Latest from The Spinoff
The Spinoff
15 hours ago
- General
- The Spinoff
The Weekend: The best food I ate in Singapore was toast
Madeleine Chapman reflects on the week that was. It's almost too predictable that I would travel to Singapore for the first time, spend a week eating incredible Malaysian, Chinese and Indian cuisine and only want to write about the buttered toast. But if nothing else, my surprisingly extensive food writing portfolio has revealed my palate to be that of a healthy, developing three-year-old. So let me talk about this toast. I never thought I'd pay for toast (bread, of course, but not toast) until I kept reading recommendations for Ya Kun Kaya Toast, the Singapore breakfast chain that began as a hawker cart 80 years ago. Supposedly this place could make toast better than anywhere else in Singapore, maybe even the world. I went in with low expectations because how much better can a piece of plain buttered toast be compared to the one you make at home? I may have a basic palate but I avoid places that offer things I think I'd enjoy more at home – I love that cereal cafes exist, I'll never eat at one. Well colour me humbled because the Ya Kun Kaya Toast was by far the best buttered toast I've ever had, and for all the wrong reasons. Have you ever tried to describe why toast is delicious? It's quite hard, but here's my attempt to explain why this particular toast was so good. The bread was thin. A piece of thin toast is really underrated. It wasn't hot. Sounds bad but this toast was just warm, and somehow stayed just warm, which meant… The butter had texture. Buttering hot toast means the butter disappears and you're left experiencing just one texture (the slightly soggy, crunchy bread). If you butter like an aunty, you'll get the soggy bread and some extra butter on top. But because the toast wasn't too hot, the butter sat inside like a piece of cheese, resulting in the soft butter texture alongside the dry crunch of the toast. Delightful. The kaya. Kaya is a coconut jam, sweet and subtle. Ya Kun includes it in the toast but very, very sparingly. I'd say the kaya-butter ratio was 1:4. Rather than tasting like coconut, the buttered toast instead tasted just a little bit sweeter, like it had a sprinkle of sugar added (I think they do add an extra sprinkle actually). The portion was small. I could eat a truly shocking amount of white toast with butter and yet the single serving (four pieces of bread with crusts cut off) felt just right. The classic 'kit' came with veeery soft boiled eggs – barely seasoned, just my style – which worked surprisingly well as a dip, and a cup of tea or coffee (I got tea). A perfect light breakfast. I also got some buttered crackers, another island aunty staple, but they weren't needed. I went back two more times at different times of the day, and the toast remained the best I've eaten. I am bringing a jar of Ya Kun Kaya back with me but I suspect it won't be near as nice when I'm in my own kitchen. I love it when people take something that everyone can, and does, do, and finds a way to make it perfect. Ya Kun Kaya makes the perfect toast. The stories Spinoff readers spent the most time with this week Feedback of the week 'Hatch, Match and Despatch is right up there as a memorable institutional name; in my book it ranks alongside a pre-earthquakes Chch women's clothing shop called Get Frocked.' 'Ursula Le Guin: 'The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows. The mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in men's eyes … They exist. But they are not your Masters. They never were.''
The Spinoff
15 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Spinoff
‘She had mettle': Anne-Marie Te Whiu on poetry, weaving and whakapapa
Claire Mabey talks with poet, weaver, Atlantic Fellow and cultural curator Anne-Marie Te Whiu about her new collection of poetry, Mettle. Claire Mabey: Kia ora Ani, it's very nice to be talking to you about your beautiful poetry collection, Mettle. Why did you dedicate the book to your younger self? Anne-Marie Te Whiu: Because she's still here. You know that whole thing of you've got to be turning into the person that your younger self would have looked up to? I feel like now I'm 52 I'm just becoming that person, so I'm in conversation with her now, that little kid. It's taken all these decades but it's really beautiful. CM: And why 'mettle'? What does that word mean to you? AMTW: Being a poet, I love playing with language. So when I tell people I've written a collection called Mettle, I love seeing their faces. You can see they're thinking 'Oh so you've written about the periodic table? Is it from a science lens? It is about, like, heavy metal?' I love that. The reason I used 'mettle' is because when I was doing research on my whakapapa and the connection with Whina [Dame Whina Cooper], my great aunt, I looked at archival works, newspaper articles, that kind of thing. I found that one of the words that was used to describe her was that she had 'mettle' and that word just really struck me. CM: So your whakapapa is here in Aotearoa, and you were born in Australia. What is that relationship like for you? Is your collection working into that? AMTW: Exactly. It's working to understand myself. I use poetry as a vehicle and a platform to work out who I am. What does it mean to have whakapapa? How do I acknowledge that whilst being born on and living on these unceded, stolen lands? How do I reconcile that relationship? It's kind of reconciling with myself, really. It's also a vehicle for understanding my siblings, particularly my youngest brother – for him to further understand who we are. CM: I really like the poem 'Blood Brothers', where you're trying to have a conversation with your brothers and they're distracted by the stuff of daily life. AMTW: Totally. Don't you have that with your siblings? CM: Yes! Do you relate to the idea that there's always one sibling who seems to lead the family 'work' so to speak? I've observed over the years that there often seems to be one in the family who works on whakapapa and makes the connections and reconnections. Does that ring true for you? AMTW: 100% relate. I think that's exactly right. I have three brothers, one who sadly passed away – but growing up I was always the fourth wheel. Like, we need to play handball and need a fourth, might as well be her. CM: I was really also struck by your poem, the Letter to Keri Hulme that you've dedicated to essa ranapiri. Is it a fictional letter? AMTW: You're the fourth person to ask that! Like, what? No, it's totally fictional. That was a gift of a poem that was written because essa, who edited Mettle, invited me to be part of a journal dedicated to the legacy of Keri Hulme. We were asked to create whatever we wanted. But how awesome that you think that there's the potential there for the letter to have been real. It brings me back to the question of 'why poetry?' Poetry is a portal. It allows us to stretch and play. CM: I love that. It feels like so many roads lead back to Hulme. Is there anything in particular about her work that you love? ANTW: Her relationship to water. Watching tides, watching waves, reading waves; that's what I really related to. The writer Melissa Lucashenko embodies something of the way Hulme's work enters into your blood. There's something incredibly sacred about the way all the parts work together. There's a power in Hulme's work, and in Lucashenko's too. CM: You're a weaver as well as a writer. There's a poem in the book about having a 'weaving hangover'. What does that mean? AMTW: Have you been a weaver before? CM: Never. But I used to paint a lot. AMTW: Perfect. Here's the comparison. Would you paint until 4am and then go, how did that happen? Then the next day what you did is still with you. That's the kind of hangover I'm talking about. The number of nights I've had where it's got to four, five in the morning just weaving. CM: How does weaving relate to poetry for you? Or does it? AMTW: It compliments poetry rather than that they definitely meet. But I lean on one and then the other, and throw in a couple of dog walks in there as well for physicality. They're both practices that require being still so you gotta balance it with that physicality. CM: Mettle is out in both Australia and New Zealand and I imagine they're two really different audiences, in some ways. AMTW: Massively. I don't know if you got the little insert in the book when it arrived? It has this message explaining that Mettle delves into my whakapapa and then in brackets it says 'Māori genealogy'. Obviously that's so patronising and so unnecessary for the Aotearoa audience, and so imperative if I want to connect with this audience here in Australia. I've had a couple of moments of 'how do I bridge this?' But that's the work. That's our work as writers, producers, artists. We're bridge builders. CM: Have you had feedback on the book so far? ANTW: I got a beautiful message on Instagram from a gorgeous Australian-born wahine, about a poem I have in the collection about understanding and not understanding in a te ao Māori space. To have feedback from someone that gets it is so sweet. I've had feedback from the most important people who are my whānau. The book is for my younger self but we always write for those we love, too. Hopefully all my family will look at it and go, yeah, that's great. CM: In your acknowledgements you talk about a class you did at the IIML at Victoria University with Victor Roger. What was the impact of that class? AMTW: It was so significant being in a room with other Māori and Paskifika writers. Nafanua [Percell Kersel] was there, Nicole Titihuia Hawkins, Kahu Kutia, and a whole bunch of amazing writers. Victor led our waka in such a joyful and challenging way. It was a very, very profound experience. Blood Brothers i recite a karakia for my brothersthey would prefer i bring kebabs i tell them about the Hokianga they tell me about their bills i explain tangata whenua they turn up the TV i dream of Tāne Mahuta they roll a cigarette i summon the names of our ancestors they take their medication i miss our marae they put out the bins – Anne-Marie Te Whiu Mettle by Anne-Marie Te Whiu ($30, University of Queensland Press) is available to purchase from Unity Books. The Spinoff Books section is proudly brought to you by Unity Books and Creative New Zealand. Visit Unity Books online today.
The Spinoff
15 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Spinoff
‘So fulfilling': Xavier Horan on making new spiritual comedy Dead Ahead
The star of new TVNZ comedy Dead Ahead takes us through his life in television. Few New Zealand actors can attribute their career to the early work of Arnold Schwarzenegger, but Xavier Horan certainly does. As a young aspiring actor, Horan's first ever audition – for a BBC documentary series – saw him choose to reenact the dramatic final scene from his favourite movie, Commando. 'Arnold Schwarzenegger has come down to the sewer, and his daughter is in there, played by Alyssa Milano,' Horan remembers. Sadly he didn't get the role, but his love of watching action movies before he goes to sleep at night has never changed. 'Those are the foundations of my career. I've always got to go back and remember them.' Since those early days, Horan's acting career has taken him out of the sewer and into everything from Shortland Street to The Dead Lands, The Bad Seed to Westside. Horan's latest project is new TVNZ series Dead Ahead, a comedy about a family that returns to Aotearoa after living in London for several years. When the Wharehoka whānau arrive at their new home, their presence sparks a shift in the delicate balance between the spiritual and physical realms. Strange things begin to happen, and before long, three tīpuna appear in the household to guide the whānau in the right direction. Horan stars alongside Miriama Smith, Nicola Kawana, Te Kohe Tuhaka, Pana Hema Taylor and Scotty Cotter, and the show is produced by his wife, Nicole Horan. Dead Ahead's dialogue includes both reo Māori and English, and Horan loves that the show focuses on the connection between the spiritual and physical worlds. 'As Māori, we have this belief that there is a spiritual world, and when our time comes, our body may stay here but our spirit still lives.' Filled with interesting and quirky characters, Dead Ahead is a gentle, humorous exploration of how our ancestors can influence our lives in the present. Before Dead Ahead launches on TVNZ+ next week, we sat down with Horan and asked him all about his life in television, including the cartoon he loved as a kid and the hit show he couldn't stop watching. My earliest TV memory is… It's 1986, I'm four and I've just got home from kōhanga reo. My mum was going to teachers training college, so I'd be with my nanny. She was a little old kuia, who was quite a grumpy old lady. She was a teacher at the kōhanga reo, so I had to walk with her and walk back, and then I'd get home in time to watch Rawiri Paratene on Play School. The TV show I used to rush home from school to watch was… Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I think it was 1989 and I was in standard two. TV3 had just come out, and one of the first shows in the afternoon was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I was like, 'holy crap, this is awesome'. A moment from my own career that haunts me is… At Shakespeare's Globe in London. Rawiri Paratene and Rachel House cast a whole lot of us, and it was my first time acting on stage. The play was Troilus and Cressida and I played Hector. Maaka Pohatu and I had this big fight scene, and there's a lot of old people in their little bright yellow coats, just looking up at you. One night it was quite frosty, and I came flying in the air, thrusting at Maaka's head. My toe landed right on the edge of the stage, I skidded and ended up falling off the stage into these three old ladies. Luckily it wasn't with too much force. The TV ad I can't stop thinking about is… Tina from Turners is pretty funny at the moment. The last TV show I binge watched was… The Day of the Jackal with Eddie Redmayne. I just came back from Jordan with my wife, who was making a documentary series called Earth Oven with Temuera Morrison. On the flight there, I just couldn't stop watching the Day of the Jackal. I had to finish it on the way back. My favourite TV moment from my own career is… I loved doing the boxing fights on Westside. I got to help choreograph the stunts in The Convert with Lee Tamahori, and it's a dance. It has to be well-rehearsed, because we can't get hurt. I've been fortunate enough to do all my stunts and now be a stunt coordinator. I love all of that stuff. My favourite TV project is… Dead Ahead, for so many reasons. It was so fulfilling. It was made out here in South Auckland, so for once I was not traveling to bloody Bethells or Henderson and going to work was only a 15 minute drive. We started and finished every day with a karakia. The key marker for me is that at the wrap party, everyone was so grateful, so happy. That's what I valued, that human experience. No one was bickering, no one had problems, and the mahi was fun. The TV show I loved and wished I was involved with is… The Night Agent. I hear they're doing season three, I've got to give Luciane [Buchanan] a call, man. I really like that show. That drama, that intrigue, the action, the fight scenes are awesome, all the twists and the turns. The show I'll never watch, no matter how many people tell me to is… EastEnders. It just brings up memories. I feel like whenever EastEnders was on, there was always trouble. The last show I watched on TV was… The Studio with Seth Rogen. They got a lot of great cameos. It's a really cool, interesting insight into the Hollywood industry, the decisions they have to make and some of the lies they tell to save their arse.
The Spinoff
15 hours ago
- Lifestyle
- The Spinoff
My capsule pantry: The realistic base for cheap and tasty meals
Keeping your pantry (and fridge and freezer) stocked with some solid staples will save you that last-minute trip to the supermarket – and save you money, too. One question I get asked all the time on Instagram, where I share cheap and realistic recipes as @alicetayloreats, is what's in your pantry? So here it is. This is my baseline. These are the foods I always have on hand, and they're the foundation for almost everything I cook. It's simple: if you have a solid staple pantry, you will save money. Start with your base: carbs First things first, find your base. For me, that means three carbs I keep stocked at all times: long-grain rice, pasta and sliced bread, which I keep in the freezer so it lasts longer. These are my everyday staples. I buy them in bulk or grab them when they're on special. If I don't have at least one of these ready to go, I feel completely off track. Potatoes also deserve an honourable mention here. The savoury cabinet This is where the flavour begins. I keep things simple. I always have one plain cooking oil, usually canola or sunflower, and one bottle of olive oil. Olive oil is non-negotiable in our house, since I live with an Albanian Italian man. I tend to skip butter most of the time because, to be honest, it's expensive. There are a few tins I always have in the cupboard: chopped tomatoes, tomato paste and coconut cream. I also make sure I have soy sauce and one nut butter, usually peanut or almond depending on what's on sale. When it comes to spices, I'm really not a fan of pre-made spice mixes. They're mostly just salt and come at a high price. Instead, I stick to a few basic but versatile staples: curry powder, paprika, and one dried green herb. My choice is thyme. That's really all I need to build flavour. Baking basics If you enjoy baking, you don't need a huge collection of ingredients. I always have one kind of flour, usually plain, one sugar, baking powder and baking soda. Everything else can be adapted depending on what you're making and what's in season. The freezer My freezer is one of the hardest-working parts of my kitchen. I always keep homemade chicken stock (you can find the recipe on my Instagram), frozen mince, bone-in chicken pieces and some kind of frozen vegetables. With these on hand, I can throw together soups, stews or stir-fries without needing to run to the shops. The fridge The only things I really rely on keeping in the fridge are milk and yoghurt. Yoghurt is one of my secret weapons. I use it with or on almost everything. A little bowl of rice, some veges, a fried egg and a spoonful of yoghurt with chilli oil is absolute heaven to me. Decoration, not limitation Once your base pantry is set up, you can get creative. If I want to make a stew, I'll see what's on special. Maybe it's chicken, maybe it's chuck steak, or maybe it's just a bunch of delicious root vegetables. If I feel like baking, I'll check if chocolate is on sale. If it's not, maybe apples are in season instead. I try to stay flexible and open-minded when I'm shopping. Final thought: keep an open mind One of the biggest things that has helped me save money is not running to the supermarket the moment I feel like I've run out of food. More often than not, I haven't. I've just got some tired green veg – great, that turns into soup. Or maybe there are a few sausages left – perfect, that can become a stew. Try to use what you already have. Not every meal needs to be a culinary masterpiece, no matter what social media might suggest. Simple food, cooked with love, is more than enough. Alice's pantry essentials Carbs Long-grain rice ♦ pasta ♦ sliced bread (stored in the freezer) Cooking oils and condiments Plain oil (canola or sunflower) ♦ olive oil ♦ soy sauce ♦ nut butter ♦ tomato paste ♦ tinned tomatoes ♦ coconut cream Spices and seasoning Curry powder ♦ paprika ♦ dried thyme (or your preferred herb) ♦ salt and pepper Baking Plain flour ♦ sugar ♦ baking powder ♦ baking soda Fridge Milk ♦ yoghurt Freezer Homemade chicken stock ♦ frozen mince ♦ frozen bone-in chicken ♦ frozen mixed vegetables ♦ sliced bread
The Spinoff
15 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Spinoff
The bridge builder: my mother Margaret Mahy
Bridget Mahy reflects on what it was like to grow up with the beloved writer and witness the construction of her stories. 'Imagination is the creative use of reality' My mother once described herself as a 'slave to fiction'. From a very young age, her parents would find her 'conducting unseen orchestras of stories, stories remembered, recreated and invented'. She would incessantly verbalise her ideas until she was old enough to write them down. And because of this powerful, intrinsic drive to respond to the world through narrative, she never stopped conducting. Margaret looked to build bridges between the constructive truths of fact and reality, and the transformative truths found in the imaginative world. She wanted to peer through the looking glass, to take the riddles of a paradoxical reality and give them meaning in an alternative world. This led her down paths of wordplay and absurdity: a tone akin to Lewis Carroll but infused with her own particular humour. In part, her job was to entertain herself as much as her readers – both child and adult. A powerful influence on Margaret were the European folk and fairy tales she devoured as a child. They continued to shape her imagination, offering conduits between the real and the imagined. Margaret felt they gave her a kind of 'code by which to decipher experience'. Drawn to the ebb and flow of high drama, their struggles of good vs evil, magical reality and gothic romanticism, she fell in love with the spectacular imagery, archetypal figures and the rhythmic patterns of their structure. The language of mystery and the magic of fairy tales are interwoven into her stories. One example is a picture book called The Railway Engine and the Hairy Brigands. The hardback edition, illustrated by the fabulous Brian Froud, was published in 1973, and I was fascinated to turn its pages for the first time and discover that the heroines of the story were 'Penny and little Bridget'. My mother had placed my older sister and myself at the heart of a tale in which we ran the cheerful (but annoying) hairy brigands out of town. With no effort at all on our part, we had been cast as heroes. I can readily imagine Margaret deliberately inserting her daughters into the story as a gift to us. We officially existed within both her storytelling codes and her day-to-day world. It was a potent reminder that our mother had one foot firmly placed in the life of a working solo parent, yet could escape that tough reality through creative endeavour. The House is a character Over time, Margaret built a house around herself. Here was a structure that was both tangible and strong, offering shelter to a small family and a menagerie of pets. Our house became something of a sanctuary, a sometimes-successful hiding place where solitude and silence could flourish in the face of too much intrusion. Bookshelves crept up and out like vines from ceiling to floor. The librarian wanted to live in a library, and the writer enjoyed the semi-organised jostling of other people's ideas. The house itself took on a role in her stories. For 40 years, the writer and the house went hand in hand, utterly inseparable. I can only imagine Margaret's relief at the end of the working day as a librarian, after putting her young children to bed, to claim some hours for herself. Reading or writing into the early hours in her small bedroom must have been its own form of escapism, freedom from the repetitive slog of processing daily life. While Margaret could do a lot, she couldn't do it all. So she hired a neighbour to clean the house twice a week, in an effort to stem the inevitable entropy of a home with one adult juggling two jobs, two children, any number of muddy pet paws – the chickens were particularly painful when they elected to try and move in. However, Margaret would bemusedly tell friends how, too embarrassed to let anyone see a trail of domestic detritus, she would cajole the children into helping tidy the house for the cleaner. This episode formed the basis of a picture book called The Housekeeper. 'The house Lizzie Firkin, the songwriter, lived in was particularly untidy. It was a rough and tumble house, unwashed, undusted and topsy turvy. When she opened the cupboard doors, a thousand things with sharp corners fell out on top of her. So she nailed the cupboards shut.' I'm rather fond of this story, not only because Margaret uses reality to her creative advantage, but also because she and Lizzie share a moment of comic solidarity over their need for help. While Lizzie's rescuer, Robin Puckertucker the 'Wonder Housekeeper', is deeply disappointed, I suspect Margaret's cleaner was quietly relieved. Part of the the flotsam and jetsam that covered Margaret's large study desk, and spilled into its drawers, were small notebooks: a couple of very elderly ones still hanging on; one chewed by the dog; one falling apart; one given to her at a conference; one with a leftover primary school spelling list; and one marked with the ubiquitous coffee stain. None were to be thrown away. Yet when I randomly opened them, they all showed the same thing: the raw mechanics of piecing together poetry. Inside were small lists of rhyming words, the 26 letters of the alphabet, quotes, snatches of half-finished sentences, varying rhyme schemes, wordplay experiments and collections of words chosen for their sound. A poem of hers comes to mind: Through my house in sunny weather Flies the Dictionary Bird, Clear to see on every feather Is some outlandish word. 'Hugger Mugger,' 'gimcrack,' 'guava,' 'Waggish,' 'mizzle,' 'swashing rain' — Bird, fly back into my kitchen, Let me read those words again. When Margaret had a light-hearted poem well underway, the performer and conductor within would emerge. It was charming to hear her confidently reciting sections, editing as she went, entertaining herself with the search for successful rhythm and rhyme. She would sound out extended poems to family members as though she couldn't believe her good fortune that the selected words were not only alliterative, but were also dutifully conforming to her version of anapestic tetrameter. 'Little Mabel blew a bubble and it caused a lot of trouble… Such a lot of bubble trouble in a bibble-bobble way. For it broke away from Mabel as it bobbed across the table, Where it bobbled over Baby, and it wafted him away.' Nineteen stanzas later, the baby in the bubble is safely returned home. Margaret would go on to regularly, cheerfully, heroically recite this epic poem to thousands of children. A quieter version of my mother was revealed in the way she murmured to herself while fine-tuning ideas for a novel. As chief instigator, director and actor, Margaret could often be found role-playing an ensemble of quite distinct characters: mothers, fathers, precocious children, 14 year olds, an elderly woman with Alzheimer's and menacing tricksters. Her boundless curiosity fed a complex interior world, and on occasion, that world had to be made real, by chasing her ideas into the open and speaking them out loud. Away from the keyboard and the drafted word, she murmured as she stirred a wholesome soup, inspected the burnt edges of a grilled cheese toastie, or walked the dog down the long jetty. I could hear her softly, experimentally expressing her characters' shifting tones of voice, trying to capture the tempo of nuanced dialogue and giving voice to their private thoughts. T he bridge builder I sometimes hesitate to open the pages of my mother's teenage novels. And yet, when I return to The Haunting, The Changeover, Catalogue of the Universe, or The Tricksters, the words resound with her voice, incredibly immediate and incredibly distinct. Time collapses. These novels explore the intricacies of family life. Her characters are tightly bound by strong familial relationships that shift and evolve as the adolescents are transformed by mysterious or supernatural experiences, and ultimately see themselves in a new light. My great privilege was to hear these stories take shape with manuscripts repeatedly refined and road-tested on a willing volunteer as they inched forward in creation. Like any writer, Margaret wrestled with her novels, looking for a delicate balance in an unwieldy creation. Not so much control, as dabbing detail into all the available spaces. When she read aloud from her handwritten volumes or typewritten pages, I sat beside her knitting a scarf that, like the story, didn't know how it would end. She stopped and started, paused, scribbled, swapped words until (unlike the scarf), we reached a finale. Once all the words were finally gathered and polished, I could see the facets of her ordinary life made extraordinary through the writing: Christchurch itself, Canterbury's weather patterns, domestic responsibilities, elderly car issues, house maintenance, a missing septic tank, the alternative life a writer, family dynamics, Christmas, cats, art, culture, science, memory, astronomy … the list goes on. Although Margaret's characters are inventions, they also reflect her own interests, childhood memories, daily experiences, archetypes and the personalities of her wider family. Unsurprisingly, there are unmistakable intonations of Margaret herself. On occasion she is her own archetypal figure – surprise! The writer! When Margaret was finally able to take a risk and become a full time writer, her first significant teenage novel was The Haunting (1982). Margaret introduces two sisters – the mysterious Troy, described as 'stormy in her black cloud of hair', and the effervescent, talkative Tabitha. Tabitha says that she is writing 'the world's greatest novel but that no one could read it yet. However, she talked about it all the time.' By the end of the story, Troy, once silent and watchful, has become the indomitable talker, and by contrast, Tabitha feels defeated by being overtaken by her sister. 'Everyone else can be a magician or haunted, and that leaves me stuck with ordinariness, though I was the one who didn't want that in the first place…' Margaret later reflected that she saw in these characters a duality of her own life and an early love of romanticism. As a child, she had longed to be dark and mysterious, made powerful and magical through silence, but was confronted with more prosaic truths. Margaret says: 'Tabitha was quite the self-portrait: the talkative girl who wants to write, managing to mention my stories into conversations in an effort to show other people how interesting I was.' By the end of the writing process, she adds, 'I had written all about myself without ever once realising. Now that's scary.' A short story Margaret wrote for older children was called 'The Bridge Builder'. Margaret's father, a construction builder, worked on bridges in the Bay of Plenty during the 1940s and 1950s. 'Like a sort of hero, my father would drive piles and piers through sand and mud to the rocky bones of the world,' she recalls. In the story, the bridge builder raises a family and constructs purely functional bridges, bridges to be driven over. But later, after his three children have grown and his wife has died, he is released from his domestic responsibilities and finally builds the bridges he had only seen in his dreams. He builds a bridge out of black iron lace and releases a hundred orb-web spiders onto the iron curlicues to spin their own lace, and after a night of rain 'the whole bridge glittered black and silver, spirals within spirals'. Another creation is the 'mother of pearl bridge only to be crossed in moonlight at midnight'. Now the people crossing over these surprising bridges 'became part of a work of art'. Margaret was proud of her father and the ability to point out his bridges as they drove along. I rather like to think of Margaret and her father both conducting productions, one shaping the tangible, the other crafting eloquent ideas; each building bridges, linked by the art of transformation. The author would like to thank the following books for their help: Margaret Mahy: A Writer's Life by Tessa Duder; Dissolving Ghosts by Margaret Mahy; The Word Witch: The Magical Verse of Margaret Mahy by Tessa Duder.
