Te Kaituhi Māori Professional Development
We’re drawing from the collective strength and knowledge of our community of Māori writers to essentially create a whata for our excellence to sit on. Ruby Solly (Kāi Tahu, Waitaha, Kāti Māmoe) has created a toolkit module for kaituhi Māori. These modules will be living artefacts that can feed many generations of writers. Alongside, Paula Morris will take a Webworkshop on a craft topic for kaituhi Māori.
Kōrero
First-person: writing personal essays and short stories – with Paula Morris
Tuesday 22 October, 6:30pm – 8:30pm
This Webworkshop explores the art and craft of writing short first-person narratives – either true stories (creative nonfiction) or invented ones (fiction). We’ll discuss excerpts from the work of various Māori writers to inform the way we shape stories and evoke character, setting and situation. The focus is the first-person point of view – the ‘I’ of the story – and its opportunities and challenges. All participants will get a set of exercises to help develop their own work after the class.
Paula Morris MNZM (Ngāti Wai, Ngāti Manuhiri, Ngāti Whātua) is an award-winning novelist, short story writer and essayist. Director of the Master of Creative Writing at the University of Auckland, she is the founder of the Academy of New Zealand Literature; Wharerangi, the Māori literature hub; and the online Aotearoa NZ Review of Books. She edited the 2023 anthology Hiwa: Contemporary Māori Short Stories.
Photo credit: Colleen Maria Lenihan.
Sign up for this webworkshopIntellectual Property
Te Kaituhi Māori will be hosting a kōrero with experts on Intellectual Property, copyright protections and its implication for Māori exploring WAI 262 and story sovereignty.
Writer Toolkit Module
What is the whakapapa of the world you’re writing?
Ruby Solly
What is the Whakapapa of the World you’re Writing? What has gone in to creating this place of your own imagining? This toolkit module looks at how we build the whakapapa of our imagined and re-imagined worlds within our writing as Māori writers. We will look at different exercises and experiments to help us bring out this whakapapa, to highlight it within our work. Join us to explore the worlds of our kaituhi, and to craft spaces of our own to explore. A module suitable for all genres, we look at ahua, aesthetics, lore, whakapapa, and more in a module designed to value play, creativity, and our potential as creators of our own worlds that descend from us as Māori.
Ruby Solly (Kāi Tahu, Waitaha, Kāti Māmoe) is a writer, taonga pūoro practitioner, and doctor of public health. She has had poetry published in Aotearoa, Australia, America and Antarctica, and has had two books of poetry long listed for the Ockham book awards; ‘Tōku Pāpā’ (2020) and ‘The Artist’ (2023). As a taonga pūoro practitioner, musician and composer, she has worked with artists such as Tararua, Trinity Roots, the Auckland Philharmonia, and Yo-yo Ma. Within all her work, world building and story telling are the waka and winds that drive her forward.
Photo credit: Ebony Lamb
The module will be ready soon. Register your interest
NZSA is grateful to the Ministry of Culture and Heritage Manatū Taonga for its support:
