The Pole
The Pole: PreambleThis 500 word short-short story appeared in my first collection, Extreme Weather Events (2001). It reflects my continuing fascination with the events of December 1911 and January 1912, when the Norwegian expedition under Roald Amundsen and the British expedition under Robert Falcon Scott contended, with their different methods and different personalities, to be the first in recorded history to reach the Sout

Genre Benders: How Interstitial Fiction Is Bringing Speculative Fiction and Literary Fiction Togethe
This is a lightly edited version of my article of the same name in the journal English in Aotearoa, Issue 67, April 2009. Keen readers of the genres I discuss will be aware that I have missed out much more than I have included!.1. What is Interstitial Fiction?What do you call a short story that incorporates the Soviet Politburo of the mid-1980s, the early science fiction of Arthur C. Clarke, consensus decision-making techniques, matter transmitters, the KGB and emissaries from the Galactic Federation?You might call the story "Win a Day with Mikhail Gorbachev!", as I did when I wrote it

Book Review: Watching For Smoke, by Helen Heath
Sometimes, you can judge a book by its cover.Paekakariki poet Helen Heath's chapbook Watching for Smoke, recently published by Seraph Press and available from Seraph Press or on Etsy, is a beautiful package both inside and out, with its card cover featuring an inserted knitting needle and its coloured and textured end-papers.The epigraph to Watching for Smoke is:Family is a waiting fusewatching for smoke.Family is the subject of these poems: partners, c

Wellington Essay: Close To The Edge
This article appeared in the Dominion Post's Wellington Essay series in December 2007. It makes me think of summer.Nothing stays the same on Mount Victoria. The pines through which I walk with my son weren't here in 1930 and won't be here in 2030. On one side of the Mount Victoria ridge, the Basin Reserve used to be a swamp. On the other, Miramar used to be an island. Film crews come and go. Mountain bikes race by. Tracks narrow or widen, appear or disappear.But things stay the same long enough that I have been walking these tracks for more than twenty years, and I hope to walk them for many more years yet. When I still lived in Dunedin, I used to visit W

Under Government and Restraint: An Interview With David Howard
After serving as a pyrotechnics supervisor for acts such as Metallica and Janet Jackson, David Howard retired to Purakanui in order to write. His collaboration with photographer Fiona Pardington, How To Occupy Our Selves, was published in 2003. A draft of the opening poem "There You