26 / chrysanthemum morifolium, gladiolus, goldenrod

Here we are again, baby!!! Here we are, each day anew!!! 🍬

Kia ora! 😘

Since last newsletter:

• I interviewed Hone Taukiri about The Gaza Dialogues, amid its sold-out season at Basement. You can read that over on bad apple, where links have also been included to ASHTAR Theatre (to which proceeds from the festival were donated) and other resources through which you can take day-to-day action in support of Palestine.

• I answered 5 Questions from Paula Green over on NZ Poetry Shelf, pertaining to writing, the concept of place, books I’ve been reading, what I look for in poems, and more.

At the beginning of 2024, I sat in a booth with two dear friends in the corner of the outdoor area at the gone-but-not-forgotten Conch in Ponsonby. We were repeating our choices of a word to represent our approaches to the coming year. We’d broached the topic separately with one-another in pairs, sides of the triangle connecting in a provocation set forth from one vertex, but here those edges joined; we shared our words, set our most loving challenges for each other. My word was ‘presence’, a sincere, many-sided grain.

The challenge my friends set me was around an essential aspect of my creative life that had fallen into neglect—which I’m deciding to see as a consequence of success and overload in other areas, not something for which to punish myself. I have—almost without realising—met the challenge in the subsequent months, lent into it severally and already felt the flow-on of that.

It was a well-chosen challenge, to go along with the ‘presence’ concept; I wanted to assert my own presence in my life, and ensure my own drives and ambitions were taking a more prominent place in the hierarchy of my priorities, and I also wanted to focus on the present moment, instead of constantly toiling in favour of a future that, by virtue of its state as future, is in a constant state of unreachable forward shift. I wanted to be concerted in my efforts to keep these things front of mind. Perhaps, over the course of the year, to buy into them. My friends’ prompt nestled itself in at the heart of that: foregrounding tangible investment in the true lodestar unfulfilled.

As I said, I’ve felt the flow-on of that challenge—felt the little ways I’ve been driven to meet it, after an initial period of worry that I’d let them down if I didn’t. I’ve felt it in rooms, in encounters, in material opportunities. Felt it the same way I’ve felt the purchase of new beloved clothing, or beginning to wear jewellery that has now long become a staple: that certain barriers to entry, or to a type of life or experience or expression of self, are our own creations. Surpassing them is simple, actually. There is no great, by-committee hurdle. You just have to get past whatever it is in your head that you think has denied permission.

It helps that there are people in my life providing wise exemplars for reframing the relationship between oneself and creativity. I don’t have the precise words to impart from one particularly instrumental friend—what I imagine I could draw together, from Instagram DMs and the like, I’m not inclined to share verbatim—but what it boils down to, what she’s given me and what I’ve built on, is the following:

Your creativity, should you choose to share it, is a gift you give the world. It is not something to degrade or downplay your propensity for, nor something for which you are meant to spend your life in a fight to prove your aptitude; it is not something you are being actively denied; it is not something with parameters already set, not those against which you find yourself rebelling; it is something you love, and something innate to you, and something you feel called to do. It’s the lens through which you view the world. It’s the guide that informs everything.

Just last night, actually, when I got home from the opening of Whānau Marama: New Zealand International Film Festival, I came across this extract from Marie-Louise von Franz’s Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales:

People who have a creative side and do not live it out are most disagreeable. They make a mountain out of a molehill, fuss about unnecessary things, are too passionately in love with somebody who is not worth much attention, and so on.

There is a kind of floating charge of energy in them which is not attached to its right object and therefore tends to apply exaggerated dynamism to the wrong situation.

I’ve felt that floating charge, a bit—I think I’ve written about it here. Energy with no outlet; knowing where it ought to go but not having the space or time or capacity to take a moment and let it get there. Being punitive in what I owe myself. All the learnings we take in, and take in, and take in, which so easily boil up and over again.

But I’m 26 today¹—which is probably why I’m thinking about the new year so far beyond both te tau hou Pākehā and Matariki. This is my own date marker, an opportunity to take stock: to chip away everything that isn’t Tate [or David, or Charli]; to figure out what’s next and most essential. What protected me before, but no longer serves a purpose? What, day to day, makes up the life I want? Where can I course correct that dynamism? Where does the fun live? How can I get in on more of it?

This is the task of a life, really, birthday or not. It’s probably the task of every one of these newsletters—this inadvertent litany of correspondence-essays devoted to the iterative process of living. And I think, confronted with the recognisable precipice of another turn around the sun, what I want now is to make good on the shift I’ve already felt brewing—seeing the outcomes of everything I’ve put in, and more. Because I know who I am; I know what I’m after. I know what sits at the core of all this, for me, and I know how to take it and grasp it. I know how to let go of the rest. And I’m ready. I’m ready, I’m here, and that’s the point. Every day is a new beginning. And sometimes, I swear, you can have the things you want.

• Music [!!!]: Charli xcx’s BRAT and two PARTYGIRL Boiler Room sets; Olivia Dean’s Messy; Dua Lipa’s Radical Optimism²; Sabrina Carpenter’s two singles and Wembley set; Chappell Roan’s everything, and especially her set at Bonnaroo; Maya Hawke’s Chaos Angel³; The Chills’ Brave Words (and much more!); JADE’s ‘Angel of my Dreams’

• ScatterGun: After the Death of Rūaumoko, created and performed by Ana Chaya Scotney (Silo Theatre)

• The Halal Kiwi app—great to keep on hand in the supermarket, and when you’re thinking about where to put your money

• Daily Bread’s cardamom morning bun

• Challengers (2024), dir. Luca Guadagnino

• Lamplight Books’ first Lamplight Night back in June, themed Apples, with appetizers and aperitifs by Jennifer Yee Collinson as inspired by Paul Harding’s This Other Eden and Clarice Lispector’s The Apple in the Dark

• Happy Hour (Weds–Sat, 4–6pm) at Tappo

• LOVING MY FRIENDS 💝

• Ecostore’s lemongrass soap

• Maggie Nelson’s Bluets⁴, which bowled me over with its contents and its references, almost like finding yourself in the background of someone else’s photograph

• I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Ride with Benito Skinner & Mary Beth Barone—they’re back for Season 2, kiiid!

• We Were Dangerous (2024), dir. Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu

• Derek Jarman: Delphinium Days at Gus Fisher Gallery, including its exquisite related programming of screenings, writing, live performance, and public events

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A 💐 for a 💐—for you!

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Here we are—in another August. One day I’ll stop kidding myself about things quieting down.

I’m also on Instagram, if that’s your thing; and I have a website (including exactly one [1] Succession Easter egg, if you can find it).

My poetry collection, Short Films, is available directly from Tender Press and in bookstores across Aotearoa. You can also read Starling, full of wonderful work from New Zealand writers under 25, right here.

Stay well and stay silly x

🍒 T

1. Same as the number of this newsletter—a nice coincidence among the sporadic distribution of them.

2. Further to this, the ‘Taste!’ episode of Las Culturistas.

3. Maya is one of my favourite lyricists!

4. Add the Royal Court production to the list of shows I wish I’d seen this year. That design? That cast? With this source material? The stuff of dreams!