Photo by Ebony Lamb
Photo by Nisha Hunter
Olive Nuttall is a biological puppycat girl raised in Kirikiriroa – now fighting out of Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Her novel, kitten, won the 2022 Adam Foundation Prize. Olive writes about tgirl shxt, BDSM, family trauma, and falling in love. romesh dissanayake is a Sri Lankan and Koryo Saram writer, poet and chef from Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. His work explores ideas of identity, decolonisation and place. romesh’s poetry, fiction and essays have appeared in various print and online publications. His first novel, When I open the shop, was the winner of the 2022 Modern Letters Fiction Prize and is published by Te Herenga Waka University Press. His chapbook poetry collection, ‘Favourite Flavour House’, is forthcoming in AUP New Poets 10. He has cooked at Mabel’s Burmese Eat and Drink Shop, and Rita in Aro Valley.
How did you come to writing?
Olive: All my friends made home movies and drew comics, and we did music and stuff. Writing was just one of the things I was up to. I did pretty well in school until I had a little bit of a menty-b in Year 13 and got really into being super boring on strangers’ couches for quite a few years. In my last year of school I wrote a short story about all the stuff me and the strangers were doing on their couches etc and my English teacher trashed it, and I basically had a tantrum and quit school. At the time, I thought she trashed it ’cause of the drug use and sex and stuff, but it was honestly probably just NOT GOOD lolololol.
Anyway, I kept trying to write—basically ’cause my mum thinks writers are the best and I wanted to make her proud, and also ’cause writers are kind of the best and I wanted to be one. Once I was old enough to get Adult Entrance into Uni, I enrolled at Te Herenga Waka and did an undergraduate creative writing course. I really liked it, but then it was time to have another menty-b for six years and then I was like, ‘Hey guess what? I’m a girl, actually!’
Once I realised I was a girl, I was super desperate to consume trans media made by trans people—TikTok, Youtube, blog-posts, forums, movies, and books. Most of the stuff that is out there is really good, but also there isn’t, like, heaps of it out there.
So then I was like, dang! I guess I better make some stuff for girls like me, so I enrolled at the IIML and wrote a book. The book is called kitten and it’s trans af. Buy it, borrow it, steal it, whatever—if you’re trans I really really hope you read it.
romesh: I guess I’ve always had an interest in words. In my novel, song lyrics appear quite often throughout and that’s probably how I first came to writing — the musicality of it all. I used to know Lisa ‘Left Eye’ Lopes’ whole verse in ‘Never Be the Same Again’. And, I used to do this thing where I’d text my friends song lyrics out of the blue. No context.
As much as I’d like to say it was because of reading and books, it was really because of radio and TV and Top 40 charts. It was only much later that I got into reading. And even later still, writing.
What are the books and authors that have meant the most to you in your development as a writer?
Olive: Casey Plett, Arielle Twist, Always Becominging, essa may ranapiri, Torrey Peters, SOPHIE, Carmen Maria Machado, Imogen Binnie, Cassia Hardy, Laura Les, Ada Rook and Devi McCallion, Ursula Le Guin, Will Hansen, Audrey Lorde, Leslie Feinberg, Lou Sullivan, Joshua Whitehead, and Tove Jansson. They’re all really important to my writing.
romesh: When I was just starting out I used to do this soft boi Murakami/Camus thing and it was so cringe. Gosh, in the beginning stages of writing it’s so awkward but you’re also so energised and you have all these ideas but don’t have the skills to pull them off. I remember reading Alice Tawhai’s short story ‘Damnation Circus’ and being completely blown away by it. Like, that really changed something for me. Check it out:
‘All the clowns were on P, bright and psychedelic in more ways than one, thanks to the glittering crystals in the little bags in their pockets.
Aside from being a ringmaster, my father was a juggler who did magic tricks. My mother had saved our placentas, and he juggled them in the air in glass globes full of formaldehyde.’
Just so good!
Brannavan Gnanalingam was also a big influence. It was such a blessing to have him as my mentor while I was writing the novel. No one has centered South Asian voices in literature in Aotearoa like he has. Really gave us a platform. Sodden Downstream, Sprigs and Slow Down, You’re Here are such classics.
Your debut novels are both being released by Te Herenga Waka University Press in quick succession, and were worked on when you were classmates at the IIML in 2022. Rather than asking you to describe your own writing, what can each of you tell us about the other’s book?
Olive: That’s a really funny question, ’cause romesh wrote his book for NOT ME and I wrote my book for NOT HIM. We both made stuff for our people first.
Like, as far as I’m concerned, cis people are welcome to read my book (please buy my book, and while you’re at it, buy a copy for a trans person too), but like, I don’t really care how they experience it? It’s for trans people—specifically, it’s for the girls™.
So like, yeah, I REALLY like romesh’s book. I think he’s a powerful writer, telling a powerful story. You should buy a copy and read it. But also, who cares what I think? lololol.
romesh: What I love most about Olive as a person and as a writer is that she’s incredibly generous and caring. I saw a tweet the other day that said something like, ‘I don’t trust anyone that had a positive MFA experience.’ And I think that basically sums up both of our years at the IIML. We both helped each other get through a particularly rough year.
Her book, kitten, is a game changer. I know a lot of people will cherish it and feel seen because it exists in the world. Don’t sleep on it! Be thankful that she wrote it. Go get a copy already.
How did you set about writing a novel – did you already know the characters or story you wanted to write?
romesh: As a poet I’ve learned to just follow my gut. Coming into writing fiction, I brought that same energy. All I need is a spark and I’m good. Before the MA year started, I used to go for runs around Berhampore and Island Bay and try to map the story in my head (or figure out a way to enter it).
Through the process of writing it, I discovered new things about the story. It’s amazing how you can get into a sort of rhythm and things just start happening that make you go, Holy shit, where did that come from? Writing ‘The Island’ section in the novel was like that. Throughout the whole process, as much of a slog as it felt at times, I really tried to incorporate a sense of play into my practice. And that’s where the not knowing comes in handy.
Olive: My process is:
1. Try to write a sci-fi or fantasy novel
2. Fail
3. Write some shxtty auto-fiction
4. Profit
All I knew was that I wanted to write some tgirl shxt. Once I found Rosemary’s voice, I knew things would fall together. I didn’t know much about kitten, except that Rosemary’s nana was gonna get sick. After that, it was just sticking to a weekly work schedule that I could realistically maintain. I’m ADHD, so I really need the act of writing to be surprising and exciting for me. If I know too much about what happens next, I get really bored and can’t finish a project. Also, ritalin helps.
Community is a central part of both of your books. In what ways does community, and the expectations that come from writing to and from your community, impact on your work?
romesh: I think it’s intersectional, eh? No one belongs solely to one community. The way our society is structured, we exist in multiple spheres. Finding community is incredibly important, sure. But writing with just one community in mind is maybe a bit unrealistic? Limiting? I’m thinking here of my cooking and hospo community, my migrants and job seekers, my friends who are artists and creatives, my family, and my people from way back when. I really wanted to create space for all of these communities.
Olive: I don’t really know about the thematic impact of community on my work. I guess I knew who my intended audience was (tgirls) and knew what lane I was in (pākehā tgirl lane), and I wrote accordingly.
In terms of material and emotional help, community was and is huge. The IIML workshop I was writing in was a white-cis-hetero-colonial coded space—and that made things really painful, pretty often. Solidarity across intersections of marginalisation was vital to me when it came to finishing the book, and the MA thesis.
Outside of the workshop, I was living with my ex-wife (but in, like, a chill gay way) Kōtuku, with her parents in their house. My partner Pluto was writing up daily, weekly, and yearly writing schedules for me. My supervisor, William, was cheering me on. My friends were reading drafts of stuff I was writing and giving me critique. That’s just scratching the surface of the support I was receiving from people.
Writing is a total luxury, and I didn’t get to do it without a lot of people supporting me through the process.
Your books are both written from a first-person perspective – was that an instinctive choice?
Olive: Writing third-person is hard, and I’m dumb lol. I literally think that’s what it boils down to for me :3
romesh: Yeah, true. But I also think both our protagonists are introspective and unsure of themselves. First-person perspective works really well for someone trying to find their place in the world, don’t you think? I also like the unreliable narrator in first-person. You can do so much behind the scenes and it hits so hard.
How did you both land on more compact length for your novels and why was that right for this work?
Olive: Novels finish when they finish. kitten is the length it is ’cause that’s what the story needed. Also, I have a short attention span—so I like compact novels.
romesh: I think for me it was a question of accessibility. I knew I didn’t want to write this big tome of a novel because a) I wouldn’t have been able to finish it in a year, and b) I wanted to write a story that everyone could read. I’m thinking here of people who are close to me, my family and friends, who don’t usually read fiction or for whom reading in English is not their preference. Plus, short novels are so cute! You can carry them around with you and read them in the sun.
I was influenced by expansive shorter novels like How to Loiter in a Turf War by Coco Solid, Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett, and Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin. Not to mention everything by Claire Keegan is so gorgeous.
Olive: Short novels are SO cute! I hope I get to see our books sticking out of people’s bags and back pockets :3
In a recent article for LitHub, Rebecca K Reilly wrote, ‘I hope that if this next wave of the internet can bring one positive thing, it could be a shift away from having super-dominant cultures that everyone else feels obliged to anthropologically explain themselves to as people become more connected with more distant parts of the world.’ Was there any question of where you would set your novel and how prominently that location, and other cultural signifiers, would feature in the book?
Olive: In terms of setting, I think I just wrote what I knew? It’s trite, but like, not bad advice.
Tgirls exist online A LOT, so like, a lot of the cultural signifiers are international. At the same time, the physical space your characters move through and grow up in is really significant to their development. I just wrote places that I knew well—it’s playing on easy mode I guess.
If you’re a white settler (like me), you also gotta be aware of the limits of your relationships with land and place. A lot of the time, you don’t belong to the places you’re writing about. So like, don’t act like you do belong. That’s a thing.
romesh: It’s exactly as Olive said, The physical space your characters move through and grow up in is really significant to their development. Early on, I knew that time and place would play a big part in how the protagonist in my novel would negotiate grief, identity and belonging. I owe a lot to my editor at Te Herenga Waka University Press, Jasmine Sargent, who is just as pedantic about getting the details right as I am. We dove deep into weather reports from 2013, TV guides from 2008 and concerts and sporting events from 2021. Not to mention defunct establishments like The Big Kumara and air conditioning faults on Honda Citys from 1998. All of these things give texture to fiction and ground it, I think.
Unless you were born fairly recently, I’d say we can all remember going through those ages and how we felt back then. I’m banking on the personal being universal. And, if anything, I hope it’s a way the reader can examine their place in the world through the protagonist’s journey.
Olive, can you speak to writing about sex – do you have any advice based on how you approached writing the sex scenes in kitten, and what was important to you to get right?
Olive: For me, writing sex is just like writing any other action. At a pretty young age, the bit of my brain that distinguishes sexual behaviour from regular behaviour got broken, so I don’t really see the difference between a sex scene and a car chase or whatever. Also, like, queer sex is whatever you want it to be. It could be a car chase.
Anyway, good action moves the story along. It’s meaningful for the characters involved. It raises and releases tension. Kind of like sex.
On receiving feedback about your work, what have you learnt about navigating that process and what was the most helpful feedback you received in the course of writing your book?
Olive: Feedback is really helpful, if you are me. There is lots I can’t see about my own work, so it’s super helpful to have people who are willing to have a look and let me know what they reckon.
When I get feedback, I always think about the person who is giving it to me, and what their proximity is to my intended audience. I also think about what they’re good at—what can I learn from them?
Feedback gives me an idea of how people are responding to my work. If I’m doing good work, yucky people won’t like it. They’ll give me awful feedback and I can be happy in the knowledge that I’m nailing it!
At the same time, I practice being open and vulnerable with trustworthy people that I respect. When they’re giving me feedback, I listen, keep pretty quiet, and give stuff time to sink in.
As for the MOST helpful feedback I received when I was writing kitten? Who knows, there was a lot of helpful feedback. I do remember that romesh encouraged me to write for my audience (tgirls) and not to get too hung up on what anyone else wanted or expected from my work. That was helpful feedback, for sure.
romesh: Hmm, feedback is a tricky one. I want to start off by saying, words of affirmation probably isn’t too high on my list. Even though I’m by no means confident or self-assured in many parts of my life, in writing, I weirdly am. What this means is I don’t really seek feedback at the start of the process, and prefer not to receive it.
If a chapter or poem isn’t quite there yet, and I know how to fix it, it’s kind of a waste of the other person’s time for them to tell you what you already know.
But every writer is different. And receives and processes feedback differently. I find that I don’t like to let other people into the work until I’ve done as much as I can do with it. It’s only when I’m stuck. When I get to the point where the words don’t make sense and I’ve shifted a single comma around like a thousand times, that’s when I value feedback the most.
Throughout writing the novel, I was incredibly privileged to have key people take a look at it and offer their guidance. They know who they are and I cannot express my gratitude to them enough for their kind words/ pep talks/ brutal honesty.
Olive: I am WAY more needy than romesh! I got that Leo Sun/Cancer Moon combo so I really want you to like me and like my writing and tell me that you like me too. I’m weak that way lol.
How does writing fit into your life in a practical sense, around the other commitments you have?
Olive: When I was writing kitten, I was pulling a student loan—that meant I had a year to get it done. Since then, I’ve done some comms work. That’s technically writing, but it’s not like writing my own stuff. Colonial capitalism is hell, and it’s not really realistic for me to work part-time and write—it wouldn’t pay enough, plus I don’t have the energy for that. I think the resolution to my economic and artistic difficulties will be heavily reliant on organised collective action and the quality of local guillotine construction.
romesh: Omg, Olive! How? to? escape? colonial capitalism?? If I could add to that a bit: I’m pretty keen to keep writing as the last bastion of Things That Bring Me Joy Outside of White-Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy (to quote bell hooks). I know that’s probably an unrealistic expectation, especially given that we’ve both got books coming out in the world, but I’m gonna try keep it sacred nonetheless.
What’s next in your writing life?
Olive: I’m hype to get kitten into the hands of all the little gay people in my phone. I really want to distribute the book overseas, as well as locally. That’s what I’m thinking about at the moment.
romesh: Moving back to Aotearoa and seeing friends and family. It feels like it’s been too long. The book comes out soon and I’m excited for you all to read it x