics that the
• 1:03:25
  SPEAKER_01: The current coalition that's running things is not going to prioritize
• 1:03:32
  SPEAKER_01: those areas
• 1:03:33
  SPEAKER_01: of life for a lot of reasons.
• 1:03:36
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, I think you're absolutely right.
• 1:03:40
  SPEAKER_01: I think it could be messaged more clearly.
• 1:03:45
  SPEAKER_01: So say you're looking at it from that pure commercial point perspective or geopolitical.
• 1:03:54
  SPEAKER_01: So we want to grow the strength of the nation in a GDP sense,
• 1:04:01
  SPEAKER_01: in a competitive sense internationally.
• 1:04:05
  SPEAKER_01: We want to grow innovation in the country and opportunity.
• 1:04:12
  SPEAKER_01: Learning Music.
• 1:04:15
  SPEAKER_01: And drawing and writing in particular,
• 1:04:19
  SPEAKER_01: communicating from a young age,
• 1:04:23
  SPEAKER_01: all those things make for a more nimble and more broadly educated and more able
• 1:04:31
  SPEAKER_01: to operate in a variety of contexts population.
• 1:04:37
  SPEAKER_01: And that's valuable,
• 1:04:39
  SPEAKER_01: like even from just a dollar cents,
• 1:04:42
  SPEAKER_01: a population that Is educated narrowly is going
• 1:04:47
  SPEAKER_01: to be less successful internationally.
• 1:04:51
  SPEAKER_01: If I was running the show, that's what
• 1:04:54
  SPEAKER_00: I would do.
• 1:04:55
  SPEAKER_00: You'd invest more in education and change the curriculum in terms of putting more of
• 1:04:59
  SPEAKER_00: an emphasis on creativity or creative topics.
• 1:05:04
  SPEAKER_01: I taught for a number of years and every 10 years there's this Our kids are falling behind.
• 1:05:10
  SPEAKER_01: They're not good at math.
• 1:05:11
  SPEAKER_01: They're not good at reading.
• 1:05:12
  SPEAKER_01: We've got to put more money into the basics.
• 1:05:14
  SPEAKER_01: They've got to learn the basics.
• 1:05:16
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's really cute that they're going to learn recorder, but it's not important.
• 1:05:19
  SPEAKER_01: And let's drop this, you know, no more art history, languages, all this stuff that is really...
• 1:05:30
  SPEAKER_01: Valuable in a completely scientific way.
• 1:05:34
  SPEAKER_01: There's no question that a broad education from a young age is valuable.
• 1:05:41
  SPEAKER_01: And just rote learning of maths and letters, it's very limiting and small-minded.
• 1:05:50
  SPEAKER_00: I'm amazed that it still goes on to the degree it is.
• 1:05:53
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know,
• 1:05:54
  SPEAKER_00: just thinking back and,
• 1:05:55
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:05:55
  SPEAKER_00: I was at primary school when calculators were introduced,
• 1:05:58
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:05:59
  SPEAKER_00: and what a breakthrough that was and having to think, well,
• 1:06:01
  SPEAKER_00: actually,
• 1:06:02
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:06:03
  SPEAKER_00: apart from the basics and,
• 1:06:04
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:06:05
  SPEAKER_00: being able to do two times six,
• 1:06:06
  SPEAKER_00: that might be important,
• 1:06:07
  SPEAKER_00: but you don't need to understand what, you know, 173 divided by seven is.
• 1:06:12
  SPEAKER_00: And yet we're still kind of teaching a lot of things as if there were no other tools
• 1:06:17
  SPEAKER_00: that we could use to help us get to these things.
• 1:06:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and you know,
• 1:06:23
  SPEAKER_01: in sport,
• 1:06:23
  SPEAKER_01: when you're training for your sport, you,
• 1:06:26
  SPEAKER_01: so say you're training as a ski racer,
• 1:06:28
  SPEAKER_01: you train gaits,
• 1:06:29
  SPEAKER_01: you train on snow,
• 1:06:31
  SPEAKER_01: you work on your angles and your lines,
• 1:06:33
  SPEAKER_01: and then you go to the gym and you do core work,
• 1:06:36
  SPEAKER_01: and then you go out for a run to work on your cardio.
• 1:06:39
  SPEAKER_01: You cross train, and I think it's the same with minds.
• 1:06:44
  SPEAKER_01: Cross training for the minds.
• 1:06:45
  SPEAKER_01: Let's rebrand art.
• 1:06:47
  SPEAKER_01: Rebrand the arts.
• 1:06:48
  SPEAKER_01: It's the new CrossFit.
• 1:06:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, it definitely needs some work.
• 1:06:52
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I look at how they successfully rebranded the King hit from a King hit to
• 1:06:57
  SPEAKER_00: a Coward Punch, which I thought was a fantastic concept, basically.
• 1:07:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I think, as I said, I think that's one of the...
• 1:07:05
  SPEAKER_00: The problems the arts has in New Zealand is the term itself and what
• 1:07:10
  SPEAKER_00: that conjures up for perhaps your average taxpayer and what they associate with that
• 1:07:16
  SPEAKER_00: and think,
• 1:07:17
  SPEAKER_00: oh actually no,
• 1:07:17
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not comfortable with paying more tax to be able to fund those people
• 1:07:21
  SPEAKER_00: or whatever it is that they will see as being the arts.
• 1:07:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I guess that, yeah, I think that's absolutely true.
• 1:07:30
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, another way to look at it is, what is Taika Waititi worth to New Zealand?
• 1:07:36
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 1:07:36
  SPEAKER_01: and he he started out and a government funded short film program that they used
• 1:07:41
  SPEAKER_01: to fund young filmmakers to make short films and develop their craft.
• 1:07:46
  SPEAKER_01: That's where he learned to direct Marvel movies.
• 1:07:50
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 1:07:51
  SPEAKER_01: or Lorde,
• 1:07:52
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:07:52
  SPEAKER_01: she got her start,
• 1:07:54
  SPEAKER_01: like she did Smokefree Rockwest,
• 1:07:55
  SPEAKER_01: which did just get a bunch of extra funding, actually.
• 1:07:58
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, National.
• 1:08:00
  SPEAKER_01: I appreciate that.
• 1:08:02
  SPEAKER_01: So those kind of funded incubator programs can be massively,
• 1:08:09
  SPEAKER_01: what's Peter Jackson worth to New Zealand?
• 1:08:11
  SPEAKER_00: In terms of the export value as well of those things,
• 1:08:14
  SPEAKER_00: in terms of like you take away the production costs compared
• 1:08:17
  SPEAKER_00: with things like exporting logs and dairy powder,
• 1:08:22
  SPEAKER_00: I'd far rather be exporting stories and film and people's voices or musical ability.
• 1:08:29
  SPEAKER_01: Sure, like,
• 1:08:31
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:08:31
  SPEAKER_01: forestry has been palpably damaging to,
• 1:08:34
  SPEAKER_01: you know, like,
• 1:08:36
  SPEAKER_01: the Wairapas just had a huge amount of flooding with a bunch
• 1:08:39
  SPEAKER_01: of forestry slash blocking waterways,
• 1:08:42
  SPEAKER_01: you know, it's, yeah, making movies doesn't cause floods.
• 1:08:49
  SPEAKER_00: What's the connective tissue between the stories and features that you have in
• 1:08:54
  SPEAKER_00: a magazine and then also from issue to issue?
• 1:08:57
  SPEAKER_00: How much do you theme things?
• 1:09:01
  SPEAKER_00: So I understand I think it needs to be part of that rural,
• 1:09:05
  SPEAKER_00: remote aesthetic and also it needs to be original, right?
• 1:09:11
  SPEAKER_00: And how do you look at the originality then from an editorial perspective?
• 1:09:15
  SPEAKER_01: I mean the dream story is one that you can't Google.
• 1:09:18
  SPEAKER_01: If someone's written something and I'm trying to fact check it
• 1:09:21
  SPEAKER_01: and I'm really struggling to find the facts online,
• 1:09:24
  SPEAKER_01: that means it really hasn't been told before.
• 1:09:27
  SPEAKER_01: I've had a few like that, um,
• 1:09:30
  SPEAKER_01: where I've literally had to go to the,
• 1:09:32
  SPEAKER_01: you know, the shelves in the library where you're not allowed to take the books out.
• 1:09:35
  SPEAKER_01: It has all those old moldy books.
• 1:09:37
  SPEAKER_01: I've, you know,
• 1:09:38
  SPEAKER_01: I've had to go look in a couple of those to make sure,
• 1:09:40
  SPEAKER_01: you know, a name was spelled right or something.
• 1:09:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um, So there's that side of it.
• 1:09:45
  SPEAKER_01: Nathan always and I always talk about keeping the readers,
• 1:09:49
  SPEAKER_01: our readers off balance a little bit,
• 1:09:51
  SPEAKER_01: which is that you read, you never know what you're going to get next.
• 1:09:55
  SPEAKER_01: So you'll read one story,
• 1:09:58
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:09:59
  SPEAKER_01: a story about the woman who drove the Glenorchy bus,
• 1:10:03
  SPEAKER_01: school bus for a number of years, will be on one page.
• 1:10:07
  SPEAKER_01: And then the next page will be about how in the 1940s,
• 1:10:12
  SPEAKER_01: In the 1940s,
• 1:10:12
  SPEAKER_01: a bunch of farmers' overalls were spontaneously combusting and no one knew why.
• 1:10:17
  SPEAKER_01: They thought they were possessed or something and it turned out the fertilizer,
• 1:10:22
  SPEAKER_01: maybe it was weed killer or fertilizer they were using with spray guns was getting
• 1:10:27
  SPEAKER_01: into their trousers and then igniting.
• 1:10:32
  SPEAKER_00: That's one of those things that you wouldn't hear about too often.
• 1:10:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so yeah,
• 1:10:38
  SPEAKER_01: that's kind of what we want to do is keep our readers guessing and therefore excited
• 1:10:45
  SPEAKER_01: to turn the page and find out what's going to happen next because they don't know.
• 1:10:50
  SPEAKER_00: Do you have benchmarks internationally that you look at from
• 1:10:55
  SPEAKER_00: a publishing perspective and go,
• 1:10:56
  SPEAKER_00: okay, what those guys are doing, that's awesome, or are you out on your own by now?
• 1:11:01
  SPEAKER_01: We're a little bit out on our own,
• 1:11:03
  SPEAKER_01: although one magazine we both really loved that was a little bit of a model
• 1:11:07
  SPEAKER_01: for us was one called The Smith Journal that was published out of Australia.
• 1:11:12
  SPEAKER_01: And there's an Australian magazine called Frankie that you'll see around here
• 1:11:17
  SPEAKER_01: that still exists and is very popular.
• 1:11:19
  SPEAKER_01: And it's on beautiful matte paper.
• 1:11:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I would say it's aimed at a crafty, funky Melbourne girl who's like 25 to 35 and...
• 1:11:31
  SPEAKER_01: Wears cool overalls and gets into beanie knitting sometimes.
• 1:11:36
  SPEAKER_01: So it's like...
• 1:11:39
  SPEAKER_01: Indie, crafty, girly kind of culture.
• 1:11:42
  SPEAKER_01: Again, not to be too gendered about it, but that's... And it's a beautiful magazine.
• 1:11:46
  SPEAKER_01: I always really loved it, although it's way too girly for me.
• 1:11:49
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like a sports girl.
• 1:11:52
  SPEAKER_01: And they launched, again,
• 1:11:54
  SPEAKER_01: in a gendered way,
• 1:11:55
  SPEAKER_01: the kind of air quotes, men's version of Frankie, which was the Smith Journal.
• 1:12:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I loved it.
• 1:12:03
  SPEAKER_01: They had a story on like...
• 1:12:06
  SPEAKER_01: Heavy metal grandmas.
• 1:12:08
  SPEAKER_01: And it was like women in their 80s and 90s who like hang out at Iron Maiden shows and stuff.
• 1:12:13
  SPEAKER_01: And you can imagine the photos were great.
• 1:12:17
  SPEAKER_01: They had an issue.
• 1:12:18
  SPEAKER_01: They had an article about how to make your own homemade tattoo gun.
• 1:12:22
  SPEAKER_01: So sort of that...
• 1:12:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I don't know how to describe it without making gross
• 1:12:33
  SPEAKER_01: gendered generalizations.
• 1:12:35
  SPEAKER_00: But that's maybe the thing, right?
• 1:12:37
  SPEAKER_00: Is to be unclassifiable.
• 1:12:40
  SPEAKER_00: Basically, hey, this is the thing.
• 1:12:41
  SPEAKER_00: Because I think that's also with you guys is that mix of stories and features
• 1:12:47
  SPEAKER_00: that you have that for some editorial teams or publications would be like,
• 1:12:53
  SPEAKER_00: oh, they don't know who they are.
• 1:12:54
  SPEAKER_00: So it seems to be too all over the place.
• 1:12:58
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas, no, actually, that's the point of it.
• 1:13:00
  SPEAKER_01: That is the point.
• 1:13:01
  SPEAKER_01: We contain multitudes, all of us.
• 1:13:05
  SPEAKER_01: I
• 1:13:09
  SPEAKER_01: guess there's a human tendency to be reductive
• 1:13:14
  SPEAKER_00: about groups of people
• 1:13:16
  SPEAKER_01: or
• 1:13:16
  SPEAKER_01: about communities or areas of life.
• 1:13:21
  SPEAKER_01: We want to be the opposite of that.
• 1:13:23
  SPEAKER_01: We want to show the depth of communities like this and the people who live in places like this.
• 1:13:30
  SPEAKER_01: We want to show the crossover between creativity and activity.
• 1:13:38
  SPEAKER_01: We want to show that
• 1:13:41
  SPEAKER_01: Activities that we think of as scientific or sporty have creative elements to them.
• 1:13:51
  SPEAKER_01: And we want to show that creative acts are, there's a physicality to them sometimes.
• 1:14:00
  SPEAKER_00: So communities often bandied around when it comes to media.
• 1:14:05
  SPEAKER_00: How do you look at the 1964 community and looking at it then in an analog sense
• 1:14:10
  SPEAKER_00: in terms of the opportunity for people to connect with one another?
• 1:14:16
  SPEAKER_00: So they've found the publication that speaks to them.
• 1:14:20
  SPEAKER_00: Have you done any sort of experimentation around that sort of thing?
• 1:14:25
  SPEAKER_01: Not a lot because we don't have any resources because we're on such a shoestring.
• 1:14:32
  SPEAKER_01: We've had a few beer and raffle nights to bring everyone together.
• 1:14:37
  SPEAKER_01: But our main thing is offering people the opportunity to just put everything down,
• 1:14:44
  SPEAKER_01: sit down and slow down and lose themselves in our world and connect with
• 1:14:52
  SPEAKER_01: the community that way.
• 1:14:57
  SPEAKER_01: Get off your phone and sit down and read about the people around you
• 1:15:04
  SPEAKER_01: and what they're doing in a deep way.
• 1:15:08
  SPEAKER_00: Are you happy with where the magazine's at in terms of the amount of content,
• 1:15:14
  SPEAKER_00: the balance, the mix of editorial and advertising, the general direction?
• 1:15:21
  SPEAKER_00: Or is this, okay, we're at a stage whatever of six?
• 1:15:26
  SPEAKER_00: How do you see it?
• 1:15:29
  SPEAKER_01: The magazine itself, content wise, I'm pretty happy with and the look and feel of it.
• 1:15:36
  SPEAKER_01: I'd love to be resourced to travel more.
• 1:15:39
  SPEAKER_01: We don't have the resources to pay people to travel around and go out into the field
• 1:15:46
  SPEAKER_01: and get stories in the way larger publications do.
• 1:15:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I would love to see that one day.
• 1:15:52
  SPEAKER_01: It would help us get into more remote communities and just see what's happening.
• 1:15:57
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 1:15:57
  SPEAKER_01: we could,
• 1:15:58
  SPEAKER_01: I would love to do an epic fact,
• 1:16:00
  SPEAKER_01: fact collecting road trip around the South Island for six weeks,
• 1:16:05
  SPEAKER_01: but we can't afford that.
• 1:16:06
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, one thing that's interesting about our magazine is Nathan's really staunch.
• 1:16:12
  SPEAKER_01: Our publisher, Nathan is super staunch about how many pages of advertising we have.
• 1:16:17
  SPEAKER_01: So he keeps it.
• 1:16:19
  SPEAKER_01: I can't remember the number.
• 1:16:19
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's 24 pages.
• 1:16:21
  SPEAKER_01: Industry standard can be up to 40.
• 1:16:23
  SPEAKER_01: So 40 pages out of a hundred.
• 1:16:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and he doesn't want that because he feels that it, uh,
• 1:16:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's a less enjoyable reading experience when you're interrupted by ads that often.
• 1:16:40
  SPEAKER_01: So that's really important to him.
• 1:16:42
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm really happy with that because it allows me as the editor,
• 1:16:45
  SPEAKER_01: a lot more space to breathe and have longer stories.
• 1:16:50
  SPEAKER_01: But we always do like a multi-page visual essay to have space to do things like that.
• 1:16:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's really unusual in a modern magazine.
• 1:17:00
  SPEAKER_01: So really happy with that.
• 1:17:03
  SPEAKER_01: We would love more people to subscribe.
• 1:17:06
  SPEAKER_01: That's because we're limited on our ad pages.
• 1:17:10
  SPEAKER_01: The only way to grow the business is to have more people subscribe.
• 1:17:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I, we are sort of at this turning point.
• 1:17:18
  SPEAKER_01: I always think of it as like the vinyl record thing.
• 1:17:23
  SPEAKER_01: You know, again,
• 1:17:23
  SPEAKER_01: I'm old enough that I listened to all my music on vinyl when I was young and I,
• 1:17:30
  SPEAKER_01: super big music freak is another thing, collected vinyl records.
• 1:17:34
  SPEAKER_01: My weekly allowance when I was a kid was like the equivalent.
• 1:17:39
  SPEAKER_01: I was based around so that I could afford to buy like one vinyl record a month or something.
• 1:17:45
  SPEAKER_01: And then in the 90s, it was all CDs.
• 1:17:48
  SPEAKER_01: And then Pyra Bay came along and LimeWire and eventually streaming and Spotify.
• 1:17:55
  SPEAKER_01: But now vinyl's having this and it seemed like no one would ever make a record again.
• 1:18:00
  SPEAKER_01: But vinyl's back and like 20 year olds have record players
• 1:18:04
  SPEAKER_01: and they're collecting them and geeking out about them and...
• 1:18:08
  SPEAKER_01: I do feel like that movement is sort of happening with print now.
• 1:18:14
  SPEAKER_01: There's the kids, the kids, which by kids I mean people from like under 40.
• 1:18:20
  SPEAKER_00: The younger generation.
• 1:18:21
  SPEAKER_01: The younger generation.
• 1:18:22
  SPEAKER_01: They're having like offline nights at bars where they all sit around and read and knit.
• 1:18:27
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know,
• 1:18:29
  SPEAKER_01: they're starting to understand the damage of that kind of ADHD style
• 1:18:35
  SPEAKER_01: of media consumption.
• 1:18:39
  SPEAKER_01: What it's doing to them and their own brains.
• 1:18:41
  SPEAKER_01: But also,
• 1:18:43
  SPEAKER_01: they're now entering in the world where they're trying to get paid work
• 1:18:46
  SPEAKER_01: and do what they do and realizing that this...
• 1:18:50
  SPEAKER_01: World in which we do not pay for the content we consume has a knock on effect,
• 1:18:56
  SPEAKER_01: which is that no one can afford to make valuable content anymore.
• 1:19:02
  SPEAKER_01: They're going to have nothing left to read or look at or listen to one day
• 1:19:05
  SPEAKER_01: because no one's been paid to do it.
• 1:19:09
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm hoping if you're listening to this and you're under 40,
• 1:19:15
  SPEAKER_01: buy a book, subscribe to our magazine, go to a movie in the theater.
• 1:19:20
  SPEAKER_00: Have you experimented with scent in your magazine in terms of smell?
• 1:19:28
  SPEAKER_00: Because that's the thing,
• 1:19:29
  SPEAKER_00: when you think about print and one of the things it has to offer
• 1:19:32
  SPEAKER_00: over digital is you're involving other senses and you're never going to be able
• 1:19:37
  SPEAKER_00: to do scent in a digital context whereas with print,
• 1:19:42
  SPEAKER_00: Whether I'm sort of getting a Douglas Fir Whiff or I'm not sure what you'd say.
• 1:19:46
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, this is the scent of 1964 or sort of a four-day-old bit of merino underlayer.
• 1:19:54
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I wouldn't infuse a scent into a piece of paper because so many people have allergies.
• 1:20:00
  SPEAKER_01: But we certainly, so the magazine is printed on quite thick paper and it's offset print.
• 1:20:05
  SPEAKER_01: So it's real, it's not digital.
• 1:20:07
  SPEAKER_01: It's a real ink that's so, So many people are like, I love your magazine.
• 1:20:11
  SPEAKER_01: I love I open it up and I sniff it when I first get it.
• 1:20:14
  SPEAKER_01: And when Nathan gets,
• 1:20:16
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:20:16
  SPEAKER_01: 2000 copies,
• 1:20:16
  SPEAKER_01: and fills his shed with them that it's almost overwhelming that smell of ink.
• 1:20:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:20:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah,
• 1:20:34
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's great in terms of having that and particularly for a younger generation
• 1:20:38
  SPEAKER_00: that perhaps has grown up more digitally and to have the joy of that.
• 1:20:43
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the thing, thinking back those early independent years as a sort of 20s.
• 1:20:49
  SPEAKER_00: 20-something-year-old and the role of magazines back then in terms of,
• 1:20:54
  SPEAKER_00: you know, there was no endless scroll.
• 1:20:56
  SPEAKER_00: It was, you know, basically you'd wait for that magazine.
• 1:20:58
  SPEAKER_00: It was often monthly and,
• 1:21:00
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:21:00
  SPEAKER_00: you'd pick it up and you'd read it over the weekend or what have you and then you'd,
• 1:21:04
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:21:05
  SPEAKER_00: have it lying around for other people to look at or you might,
• 1:21:07
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:21:08
  SPEAKER_00: cut some things out at some point and put into some sort of mood board or...
• 1:21:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, totally.
• 1:21:14
  SPEAKER_01: Like that, the tactility of it.
• 1:21:18
  SPEAKER_01: And one thing that's happened with 1964,
• 1:21:20
  SPEAKER_01: and there's many things that have happened with this magazine that Nathan
• 1:21:23
  SPEAKER_01: and I have never experienced before.
• 1:21:25
  SPEAKER_01: But I have had multiple people send me images of collages they've made
• 1:21:30
  SPEAKER_01: with our magazine, that they've cut up back issues and made art out of them.
• 1:21:36
  SPEAKER_01: Like, A dozen or something of people have sent me versions of that.
• 1:21:42
  SPEAKER_01: And there was in the big annual Wanaka art exhibition, there was
• 1:21:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I've never worked for a publication where that's happened before.
• 1:21:53
  SPEAKER_01: So so people are engaging with it in like,
• 1:21:56
  SPEAKER_01: yeah, literally, physical and tactile way, which is really cool.
• 1:22:13
  SPEAKER_00: You've had a bunch of different roles over your life, different job titles.
• 1:22:19
  SPEAKER_00: You're still doing some of them concurrently.
• 1:22:22
  SPEAKER_00: When somebody asks you who you are,
• 1:22:26
  SPEAKER_00: what are you, what do you do, is there a single answer to that?
• 1:22:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, I'm a writer.
• 1:22:31
  SPEAKER_01: Definitely.
• 1:22:33
  SPEAKER_00: Not a poet?
• 1:22:35
  SPEAKER_01: No, because I do way more than just poetry.
• 1:22:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, way more than just poetry.
• 1:22:40
  SPEAKER_00: And in terms of how that then might develop further into the future,
• 1:22:44
  SPEAKER_00: is there going to become a forward slash something or other else after that?
• 1:22:48
  SPEAKER_00: Is that like writer-director, for example, writer-producer?
• 1:22:54
  SPEAKER_01: I have no idea.
• 1:22:55
  SPEAKER_01: I have no idea.
• 1:22:58
  SPEAKER_01: Everything changes so fast.
• 1:23:00
  SPEAKER_01: There's no answer.
• 1:23:02
  SPEAKER_01: If you'd asked me what I was going to be doing when I was 22,
• 1:23:06
  SPEAKER_01: what I envisioned was a world that doesn't exist anymore.
• 1:23:09
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't know what the world's going to look like in 10 years.
• 1:23:13
  SPEAKER_00: Do you realize some changes for you,
• 1:23:15
  SPEAKER_00: conscious changes in terms of seeing, okay,
• 1:23:17
  SPEAKER_00: that world that you thought that was going to exist or
• 1:23:20
  SPEAKER_00: that you thought was happening and you realize, well,
• 1:23:22
  SPEAKER_00: actually it's not, or I was thinking of things through the wrong lens at that time.
• 1:23:28
  SPEAKER_00: What sort of changes is that forced within you?
• 1:23:32
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it kind of goes back to what we were talking about before,
• 1:23:36
  SPEAKER_01: which is the value of a broad education.
• 1:23:39
  SPEAKER_01: You know, like...
• 1:23:42
  SPEAKER_01: My generation, so I'm generation X, I think I'm an X, yeah.
• 1:23:47
  SPEAKER_01: We were analog and switched to computers when we were about in our late teens.
• 1:23:58
  SPEAKER_01: So the first time I touched a computer, I think I was 19.
• 1:24:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember the World Wide Web starting.
• 1:24:05
  SPEAKER_01: I looked up Courtney Love, MySpace.
• 1:24:08
  SPEAKER_01: Remember, I was very excited.
• 1:24:12
  SPEAKER_01: So we went through this period of radical change that really impacted the workplace
• 1:24:20
  SPEAKER_01: and the ways Particularly if you were interested in working in any kind of media,
• 1:24:24
  SPEAKER_01: like that whole landscape changed wildly in my generation's lifetime.
• 1:24:32
  SPEAKER_01: So we were forced to pivot generationally, I think, multiple times.
• 1:24:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so it's kind of baked into people my age anyways.
• 1:24:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um, Again,
• 1:24:48
  SPEAKER_01: unless we were a real estate agent,
• 1:24:50
  SPEAKER_01: but even that,
• 1:24:51
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:24:52
  SPEAKER_01: you've got to make your little TikToks now if you're a real estate agent
• 1:24:54
  SPEAKER_01: and your drone shots.
• 1:24:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um, So going back to being kind of educated broadly and have had a broad range
• 1:25:05
  SPEAKER_01: of experience as a young person, it gives you little backups that you can dip into.
• 1:25:12
  SPEAKER_01: So I had done a bit of sport as a kid and done the skiing.
• 1:25:17
  SPEAKER_01: And then when I was almost 30, I took it up as a career.
• 1:25:22
  SPEAKER_01: And crazily, that was a really good time to do it.
• 1:25:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I bought a house from working in skiing.
• 1:25:27
  SPEAKER_01: I'm so sorry, anyone young listening to this now, because it's not a thing anymore.
• 1:25:31
  SPEAKER_01: But I never thought I would buy my first house from skiing, but I did.
• 1:25:40
  SPEAKER_01: I thought I was going to buy my first house after I won a Pulitzer Prize,
• 1:25:43
  SPEAKER_01: but that didn't happen.
• 1:25:44
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it hasn't happened yet, right?
• 1:25:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:25:46
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I don't qualify.
• 1:25:47
  SPEAKER_01: I realize I don't qualify because I'm not American.
• 1:25:51
  SPEAKER_00: So you've retrained,
• 1:25:56
  SPEAKER_00: you've learnt new skills and things along the way,
• 1:26:01
  SPEAKER_00: with a positive outlook and a positive frame of mind,
• 1:26:04
  SPEAKER_00: or kind of begrudgingly,
• 1:26:05
  SPEAKER_00: because,
• 1:26:05
  SPEAKER_00: oh shit,
• 1:26:06
  SPEAKER_00: that's no longer viable, the frustration that's associated with those things?
• 1:26:14
  SPEAKER_01: No, I mean, it's...
• 1:26:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's a good question.
• 1:26:18
  SPEAKER_01: No, not begrudging.
• 1:26:20
  SPEAKER_01: Kind of exciting and interesting.
• 1:26:22
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not someone who would have been happy just doing the same thing my whole life.
• 1:26:26
  SPEAKER_01: Some people are.
• 1:26:27
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not that guy.
• 1:26:32
  SPEAKER_01: I really enjoy going back to working in industries that are in free fall,
• 1:26:37
  SPEAKER_01: so the arts and publishing.
• 1:26:39
  SPEAKER_01: You end up having to do everything yourself,
• 1:26:42
  SPEAKER_01: and so you're constantly having to figure stuff out.
• 1:26:46
  SPEAKER_01: In the arts festival world, it's Often part of the cycle, it was just me in the office.
• 1:26:54
  SPEAKER_01: So I had to figure out all the fundraising,
• 1:26:58
  SPEAKER_01: all the sponsorship stuff,
• 1:26:59
  SPEAKER_01: how to run email newsletters, how to get the brochure published, tech issues.
• 1:27:07
  SPEAKER_01: Like one day I'll be trying to fix an amp that's blown up and then in
• 1:27:13
  SPEAKER_01: the afternoon I'll be meeting with some high value sponsor and then I'm writing
• 1:27:16
  SPEAKER_01: a press release at night and Um, you,
• 1:27:20
  SPEAKER_01: you kind of learn to be a Renaissance person because you have to,
• 1:27:26
  SPEAKER_01: because there's no one else.
• 1:27:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and it's the same in publishing.
• 1:27:30
  SPEAKER_01: Um, You know,
• 1:27:32
  SPEAKER_01: over the years I've had to learn how to do,
• 1:27:34
  SPEAKER_01: take photos,
• 1:27:36
  SPEAKER_01: do photo editing,
• 1:27:37
  SPEAKER_01: how to do layout design,
• 1:27:41
  SPEAKER_01: as well as the written word,
• 1:27:44
  SPEAKER_01: how to edit,
• 1:27:45
  SPEAKER_01: which is very different from being a writer,
• 1:27:47
  SPEAKER_01: like how to edit other people's writing.
• 1:27:49
  SPEAKER_01: How to, what I, one thing I do do begrudgingly is social media.
• 1:27:54
  SPEAKER_01: I have to do like Instagram and LinkedIn.
• 1:27:59
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not doing TikTok ever.
• 1:28:01
  SPEAKER_00: You're drawing the line.
• 1:28:02
  SPEAKER_01: I'm drawing the line at TikTok.
• 1:28:04
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not making reels.
• 1:28:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:28:06
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not a real girl.
• 1:28:08
  SPEAKER_00: And if you had the choice,
• 1:28:10
  SPEAKER_00: would you say, okay,
• 1:28:13
  SPEAKER_00: I would rather just write and just be able to just write
• 1:28:17
  SPEAKER_00: or I understand those things and actually I don't mind having
• 1:28:22
  SPEAKER_00: to do all those other things because it makes writing more pleasurable
• 1:28:25
  SPEAKER_00: because it has a different role compared to all the other activities
• 1:28:31
  SPEAKER_00: that you're now having to do.
• 1:28:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's very hard to write 24-7.
• 1:28:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's very hard.
• 1:28:35
  SPEAKER_01: You can't write eight hours a day.
• 1:28:37
  SPEAKER_01: And even someone who's a successful,
• 1:28:40
  SPEAKER_01: well-known writer will have some thing where they write for like four hours in
• 1:28:44
  SPEAKER_01: the morning and then they go out into the garden or they go for a walk
• 1:28:47
  SPEAKER_01: or they answer their fan mail or whatever,
• 1:28:51
  SPEAKER_01: count their big pile of money they're sitting on.
• 1:28:54
  SPEAKER_01: So I would always want to do something else.
• 1:28:59
  SPEAKER_01: In my world,
• 1:29:00
  SPEAKER_01: that something else has always had to be something paid because
• 1:29:03
  SPEAKER_01: the writing doesn't really pay the bills.
• 1:29:06
  SPEAKER_01: But in my dream world, I would write and then do a little bit of sports coaching on the side.
• 1:29:12
  SPEAKER_01: That would be my dream life.
• 1:29:14
  SPEAKER_00: And the writing itself,
• 1:29:16
  SPEAKER_00: what would that process look like then in terms of,
• 1:29:20
  SPEAKER_00: you know, are you a morning person, night time?
• 1:29:23
  SPEAKER_00: How do you write?
• 1:29:24
  SPEAKER_01: I work very well in the morning and then I run out of steam in the afternoon.
• 1:29:29
  SPEAKER_01: So if I have something tricky I'm working on,
• 1:29:32
  SPEAKER_01: I'll do it right away first thing in the morning and then
• 1:29:34
  SPEAKER_01: the afternoon I'll spend doing easier jobs,
• 1:29:36
  SPEAKER_01: a bit of editing,
• 1:29:38
  SPEAKER_01: sorting emails,
• 1:29:38
  SPEAKER_01: admin for the magazine,
• 1:29:40
  SPEAKER_01: things like that,
• 1:29:41
  SPEAKER_01: or whatever other job I have at the time that takes less,
• 1:29:46
  SPEAKER_01: I can slow down the intellectual engine a bit in the afternoon.
• 1:29:53
  SPEAKER_00: You're writing a history of Luggett
• 1:29:59
  SPEAKER_00: and one of the things I think you said is
• 1:30:01
  SPEAKER_00: that you haven't met somebody there who hasn't got an interesting story to tell.
• 1:30:07
  SPEAKER_00: Is that partly a skill in terms of getting people to be able to share that story
• 1:30:13
  SPEAKER_00: that they've got and is that something that you've developed over time or is
• 1:30:17
  SPEAKER_00: that something that you've always been pretty good at?
• 1:30:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the Luggett project was a book that the community association was working on.
• 1:30:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I just helped them write it.
• 1:30:29
  SPEAKER_01: But they had the idea to interview particularly older people in the community
• 1:30:34
  SPEAKER_01: to get their stories down before they passed on to the next small town in the sky.
• 1:30:40
  SPEAKER_01: And...
• 1:30:43
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if it's a skill.
• 1:30:45
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's an open-mindedness that people don't even have about themselves.
• 1:30:50
  SPEAKER_01: So one thing I've learned in all the work I've done,
• 1:30:54
  SPEAKER_01: particularly magazine work,
• 1:30:56
  SPEAKER_01: where you're talking to and meeting different people all the time, every day.
• 1:31:01
  SPEAKER_01: And every time you go and sit down and talk to someone,
• 1:31:03
  SPEAKER_01: they say, oh, I don't know why you want to talk to me.
• 1:31:07
  SPEAKER_01: I don't have anything interesting to say, or I've never done anything interesting.
• 1:31:12
  SPEAKER_01: And Everyone is interesting.
• 1:31:15
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone's life is a novel.
• 1:31:18
  SPEAKER_01: I've never met someone who wasn't interesting in some way.
• 1:31:24
  SPEAKER_00: How gender related is that initial reluctance?
• 1:31:27
  SPEAKER_00: Because that's certainly something I've had experience from in terms of podcast guests.
• 1:31:34
  SPEAKER_00: In my experience,
• 1:31:35
  SPEAKER_00: men are much easier to persuade that what they've got to say is going to be
• 1:31:38
  SPEAKER_00: of interest to people,
• 1:31:39
  SPEAKER_00: whereas women are a lot more self-critical about,
• 1:31:43
  SPEAKER_00: oh, nobody will want to listen to what I've got to share.
• 1:31:45
  SPEAKER_00: Is that something you've experienced?
• 1:31:47
  SPEAKER_01: More so generationally.
• 1:31:49
  SPEAKER_01: So when we did the Luggett project,
• 1:31:51
  SPEAKER_01: one thing in particularly,
• 1:31:52
  SPEAKER_01: we wanted to interview women because they were sort of socialized to believe
• 1:32:01
  SPEAKER_01: that their part in life was uninteresting and unimportant because historically
• 1:32:08
  SPEAKER_01: the world of women was not written about.
• 1:32:10
  SPEAKER_00: And they were the supporting actor rather than the lead actor.
• 1:32:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:32:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:32:15
  SPEAKER_01: And in fact, You dig in a bit, and they were running the show almost without fail.
• 1:32:25
  SPEAKER_01: Now, yeah, I don't know whether
• 1:32:30
  SPEAKER_01: I have found that with younger people.
• 1:32:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I don't know.
• 1:32:39
  SPEAKER_01: I haven't noticed that with younger people.
• 1:32:41
  SPEAKER_01: I think...
• 1:32:46
  SPEAKER_01: Young women are raised in a...
• 1:32:48
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know how to answer that without digging a big old hole.
• 1:32:54
  SPEAKER_01: But no, I haven't found it.
• 1:32:55
  SPEAKER_01: I have found that with older communities when people's roles
• 1:33:03
  SPEAKER_01: in society were very much delineated by gender most of the time.
• 1:33:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I have not found that now.
• 1:33:12
  SPEAKER_00: No, that's encouraging.
• 1:33:13
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's a good sign in terms of societally that, well, okay,
• 1:33:16
  SPEAKER_00: that's at least one positive thing that we're,
• 1:33:18
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I thought progress was linear.
• 1:33:21
  SPEAKER_00: I've since realised that it's not societal progress and
• 1:33:23
  SPEAKER_00: that sometimes we do do things that you'd think, what, I thought we were wrong.
• 1:33:27
  SPEAKER_00: On this fast track to prosperity and understanding each other and working together
• 1:33:33
  SPEAKER_00: and collaborating and then things like Brexit and Russia invading Ukraine
• 1:33:39
  SPEAKER_00: and these things that just really shook my world.
• 1:33:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I don't think progress is linear.
• 1:33:45
  SPEAKER_01: I think progress happens and then there is pushback over and over and over again.
• 1:33:51
  SPEAKER_01: And you see that with pushback against LGBTQ communities.
• 1:33:59
  SPEAKER_01: We felt like we made all this progress and now that kind
• 1:34:04
  SPEAKER_01: of bigotry is being weaponized in a political way.
• 1:34:07
  SPEAKER_01: You see that in misogyny online.
• 1:34:11
  SPEAKER_01: This pushback against
• 1:34:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the Tradwife movement and the Manosphere and all that.
• 1:34:21
  SPEAKER_01: But I mean, here's an interesting thing.
• 1:34:23
  SPEAKER_01: So when I was at university in the early 90s, I studied political and military history.
• 1:34:27
  SPEAKER_01: I was quite often the only girl in the room.
• 1:34:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's a great way to meet boys when I was 21.
• 1:34:35
  SPEAKER_01: Of a certain type, I would imagine,
• 1:34:37
  SPEAKER_00: studying that subject.
• 1:34:39
  SPEAKER_01: I was young and desperate.
• 1:34:40
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't care about the type.
• 1:34:43
  SPEAKER_01: And I've just started attending a book club that is run by my history professor from 1990.
• 1:34:53
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a bunch of his ex-students getting together and reading books.
• 1:34:57
  SPEAKER_01: I studied American history.
• 1:34:58
  SPEAKER_01: We just wrote a book about POW camps in the Civil War, American Civil War.
• 1:35:03
  SPEAKER_01: That was our book this month.
• 1:35:06
  SPEAKER_01: And 95% of the people on the Zoom who are all over the world, and most of them are in their 20s.
• 1:35:13
  SPEAKER_01: They're more recent students of his.
• 1:35:15
  SPEAKER_01: 95% of them are female or women.
• 1:35:18
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 1:35:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:35:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:35:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's a big change.
• 1:35:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, huge change.
• 1:35:23
  SPEAKER_01: And in like adventure sports,
• 1:35:26
  SPEAKER_01: so the first magazine or an early magazine I edited with Spoke,
• 1:35:32
  SPEAKER_01: which is a mountain bike magazine.
• 1:35:34
  SPEAKER_01: And a couple of guys emailed me when I started and said, oh, good luck.
• 1:35:37
  SPEAKER_01: It's a pretty alpha.
• 1:35:40
  SPEAKER_00: Cause that wasn't really your world at that point, right?
• 1:35:42
  SPEAKER_00: You were cycling and, and,
• 1:35:44
  SPEAKER_00: but you don't,
• 1:35:45
  SPEAKER_00: cause I was surprised as well when I saw that and I thought,
• 1:35:48
  SPEAKER_00: I can't remember them as being pretty core, uh, in terms of like core mountain bike.
• 1:35:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so I did wonder in terms of what that world was like for you.
• 1:35:58
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it was great.
• 1:35:59
  SPEAKER_01: I was, I was in that world quite a bit and I knew, knew all those guys and, uh,
• 1:36:05
  SPEAKER_01: There's something about a new sport actually that is more welcoming to outsiders or i.e.
• 1:36:11
  SPEAKER_01: women that I found mountain biking a lot more welcoming than skiing.
• 1:36:16
  SPEAKER_01: As far as being a female operating at a high level in the sport,
• 1:36:21
  SPEAKER_01: there were less expectations and judgments about what I could do or couldn't do or
• 1:36:25
  SPEAKER_01: where my place was.
• 1:36:27
  SPEAKER_01: But certainly when I started doing that job
• 1:36:32
  SPEAKER_01: In the adventure sports press was pretty male,
• 1:36:35
  SPEAKER_01: but now most of the,
• 1:36:37
  SPEAKER_01: I always,
• 1:36:37
  SPEAKER_01: I always check it out who the editor is,
• 1:36:39
  SPEAKER_01: you know, Red Bull magazines and a lot of these mountain bike and ski magazines.
• 1:36:43
  SPEAKER_01: And I'd say the majority of them are women now.
• 1:36:47
  SPEAKER_01: That's interesting.
• 1:36:47
  SPEAKER_01: Edited by women.
• 1:36:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:36:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:36:51
  SPEAKER_00: I've certainly followed those publications and I enjoyed Spoke in terms of
• 1:36:57
  SPEAKER_00: the attitude that they brought compared to a lot of
• 1:37:02
  SPEAKER_00: the traditional North American mountain boat mags at the time
• 1:37:08
  SPEAKER_00: that were really quite different.
• 1:37:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought Spoke was much more literary in terms of the ambition and the concept
• 1:37:16
  SPEAKER_00: and much more artistic.
• 1:37:18
  SPEAKER_00: In terms of the contemporary creativity that was put into the layout and
• 1:37:22
  SPEAKER_00: the photography and all that sort of stuff.
• 1:37:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the editor before me was a woman as well, Eleanor Meacham.
• 1:37:29
  SPEAKER_01: And she's a very, very good writer.
• 1:37:32
  SPEAKER_01: She's written a couple of books.
• 1:37:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that had a lot to do, the literary quality of the magazine had a lot to do with her.
• 1:37:40
  SPEAKER_01: And then Caleb,
• 1:37:41
  SPEAKER_01: who I think started it,
• 1:37:42
  SPEAKER_01: who's a photographer, had a lot to do with, and his partner, I think, is a designer.
• 1:37:48
  SPEAKER_01: So that sort of had a lot to do with that aesthetic,
• 1:37:51
  SPEAKER_01: that kind of much more art magazine aesthetic.
• 1:37:54
  SPEAKER_01: So that was a combination that really developed that magazine into something quite interesting.
• 1:38:00
  SPEAKER_01: But having said that,
• 1:38:01
  SPEAKER_01: I remember the first time,
• 1:38:03
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was the first time I had an article published and spoke,
• 1:38:07
  SPEAKER_01: or it was the first time I'd written,
• 1:38:08
  SPEAKER_01: I used to write for them for a And Ellen sent me a message and she said,
• 1:38:14
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my God, I am so sorry about the back of the magazine.
• 1:38:18
  SPEAKER_01: And when I got it in the mail,
• 1:38:20
  SPEAKER_01: I turned it over and the ad on the back was an ad for some forks
• 1:38:23
  SPEAKER_01: and it was this woman dressed like Um,
• 1:38:27
  SPEAKER_01: someone,
• 1:38:27
  SPEAKER_01: a waitress at Hooters,
• 1:38:28
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:38:29
  SPEAKER_01: with like a skin tight t-shirt on and like togs and she was holding the forks kind
• 1:38:35
  SPEAKER_01: of between her legs and she was all oiled up and then someone
• 1:38:37
  SPEAKER_01: from off camera was like spraying her with a hose.
• 1:38:40
  SPEAKER_01: It was just like, it was like a Bon Jovi video from 1987.
• 1:38:47
  SPEAKER_00: Or ISPO.
• 1:38:48
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not sure if you've ever been to the ISPO event in Munich,
• 1:38:51
  SPEAKER_00: but that used to be the,
• 1:38:52
  SPEAKER_00: you know, those were the action sports stands essentially for a while there.
• 1:38:56
  SPEAKER_00: That was,
• 1:38:56
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:38:57
  SPEAKER_00: so whether it was the Monster Girls or whoever it was,
• 1:38:59
  SPEAKER_00: that was the,
• 1:39:01
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:39:01
  SPEAKER_00: that sort of old car show kind of style of sex sells and just basically,
• 1:39:07
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 1:39:07
  SPEAKER_00: putting a hot young thing out there front of house and,
• 1:39:10
  SPEAKER_00: you know, having the thing to bring in the dealers.
• 1:39:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:39:15
  SPEAKER_01: I'm so distressed about the monster girls.
• 1:39:17
  SPEAKER_01: I hope they're not.
• 1:39:18
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if they still exist.
• 1:39:21
  SPEAKER_01: There was a big thing about...
• 1:39:23
  SPEAKER_01: So the Tour de France had podium girls until like maybe five years ago.
• 1:39:28
  SPEAKER_01: And they finally...
• 1:39:30
  SPEAKER_01: Now they have a nice young woman and a nice young man on the podium together to give
• 1:39:33
  SPEAKER_01: the whatever laurel to whoever's won the stage.
• 1:39:38
  SPEAKER_01: And there was a race.
• 1:39:39
  SPEAKER_01: It might have been around the Taupo race a few years ago.
• 1:39:43
  SPEAKER_01: Had Podium Girl, like these, yeah, it was not that long ago.
• 1:39:47
  SPEAKER_01: A whole bunch of, this is where the online world is good.
• 1:39:50
  SPEAKER_01: A bunch of us just jumped on them online and we're like, nah, please don't do that.
• 1:39:55
  SPEAKER_00: Do you listen to music while you're working or different phases of the process
• 1:40:01
  SPEAKER_00: where, okay, no,
• 1:40:02
  SPEAKER_00: this is music free, but no,
• 1:40:03
  SPEAKER_00: this part,
• 1:40:04
  SPEAKER_00: this is where I can listen to music and I'm listening to it in a different way.
• 1:40:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I listen to music all the time.
• 1:40:11
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a massive music freak.
• 1:40:15
  SPEAKER_01: But I definitely listen to different kinds of music for different things.
• 1:40:19
  SPEAKER_01: When I'm writing, I cannot listen to music with words.
• 1:40:23
  SPEAKER_01: So I have to listen to jazz or electronica or something in the background.
• 1:40:31
  SPEAKER_00: Because as soon as you're hearing words,
• 1:40:33
  SPEAKER_00: you're then going to, okay, what are they saying, interpreting that?
• 1:40:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:40:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it takes up space in the word part of my brain, I guess.
• 1:40:40
  SPEAKER_01: But if I'm answering emails or doing kind of design work or whatever,
• 1:40:45
  SPEAKER_01: then I can listen to something a little more rowdy and with words.
• 1:40:51
  SPEAKER_01: When I'm doing exercise, I listen to like what I call like sporty spice music.
• 1:40:56
  SPEAKER_01: So that's more like pop music.
• 1:41:00
  SPEAKER_00: Purely BPM in terms of just a certain energy level or...
• 1:41:05
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, yeah, I guess so.
• 1:41:07
  SPEAKER_01: Like, I'm trying to think of what,
• 1:41:10
  SPEAKER_01: um, I have a mix called the Bad Feminist Mix that I made on Spotify.
• 1:41:17
  SPEAKER_01: Got a lot of, like, Snoop Dogg and, um, uh, Avril Lavigne.
• 1:41:24
  SPEAKER_01: Sorry, Avril, but she did have some bad feminist music back in the day.
• 1:41:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um, like, really, um,
• 1:41:32
  SPEAKER_01: Pop music that does not support the sisterhood.
• 1:41:35
  SPEAKER_01: I'll listen to a lot of that if I'm working out or running or biking or at the gym.
• 1:41:40
  SPEAKER_00: Clearly labeled that this is the role that it's performing right now.
• 1:41:45
  SPEAKER_01: I wouldn't listen to that.
• 1:41:46
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I'd listen to Snoop Dogg anytime actually.
• 1:41:49
  SPEAKER_01: Avril Lavigne is strictly for exercise.
• 1:41:53
  SPEAKER_00: What about the decision when you're naming the magazine?
• 1:41:55
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's really punk to name a magazine with such a heavy literary ambition with a number.
• 1:42:04
  SPEAKER_00: So I understand the significance of the date,
• 1:42:06
  SPEAKER_00: that it was 1964 and this was the year that Aspiring National Park was formed.
• 1:42:12
  SPEAKER_00: But how much of a debate was there around a word or words as opposed to a number?
• 1:42:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that did take a long time,
• 1:42:21
  SPEAKER_01: actually,
• 1:42:22
  SPEAKER_01: and a lot of back and forth and just brainstorming over and over and over and
• 1:42:25
  SPEAKER_01: over again,
• 1:42:26
  SPEAKER_01: because we really wanted to differentiate ourselves from other outdoor focused
• 1:42:33
  SPEAKER_01: or sport focused publications.
• 1:42:36
  SPEAKER_01: But we didn't want to limit ourselves too much with whatever word we chose,
• 1:42:41
  SPEAKER_01: like every word we thought about seemed to have a really specific perspective.
• 1:42:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's like naming a child.
• 1:42:46
  SPEAKER_00: I'm guessing, oh, that one time I met that person and they were such a pain in the ass.
• 1:42:50
  SPEAKER_00: I can never call my kid that.
• 1:42:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, got it.
• 1:42:53
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 1:42:54
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 1:42:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and you've really got to be careful with the connotations of...
• 1:43:03
  SPEAKER_01: A word or a symbol now,
• 1:43:05
  SPEAKER_01: like you have to madly Google whatever it is
• 1:43:07
  SPEAKER_01: and make sure it doesn't say something you didn't realize.
• 1:43:10
  SPEAKER_00: The far right using it as some sort of dog whistle or something or other.
• 1:43:18
  SPEAKER_01: A family member of mine,
• 1:43:19
  SPEAKER_01: I won't say who it is,
• 1:43:20
  SPEAKER_01: emailed me once,
• 1:43:21
  SPEAKER_01: messaged me and said,
• 1:43:22
  SPEAKER_01: is the upside down happy face something I shouldn't be using in my messages?
• 1:43:26
  SPEAKER_01: You can look up what the upside down happy face means.
• 1:43:31
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, you've got to look at all that.
• 1:43:35
  SPEAKER_01: You've got to think of something that will be, that will look good as a logo.
• 1:43:39
  SPEAKER_01: Anyone who's worked in branding knows, you know, can you put it on a hat?
• 1:43:43
  SPEAKER_01: Can you put it on a sticker?
• 1:43:44
  SPEAKER_01: Is it going to Pop out on a bookshelf.
• 1:43:49
  SPEAKER_01: We had a long discussion about whether to include other words on the cover.
• 1:43:55
  SPEAKER_01: So most magazines that operate in our kind of broader space will have like teasers
• 1:44:03
  SPEAKER_01: on the front cover about what the content is inside, you know.
• 1:44:06
  SPEAKER_01: Glenorchy, Bus Driver, Tells All, that kind of thing.
• 1:44:11
  SPEAKER_01: So we eventually made a decision not to do that, that we wanted a cover that was a piece of art.
• 1:44:17
  SPEAKER_01: And we wanted a name that was going to just sit in that piece of art
• 1:44:23
  SPEAKER_01: without interfering with it.
• 1:44:24
  SPEAKER_01: So it had to be something really spare.
• 1:44:28
  SPEAKER_01: And then Nathan came up with it.
• 1:44:31
  SPEAKER_01: He had a, I think...
• 1:44:33
  SPEAKER_01: He had a map of Mount Aspiring National Park on his wall and he was just kind
• 1:44:37
  SPEAKER_01: of looking at it and it was like established in 1964.
• 1:44:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I think the 1964 was kind of written in big font or something.
• 1:44:44
  SPEAKER_01: And he put that to me and we kind of sat on it for a while and we were like, no, that's it.
• 1:44:50
  SPEAKER_01: That's it.
• 1:44:50
  SPEAKER_01: And we wanted to come at it sideways, like our content.
• 1:44:54
  SPEAKER_01: We wanted it to be something that people would look at it and go, Nathan calls it the WTF.
• 1:45:00
  SPEAKER_01: You know, he wants people to look at it and go, huh?
• 1:45:02
  SPEAKER_01: What's that?
• 1:45:04
  SPEAKER_00: And do you get that question still from people that are coming at it and saying why?
• 1:45:08
  SPEAKER_00: I've seen that you're popular with the boomers and that people like the idea
• 1:45:12
  SPEAKER_00: of having something with their birth year on it.
• 1:45:14
  SPEAKER_00: But for other people, they're trying to figure out what it is.
• 1:45:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we get asked a lot.
• 1:45:20
  SPEAKER_01: Some people look it up.
• 1:45:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um, yeah, it is, it is funny.
• 1:45:24
  SPEAKER_01: It is the year that, uh, it's the last year of the boomer.
• 1:45:28
  SPEAKER_01: If you were born in 64, you're still a boomer.
• 1:45:30
  SPEAKER_01: 65, you're not a boomer.
• 1:45:32
  SPEAKER_01: You're an Xer.
• 1:45:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but again, 1964,
• 1:45:35
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:45:35
  SPEAKER_01: like I spent a lot of time looking up everything that had happened that year.
• 1:45:38
  SPEAKER_01: Did any, were there any connotations that were, you know, like I wouldn't have called it 1933.
• 1:45:43
  SPEAKER_01: Like, you know, uh, a lot of people go, I love your magazine, 1984.
• 1:45:49
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, really?
• 1:45:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 1:45:53
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if that's good or bad, but yeah.
• 1:45:55
  SPEAKER_00: What's the next thing that you've got on the horizon that looks a little bit scary
• 1:45:59
  SPEAKER_00: from a personal development perspective?
• 1:46:04
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not sure.
• 1:46:05
  SPEAKER_01: I'm getting older.
• 1:46:08
  SPEAKER_01: So starting to think about what I'm going to do so I don't have to eat cat food
• 1:46:12
  SPEAKER_01: when I'm 75, I guess.
• 1:46:15
  SPEAKER_01: But I don't have the answer to that at the moment.
• 1:46:17
  SPEAKER_00: So it's looking like cat food then is the plan.
• 1:46:18
  SPEAKER_01: We're on cat food at the moment, but we're trying to work through it.
• 1:46:23
  SPEAKER_00: Have you changed your outlook to the concept of retirement over the course of your life?
• 1:46:31
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 1:46:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's a funny thing.
• 1:46:34
  SPEAKER_01: I was talking to my mom about this recently because she retired when she was
• 1:46:39
  SPEAKER_01: a year younger than I am now.
• 1:46:41
  SPEAKER_01: And she had a government job with a pension.
• 1:46:44
  SPEAKER_01: And that's more of a North American thing.
• 1:46:47
  SPEAKER_01: North America...
• 1:46:49
  SPEAKER_01: They're not anymore,
• 1:46:49
  SPEAKER_01: but pensions were common, not just in government jobs, but in private sector jobs.
• 1:46:56
  SPEAKER_01: And everyone pays into,
• 1:46:57
  SPEAKER_01: like Australia does,
• 1:46:58
  SPEAKER_01: everyone pays into a pension program,
• 1:47:01
  SPEAKER_01: which is a mandatory version of KiwiSaver, I guess.
• 1:47:05
  SPEAKER_01: So...
• 1:47:09
  SPEAKER_01: Particularly people of that generation,
• 1:47:11
  SPEAKER_01: if you had a good job and stuck with it,
• 1:47:15
  SPEAKER_01: you were sort of taken care of a little bit later in life.
• 1:47:21
  SPEAKER_01: And we don't really have that.
• 1:47:26
  SPEAKER_01: I've always done contract work and sort of bounced around doing this and that.
• 1:47:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so no retirement plan baked into any of that.
• 1:47:38
  SPEAKER_01: So I was sort of talking to her about that and saying, oh, God, I might have messed it up.
• 1:47:44
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, you did it so well.
• 1:47:46
  SPEAKER_01: And she said, oh, God, no.
• 1:47:48
  SPEAKER_01: I was just bumping along, too.
• 1:47:50
  SPEAKER_01: She said she didn't think about it, but it was just sort of the way things were and luck.
• 1:47:58
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and she worked really hard and deserves to be having a nice time now.
• 1:48:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm very happy for her.
• 1:48:05
  SPEAKER_01: But the models changed and I'm not actually sure what the answer is.
• 1:48:09
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know,
• 1:48:10
  SPEAKER_01: I'm the age I am,
• 1:48:11
  SPEAKER_01: it's worse for people who are younger because they don't have access to property.
• 1:48:17
  SPEAKER_01: Like I bought a house when I was a ski bum.
• 1:48:21
  SPEAKER_01: Now you can't buy a house when you're a corporate lawyer.
• 1:48:25
  SPEAKER_00: What role does publication then play for you?
• 1:48:27
  SPEAKER_00: Is that a sort of, if there's no pictures, it didn't happen kind of thing?
• 1:48:31
  SPEAKER_00: So you could have written a poem,
• 1:48:33
  SPEAKER_00: for example, before your child was born, but it was about getting it published.
• 1:48:38
  SPEAKER_00: So that's quite a different thing.
• 1:48:39
  SPEAKER_00: What's the significance of that act?
• 1:48:42
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I've talked about this with other writers, like do we, why do we do it?
• 1:48:48
  SPEAKER_01: Why do we care if we get published or not?
• 1:48:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I guess that's the difference between keeping a diary,
• 1:48:52
  SPEAKER_01: which can be a record for yourself or a form of therapy,
• 1:48:57
  SPEAKER_01: and Writing for publication,
• 1:48:58
  SPEAKER_01: which is that you don't write just for yourself and you are trying
• 1:49:06
  SPEAKER_01: to put something out into the world that helps the world or says something
• 1:49:11
  SPEAKER_01: or distills a truth that you want out there.
• 1:49:18
  SPEAKER_01: It's incredibly rewarding when someone comes up to you and says,
• 1:49:21
  SPEAKER_01: it goes back to like the teaching, right?
• 1:49:24
  SPEAKER_01: Like someone comes up to you and says, Oh,
• 1:49:26
  SPEAKER_01: I read this poem you wrote and it made me think of this and here's a story
• 1:49:30
  SPEAKER_01: from my life that it helped me with or reminded me of or made me think differently
• 1:49:38
  SPEAKER_01: about an issue or something that happened.
• 1:49:42
  SPEAKER_01: So you are doing it to have some sort of impact or to leave some sort of mark.
• 1:49:52
  SPEAKER_01: I had a massively rewarding moment with my child who's in his twenties,
• 1:49:58
  SPEAKER_01: who is not interested in literature, tech guy.
• 1:50:03
  SPEAKER_01: And actually he texted me from overseas one day and texted me a line from one
• 1:50:09
  SPEAKER_01: of my poems that I wrote like 10 years ago and said,
• 1:50:13
  SPEAKER_01: I was thinking about that poem you wrote and this line, what a great line.
• 1:50:18
  SPEAKER_01: I think I kind of get poetry now.
• 1:50:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, man.
• 1:50:23
  SPEAKER_01: I broke through with like a young person who's not interested in that stuff.
• 1:50:27
  SPEAKER_01: And plus, I'm, I'm mom, so I'm totally not that cool.