TURBINE | KAPOHAU

Anna Smaill is this year’s Writer in Residence at the IIML. She completed an MA in Creative Writing there in 2001 and has a PhD in English Literature from University College, University of London. Anna’s first book of poetry, The Violinist in Spring, was released in 2005 by Te Herenga Waka University Press. Her first novel, The Chimes, published in 2015, was longlisted for the Booker Prize and translated into four languages. Her second novel, Bird Life, published in 2023, was longlisted for the Ockham Book Awards.  

When you first were announced as the Writer in Residence, you mentioned it’d been 24 years since you first set foot in the IIML building as a student. What’s it like returning as Writer in Residence? 

It has been 24 years — that’s quite terrifying. I remember Charlotte Randall was the Writer in Residence during my year, 2001. One of the best things about that year was the guest lectures from published working writers, including Charlotte. Each time it was proof that you could in fact make a life writing in the world. And to be treated as a peer by a published writer, that was remarkable. One of the great things about the MA in general — as Damien [Wilkins] said in the mihi whakatau — is it’s not some hierarchy up on the hill telling you what to do. The ethos is one of shared endeavour. Everyone’s grappling with the same questions. The published writers might have gone through the process a few more times. They might be further along in something that resembles a career. But they are still constantly asking themselves the same questions you’re probably asking, as a student. 

Charlotte was very generous. I remember she talked about writing her first novel, Dead Sea Fruit. I recall her revealing that she hadn’t planned out a coherent, linear plot. She’d simply started — hopscotching around, hearing the voices, writing the bits that she knew, and working out the bigger picture as it emerged. She’d discovered by doing. That was quite a revelation for me. Even though I was writing poetry. I must have stored the advice up, as it was a reassuring touchstone when I started writing my first novel. It was an enabling idea. You never know when these pieces of wisdom are going to be helpful. Which is the writing life, I suppose. 

Do you have a moment where you switched from poetry to fiction? Were you always dabbling in fiction?  

I was deeply committed to poetry during my MA year. But when I first started writing, it was always story. It’s always story, isn’t it? Does any kid start out by writing poems? Maybe they do. Actually, I’m remembering some very bad rhymed poems from my childhood, and also, being entranced by my dad reading me James K Baxter. But really, the first seduction into writing was through reading. And the deepest pull there was always story. The power of trying your own hand was heady. I remember those blue Pacific exercise books at school. The moment when you realise, ‘Oh, I don’t need to stop after a few pages. I could just keep on going!’ And then, ‘I’m really writing!’ And suddenly there are fifteen pages, and you feel like a genius. I wrote stories passionately right through school.  

But clearly there was a time where it became something I didn’t think I could do as readily. As a young adult, I didn’t see myself as a fiction writer. I saw fiction as something other people did, that was beyond me. I suspect I was too solipsistic a teenager, locked in my subjective experience. Very shy and very insular and found the act of imagination required to project myself into someone else’s life very daunting. Yet fiction always did seem like that fairy land through the door. It was something I knew I wanted.  

What changed for you? How did you get to writing fiction? 

I think it was after I finished my PhD. I had been so completely immersed in poetry up until that point. I’d written my portfolio for the MA in Creative Writing, then redrafted that until it was a more substantial collection that I submitted for publication [The Violinist in Spring]. Then the next natural avenue that emerged was to continue studying poetry academically. I began my PhD in the belief that academic work was a necessary complementary endeavour for my creative writing. I always had this idea that you worked your way up through academic discipline to a creative pinnacle. I don’t quite know where I got that idea from; that the academic work was like a necessary scaffold to the creative work. Possibly, I thought I was a modernist poet.  

Then I suspect I reached the point where I was a bit tired of it. Possibly a bit worn down by my own seriousness. ‘Poetry / I, too, dislike it’ (Thanks, Marianne Moore!). There was something quite primitive and atavistic about turning to fiction. I think I was looking for a return to childhood fun and the pre-analytical pleasure of being read to. The joy of that. The joy of play. I had reached the point where I wasn’t able to access that very well through poetry. I began reading a lot of young adult fiction, and the books I’d loved as a kid — which was part of the return. I found myself trying to source old books that I’d forgotten.  

You were returning to the Leys Library! [Both Lucy and Anna’s childhood library is Leys Library in Ponsonby]. Were you re-reading the shelf? Did you try to go from A to Z? I made that my goal at one point.  

All roads lead to Leys! One of those defining childhood experiences is the physicality of the library shelves, how you choose to navigate them. How tall you are; what you can reach at the time. I didn’t do it alphabetically like you, but I definitely tackled those shelves as a project. It was literally possible to read all of the children’s fiction in Ley’s Library. I can’t say I did that. But I got through a lot of it. 

As an adult, when I was returning to these books, I often had the singular experience of having a profound core memory of a novel, but no recall of the title, or who wrote it. I went through a phase of trying to put authors to plotlines that had lived in my head since childhood. I spent a lot of time on BookSleuth, the AbeBooks forum where you can post your remembered plotline and helpful people with too much time on their hands make suggestions to aid identification. I found several old books through that. The Monica Dickens Favour book. A particularly haunting Jacqueline Wilson novel. 

 Living in England at the time, it was easier to get hold of secondhand books. I read the beloved old stuff, including quite a lot of Rosemary Sutcliff. And some newer Young Adult, like Patrick Ness. I read The Knife of Never Letting Go around that time.  

Anyway, to return to your question about what prompted the shift to fiction. I had finished the PhD. I had made the decision that I didn’t want to be an academic after all — though to be fair, the Global Financial Crisis had helped me to make that decision too. No jobs. Then, one of those recurring patchwork career moments of standing at a crossroads and thinking: What do I do next? Who am I? How do I define myself?  

I thought about what would make me happy. This was before I had kids, I should add, when one had the freedom to ask such questions. The two things I thought of were: I could go to Paris, or I could write a book, a children’s book. Those two things seemed the ideal for happiness at the time. 

What happened to Paris!? 

It’s always there, it’s always there! I didn’t go to Paris at the time, but I did start writing a children’s novel, a young adult novel. It was wonderful. It was so intoxicating. And I thought, why have I withheld this from myself for so long? I love poetry, and I do always come back to poetry, though more often as a reader now. But there’s something so wonderfully fun about fiction. I loved it, and it felt like a game, and it felt like play. Obviously, this is the rose-tinted version from the perspective of completion. The book I started writing in London was The Chimes. That’s where it started, the dream of fiction.  

And you started writing The Chimes as a YA novel as well?  

Yes, absolutely. I still think it is a YA novel. I think the only thing that distinguishes it from what is labelled YA at present, is perhaps the complexity of the prose style. But I was aiming squarely at younger readers.  

I have that gripe with YA, sometimes the prose is too simplistic. Kids are smarter than we think.  

Absolutely. And I read children’s fiction that was published in the ‘60s and ‘70s that is now being republished as adult fiction. There’s this perception that children can’t manage complexity or ambiguity, or challenging prose. Which is obviously bullshit.  

I agree. When you were delving into YA and children’s literature in London, did it feel like a connection back to New Zealand and your childhood?  

That’s interesting. I didn’t think about it at the time. At the time we were really considering whether it was an option for us to stay in England. What shifted the decision, I think, was getting pregnant. I wanted my daughter to experience the childhood that I had. There were so many wonderful things, things we still miss, about life in England. But there was something powerful in seeking to replicate your own upbringing and the freedom of a New Zealand childhood.  

A wanderlust for your own childhood, and nostalgia? 

Definitely. In some ways coming back to New Zealand was quite useful in finishing off The Chimes, because it gave me the separation from the reality of that location.  

It’s interesting, and possibly characteristic of a certain New Zealand experience, but I had a lot of imaginative ties to England from my upbringing. My parents had lived in London when my dad did his PhD. My sister was born there. We’d digested so much English literature. E. M. Nesbit and Arthur Ransome, Frances Hodgkins Burnett — all that Anglophile reading. England was very much connected with a world of the imagination. Going over there was both discovering the reality of living in what was quite a challenging city —  having to make a living and study fulltime and hold it all together — and seeing this romance and mystery of that undercurrent of literature. It’s an odd element of the colonial experience.  

And yet we also read a huge amount of children’s literature from New Zealand. So, there’s the question of whether occupying an imaginary England in fiction was a way of absconding from the nationalist imaginative responsibility… That’s a whole other discussion! Anyway, when I came back, the London I imagined from Berhampore was quite different from the one I would have created in London. I would have written a different book if I’d stayed. What I took back was a sensory world as much as a literary one. The city got under my skin in some way. Though, working on it from New Zealand did create challenges. It would certainly have been easier to do my final research checks in London. Google Maps was useful, but there was some glossing over of detail.  

That’s the beauty of fiction though, isn’t it? If your audience’s belief is still suspended, then you’re good. 

Exactly. I feel like a lot of writers are more painstaking in their observation of specific physical details than I am.  

Yes! Like the Auckland Writers Festival panel we both went to, with Catherine Chidgey. How she has to get the exact details correct. Phenomenal, but that’s not me.  

Absolutely, I’m so intrigued by that. I don’t work like that either. I’m not a very ordered researcher; it’s a very haphazard and organic process. The novel I’ve been working on this year has involved a lot more research than I’ve ever undertaken. So, I’ve been trying to understand what I find useful, and what generative and fruitful research looks like. It’s been interesting. 

What’s been interesting about it for you? 

I think realising I don’t feel I know how to do it.  

But you have a PhD!  

Academic research is its own thing, though. And my favourite element of literary criticism, which was what my thesis was in, is close reading. I love thinking through the influence of history and autobiography on literature, but for me the most interesting and useful critical stuff happens between the writer and the text and the reader and the text. I think what I end up doing in my fiction research is looking for the primary texts that catch or flare in some way; the ones that prompt my curiosity. From there I’m trying to build a world, an awareness of what I do and don’t know, so I can pinpoint with precision the details I need.  

But I’m not at all painstaking. I was trying to explain this to Carl [Shuker, Smaill’s husband]. I think my discomfort with the research process is analogous with the discomfort it’s possible to feel in writing itself. I don’t know if you experience this. Sometimes when you’re writing a novel, a big project, everything feels entirely wrong, everything is impossible, nothing is working. Then you come to a breakthrough, a moment of realisation, an epiphany, that casts light back on everything. In those moments, you ideally find what’s not working, and how to fix it. Then you have a wave of energy that runs through and it’s a force that pushes you along to the next phase.  

My orientation to the research is quite similar. At first there’ll be a morass of information. No grip or handhold. Just a massive angst of stuff that I don’t know how to tie myself to. I’ll read and read and read in a very disparate, non-sporadic, non-systematic way. Everything I read is hitting me, but it doesn’t adhere. Suddenly, there’ll be a moment of it coming together, a hook, a breakthrough. And unbeknownst to me, it’ll have moved along, like a heartbeat.  

It’s funny, when you mention the force that propels you – for me it’s wanting to know more.  

Yes, the desire to learn more and to know what you don’t know. The research and writing process is destabilising, though. That feels like a crucial part of it. Not for masochistic reasons, just because… maybe it needs to be humbling? An undoing as well as a building? I’m coming through the other side now, and looking over the process I’ve been through. I look back at my earlier forays of plot in relation to this particular book’s challenge. ‘God,’ I think, ‘I was so naïve! I had absolutely zero clue.’ Yet, even now, I couldn’t sit down and explain to you everything I have learned necessarily. It’s a textural and textual build-up of awareness, language and resonance.  

I think if there’s too much of my conscious brain getting involved, I can’t draw on it. I can always tell when something’s being written in that superficial layer of researched awareness. It has to go down deeper into a compost layer of thinking or imagery. It’s always the imagery, the idea cluster, the abstraction, that sticks with me, rather than the finer details.  

I think this is a good point to ask — what’s the novel you’ve been working on this year? 

The million-dollar question! It’s quite strange, and it has changed a lot over the year. The one sentence description is that it’s an archival quest novel about 18th century chimneypieces. I had a great condensed elevator pitch for The Chimes, but this book doesn’t lend itself to that. It’s a book that wants to ask questions, I think, about the conditions of creating art. What if we exist in a world where those conditions can’t be met? It’s set in a semi dystopian world, or perhaps it’s just a projected late-period capitalist breakdown. And one of the currencies of this world is art and antiques. I have been thinking a lot about what it means that we’ve just scrapped the teaching of Art History in NCEA in New Zealand.  

But it’s still evolving. I don’t know if you have this experience when you’re writing? I very rarely know the bigger picture or the ultimate shape of a book when I start out. I have a feeling, or a series of problems and textures, that I want to engage with, and then it develops from that. 

Yeah, I found that with my manuscript this year. One of the biggest things I learnt this year was trusting yourself and backing yourself.  

Absolutely. I’ve been thinking about writing process and practice a lot this year. One of the incredible gifts of the residency is that it gives you time to ask yourself how writing works for you. Going deeper into that question has been one of the biggest gains for me this year. I had coffee with Damien in February or March and I was so full of confidence. ‘I’ve made so many mistakes in my past novels; I’ve wasted so much time. This time I’m really going to plot it out before I go.’ And I did. I used index cards to sketch out scenes and laid them all out and moved them around. I had never done that before. It encouraged a degree of fluency for me and enabled fast work. I quite quickly ploughed through the first draft of the book.  

But, then I reached the end of that draft and realised I hadn’t solved it quite as neatly as I’d thought. I’d just got to the start of thinking about what the book was doing. It certainly made some things quicker, but it wasn’t necessarily easier. Maybe there’s never a straightforward solution. But I’ve learned a lot about what works and the different phases I go through. I am now going back and, I guess, living inside the book and the plot more deeply. And that requires the trust to follow different tributaries and sub-plots. For me, the work is always inside the book. You’ve got to build it from the ground up, you can’t scaffold it and then construct it.  

Is music part of this book as well? After being weaved through The Chimes, Bird Life and The Violinist in Spring?

Not really, surprisingly. That’s the first time I’ve thought about it. The Chimes is obviously deeply musical, and Bird Life has a musician as part of the plot and is structured around The Magic Flute. But this novel doesn’t have any overt ties. Music is always part of the books in the patterning and the resonances, and they always do trace back to my own experience with music in some way. I like the idea of a shapeliness or a symmetry that’s formal in the way classical music demands. But it’s not overtly connected plot wise, at all. Nothing like Philip Hensher who has structured novels around particular musical forms. Although, because some of it is set in the 18th century, I have been listening to a lot of Mozart.  

I’m yet to find this, being in the process of writing my first novel. What’s it like finishing a book? 

It’s always very odd afterwards when you move into the public sphere to talk about the work. In all cases, I’ve felt very distant from the book itself. It feels as though it happened quite separately from me. Perhaps it’s also that the ownership transfers. The creative process shifts to the reader. I very rarely want to go back and read my work once it’s published.  

How do you get back into the creative process again after publishing?  

I know a lot of people recommend that as soon as your book’s gone to the agent or publisher, you start writing again. I haven’t been very successful with that. I tend to need a bit of time to come down off the creative experience and to separate myself and be someone who’s just living again. It’s a great mystery — where does the spark come from? What is the generative feeling, the thing that propels you to sit down and write a new book? I think you just get sick of your own head, or you get sick of not writing, and you build up a head of steam. There’s a slightly antagonistic thing for me in that there needs to be a problem or a puzzle that writing is the only way to solve.  

This year I’ve been really intent on trying to… not solve, but — to find names for some of the different parts of the creative process. Not to harness or control it, but to feel like I can create the conditions to enable it. Again, this is the benefit of the residency and writing full time. It’s so rare to get the chance to reflect on this. I’m quite used to writing being the side-hustle. The thing that happens around other things. That doesn’t necessarily allow for such self-reflection.  

I’ve discovered that I can parent and write, or parent and work, but it’s a particularly tricky balance doing three things: parenting, writing and working. Perhaps as the kids get older, the possibility of that triangle becomes more realistic.  

Especially as your kids’ needs shift. 

I guess the dream for all writers is to find the perfect part-time job that pays really well but also enables you creatively. 

Exactly, and doesn’t take your soul with it.  

Yes, that doesn’t generate too much stress or emotional demand, and that frees you to be a little bit bored, even, so you can spend that time percolating. But not too boring… 

Are you listening, Seek? Can you find us a job? 

I do feel that what I’ve learned this year, the sort of reflection on process that has been possible, will enable me to be better at that equation. In this way the residency has a huge value beyond just the one year. It’s setting down long-term foundations for ongoing creative work in and around other things.  

That’s really cool. How do you and Carl juggle all this, since you’re both writers? 

I think in all families with two working individuals it’s a challenge. Often, almost inadvertently, we’ve tended to tag-team big projects. This is the first time we’ve both been really in the thick of creative practice and generating words at the same time, which has been interesting. The last time we were both in parallel was probably 2013 when Carl had the IIML residency. We had just returned from London, Carl had the residency, I was full-time parenting. But then we had two days up at the Kelburn crèche and that was when I finished The Chimes. So, he got the residency and I got a little mini-residency (shout out to the IIML two-for-one writing deal). 

I’m a bit nervous returning to work and trying to juggle that and keep the writing momentum, after this year… 

Be optimistic, it’s all one can do! My goal is to keep the things that worked this year in place as much as possible. For me it’s the morning hours. And I’ve found having a whole writing day is better than any number of half-days. But I suspect that’s just a matter of discipline. 

To go back to an earlier question — what has and hasn’t changed in the IIML since you first entered? 

I adore the fact that the building hasn’t changed at all. 2001 was such an important year for me. The space and layout of the building is intrinsically connected to the MA experience. Coming down the stairs to the room and then looking out across Wellington harbour. It’s both trammelled and expansive. There’s enough structure around you, but it’s a very human space. All the rooms are slightly too small for anything other than writing or workshopping. You could never give a lecture here. And everyone’s stacked on top of each other so there is this wonderful writerly experience of being both by yourself, but part of a ladder of creativity. I love how it sits on the hill like this. I love the fact that Katie [Hardwick-Smith] and Clare [Moleta] are in the office and all the same posters are up in the kitchen and the same New Yorker cartoon by the photocopier about pretending to be a writer at cocktail parties. And there is the same energy also. It’s the energy of excitement and play and people meeting each other with the highest shared ideals of creative work and collegiality. I think the biggest change is that there’s been an explosion of numbers. The separation into different forms: page, script, poetry and creative non-fiction, and the addition of the Māori and Pasifika stream. A huge leap in scale and very much a thronging vibe.  

I was surprised by how the time feels. It’s this great cliché of adult life that so many years pass and it feels like the blink of an eye. But still, it’s terrifyingly true.  

Does having written poetry inform your fiction? I always think about Lauris Edmond’s quote on the Wellington Writers’ Walk ‘This is the city of action. The world headquarters of the verb’ and have that stuck in my head when making my characters do things — show, not tell.

Yes, poetry is a wonderful, portable, economical kitset for writing in general. The magic thing about poetry is it fits so much into one small operational machine that can propel so much. I often find an idea that’s in this really condensed, nutty form within a poem and it will be something I spend a whole novel thinking about, or unpicking. Or I’ll realise certain imagery from a poem has gone in deep for me and is now percolating out in prose.  

It’s been interesting when I’ve been working at uni in the same space as a lot of the poets, and they’ve been trying to distil their ideas to a concise sentence. And then there’s me, trying to expand it all.  

It’s that systole-diastole thing that I talked about earlier, I think. I found when I was editing The Chimes that I’d follow a poetic impulse towards concision and economy. Then I’d have to stop myself. You need a bit of bagginess and airiness so that the reader can inhabit the world.  

And then conversely, when you’re editing you’re trying to get rid of the fluff so that you have the perfect amount of bagginess and space.  

Absolutely. It’s so much about rhythm and the dramatic impulse of inhabiting and embodying space and time and event. It’s so interesting to me, the many different ways of approaching fiction. It can be as lyrical or as evasive or elliptical or as plainly built as a poem, but the story canvas is also so vast. It’s quite seductive. I think I’ll keep going.