Becky Manawatu’s Auē is shortlisted for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at this year’s Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. You can listen to Kiran’s rave review on 95bFM Breakfast’s Loose Reads here. Manawatu spoke to Kiran ahead of The Ockham NZ Book Awards Winners’ Ceremony which will be live-streamed from 6pm May 12 on the Ockhams YouTube channel where you can now also view readings from the shortlisted authors.
How do you balance fiction writing with journalism? Do you have a preference and do the two different forms inform each other?
My experience as a reporter helped me with editing, and has improved my writing in general. Writing human interest stories, interviewing people gives me a unique, though I admit sometimes sanitised, insight into people's lives. I just love working with words.
Arundhati Roy says fiction is her first love and greatest love, and that is true for me too. Fiction means so much to me. It does not keep me or my family fed or clothed, however if I could immerse myself in it more often, either reading or writing, I really would.
Congratulations too for your nomination for the Best First-Person Essay or Feature at the Voyager Media Awards for your striking personal essay published by Newsroom. Is this area of writing something you’d like to pursue?
I do enjoy personal essay writing, but it is a tough one, while writing them I am obviously mining my own life and writing with the belief that someone might be interested in what I tell them - about myself, this feels like an immensely indulgent thing to do.
But it is not just out of an interest in myself, but an interest in the world and people. And I guess I am my own access to other people and the world and I like to write with that access kept intact. I also prefer reading essays where that connection is kept intact. If it's severed, ie, the writer removes themselves completely from what they are expressing, I have to work harder to hold my attention on it. It is probably important I try to do that more often, maybe.
However, I have thought about cutting down on the number of personal essays I write, as I really want to write another novel. To write a novel I need to have a bright, burning hunger to say something, to feel heard.
If I keep saying things and being heard, I'm afraid it'll keep the fire in my belly just smouldering away, contentedly, the hunger consistently satiated. But I think the personal essays around Auē were important ones for me to write, and I hope I can continue to write the odd first person essay.
Becky Manawatu’s lockdown bookstack
What was in your lockdown bookstack?
I read Bernadine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other. I re-read 'patches' of Renee's memoir These Two Hands, and re-read Janet Frames' Owls Do Cry. I read poems and prose in Sport 47 edited by Tayi Tibble. I listen to Zadie Smith on Youtube lots too, then read any of her essays I could find online. Every Saturday I read Newsroom's new short story.
What book is your comfort read/re-read and why?
Women who Run with the Wolves, by Clarissa Pinkola Estes. I like to reread parts of Witi Ihimaera's Tangi and parts of The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. Tangi and The God of Small Things are both books to pick up and flick to a page and reread because they are poetic, as is Frame's Owls Do Cry.
Women who Run with the Wolves is to me, mostly about creativity. It's deep and yum and honours storytelling and makes me want to write.
I have ordered myself a wee stack of books from my main book squeeze. Order includes Hemi Kelly's A Māori Phrase a Day and Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor and Ice Monster by David Walliams for my 11-year-old girl who loves reading too.
What was the last book that really moved you, and why?
Janet Frames' Owls Do Cry. I love the feeling that I am moving around in other human's minds, not being held out, allowed into the strange landscape that is the human psyche. Frame makes these allowances like few other writers can.
What are you working on next, Becky?
I've started writing about this character, a young girl. I have given her a single experience from my childhood to plant a kind of seed.The experience is when I was very young, probably six,I squashed a fly on a windowsill at my house I lived in Birchfield (West Coast). I had been so bored and in my boredom, simply killed this little fly. Small maggots writhed out of it and I was stunned by them. (Mistrusting this memory, because I believed flies laid eggs I googled it and found flies can lay eggs or have live maggots in their bellies).
Anyway, I recall sitting there watching the maggots and looking at the dead fly and feeling like I had done something enormously bad.
Probably months later - I can't be sure - I was watching a nature show on TV and it was about termites, and when I saw the termites I was consumed by guilt because I thought they might have been the things that came out of the fly's belly and on the TV the termites were turning wood to dust and I thought 'Oh no - the termites will be eating our house too and then it will fall down and we will all die and it will be all my fault.'
So I have given this character this story, this grain of worry, guilt, and I just want to see what happens, what the worry forces her to think, feel, do and how it shapes her. Also I just find it interesting how children perceive the world, and I think this personal experience is a good example. Who knows, it'll probably come to nothing...
More about the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards here