TURBINE | KAPOHAU

Ingrid Horrocks is a writer, teacher, and the 2024 Writer in Residence at the IIML. She has a PhD in English Literature from Princeton, was a Commonwealth Scholar at the University of York, has a BA (Hons) from VUW/THW, and has been a Professor of Creative Writing at Massey University. Her genre-crossing writing has been published widely, and she has published four books: Where We Swim, Travelling With Augusta, Women Wanderers, and a book of poetry, Mapping The Distance. Her first book of fiction, Nine Lives, will be published by THWUP in 2025.

How would you introduce yourself as a writer?

At this point, I feel like I’m so much a writer from this place. I’m very much a Wellington, South Coast writer, and that’s where I get a lot of my nourishment. 

I would say that I’m very restless, and that I like new challenges. I seem to have been jumping a lot between forms. I’m writing a nonfiction writer’s fiction now, but also a poet’s fiction, in my structure, because that’s where I started as a writer.

But, basically, I just keep writing the same book. There’s a poetry book, which is all about movement, then there’s an academic book, which is all about movement – historical women’s wandering and formal digression in literature. Then there’s a nonfiction book that tries to do some of that work in my own writing. And now I’m writing this collection of fiction about women’s lives and am putting different experiences and times in relation to each other. So, yeah, it’s kind of always the same book. 

So, what have you been working on this year? 

I’ve been finishing one project and beginning a new one; the one that I’m finishing is called Nine Lives, and it’s a collection of interlinked stories, each of which focuses on a pivotal moment in a woman’s life. They’re all in different time periods – the earliest one is in 1796, and it’s based on the life of Mary Wollstonecraft. And then there’s Kathleen on Branch in 1919 and then one in 1950 and then the 1970s and so on, with a set of contemporary stories. 

In Kathleen on Branch, Kathleen is a queer nurse returning from having worked in Europe during the war. She’s returning to her farming family and her brother, who’s got a new baby and a new wife. It’s kind of a stranger in the house story; she’s seen something and feels like her brother hasn’t seen something. The story works around the idea that, really, they both have changed lives, so how do they manage to continue as family in that space?

One of the hard things about the Nine Lives project has been working out the order. Early on, I felt that it shouldn’t be in chronological order, because then we’d have to begin with Mary Wollstonecraft in Scandinavia, which would have been weird, and also misleading in terms of the book as a whole. So, I had to find another structure. Currently, it starts with Kathleen in 1919, and it goes forward and then it goes back, and then forward again. I was really interested in the idea of destabilising historical progression, and in setting these moments and the struggles of these women alongside one another. 

The new project, Seeds, takes one of the characters from Nine Lives. That one – which I think I’m now calling a novel – is set in something like 2030. It gathers a lot of the people from the other stories and it’s just going to be set in a week.

There’s a wonderful line in Where We Swim about being immersed in something other than air. With these projects, are you immersing in history, rather than water?

History, and place, I would say, are really important. Each of the stories – which is why it’s a really hard project – has a deep immersion in a place that I wanted to be much more than setting. I wanted place to have its own historical tensions, which the characters then had to work within, and which form the constraints around what they can imagine. 

It has required quite a lot of research, but I have really loved that. Like, I love the way Kathleen on Branch, because it’s in 1919, needed very precise work to find out what was happening in terms of deforestation, and farming practices, and how aware this Pākehā family might have been of the fact that other people had been essentially evicted from that land.

Also, one of the challenges of that deep immersion of history is trying to make it speak to the present, while not imposing present-day understandings on my characters. 

There’s that weird thing of trying to line everything up, where someone needs to be a certain age to witness a particular event, but not have children when they’re 80 …

It’s partly worldbuilding, and then the world gives you your material, and your constraints.

Is it creatively helpful for you to have those constraints?

I really like it. Somehow, it seems like it’s liberating and enriching … I think. Except for when you get it wrong, and you realise that you have made someone have a baby when they’re 80. I have got quite a few characters who seem to be having late-life babies, because I wanted to stretch the generations. I now also have an elaborate spreadsheet to keep track of everyone. 

But having constraints, and some decisions that don’t have to be made, that just have to be worked with, seems really useful for fiction. Obviously, there’s a lot more freedom in fiction than in nonfiction where the constraints are more set and you can’t give people, for example, extra family members. For me, that’s been exciting – that I can just change things.

Kathleen On Branch is set in a particular place in a particular moment, but the characters are fictional, and I found that was great and enriching. The ones that I have found especially hard are the ones with real historical people and working out how much I can imagine in that space. The big ones there are Mary Wollstonecraft, and then Truby King is the other. Do you know about Truby King? 

I don’t. 

Truby King started Plunket, still our largest support service for parents with babies and young children. Late in his life he lived just across the valley, in Melrose. You can almost see it from this office. And he has a mausoleum, so, you know, he had a state funeral. Big New Zealand historical figure, really influential, but also a eugenicist and also said and wrote some pretty terrible things about women. 

He’s a bit player in one of my stories, so I feel like I have a responsibility to get that right. There are real problems with Truby King, but also there were some good things associated with him. Working out how to write that nuance into a story has been hard. 

I’ve gone sideways in that story and told it as the story of the gardener’s daughter as a little girl, told by her older self looking back.

Just a caricatured bad guy is not very interesting. And also, generally, if it’s that straightforward, they won’t have been that influential. So, I feel like possibly doing good history also makes good fiction. But it does make me anxious …

I think – or I tell myself – that if I’m anxious about it, it’s probably a productive creative space … 

It’s partly that it feels to me like it matters. It matters that this engagement is true in some way. Not so much right, but true. 

I’m interested in that, because you’re also an academic. Do you feel like that conversation between creative writing and your academic work is part of a cohesive project – different ways of unpicking the same things – or are you just trying to do everything that you’re interested in?

I think they’re just different ways of approaching the similar things that I’m interested in. In my academic work, I was interested in writing about bits of women’s lives that, for various reasons, were hard to see. For example, women who were on the move but who didn’t fit the conventional travel or hero narrative. What did that look like in literature? And, I was interested in putting different kinds of things alongside each other and saying if we look at these together how does our understanding of the world tilt? 

I think that’s the same thing I’m doing in Nine Lives; delving into lots of small moments in lives that are hard to see as important, and putting them alongside each other.  This is why I love having Mary Wollstonecraft in there. The story that goes before her story – in the current draft – is about a woman living in a flat on her own with her baby, sometime in twenty-first century New Zealand. [Wollstonecraft] is Big Feminism – obviously old-school, white feminism, but I like the idea that you put these stories alongside each other, and then it’s like, what happens? How are these lives in fact still part of the same conversation? 

Both in terms of narrative and politics, my thinking about unpicking structures is bedded on my academic understanding. And writing fiction has given me another way of exploring this. 

Across the breadth of your work, I’ve been thinking about how we’re not very good at expressing the past in the present: we’re good at looking back and recognising Mary Wollstonecraft, but not at making connections to the present.

And I think when we do, it is often this progressive narrative – there was this, and then there was this. But our current moment might be telling us that it doesn’t work that way. 

Actually, initially, I got interested in Wollstonecraft because she lived in a radical moment where it looked as though many things were going to change for the better, and then it didn’t. There was a backlash. When I understood that, which was probably in my early twenties, I found it profoundly shocking and scary. And I think that’s probably one of the reasons I keep going back to that moment, where things open up and just that reminder that you gotta hold on, ’cause what’s coming next isn’t always better. 

That seems connected to your interest in ecology and in crisis, and the interplay between crises building, and things moving and things not moving.

Yeah, I’m interested in political despair at the moment and how one narrates that, beyond stasis. I think that some of my characters are grappling with that – it’s also quite hard to write fiction in that space. But I’m interested in reading that. So, I guess that’s part of why I’m trying to write. 

I do feel like watching that sort of long history makes it easier to see shifts now, when there’s a longer history instead of this slightly hysterical, compressed present. Even writing those stories [in Nine Lives] here in New Zealand, where the trees get cut down, but then in a later story, actually, the kererū and the kākā are back … Things don’t always get better, but they also don’t always get worse.

So that’s been a really interesting thing, paying attention to ecologies and having trees grow and disappear and then come back. It’s like that Richard Powers project [The Overstory], which is trying to partly have the landscape set the narrative time. That was one thing I was interested in getting away from: narrative time always being around a human lifespan. 

During your Writers on Mondays talk, you mentioned that you’re quite irritated when you were writing Where We Swim, because there was this whole narrative of New Zealand’s rivers and waters becoming unswimmable, and you wanted to know what that actually meant. Does your work often come out of irritation?

Irritation, or puzzlement, or curiosity. I think there has to be something I don’t understand – that’s probably the nub of it. That sense that whatever story has been told doesn’t explain it to me. So, I want to write my way into that space and understand it, whether that’s in nonfiction, or with a story.

I’m trying to think if any of my other stories in Nine Lives come from irritation. There’s a late story about a climate activist, which started from reading a judge’s statement saying that an activist had not cared about other people. And there seemed to me to be a terrible mismatch between the actions of a climate activist and the idea that they did it because they didn’t care about other people.

I’m interested too, in your big stories, versus small, domestic ones. We’re all just doing small lives as part of world historical processes and then there’s a bigger picture of ecological and deep time processes … That wasn’t a question. Sorry.

You know, I can’t really write political discourse. That’s not my mode. That’s not how I understand the world. So, the way in which fiction and creative nonfiction can explain some of those connections feels important.

What have you been reading this year? Is there anything that’s been unexpectedly helpful?

I just finished Richard Flanagan’s Question Seven. I thought it was quite extraordinary. I don’t know if you know that book. 

I know it exists. 

It’s a sort of memoir of him and his father. And it’s about Hiroshima and the nuclear bomb, and about the genocide in Tasmania, and climate devastation. It does a pretty amazing job of setting those things alongside each other and not being utterly hopeless. 

I actually have a reading journal. Can I pull up my reading journal? It will remind me what I’ve read.

Since I’ve got it up, you might as well see: it’s all colour-coded by genre. That’s the list, and then sometimes I write notes on them. I realise that’s pretty nerdy. 

I’m midway through Ngahuia Te Awekotuku’s memoir [Hine Toa], which is great. I’m a big Elizabeth Strout fan; I just read Tell Me Everything, which is her new one, and I’ve read almost all of hers. I love that there are characters that move between her short stories and her novels. I’ve now been reading her for about eight years. She’s got a lot of Lucy Barton books where Lucy Barton appears as a narrator, and then there’s the Olive Kitteridge books. And then in this last one, she put them – Lucy and Olive – together in one novel. She’s also writing them in real-time. So, the one before this was the first pandemic book I read. 

This year I have been reading things like Charlotte Wood’s interviews with writers. And, Reading Like an Australian Writer, which is a really great collection. Just writers talking about writing. And there’s so much good New Zealand stuff. That Flora Feltham book, Bad Archive, is fantastic. I’ve been going to the Reading Environments reading group at the Adam Art Gallery; I found a lot of their contemporary readings on environmental thinking helpful for my writing, in terms of opening up new ideas. I’ve also been thinking a lot about the structure of Tina Makereti’s new novel, The Mires. 

I was reading Pip Adam’s interview from a few years ago, and she was saying that she walked around and talked to academics from disciplines that weren’t hers as well. 

I feel like I should have done a little more of that. But yeah, that reading group’s been great and I have done various things. Like, I went and talked to Su Ballard, who’s in Art History, and said ‘I’ve got my characters, they’re walking through Wellington in 1955, and I want them to encounter some art. What do you think?’ And she gave me some great ideas, including giving me photographs of an art exhibition outside the library. And that’s in the story.

That’s exciting! One of the things I was wondering about was what it’s like being a writer here specifically. We’re in this lovely office with big views, and there’s lots of smart people just bumping around …

Yeah, it’s so amazing. I’ve never had a writing space before. I have a little desk at home, set up in our bedroom, which I share with my partner, so it’s quite a different situation. When I arrive here I have a sense of stillness. And I’ve never had a computer that isn’t my work computer before – this computer doesn’t shout at me, there’s not a lot of emails. So, I’ve found the quiet of a space dedicated to writing incredible.

But, I also love that when I walk out my office door, there’s people to talk to about things. And it’s really valuable to have people around who understand what it is to make creative work. 

I noticed that no one knocks on my door, which sometimes makes me sad, so I keep it open when I want to signal I’m open to conversation. But I think people here know that sometimes you’re immersed for two hours and if someone knocks on the door, you go back to the beginning of the two hours. Supervising an MA student has been really important, too. And, knowing that there are 30 people through that wall [to the MA workshop room] who are all going to have to produce a manuscript in eight months. I found that inspiring. 

What’s extraordinary is the space and the quiet combined with the stimulation of people doing interesting things around you and talking about writing. And high-quality coffee conversations. Kate Duignan and I have talked a lot this year.

I think that to people who don’t write, writing often seems kind of mystical, and also very solitary – like writers just go into these rooms and do magical things and then emerge. So, I feel like every interview with a writer has to ask ‘what do you actually do? What’s your process?’

I think what I’m learning more is that it’s different at different stages of a project. I’m now generating the new material for the new project and remembering that I love this stage. At the moment, I come in in the morning, I have a lot of flashcards, I know what scene I’m going to write each day. So, I sit in that chair and I look at my flashcards, remember where I’m up to, and then I sit down and write a thousand words. And sometimes then it’s eleven or twelve, and I’ve done that, and it’s no use doing anymore.

There’s lots of other things I can do at that point, but on other projects. When I’m writing, when I’m generating new work, that’s almost always how I work. It’s just making in the morning, and trying not to put too much pressure on. 

I have changed my process while I’ve been here because I’ve had more time. It’s pretty incredible to just get to focus on the thing and not have to be constantly putting it aside and constantly stopping because you’re doing other work. And because I’m writing it the day before, every morning when I come back, it’s live.

It’s extraordinary to me that you’ve told me, ‘I need my morning writing time, let’s meet at two pm.’  My brain doesn’t start working until two pm, maybe.

Before I had kids, I would often get up and do a seven to eight am time at home before I went into my job, and before I checked email, and that’s how I would do the writing. Obviously, that’s not really a process that works with children. But yeah, I’ve always been a morning writer. 

You’ve said that Travelling With Augusta is sort of a prequel to Where We Swim in some specific ways. I was thinking again about the idea of immersing yourself in different elements: immersing yourself in water and immersing yourself in family, and the domestic, and history …

And immersing yourself in life stage; I think that’s something I’ve become more interested in. Travelling With Augusta is definitely my leaving home book. It’s my working out, who am I, and doing it through someone else. I think often early books are about trying to detach from your family. 

I wrote Where We Swim in my early to mid-forties. It’s more like a midlife what happens now? book, and also about midlife in a time of climate crisis, and having all these tendrils of connections. Immersing is the right word. Really looking at something and going deep into it. I loved writing Where We Swim. That was the only book that’s come to me. It just came and said, ‘you have to write this.’ And I was like, ‘okay!’

A lot of people, including writers, seem very interested in where ideas come from and how we get enough ideas together in a little basket to say, ‘oh, maybe this is something.’

It’s funny. I feel like I’m getting more faith in that. When I did Bill Manhire’s writing course when I was 20, 21, I didn’t think I had anything to write about. Now, I feel like there’s so many things to write about. With Nine Lives, the thing that got me going was when I wrote one story and then I imagined that these women could all be together in a book. That enabled me to feel I could write them, because they weren’t going to have to stand alone. So, that was helpful for me in terms of having faith in my idea.

So you’ve got Nine Lives –is the other one more finished or less?

Nine Lives is finished, submitted and we’re about to go into editing. I began that last year. I also had a Creative New Zealand grant to begin that last year, so I was finishing that. The new one’s current working title is Seeds.

Is it helpful for you to have something to edit and something you’re still actively writing?

It was good at the beginning, and then all the reworking of Nine Lives, including new stories, took over. Now I’m back to quite a good balance. But, yeah, writing them in parallel has turned out to be a bit challenging. Things have been jumping between texts. 

When you’re actually making work, though, you can go quite fast. I think I’ve had ten days straight of a thousand words a day. That’s a good chunk. Although, since last Monday, it’s all just notes and nothing’s really been made. 

Not to be too mystical about it, but it is quite amazing when a character suddenly comes forward and says something you don’t expect. And you’re like, ‘Ah, okay, something else is going on in this interaction that I didn’t know when I sat down at the computer this morning.’

There’s a Nabokov quote where someone asked him that sort of question, about whether his characters do unexpected things, and he said, [paraphrasing], ‘Nope, they are my foot soldiers, they go where I tell them to.’ But I like the slightly organic, mystical process of it as well. 

The breakthrough for me to actually write fiction, instead of just thinking that I’d like to, was when I started thinking, I don’t care if anyone likes it or not. I’m having fun doing this. And this is an okay way to spend my time. There was a certain liberating clarity to that.

I mean, I will soon also have to get another job as well. But I now have faith that I will keep writing. I have faith there will be another book which will help me think through whatever it is that seems important to think through in that moment, whatever that moment is. It’s a huge privilege to be able to do that.

Being part of producing arts and culture is in many ways a position of privilege, but it’s also so necessary. Like, we can’t just have policy proposals.

I’m not entirely sure what the other thing we need to do is right now, but I do know there is more we need to do than write fiction. Still, creative work is one thing that we can do that is in some way resisting a kind of mechanisation of life. I understand the world through literature, and so I know how it feeds and makes an understanding, how it can shift how someone sees the world. That’s the thing that probably keeps me going when our current situation – both locally and globally – seems pretty dire, and things seem terribly urgent. 

And an act of faith, that there’s going to be a future to write to, and a heart somewhere out there that will be moved?

I think so. And also just the way in which you have to have empathy for your characters, and you love your characters; that there are these people and you have to imagine how life is for them. There’s a sort of active faith that people are worth thinking about.

Your writing is so connected to place and the parish; I guess the lingering thing, particularly around the IIML, is the spectre of capital-N New Zealand Literature. We’ve talked a little about how Australian writers have a very strong sense of being Australian writers. Are New Zealand writers as self-conscious?

Where We Swim was published in Australia and New Zealand and felt like an Australian book to me as much as a New Zealand book because of what I’d been reading. I’m not sure about Nine Lives yet, but I did especially want to be part of a New Zealand conversation with this book. I don’t think New Zealand writers are as self-conscious about it as they used to be. New Zealand literature is so alive and rich and diverse and incredible right now that it just seems like a cool thing to be part of.