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A conversation with tina makereti

it all has a way of rising up

How big a part of your childhood and young adulthood was writing? Were there any particularly influential books in your life?

I remember writing creatively at different stages of school. Plagiarising a fair bit. It used to go along with drawing and comics for me. In primary school when I was nine I won a historical fiction prize – I think it was meant to be published in the paper, but the story was too long, which might have been a sign of things to come! I also won the creative writing prize at school in seventh form. All of this I forgot about until my thirties, but I always wrote bad poetry and journals, all of which I thankfully destroyed. In my teens I read Alice Walker, Jeanette Winterson, Keri Hulme and other feminist, often queer, writers. I remember The Color Purple and The Bone People as books that really made me want to write. I learned a lot about being a woman from these writers too.

I admire Starling writers for pursuing creative work and publishing at such a young age. I was too busy having troubled relationships (with myself and others), but then having kids early was very good for me, so I’m happy I didn’t get back to it until later.

You made the decision to pursue writing as a career in your thirties. What had you been doing before that and what was the impetus for change? How did you go about making that shift?

Aforementioned children! And working as a kaitautoko for students at Massey. I had a very messy upbringing, and a very messy young adulthood, and I had nothing to lose. I literally had nothing but my daughters for quite a while. So I decided if I could do anything in the world I would write, but only if it didn’t cost the family anything. I had to have tohu early on that I was onto something, that I had some talent, that I could make a few dollars. So I was very lucky to get those tohu immediately: one was my first creative writing teacher saying I had something (shout-out to Ingrid!); two, I got into the MA at the IIML; three, I got a couple of prizes that paid very well and made continuing to write feasible. If anyone tells you prizes are not about the money I’d have to say, try being a single parent. It’s definitely about the money! And getting those prizes early on helped when things got hard, which they did later (I tell this story not to show off but to normalise talking about money, or at least normalise talking about the things we need to sustain a writing life, which also includes supportive teachers and tohu).

People often talk about ‘finding your voice’. How do you think you did that? Do you remember receiving any particularly helpful feedback early on?

There are a lot of things in writing I don’t do well and a lot of things I learnt later about craft by continuing to study and teach. But voice is something I think may have been instinctual, so perhaps those early encouragements come from being in possession of what we call ‘voice’, even while I didn’t always know what I was doing with it. I still look out for it with my students: if it’s distinctive already it can take someone a long way. I suspect my experience of having nothing to lose helped me take risks too, and believe in my voice since I had so little else to go by. We hate to talk about it, but some form of belief in what you’re doing and your ability to do it helps. Other helpful words that come to mind are foolhardiness, bullheadedness, naivety, faith, wonder, curiosity, joy.

Your first book, Once Upon A Time in Aotearoa, was a collection of short stories. Your story ‘Black Milk’ also won the 2016 Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize for the Pacific Region. What drew you to the short story as a form, and what elements particular to the form do you think are essential to get right?

Yikes, what a question! I should know the answer to this as a teacher eh? But in creativity there’s always that indefinable thing that makes the work really spark. I’m going to say, start with character, start with language. Something that has energy or juice for you. Something that makes you curious. Don’t come to the page with a statement to make but with your curiosity and the things you don’t understand. Let yourself be surprised. The stuff that really worked in my own writing was surprising to me. It should have been obvious that I would make certain sounds and approach certain topics, but it wasn’t. This seems to be quite a common experience: we often resist who we are as writers or want to be a different kind of writer. What draws me to the form is the pure fun of it and the way I don’t have to know where it’s going. I can start with a piece of language, a character or a piece of dialogue and arrive somewhere entirely new by the end of the day. When it gets hard, it becomes a problem-solving exercise and it forces me to think deeply, or to go away and not think at all (that’s often when the surprising stuff comes). The story tells me what it is, not the other way around.

You have since published two novels, Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings and The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke, in which you manage to explore Te Ao Māori, identity and the effects of colonisation across multiple generations. You do this within very specific worlds and narratives of your own creation. Is it the seeds of story that come to you first – the plot or characters – or the issues you want to bring to the fore, or a combination of the two?

Ugh, exactly. See, I don’t want to be an ‘issues’ writer, but the novels arrive very insistently, and say ‘Here is This Thing No One is Talking About – How Come?’ or ‘Here is This Thing Consistently Misunderstood – Why?’ or, last time, ‘Watch Out: Danger Here!’ and characters invariably accompany these signals. Thus far, novels have been so different for me than short stories. They are Big Stories demanding to be told that won’t leave me alone. At the moment I have no big insistent story in my head and it’s wonderful.

For emerging writers hoping to draft a novel, what would your advice be? Go for it? Or are there smaller milestones you’d recommend hitting first?

I know not everyone agrees about the relationship or relative difficulty between short stories and novels, but for me the short story was the perfect training ground for the novel. I learnt about character, language, pace, voice, structure, tone, but also in short stories perhaps it’s true that there’s less room for wasted lines so you get good at refining and balancing the overall effect of each element. I would have been lost tackling a novel without having some experience with shorter stories. Novels are really massive and demanding projects that require more formal structural interventions, for me anyway. I’ve yet to finish one in less than four years from conception to publication. So having a sense of urgency (even issues, yes) really helps in seeing it through to completion.

What does your writing community look like and how have you managed to find the people who matter most in your writing life?

Marry them and give birth to them? I am JOKING, but weirdly and without planning, we are now a family of four writers, with one or two writers in the wider family too. I think the youngest is still planning to do something useful and financially more lucrative with her life but she’s still publishing and taking writing courses. I didn’t expect the kids to get into the family business at all.

Francis & Louise, you have been part of my writing community, so it means a lot to have this conversation. Studying at the IIML was immensely important to me in finding a community. We still have a writers’ group made up of a few members of that 2008 MA cohort, plus some of our other writer friends who did the course at other times, or didn’t. It’s incredible to still meet with that group because the writing is SO good, and it feels like everyone is just in it for the work, to do good work, to support each other in our work.

I wanted that community so much when I first started writing, partly because community had always been very important to me, but also very elusive in the places I lived, that I made a few mistakes in where I put my energy. My output exceeded the return, so to speak. I ended up in situations that I found a bit soul-crushing. So now I’m more careful how and where and with whom I spend time. That’s why a writers group you trust, where you already have a shared language of critique, is such a joy.

You’ve both studied for an MA and PhD in Creative Writing, and gone on to teach the Masters course and supervise PhD students at Te Herenga Waka’s International Institute of Modern Letters (as well as convening the school’s first Māori and Pasifika creative writing workshop). Having been on both sides of the classroom, what do you think are the most important things for any writer considering taking a creative writing class to know?

Even though I’m as guilty of romanticising writing as anyone else, it’s useful to treat it as a craft, skillset or vocational training where you’re going to have to unlearn a whole lot of stuff, including assumptions and some closely-held beliefs, deconstruct what you think you know, and then build up a new set of understandings and skills. No one is going to take anything away from you, but the deal is to question pretty much everything. What I wanted when I began learning is what I still offer: a robust engagement with the work. I asked my supervisors to tell me, directly, what I was doing wrong, so that I could get rid of a bunch of bad habits. Once that was out of the way, my writing was able to develop. So willingness to let stuff go is important, and the ability to put some distance between the self and the writing, to not take it personally if someone notices you use too many adjectives or mix your metaphors. It’s always up to the student what you do with any feedback – no one can do the work, or make the decisions, but the writer. And to be honest, sometimes that’s the hard part: having faith in yourself and the process, so the other side of what we do is give a great deal of encouragement and support. I know how important those first encouragements were to me, so I hope to pass that on to promising new writers.
In my own study, as we moved through the PhD as a cohort and got closer to each other as humans, I began to notice that we became more invested in each other’s work. The more we cared, the more rigorous we were with each other’s writing. I began to see this as an active form of aroha: the time and energy it takes to read someone’s work so closely, but also to offer thoughts that the recipient might not like or feel comfort with, thereby risking one’s own comfort or even the relationship that’s been established. It takes a lot of trust to do that. There are a number of principles like aroha, manaakitanga, whanaungatanga and reciprocity that are an important part of the workshop process. It’s a pretty risk-averse culture we operate in now, so I’m always grateful when students are open to this process and allow others that intimate level of trust.

As well as winning the 2022 Landfall Essay Competition, you have just finished your third novel, The Mires, about cultures colliding in a small coastal town in Aotearoa. Can you tell us about the process for writing this book?

I had three years of thinking and very little writing before I had time to sit down and write The Mires, so a lot of the novel was imaginatively established before I sat down to do the work. I had the Ursula Bethell Writers Residency and Research Leave from my day job in 2022, which gave me a year to write it. We would have no literature if we had no funders like this, so massive thanks to all who sustain our literature financially. Despite knowing so much of what I wanted to bring to the book (characters, plot elements, relationships), a great deal happened during the writing itself. I don’t want to give too much away, but the world got into this in ways I couldn’t anticipate, by which I actually mean, I kept anticipating too much of what was happening in the world, and even though it seemed like a bit of a stretch, a bit far-fetched, the things I wrote or imagined kept happening. When I first conceived of the novel, there was a terrorist attack at the heart of it because I could see what was happening overseas and I thought it was only a matter of time before it happened in Aotearoa. Then the Christchurch Terror Attacks happened and it became painfully clear that I couldn’t write that – I’m grateful that I didn’t write that – but there are still things to say. While I was writing, the parliament occupation was happening, and it didn’t feel like anything was the right way up anymore, and how can one even write about extremism when it’s become mainstream? But what that did is force the story to go deeper, and to move away from the obvious. I imagine people will say it’s a political book, another issues book, but it’s really about friendship. And swamps.

Also, there’s nothing special about this Cassandra-like quality to predict what’s coming. I feel like anyone paying attention can see what’s coming and it’s part of the writer’s job to pay attention. What is making it a little insane right now is how fast things are coming. I set this book in 2030, but that wasn’t soon enough.

I think the world infects our writing in wonderful ways, if we let it. If I had written this book when I first wanted to, it wouldn’t be what it is and possibly what it’s meant to be. Whenever I’ve been frustrated by the world getting in the way of my writing, which it frequently does, something has happened that wouldn’t have been possible if I’d written when I wanted to. Writing really takes a whole lot of non-writing time, paradoxically.

Your website mentions you have an international agent, which often seems like a mysterious process to New Zealand writers. How did you approach that and when did you know it was the right time?

It’s really mysterious! New writers have started asking me about this, which I’m happy about because historically I think NZ lit has been very comfortable and complacent about reaching beyond our shores, but what we do is as good as any writing in the world, and what we have to say is important. Recently there’s been much more international publishing of Aotearoa writing, at last. When I’ve been overseas there’s been a real interest from audiences, but not so much from publishers. In 2018 when a group of us were in London, we were reading to packed houses and yet no one could buy our books. It’s a very strange situation that’s finally showing signs of changing.

So, the right time is before your book is published. Once it’s published in NZ it’s harder to get interest overseas unless someone decides you’re a Very Big Deal. They want to publish simultaneously at least. The ‘how’ is the hard part. Submitting to agents can be a gruelling process – there’s heaps online about this. And of course it’s strange to us because we don’t have to have an agent to get published in NZ, and NZ publishers usually ask for international rights in their contracts (if you want an international agent, make sure you get this written out of your NZ contract – the publisher likely won’t mind). However, maybe you want your publisher to sell your book overseas – this does work for some writers. Publishers like mine, Penguin Random House NZ, have international agents who act on your behalf. Or sometimes the publisher has personal relationships with overseas publishers that they make use of. I asked for international rights back because I wanted to work with an international agent who knew me and my work and was working on my behalf rather than representing me from a list of dozens of writers – you really have no contact with international agents representing the publisher. But I can’t really help much more than this, because I found my agent through Scott Pack, who is a dear friend to NZ writers, and has championed UK publishing of NZ books, and no longer works in publishing. Before he went off to do other things, he published The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke in the UK, but also recommended Charlotte Seymour, who became my agent. It’s certainly one of those businesses where personal connection counts for a great deal.

Your daughter, Kōtuku Titihuia Nuttall, has been blazing her own trail across New Zealand literature over the past few years, including publishing her debut collection Tauhou in 2022. What role did you play in her development as a writer, and how is it being part of a multi-author family?

I can’t tell you what role I played in her development – that is surely a question for her! Apart from the usual inevitable parental influence, which might have been as much bad as it was good. I was surprised when writing became her vocation, because I thought she would be a visual artist (though she is still that too) and because I didn’t think she’d really want that close an acquaintance with what her parents do.

Perhaps I can say that my daughters have always lived in a home where being a creative person, and living by that, has been possible and viable and valued. Higher education was a given for them in a way it wasn’t for me. There were books in front of their faces before they could say the word book. And paper and crayons. I’m just so glad they’ve found the creative and personal outlet of writing for themselves. It’s certainly not something I pushed them towards, but writing saved me in so many ways and I can see it doing the same for them. Tauhou is so much about mothers and daughters, so maybe that’s some indication of influence, and there’s the dedication, which was unexpected and meant so much to me.

As for reading Kōtuku’s work, I’ve read Tauhou a few times and I don’t really get through more than a couple of pages without crying. It’s probably the most painfully intimate thing I’ve ever read, knowing her, and our lives, as I do. Pride doesn’t really seem like a big enough word for it. And fear. But don’t parents always fear for their kids? It’s different having a partner who is a writer – we can be pretty straightforward with each other about the work. There’s that saying about writing being easy: you just sit down at a typewriter, open a vein and bleed. I’m really happy to do that myself, but no one wants to watch their child do it!

In 2020, you wrote that while representation in New Zealand literature is still a problem that needs to be worked on, the culture is shifting. What is exciting you most about Māori writing or publishing this year? What further practical industry changes would you like to see?

What excites me most about Māori writing & publishing is that there’s so much of it – literally too much for me to keep up with now, to be honest, and that’s the way it should be. Bring it on. It means (or should mean) more diversity in our writing, more freedom to just write in whatever way we want to write about whatever we want to write about. My biggest concern about the industry though is connected to this: there’s a lot of policing of what Māori writers write, by other Māori. There is a concern about getting representational politics correct over freedom of expression – in a way that suppresses the art form and alienates individual writers. I understand where this comes from, but I think it’s so misguided and fear-based: in many ways I think it’s buying into the colonialism it purports to resist. If the politics of the times are supposed to be making things better for us, why is it harder than ever to write about certain lives and certain topics that some of us think cast us in the wrong light? Whose view are we privileging when we ask questions like that? In some instances, Māori writers aren’t able to write about topics that Pākehā writers are free to explore and when one group of people have freedoms that another group don’t, based on ethnicity, it’s called racism. Are we not whole people, with wonderfully complex, imperfect and fallible characters? Elaine Castillo is wonderfully enraged about this in the book How to Read Now – how we rob ourselves when we buy into this thinking.

What’s next?

In response to all of the above, I suppose, I want to see what happens when I just write for fun and joy. How often do Māori get to just have fun? Is it even possible for a Māori writer to just let joy lead them? I used to think I had an obligation to use every single word to make a difference, to fight the good fight, so to speak, but then I got sick, and I also realised I was turning myself inside out to make my version of Māoriness acceptable to others, and this became self-defeating and unrewarding (and deeply, existentially, painful, tbh), and I remembered that good writing is rarely acceptable to everyone anyway. So now I think the most radical thing Indigenous people can do is cultivate Indigenous joy (this is not my original idea, but I came to it in my own way I guess).

I’m writing short stories next, because writing stories is the most fun I’ve ever had, and maybe some scriptwriting, cos that’s also immensely fun. Turns out my fun is tending towards the gothic, darkly comic, absurd and speculative, and I figure the politics will come through whether I’m looking for them or not, because it all has a way of rising up.

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