the everrumble

A poetic imagining of intense focus and sweeping ideas.

Zettie’s story is fluid and in motion, transcending geographies and time. She stops talking, at age seven, and starts to listen – to the worlds she finds in language and books, and to the people and places she encounters as she moves across continents. Her silence connects her to people, to nature and to the elemental world. Magical and beyond boundaries, this collection focuses on small fragments, taking Zettie, and the reader, to the place where human history began.
 

‘luminous’ -Tracey Slaughter

‘stunningly original’ -Robert Scotellaro

‘small-but-enormous’ -Tania Hershman

‘a tour de force’ -Christopher Allen

'the best book I’ve read in a decade’ -TM Upchurch

‘a loving homage to our beleaguered planet’ - Catherine McNamara

Bonsai: Best small stories from Aotearoa New Zealand

‘Slippery, and exciting … The stories come at you directly, and then turn askance, and then slap you in the face’ -Allan Drew

Bonsai brings together a pioneering collection of flash fiction and associated forms (prose poetry and haibun) from 165 writers in Aotearoa New Zealand, along with intriguing essays on this increasingly popular genre. In 200 small stories of no more than 300 words, where the translucent boundaries between prose and poetry are often transgressed, we discover a vast array of human experience.

Edited by Michelle Elvy, Frankie McMillan and James Norcliffe

Canterbury University Press 2018

Ko Aotearoa Tātou | We Are New Zealand

In the aftermath of the Christchurch terrorist attacks of 15 March 2019, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern declared: ‘We are all New Zealanders.’ These words resonated, an instant meme that asserted our national diversity and inclusiveness and, at the same time, issued a rebuke to hatred and divisiveness.

Ko Aotearoa Tātou | We Are New Zealand is bursting with new works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and visual art created in response to the editors’ questions: What is New Zealand now, in all its rich variety and contradiction, darkness and light? Who are New Zealanders? The works flowed in from well-known names and new voices, from writers and artists from Kerikeri to Bluff. Some are teenagers still at school; some are in their eighties. Māori, Pākehā, Pasifika, Asian, new migrants, young voices, queer writers, social warriors …

Aotearoa’s many faces are represented in this unique and important compendium. In a society where the arts, especially marginalised arts, are under threat, this anthology shows that creative work can explore, document, interrogate, re-imagine – and celebrate – who we are as citizens of this diverse country, in a diverse world.

Editors Michelle Elvy, Paula Morris, James Norcliffe

Art editor David Eggleton

Otago University Press 2020