Category: Manawatu

Matariki: the public holiday we all needed

(Above: our Matariki mandala this year.)

I think Matariki is my new favourite holiday. Long before it was made a public holiday, I used to grizzle that New Zealand needed another public holiday in winter as it was a long stretch from (then) Queen’s Birthday in June until Labour Day in October.

& because, as a pākeha, it is a new holiday, I’m really enjoying that we (my family) are creating our own celebrations for it: inviting friends to share kai and reflections, and focusing on rest.

I was hoping for a cold, wet weekend so I could be lazy and give some attention to my teetering pile of delicious library books…alas, (hello, climate change?) our winter here in the Manawatū seems to come later every year. Spring is the season I brace for…here our springs are mizzling, windy (we have a phenomena known as ‘the November gales’) and cold. So the weekend, while chilly, was also sunny…which meant I had to get out into the garden.

I did some satisfying chores that I only get to when the urgent business of harvest season is over: I tidied my junky heap of garden pots and paraphernalia into virgo-level neatness again. I cleared out the greenhouse, pruned and fed the fruit trees, planted more comfrey around their bases, dug up the dahlia bulbs. It was satisfying work that called for an afternoon tea of cinnamon pinwheels and a big pot of homemade masala chai (none of that syrupy nonsense.)

(Above: just the Edmonds date scone mixture but rolled out, spread with fruit mince and sliced into pinwheels instead of dates.)

Gardeners are always thinking a season (or more!) ahead. My winter food garden is all planted now…not too much to do. (Having said that I planted rockets seed and more broad beans on the weekend.) So now I’m dreaming ahead to summer flower/herb beds, by digging up clumps of perennial herbs and flowers and dividing them. I’ve been getting very inspired by urban rewilding books I’ve been reading (more on that in another post) so I’m eyeballing the little bits of lawn we still have and wondering if I might turn them into weedy spaces full of self-maintaining weeds and ‘wild’ flowers …for the pollinators and birds.

It takes a leap deeper into wildness and unruliness which can have a mixed response in an urban setting…and yet is so important for urban biodiversity as central city housing gets denser and more and more gardens are lost.

So, I ended up not being as lazy as I’d hoped for Matariki/Winter Solstice weekend…but it all felt good, a healthy-busy…not a pushing-hustle. Dreaming into summer is a kind of rest, I think.

& I know we’ll get plenty of stormy, frigid days in spring.

I get Koanga Garden’s newsletter and in the latest one, I like this, from founder Kay Baxter:

‘This is how regeneration works: a little effort now, in rhythm with nature, pays forward in resilience, nourishment and beauty.’

Tell me what you’re up to in your gardens. x

June 23, 2025
many moons

Last year I received a grant from the Earle Creativity Trust to write a book about my life-long practice of keeping a journal. It was so wonderful to get the grant and I’ve been busy working on this time-bound project, which has to be completed in 2016 (a condition of the grant.)

I finished year one of a permaculture design course last year. I also had a go at making yoga teaching my main source of income, really didn’t like it and am back to teaching just two classes a week, which is just the right amount for me. I had a year’s contract working for an environmental trust, doing communications and events work, and now I’m back at Massey, teaching writing.

Working with the Palmerston North City Library, I edited this anthology – you can download a .pdf version here. I gave a talk about nature writing at the Massey University-based symposium, ‘Working With Nature: understanding entanglements of humans and nonhumans in the Anthropocene’. I have a lot to say about nature and writing and nature writing, so I really enjoyed being a part of this great event.

I taught at the 2016 Kahini Retreat – it was terrific, a whole weekend of being steeped in writing and writing conversation.

Me and my friend, Nga Taonga Puoro artist Rob Thorne collaborated on a performance combining poetry with music, called ‘Tohu’. Huge satisfying fun, and we hope to do it again soon.

I was part of Massey University’s ‘writing in / writing of’ talk series, in a panel about Manawatu writers.

In May, I read with Janet Charman, Belinda Diepenheim and Johanna Aitchison at the Palmerston North City Library. I’ve loved Janet’s writing for a long time, so it was a real privilege to read with her when she visited Palmerston North from Auckland.

Last Friday was National Poetry Day and I read with other Seraph Poets and friends at Vic Books in Wellington, Paula Green took some great photographs.

My most recent creative act, though, has been painting moons. My friend is opening a shop in town with a theme of earth-based and earth-friendly hand made things. So I’ve been making moon gift tags, wall strings and cards for the shop. It is so much more enjoyable than writing poetry, which is always kind of masochistic and gnarly for me.

I

August 30, 2016
black river / peoples’ river

Last Friday the public collaboration phase of the BLACK RIVER exhibition I’ve been involved with was launched at Te Manawa.

In support of the exhibition, the poets and artists have their drafts/sketches on display in a cabinet. The idea of this was to share creative process with the public.

It is a little bit exposing to have my scrawling, messy poem draft on public display, however I believe in the reason behind it (sharing creative process). (It doesn’t help that the other poets seem to have basically ‘cheated’ (I say this jokingly) and submitted fairly polished, finished poems for display so mine looks all the more deranged. Ha ha!) Oh well, all I can say is I STUCK TO THE BRIEF.

Here is the cabinet with the sketches and poetry ‘drafts’. My mess is on bottom left – notice how much longer it is than the other ‘drafts’? Ahem.

On Friday, there were already quite a few public responses. Here are some of my favourites:

Whoever this person is, they have great handwriting…

River as hair + a great sentiment….

River is DEEP.

LOL, indeed.

June 16, 2014
KUPU, part two

Some photos of KUPU, the ‘poetry off the page’ installation which I did in the Palmerston North City Library with fellow local poet, Leonel Alvarado.

First instalment was back HERE, when they had only installed one poem.

Here are some photographs of the other poems.

Glimpses of Leonel’s poems (his were harder to photograph in their entirety than mine):

And the other two of mine…

October 2, 2013
what you hold on to

On Sunday the sun came out after two days of heavy rain. Various plants were doing a beautiful job of holding water on their surface…jewel-like, shining in the sun.

I have just two weeks to go of the residency! It’s gone SO FAST. BACK HERE I said I was going to write about it here on the blog. Well, looks like I didn’t. I’ve been too busy in it, living it, doing it to reflect on it much. You can take it as a good sign that I didn’t write about it much – all the writing was happening within the residency! It’s been so rich and rewarding and I’ve gotten lots of work done. It’s been a real gift and I feel so lucky!

There are various duties I have to do in my last couple of weeks as artist-in-residence, so I can see the last fortnight is going to romp by. The time of it being deep, contemplative, solo and quiet is over. Consequently, I’ve been a bit sad about that this week…ah well, time passes. Fact of life.

As part of my residency, I’m running a workshop soon – there are still five places if you’d like to come…. (it’s in Palmerston North, of course) Poster below. Maybe see you there…

June 26, 2013
mycology walk

Last weekend I had a yearning to go on a mushroom/toadstool hunt in the bush. I took my family out for a ramble around a bush track on the Woodville end of the Manawatu Gorge, looking out for autumnal fungi. I was not disappointed!

There were some wonderful red toadstools.

Bright orange fungus:

Tiny ethereal mushrooms (hard to photograph! This one was not much bigger than a pea and I liked the way it was growing upwards towards the light from underneath a log.)

Warty armies of toadstools:

Odd phallic looking ones with speckles:

I don’t know enough about wild mushrooms to know if any of these are edible, so I let them be and just took photographs.

After our walk, we stopped for a simple picnic of pikelets and feijoas.

Back home in the fridge was a package of field mushrooms a friend had picked from her farm. I cooked them in garlic, onions and lots of green herbs, stirred in cream right at the end of cooking and ate it on pasta. Amazing.

April 20, 2013