Favourites
A collection of stories I have most enjoyed writing.
Not hitting rock bottom and quitting anyway.
This article was first published in Matters of Substance, the regular magazine of the NZ Drug Foundation, and republished in The Spinoff on 4 April 2018. I never hit rock bottom. There wasn’t any great reckoning or moment of truth. Just a series of low-bottoms and near misses culminating in the urge to just be done […]
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Walking in Two Worlds
There’s a saying, a whakataukī, that reminds us that the kūmara doesn’t speak of its own sweetness. My Nanama was big on that. Waiho mā te tangata e mihi: leave it to others to sing your praises. In te ao Māori, being full of yourself isn’t cool. Trouble is, most of the time, we’re living in a […]
MoreWho are you, and what have you done with my son?
One of the most daunting things about sending our boy to boarding school was that, for the first six weeks, aside from handwritten letters, we weren’t allowed to have any contact with him. In the pre-email, pre-free calling era, this would have been fairly standard. Back in the day, boarding school parents didn’t have much choice […]
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