Connecting the community in tough times is the aim of the upcoming Escape 2022, the Tauranga Arts Festival's biennial writers festival.
Artistic director Gabrielle Vincent has pulled together a lineup of award-winning writers, speakers, and performers - connecting audiences to global conversations through literature, theatre and storytelling.
Held from October 12 to 16, at multiple city venues, there are various literary talks, panel discussions, workshops and performances, including a live recording of The Spinoff's political podcast, Gone By Lunchtime, where the jocular triumvirate will peer into the turbulent times of the Tauranga City Council and discuss the present and future political landscape of the city with two special guests.
Other stage discussions include fertility; wealth inequality; organised crime; escaping the Taliban; nurturing young writers; and poetry.
Essence asked five of the 20-plus names in the lineup to share a little about their event.
How to be a Bad Muslim
What it's like to navigate the world as a young Muslim man is the essence of Kiwi writer, poet and journalist Mohamed Hassan's book How to be a Bad Muslim.
His writing, which also examines Western stereotypes, includes 19 personal essays, including covering the Christchurch mosque tragedy on March 15, 2019. Hassan's work is taught in hundreds of schools across the world. He has toured internationally and is an award-winning author. He speaks about mental health, grief and loss while weaving memories of an Egyptian immigrant fighting. He will speak on stage with Rosabel Tan.
When you receive feedback on your book from non-Muslims, what is the one thing they are most surprised to have learnt?
One unexpected reaction I've received is that a lot of people found the book funny.
I was definitely worried it would end up being too heavy, and so I was conscious of trying to keep it light in some moments. The more that I think about it, the more I realise humour is absolutely a mechanism I've seen a lot of people around me use to process life experiences.
As an Egyptian, I come from a culture steeped in levity as part of how we interact with each other.
People love to poke fun at their circumstances and have the uncanny ability to turn anything into a joke, light or dark. I would like to think some of that rubbed off on me.
What feedback do you receive from Muslims?
I've had a lot of conversations with Muslims who say they saw themselves in a lot of the stories I share in the book.
So many of our experiences with migration, school, belonging and our relationship with the media are so universal to the contemporary Muslim experiences, but we rarely see it expressed.
I tried to portray not only my experiences but those of people I grew up with, my family and the many people I've interviewed and spent time with through my journalism work.
At the end of the day, it's still a small and subjective outlook on the world that shaped me and those around me, but I hope it adds to a necessary conversation that needs to happen within our community, but also as part of a national ongoing dialogue about our country and how all of us fit in it.
You immigrated to New Zealand at the age of 8, were living and working in Istanbul when you heard about the Christchurch attack, and flew back as a reporter, but joined Muslim volunteers who helped with the burial of 51 people in four days. What from that experience did you learn about the Muslim community that you didn't know before?
The days after March 15 were formative in the lives of everyone in New Zealand, but specifically for Muslims not only around the country but across the world.
When I arrived in Christchurch I found our whole community there in one space. So many people flew down to help in whatever way they could, and I think part of it was a desire to be able to mourn and grieve together.
The New Zealand Muslim community is so small and so interconnected that everyone knew someone who was at Al Noor and Linwood mosques, or someone directly affected by the attacks.
To see everyone coming together in such an urgent and devastating moment was a reminder to all of us of what community means, what the purpose of our mosques really is in times of crisis and that we had a right as New Zealanders to feel anger and pain publicly, to wear our faith unapologetically and to reclaim our right to exist and flourish in our home.
To hear the call to prayer on the radio and watch our Friday sermon on television, attended by Muslims from around the country and surrounded by our fellow New Zealanders, is an image that will never leave me.
After that horrific experience, what has, or hasn't changed, with the way Muslims are understood by society and/or carry themselves in public?
It was an awful way to begin having long-neglected conversations, but they started happening. I saw so many people compelled to learn and be present and engage. That was heartening.
Unfortunately, we also saw the ugliness that lurked in the shadows also embolden, a reminder that we still have a way to go. There are a lot of people who are afraid of their idea of New Zealand changing or evolving and are resistant to that, and this goes way beyond the Muslim community.
When we imagine our future as a country, surely it must be one that embraces all that gives it depth and breadth, that enriches all of us and makes us kinder and more open. If we keep talking and keep listening, then we can look forward to a New Zealand that not only embraces our unique communities, but champions them, and allows us all to heal our fears and become more curious, generous and bold.
• October 16, 3pm-4pm. University of Waikato, Tauranga Campus, $20.
The Mirror Book
Former lawyer Charlotte Grimshaw may be the daughter of literary legend CK Stead, but she herself is also an award-winning author of novels, short stories and essays.
A few years ago, she was sent into a deep examination of her life, triggered when she discovered her husband was having an affair.
With the help of a psychologist, she began to question her childhood and her family and the result was her memoir, The Mirror Book.
In conversation with actress Michelle Langstone, Grimshaw deep-dives into the truth as she saw it, the fallout, and the messy reality of family life.
There were always going to be reactions to your revelations. As a writer, did this worry you? Or was it the opposite - an innate need and confidence to tell your story?
I knew there would be strong reactions to my revelations, and it definitely worried me.
I received ferocious reactions before the book was published when I showed the manuscript to some members of my family. But the reactions of my husband, kids, and other relatives were entirely positive.
I wanted to publish the book even though I knew it would be difficult. It was all true, and I thought it was worth doing.
The hugely positive public reaction made it a great experience in the end.
Some people fall into the trap of vicariously living through others, or living up to others' expectations and/or memories. What are you most proud of about yourself and what you alone have achieved in your life?
I've always gone my own way. I grew up in a literary family, so I initially decided to study law as well as arts, to do something different.
When I became a writer I took a different surname from my father's to distinguish myself from him, as he was well known as CK Stead.
But later on in life I discovered I was still very enmeshed in our family fictions, and my memoir The Mirror Book is an account of challenging those fictions, forming my own opinions and finally achieving my own sense of a truly independent self.
What I'm most proud of? My kids.
Despite success, we are all human and all have faults. What one life lesson would you pass on to the younger generation?
It's hard to narrow it down to one, but perhaps a really important life lesson is: Hang on and keep going.
When you're young, you can reach extremely low points, and think it's not worth carrying on. That's when there's self-destructive behaviour. But when you get to be as old as I am, you look back and think, it was worth hanging on.
Look what I would have missed if I'd given up. So at bad moments, even if it seems impossible, just wait and see. Things can and often do get better.
• Saturday, October 15, 10am-11am. University of Waikato, Tauranga Campus $20.
News News News
What happens when we let children report the news for us? It's a concept that will be found out when amateur reporters from Mount Maunganui Primary School go live and uninterrupted from Baycourt.
News News News is a television news show made by children for adults, recorded in front of a studio audience and broadcast live on the internet.
Working with UK artists Andy Field, Beckie Darlington and Rosabel Tan, children will present a distinctive look at today's current events. Andy answers the questions below.
What can we expect to discover from this show about how children consume and think about the news?
To be surprised by the things that children are interested in.
We've made four versions of this show in four different towns and cities in the UK, and every time we have seen how perceptive children are.
They take the task of being news reporters very seriously – they want to think about big and difficult subjects.
In the past, they have done stories on homelessness, poverty, noise pollution, animal welfare and climate change. These are the things they see and hear adults talking about. The things they don't think get talked about on the news enough.
Something the children in the past have had absolutely no time for is party politics and the huge amount of space it takes up on the news - Donald Trump; Boris Johnson.
They are more concerned with the things they see happening right in front of them, which is probably an approach that we could all benefit from.
Why is important that children put their spin on local and world events, for an adult audience?
It is easy to patronise or even dismiss children's perspectives on the world and think of them only as soon-to-be adults, who have yet to learn enough to really have a proper opinion about things; and that they will understand better when they're older.
Even projects that include children, often do so on the basis that they matter because of who they will become in the future, but children are their own category of people, with their own distinctive way of experiencing and understanding the world around them.
It's incredibly valuable to have children be part of the big conversations. Not because they are our future, but because of what they contribute to the conversation today, as children.
Research has shown that children develop a sense of fairness and justice at a young age. That they are, in fact, much better than adults at judging when things are fair or just. A child can look at a situation and tell you things about it that an adult would struggle to see.
For parents, explaining complex current affairs to children is daunting. Will there be surprises in the show when it comes to kids tackling big subjects?
Almost definitely. Children are entirely fearless when it comes to discussing things that can make adults squeamish.
Things like death and money, and the horror of climate change. They are happy to look unflinchingly at these subjects, in order to try and better understand the things they sense adults are uncomfortable or afraid of.
Children's capacity to look at and think about difficult things, and then move swiftly on to the next topic is both refreshing and also, often, very funny.
This can lead to some real jack-knife moments in the show. Things escalate quickly. Serious subjects are juxtaposed with completely ridiculous ones. Stories pile up in unexpected ways.
Do you think the likes of Covid-19 and the Russian-Ukraine war have changed children's thinking about the world around them? In what way?
Everything that children experience changes the way they think. As adults, we have a much more rigid sense of how the world should be and perhaps these two events felt so frightening, precisely because they upended so much of what we thought we knew about the world and how it works.
The children we work with tend to be around 9 or 10, so were 7 or 8 when the pandemic started. My experience is that their sense of how the world should be is not quite so calcified.
They're still learning how the world operates and each new experience, including the pandemic, contributes to that. It was strange, boring and scary, but it didn't feel profoundly different to the million other things that help them build a picture of how the world is.
My hope, maybe naively, is that if anything good can come out of the pandemic it is that young people have a clearer idea than us of how possible sudden and radical change is.
When the political and popular will is there to make that change, everything is possible. The world can be transformed overnight. That knowledge is going to be vitally important if we are to be able to confront the challenges we all face now and in the future.
In what way do the artists impart their knowledge, guidance and influence for the show to come together?
We create the right circumstances, and framework, for the children to create the show. We talk, play games, teach them how to write an interview script, and help them think through story ideas.
The structure for the project is planned in fine detail because counterintuitively, our experience has always been that this is more empowering for our young collaborators.
Knowing and understanding the overall shape the project is going to take and what we are doing day to day, enables them to take ownership over that process and recognise how they can use it to tell the stories they want to tell.
• October 15, 6pm-7pm. Addison Theatre, Baycourt. $40 | child/student $20, family pass $100 (4 people, maximum 2 adults)
One in Four
There are 450 IVF babies born in New Zealand every year and one in four couples struggle with fertility, yet it's a topic many find hard to talk about.
A panel discussion will explore the multitude of ways one can conceive a baby in the 21st century, and the taboos around IVF, surrogacy and other assisted fertility options.
Fertility counsellor Sue Saunders (Maybe Baby), and actress and author Michelle Langstone, who writes about her IVF journey in her novel Times Like These, talk with actress, journalist and broadcaster Elisabeth Easther about their experiences.
Releasing a book about a personal matter is brave. Why was it important for you to make your private story, public?
It sounds odd, but I never actually considered that anyone would read the book when I began to write it.
I wrote for my family, and to find my way through tremendous grief, and I wrote to try to hold my dad close for a little longer, to pin him to the world, even though he had left.
You and your husband Arun are now parents, but it wasn't easy. On top of the IVF process in your early 40s, you were grieving the loss of your father, and Covid-19 was thrown in the mix. How did you stay strong? And what's it like being a mum?
I don't think I did stay strong. I fell apart multiple times in multiple ways, but I was lucky to have Arun, and to have my incredible family, to support me.
Motherhood is vast. It's wonderful and scary and hard and funny and joyful. I am incredibly grateful I got to have this experience. It has totally changed my life.
For someone who is about to embark on the IVF journey, what's one thing you wished you had known in advance?
How lonely it is. Fertility is a lonely place and I hadn't known that. I was prepared for some difficulties, but I wasn't prepared for the aching loneliness of waiting rooms and blood tests and scans.
What's some basic supporting advice for friends and family of couples going through IVF?
I am very wary of giving advice. IVF is a very personal process and it's incredibly specific to every individual and their requirements.
What I would like to do is to encourage, very vigorously, that anyone embarking on IVF empowers themselves to do research, and to ask questions, no matter how awkward it seems. There are no stupid questions, and the more you understand the better off you will be.
I think it's easy to feel powerless in the IVF process, and in many ways you are, but you can ask questions and get answers and really push for what you need. I hope everyone knows that.
• Saturday, October 15, 3pm-4pm, University of Waikato, Tauranga Campus, $20.
NUKU: Story Sovereignty
Director and producer Chelsea Winstanley, best known for her documentaries and short films, as well as box-office hits like Jo Jo Rabbit, is one of the wahine who appears in the book Nuku: Stories of 100 Indigenous Women.
Through telling their stories, the women seek to influence the world around them.
In this panel session, NUKU founder, creator and publisher Qiane Matata-Sipu talks with Winstanley, Pāpāmoa-based marine biologist Kura Paul-Burke and racial equity educator Kat Poi, from Courageous Conversations South Pacific.
The women will share their stories and wrestle with how story sovereignty could be improved today.
You've achieved a lot in your life, but right now, you've gone back to school full time to study te reo Māori. Why did you choose this point in your life to learn it?
I hoki atu ki te kura na te mea kei te tautoko i aku tamariki: I have returned to school full time to study te reo Māori because I want to support my children.
My daughters attend a bilingual unit in Tāmaki Makaurau - that's where I live for work at the moment. It is still abundantly clear that outside the safety of kura and a reo Māori speaking environment, our children and anyone who is learning the language, still just contend with English everywhere, which makes it so much harder to learn te reo, so I knew I needed to support them.
I'm also doing it for my mother who was never given the language because her mother was of the generation that got hit at school for speaking [it].
It's incredible to see the impact of such brutal violence on generations but we have to ensure our language survives - it's for the betterment of the whole country.
If non-Māori spoke te reo Māori and understood tikanga, we would be a much more loving, harmonious society.
How did growing up in Mount Maunganui foster your love of the arts and performing?
I believe your surroundings and environment will always have an influence on how you perceive the world and in turn how you are influenced creatively.
Certainly growing up by the beach, amongst nature and no traffic lights (laughs), my influences were local.
I'm glad I have a big whānau and my Māori whānau who lived close by while I was growing up, I whakapapa to (Tauranga suburb) Te Puna.
You were appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit this year for services to the screen industry and Maori. You were one of the producers who worked to release Disney classics Moana and The Lion King in te reo. Why was it important to you to accommodate te reo through film?
It is and always will be important to me to have te reo in my work.
It's a deliberate move to work with one of the world's largest global companies because if we can show they accept it and are excited to work with us in this space, we can prove there is an audience who will go to the movies and want to see content in te reo, then there is no excuse not to fund more projects like this.
The tamariki of this country will change societies' attitudes towards te reo Māori. They already are, we just need to raise our ceiling to give them a new floor to fly from.
What message would you give your two daughters about sovereignty in the time and age they're growing up in?
Don't ever let anyone tell you your language and culture is not relevant or important.
Te Ao Māori is unique to this country. Te reo Māori is the language of the land, pupuri to reo o tatou tupuna.
• October 16, 10am-11am. University of Waikato, Tauranga Campus. $20.
For a full programme, visit taurangafestival.co.nz. For tickets, go to ticketek.co.nz
