The View From My Window: Pip Adam on her new book Audition

Pip Adam. Photo / Rebecca McMillan Photography

As told to Rachel Judkins

I live with my partner and my son in Aro Valley, Wellington. Behind us is a really scary hill which has fallen down a few times and some houses that tower over us. Because it’s in a valley it is quite noisy and you often hear singing and the echoes of people’s parties. It’s really nice.

The view from my window is a courtyard where we have an outdoor laundry. I can see the washing machine and the drier going round and round, and we have a washing line that all the clothes sit on. I love putting out the washing - it’s nice to break up the writing rather than sitting here slavishly - but I’m hyper-vigilant about it if it rains, which can be distracting.

There isn’t a specific space where I write. Sometimes I’ll be stirring soup and writing in the kitchen! But I do find it very hard to write in isolation, I need to have the noise of the world around me. The lounge is our communal area but often people are up to things that are solo there. My son will be playing video games, my partner might be playing guitar and I’ll be writing. We make a lot of use of noise-cancelling headphones.

I’ve got the best job in the world - I am the station manager at Wellington Access Radio. We provide a platform for people who face barriers towards broadcasting. A lot of my job is listening to voices that are coming out of bodies in front of me or listening to voices that have been recorded earlier. I really really enjoy sound and listening to the noises we make when we say things.

Because I work fulltime, I don’t have a writing schedule so writing in 15-minute increments was born out of necessity. Sometimes I’ll go into work 15 minutes early to write, and if we go to the beach I might take a notebook. I’m too self-conscious to type on a screen so I use voice notes as well. But that kind of writing produces a certain type of book, because what is happening in the outside world will mess with what’s happening in the work.

I think science fiction is one of the highest forms of art and my new novel Audition is my attempt at it. The book centres on three people who have grown into giants and are sent away on a spaceship because there isn’t enough room for them on Earth. Part of the way they are controlled is talking them into thinking that they’re not worth anything, but as they travel further and further away from Earth, they start to realise that they are actually worthwhile.

Fundamentally, Audition is a book about punishment and the abolition of prisons. I’ve been visiting prison for 28 years now and I think that they are f***ing terrible places. It is a really complex problem so I don’t have the answers, but there are models of social justice - taking people back into the community rather than ostracising them - that are really successful. But for that to happen it will necessitate a real change in almost everything else. We need to look at decolonising and giving land back, and we need to look at providing enough food for everybody, because I’ve met a lot of people who steal or sell drugs to raise their family. All of that sounds really utopian but I think there has got to be a start, there has got to be more kindness and caring.

Staying politically active is very important to me and helps me to write books that I find interesting. Injustice and anger is often quite inspiring and I feel very grateful that I’ve got writing to try to figure out some of the things in life that I find confusing, like money and power structures. Looking back, my books are all getting at similar things in different ways. I get really excited about books that won’t fit into one kind of genre and the great thing about the novel is that you have to reinvent the form for every story. I never feel like I can say what I want to say in conventional forms.

Audition was a lot of fun to write. I was really surprised with how far I could go from a conventional narrative and people would still come along for the ride. I used to say really glib things like “you need to know the rules to break the rules”, but I think it’s even more than that. It feels scary and you’re just aching for something to hold on to, so I had to work really hard not to be seduced into a more conventional structure. The thing with those kinds of books is that you don’t have as much control so you’re leaving a lot of room for the reader. If you’ve got a three-act structure you’re like, “I’m taking you here, I’m taking you there, I’ll lead you by the hand” but with this it’s more like “what do you think?” I hope people approach it with an open mind.

I feel that there are so many books out there that should be written, but just don’t get to be written. It’s such an imperialist idea that art is a privilege, that after you have everything else you can have your art. Even a generation ago we had poets who were working as boiler makers or in the freezing works, but it would be very hard to find that now, and I think that we are at a risk of getting this strange sort of elite class of people that are able to write. I’m one of them. I was lucky enough to get into a course and to get a writing fellowship, and I’m able to write because my partner and I both have jobs and I can prioritise it.

My view outside changes a lot. There’s so much green out there and because it’s so damp things get overgrown quickly. I really like being out there are night and one of my favourite things is when the three of us lie on the bonnet of the car and look up at the stars. Gazing is a big part of my writing process and it’s always nice to look at the sky.

Audition by Pip Adam.

Audition, by Pip Adam (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $35), is out now.