Spreading the WORD
After nearly two decades working in Melbourne’s literary arts scene, Ngāi Tahu author and arts organiser Nic Low is excited to be back home and sharing the job of curating this year’s WORD Christchurch Fest ival with Rachael King and the release of his new book, Uprising.
Award-winning writer Nic Low has swapped a house in the Australian bush outside of Melbourne for a place on the hills in Christchurch with a spectacular view of Kā Tiritiri o te Moana, the Southern Alps. Coming home to the city where he grew up, after building a career in the arts across the Tasman, has been a choice made willingly and with no regrets. Nic’s partner Leigh Hopkinson – a freelance editor and author – is a Kiwi too, originally from the West Coast.
‘Our intention was always to come back across the ditch and, having a two-year-old [son Ahi] meant we wanted to be close to whānau here,’ Nic says. ‘He’s got a whole lot of grandparents on this island who are just so delighted to have him home, so that has been a big pull.’
In pre-Covid days, Nic loved splitting his time between Brunswick in the heart of Melbourne and their bush retreat outside the city, a perfect base for writing. With the rise of the pandemic, he and Leigh elected to go bush and didn’t go back into Melbourne for nine months. Nic reckons their 14 days in a quarantine hotel in Wellington late last year didn’t feel all that different. ‘We’re fairly accustomed now to living in isolation, with just the three of us in a small place.’
A bookworm from the start, Nic was naturally drawn to writing and storytelling from a young age. He recalls outwitting babysitters by having a back-up torch at the ready in case they confiscated the one he was using to read under the bedcovers. ‘It feels nice to be back here now in Christchurch, working in the same space and where my love of reading and writing started.’
Nic appeared in the first rebranded WORD festival here in 2014 and is bringing a fresh new perspective to this year’s event. He has big ideas for 2021 WORD – one of his roles being to oversee a programme of digital events – and says festival-goers can expect a line-up reflecting both ‘hyper-local’ and ‘global’ themes.
‘We very much want stories out of Christchurch and I’m working on a strong programme with a Ngāi Tahu and Māori focus, including storytelling traditions and contemporary work in te reo Māori to build on what Rachael and Marianne [Marianne Hargreaves, Executive Director] have done previously. We’ll be celebrating the old, along with new work – new songs, new chants and new books.
‘I’m also looking at what global conversations we want to be a part of and exploring ways of using technology to create an intimate experience that will bring people together.’
Nic recalls what a life-changing experience it was for him in his twenties going to the National Young Writers’ Festival in Australia. He will never forget the buzz of meeting so many young people making their way in life as writers, publishers and creators. He later served as a director of that festival and still stands by its informal motto – ‘no spectators’.
‘I’m hungry to bring that ethos to WORD, so one of the aspects I’m really prioritising is giving people who come along opportunities to get hands-on with making and doing. I’m pushing the workshops programme and encouraging authors to share their tips and tricks of the trade. Our intention is to also create content for a magazine out of the workshops.’
Nic’s whakapapa (genealogy) extends down to Ōraka-Aparima at the bottom of the South Island and, in Australia, he vice-chaired the Ngāi Tahu Ki Melbourne taurahere group. He has always felt strongly connected with his Ngāi Tahu ancestry.
‘My mum was one of the Māori representatives on the delegation to the UN to prepare the draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. As kids, we spent a lot of time around marae and I learned Māori at high school. At 18, my first proper job was working as a graphic designer for Ngāi Tahu, making educational and language resources, so I met a lot of people through that and am enjoying making those connections again.’
Nic isn’t the only writer in his family. His aunt, Hilary Low, published a book in 2010 called Pushing His Luck about an ill-fated 1863 expedition by Canterbury surveyor and engineer Henry Whitcombe and Swiss adventurer Jakob Lauper to find a route across the Southern Alps. Only Lauper survived the gruelling attempt. The book is based on Hilary’s re-translation of Jakob’s original report.
‘There were references in the book to the fact that in the 1860s, early explorers talked to local Māori about finding routes through the mountains and I started to get really interested in that.’
This is what planted the seed for Nic’s soon-to-be published second book, Uprising. He had just pitched his first book – a book of short stories called Arms Race, published in 2014 – to Melbourne-based Text Publishing and then the publisher asked what else he wanted to write.
‘So I told them about my idea to write about walking the Southern Alps of New Zealand, their identity and history from a Ngāi Tahu perspective. They said, “How would you feel about a two-book deal?” This is when I finally decided to take the plunge into being a full-time writer.’
Pulling together the material for Uprising has taken the best part of a decade. Nic says the knowledge he relied on for the book had never previously been collected in one place.
‘It was spread across a number of different key books – most of which were out of print, and a whole bunch of manuscripts – or it was in people’s heads. This is living history. It has been exciting to realise how alive and rich this knowledge is. These mountains don’t just have a physical presence. They are ancestors and connected to each other through whakapapa – they are not separate and apart from us.’
Nic says he was a little sceptical about paying attention to traditional omens when walking in the mountains in winter, but on one difficult solo trip out the back of Aoraki he found that scepticism put to the test.
‘I remember thinking, as things kept going wrong, if I believed in omens, this would be really bad. I carried on and ended up getting swept off by an avalanche and having to be rescued by helicopter!’
Nic observes that it is not easy making a living as a writer, but by the time he started working on this book in earnest in 2014, he had been employed as an arts organiser for four years, running an international writing programme at the University of Melbourne’s Asialink Institute and so had money saved to help subsidise his writing time. ‘That was hugely helpful.’
One of the career highlights for Nic during his years at the University of Melbourne was co-leading a project called Bookwallah, a book tour across Australia and India by train involving five authors and a travelling library.
‘People have a certain idea about what a writers’ festival is – an event that brings writers in and people go to a local venue to hear them talk about their books. It’s a formula that’s reproduced across the world. But who says it has to be at a fixed location? With Bookwallah we blew up that existing model in favour of a roving writers’ festival and even commissioned designers to build custom, leather-bound suitcases that transformed into bookcases that we set up along the way.’
Nic’s years as a writer have certainly been fruitful. He is a recipient of the 2018 CLNZ Writers’ Award, a 2018 Pushcart Prize nominee and is an alumnus of the 2017 Banff Centre Mountain and Wilderness Writing Programme. Arms Race was an Australian Book Review and Listener Book of the Year. He is a sought-after literary judge, most recently for the 2020 Commonwealth Short Story Prize and the 2020 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction in the New Zealand Book Awards. Nic has been a guest at festivals throughout Oceania, Asia and North America.
Along with his career in writing, Nic is an accomplished installation artist who has exhibited at festivals across Australia. One day he hopes to complete an earthquake memorial for Christchurch consisting of 185 bells, big and small, to remember those who died in 2011.
‘Christchurch has had a lot of trauma over the past decade but my first impressions are also of a city transformed. New Regent Street is right next to The Piano, where the WORD offices are and there’s a real buzz around there, equivalent to any great city in the world. There is so much energy – it feels like things are possible here.’
For more information, visit wordchristchurch.co.nz .
