Writing - Corpus

To Write or Not to Write

26 March 2026 3 Comments

Ruby Appleby

I have been telling stories for as long as I can remember, but I was nine when I started writing them down. The first one was a blatant plagiarism of a Jacqueline Wilson novel, and after that I never looked back (though I did start coming up with my own ideas). Each story, each poem, was a masterpiece to me, perfect simply because it existed and because I enjoyed making it exist. Writing made me feel competent, powerful, capable of building something from nothing; there was a magic to it that I never found anywhere else. I knew that I would be an author someday, that I was supposed to be one. How could I not?

Then I became a teenager, and something strange happened: the stories I began so passionately started to trail off after only a handful of pages, and everything I wrote seemed lame, meandering, ridiculous. What changed? Well, for one, venturing beyond the teen section of my local library led me to a new world of literature, which instilled both inspiration and self-consciousness in me. I learned from the likes of Donna Tartt and L.M. Montgomery two things, almost simultaneously: that stories could be more marvellously rendered than I’d ever imagined, and that mine were awful. Here, I realised, were the real masterpieces. My stories were only lacklustre imitations. [Read more…] about To Write or Not to Write

Rememberance

27 April 2020 5 Comments

A short story by M. L. E. Brown

He lifts his nose out from under the scratchy blanket. If he can just get there, he will never complain about the cold at home again. He doesn’t want to be awake. Back within the dream, a warm breeze still ripples the kawakawa bushes in his parents’ garden. His mother is inside making tea from the leaves – an old Māori remedy – as she always does whenever any of them have aches or fevers. She adds mint and then steeps the brew a long time before serving it with honey and lemon …

The tent smells of carbolic, starch, and eucalyptus oil. He must be getting better. It’s been days since he could smell anything. Outside, in the distance, he can hear the band playing “Abide With Me”. It is April 25th. Has it really been three years since those terrible landings? He wants to attend the Remembrance Service. But he can’t even get up.

All the beds in this hastily built isolation ward are full. Spanish Flu starts off as a fever and turns into pneumonia fast. Having got all the way from Gallipoli to Bapaume without a scratch, it never occurred to him he might be felled by a ruddy virus.

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Let there be light: macular degeneration and me

4 November 2019 6 Comments

Renée

Let there be warriors…

There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be regarded as warriors.” Adrienne Rich.

I was taught to read before I was five by my mother Rose. I read stories, then long books, then joined the library, changed both Rose’s and my books, read both, went out to work at the woollen mill when I was twelve and read my way around libraries wherever I worked. I worked at all sorts of jobs then, when I was forty, began studying for an extra mural BA degree. I began teaching in my forties and at fifty I began writing plays. Since then I have read and written (worked) every day. Now I am 90. I’ve just finished teaching a course on writing memoir, and The Cuba Press has just published my first crime novel, The Wild Card.

Two years ago I was told I had macular degeneration.

This is a desolate and unhappy place to be. Being labelled ‘vision impaired’ doesn’t go anywhere near describing the impact of it on my life. As a reader and a working writer it is the worst thing that has ever happened to me.

“Grandma”: a story

5 August 2019 2 Comments

Georgia MacKenzie

Spending time with her grandkids was one of Barbara’s favourite activities. And so her heart swelled with love, as she glanced in her rear view mirror, to see four pairs of eyes and four small faces grinning back at her.

“All belted up?”

“Yes!”

They sat two-by-two, with the two youngest in the front tier and the two eldest at the back. Two sets of fairy wings. One tutu. One pirate sword.

They pulled out of the driveway and off into the streets, zipping through the lines of traffic, off swiftly to their destination. Off to try another café.

Grandma might not have been the most athletic, or the most agile, but she definitely came close to being the most wise. Her house was filled floor to ceiling with piles upon piles of books. And oh how she loved those books. Filled with adventures and romance and the collective wisdom of so many authors. Wisps of spiderweb blurred the line between book and floor. But if you dared to move one, she would know.

“There’s a system. Don’t mess with the system.”

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“I’m on my way, Nan”: a story

1 July 2019 Leave a Comment

Drew Davey

Ngaia has come home.

“Nan first,” she says. “I’m on my way, Nan”

She has thick waves of hair, naturally parted. Her eyes are as dark as the soil that she walks on, oblivious to the million pieces that shatter underneath her every step. A forgotten smile paints itself on her freckled face, rose-pink lips stretching to each corner, forming a number of creases on either side and an indentation on the right side of her cheek. A smile that was lost for so many years. A smile that should’ve come sooner. Regret sinks in.

Before she knows it, she’s at the river. It seems to have carved its way through the greenery even more deeply than she had remembered. She offers a reflection to the towering giants that sit along its bank. They hug the earth in such a way that they can move their limbs in every direction, picking and choosing to let the sun in. It’s like a game to them. A rustling against one another that resonates all through the forest. A welcome back performance. Just for her.

Every morning, so far, I’m alive

3 June 2019 Leave a Comment

Chris Prentice

Professor Wendy Parkins was professor of literature at Kent University in the UK before returning recently to New Zealand. Her newly published memoir, Every morning, so far, I’m alive, offers an intimate and honest exploration of living with depression, phobias and OCD, and how these conditions have affected her in personal, professional, family, and social life. The title comes from American poet Mary Oliver’s 1986 poem, “Landscape”, and is a resonant epigraph for Wendy’s story. Her book is a gift to those who might find support in recognising shared or similar struggles, and at the same time to those who’ll appreciate its broader concerns with how to live in the world, and to live well. It’s also about how to place ourselves in the world, and how place shapes our ‘selves.’

Parkins’ interest in everyday life — in how people live — had informed her earlier academic cultural studies book, Slow Living (2006), co-written with Geoffrey Craig, about the Slow Food movement. They refer to slow living as an “attempt to live in the present in a meaningful, sustainable, thoughtful and pleasurable way”; and to “slow arts of the self” as processes whereby “we can ‘desanctify’ parts of our self-understanding”. In Every morning, so far, I’m alive, the process of ‘desanctifying’ self-knowledge isn’t an intellectual enterprise, or a conscious life-style choice, but an intimate challenge.