Show Notes
I have been a fan of Shilo Kino's writing since reading her award winning book The Pōrangi Boy (Huia, 2020) a few years ago. What I love about The Pōrangi Boy is the way it really successfully finds a fictional form to explore the troubling things that are happening around and to us. I’m never sure if fiction can do anything. I still think we need to take direct political action in other areas - and Shilo is active in this work as well - but I think there is something quite radical and productive about experimenting with real-life scenarios in worlds that we have complete control over. I think this imaginative act can open doors that seem - in the day-to-day hard stuff of life - closed and impossible. I think Shilo’s deft craft makes this possible - I could probably talk for another few hours about the genius of the structure of the novel and the imaginative possibilities it makes space for.
So, yeah, I was very excited when a copy of Shilo's new novel All that We Own Know (Moa Press, 2024), I really like keeping in that struck out word in the title, arrived at my house. It is a stunning book. Shilo is an incredible writer and she's created a book that is at once readible and challenging. The energy of the book is profound and the way it moves with force against some of the toughest things facing Aotearoa at the moment makes it one of my favourite books of the year.
I'm really grateful to Shilo for taking the time to chat with me for this episode. Where we talk about All the We Own Know, writing and the communities and politics we write in.
Thanks for listening.
Action: Māori Wards
The racist and undemocratic Māori Ward Bill passed its third reading last night.
Action Station have information about this law, its implications and action you can take on their website - here is a link.
Action Station have also have a petition to Keep Our Māori Wards which you can sign and share at this link
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More from Better off Read
On the 5th of September this year, i was lucky enough to be in an event at Word Festival called I Wish I Wrote That with an incredibly talented line-up of writers including Jon Toogood. Jon had an event before ours and i watched him perform 'Home Again' on acoustic guitar from the Green Room. Even backstage and through a screen i found myself moved to tears - it's an incredible piece of songwriting that just seems to hit me more and more profoundly. About five minutes into Jon's book signing i needed to go to the foyer and it was wild. One thing became really clear - people love Jon and Jon's book and Shihad. During our event, Jon read a really beautiful piece about Aldous Harding's song 'Treasure'. One of the really great things about Jon's memoir Home Again is the way he writes about music, not just the music he makes but the music he loves.
Helen and i have been friends for a long time. Over the years her work has been incredibly inspiring to me. When i say 'Helen's work' i mean her writing, her activism, her visual art, her journaling, her essays, her thinking, her teaching, her friendship, her family-ship, her gardening and all the other amazing things she does. i also admire the way it is quite hard to separate these 'works' out from each other. If there is such a thing as an artist's life i think Helen is a really great example of that. When we met a few weeks ago, Helen brought along her journal as the object to act as a starting place for this conversation.
September is such an exciting month because it sees the launch of The Valley of Unlikely Acquaintances an amazing novel written by Terri Te Tau and published by Spoor Books
i loved talking to Molly Crighton over Zoom earlier this month about her new novel The Body and the Blood out with Hachette New Zealand
i'm really grateful to Tīhema Baker for speaking with me about his new novel One Day a Taniwha (Hachette) i was a massive fan of Tīhema's last novel Turncoat and i've enjoyed hearing Tīhema talk over the last few years. i was lucky enough to read Tīhema's book last year and i loved it. i reread it for this podcast and i still love it. Maybe even more. It's an incredibly compelling story set in several planes of experience - centrally the waking and sleeping lives. It's an incredibly intelligent and beautiful novel. Through this deft craft i think it makes possible new ways of thinking about fatherhood, work, mental health and how these are effected by colonisation and colonialism. In our discussion i touch on how fresh and cutting edge Tīhema's depiction of fatherhood is. i just can't recommend it enough. This podcast was recorded over Zoom.