Freya Daly Sadgrove (Photo: Supplied / Design: Tina Tiller)

BooksMarch 7, 2023

Go bigger and push harder: An interview with Freya Daly Sadgrove

Books editor

Freya Daly Sadgrove (Photo: Supplied / Design: Tina Tiller)

Poet and theatre artist Freya Daly Sadgrove talks with books editor Claire Mabey ahead of Freya’s new poetry-in-performance show Whole New Woman.

Claire Mabey: You just opened a gig for Peaches here in Wellington. How did that happen and what was it like?

Freya Daly Sadgrove: How it happened is Nathan Joe. I am his baby and he nepo-babied me. We’ve worked on Show Ponies together and he’s the Creative Director of Auckland Pride and when he was asked by the Peaches people for suggestions of opening acts, he was like hmmmm time to push the poetry agenda!!! That’s what I imagine he was like anyway. He put my name forward, and I just think that was so dope and interesting of him? I don’t know, it’s just not something you expect to be asked to do when you are a poet, let alone when you’ve spent most of your life in Wellington and are, you know, used to a sort of smallness. Open for Peaches. I feel like Nathan’s thinking of a really big picture of the arts – presumably because he’s making and supporting work in so many different places and forms and ways. I Love And Respect Nathan Joe.

The experience itself was fucking magnificent. For one thing, I hadn’t performed for almost a year, really, and I just… you know, I just… it’s embarrassing for me (only cos of society) but the best thing I like to do is prance around on a stage saying exactly what I mean while my talented friends have a big hoon on their instruments. Samuel Austin was playing the drums and it’s just so fun to share the stage with him. And we got to do that for like, 20 minutes! And I don’t think anyone got bored! Some of them even bopped! And I felt fucking alive lol. So it was a very huge and usefully-timed reassurance that my show probably isn’t gonna suck too hard, which obviously has been a worry obviously.

But the massivest thing about opening for Peaches was seeing Peaches perform. I am not exaggerating when I say it was life-changing. I was open-mouthed the entire time. The craft!!!! The commitment!!!! The total absence of boundaries!!!!

You’re behind the electrifying genius that is Show Ponies, a kind of poetry cabaret where poets perform with back-up dancers and live music. It’s transformed the way audiences can access and experience poetry. Is the style and format for Whole New Woman riffing off Show Ponies?

Yes, big time. The first time we did Show Ponies it was like, oh true, we can do anything we want. It’s properly a vibe for the audience. There’s totally room to go bigger and push harder. Kirsten McDougall who was the publicist at THWUP (VUP at the time) was like well hey Freya you could make a whole show out of what you’re doing there in your set, and I was like oh shit true ok yeah cool I’m on it.

Then lockdown happened and time passed and covid covid covid. And my mental health stabilised and my thoughts progressed and my horizons widened, so my idea of the show kept growing, with nowhere to become real. It was hard to know where to like, stop the transformation represented in the show because time kept passing and I kept transforming IRL and getting new things to say and ways to say them. But you can’t say everything in one show. Anyway I’m off track fuck. Certainly it’s always been growing from the seed of my first Show Ponies set, alongside Show Ponies’s own evolution, but secret and unperformed.

Illustration of Freya Daly Sadgrove performing in Show Ponies. By Callum Devlin.

Whole New Woman is a solo show and something you’ve been working on for a while now, can you tell us what’s it about? What’s the vibe?

I don’t know if it can really be called a solo show, even though it’s very like, Me Me Me the Big Freya Show. But there’s two people with me on the stage the whole time – Samuel Austin (drummer) and Ingrid Saker (guitarist) – and they’re very much present, they’re very much doing a big powerful thing that actually makes the show. I’ve known them both for a fucklong time actually, over a decade. We’ve all done theatre together before, in quite foundational times in our lives, and it’s pretty special to be getting back on the stage with them now in this new context.

And yeah, I’ve been working on it for over three years lol. It’s evolved massively over that time. To begin with it was gonna be Head Girl: The Show, an extension of me and Thomas Friggens’ Show Ponies set – a kind of Show Pony-ified stage adaptation of my book. The plan was for that to go up at BATS in April 2020 and then go to Edinburgh Book Fest, lol, lol, lol, RIP. But I wrote Head Girl over like 4 or 5 years in my very mentally ill twenties, and I was already looking backwards at it when it was published; I was already new and different by then and ready to move ahead, so the show had to shift somewhere new too.

It’s not like completely out the gate new though, the vibe is still mental illnessy as – but still in a cool fun interesting way imo. It’s definitely to some degree responding to the book. It’s about transformation. It’s also about consciously trying to throw off that lifelong goddamn shame of asking to be seen and listened to, which currently has me by the throat. You might not necessarily suspect that if you have seen me perform lol, but that’s legit the only time I get free of it.

The OG poster for Head Girl: The Show. Design by Callum Devlin.

So Head Girl is your first collection of poetry, can you tell us more about how you’ve woven that material into Whole New Woman?

There’s seven poems from Head Girl in the show. I have on-and-off worries that I’m flogging a dead horse. Especially when I am “learning my lines” I’m like good lord can I let this poor sad period of my life rest, but when I am rehearsing the performance of them, I’m like ah, there is still some power here, and certainly there is meaning I want to draw from and reflect on and reframe from a new perspective. And the show is about transforming into a Whole New Woman, and without the context of the Old Girl that transformation wouldn’t land as hard I don’t think.

And so, yeah, the show transforms as well. The form of it transforms. Basically I’m pivoting to rockstar? For my thirties. I have written some songs. We are performing some songs. I am terrified to fucks. But also I’ve recently become very very powerful and I can totally actually do it I’m pretty sure.

Creating a live performance show is obviously a lot different to writing a poetry collection: how does the process differ? Do you enjoy one more than the other?

It definitely is different, but actually because of the panny d and various cancellations and delays and shit, I’ve spent a freaking lot of the past three years thinking about and writing this show in isolation, which is pretty similar to how I wrote my book. Similarly, at points it drove me a bit fucking mental. The thing that saved me each time was yanking my head out of my navel (or was it my ass) and talking it out with people.

So then actually getting to be in a room with my collaborators is only ever a joy. I have the excellent fortune of knowing and working with musicians and theatremakers who are really on their shit, really generous, really fun, kind and funny, and importantly beautifully accepting of my chaotic vibe. I feel so good and chill and stoked to work with everyone who’s been involved, man, it’s everything. I definitely enjoy that way more than sitting angsting in a room by myself and sweating out one word every forty minutes, yeah.

Do you prefer to encounter poetry as a performance? Do you think more people would love poetry if they saw it performed live more often?

Weirdly I’ve never asked myself this question before. I suppose, yeah, I do prefer it – even poetry on the page I prefer to experience by reading aloud. Cos like, sound, you know? It’s essential to poetry. Can’t finish a poem without reading it aloud.

In year 12 Mr Watson read aloud from The World’s Wife by Carol Ann Duffy and I was like ohhh shiiiit. Like damn, he knew how to read poetry. I still read those poems with his cadence; the rhythms of Little Red Cap and Mrs Quasimodo and Mrs Beast are all tattooed into my … er, soul? They’re definitely tattooed somewhere. Fuck I loved school lol fuck.

Yeah… I’d be lying if I didn’t say Show Ponies is my favourite way to experience poetry. I’d be lying if I didn’t say every poem performed in every Show Ponies show hasn’t moved me like… all the fuckin way. And enough people have said to me that they didn’t get or care about poetry before they saw Show Ponies that I feel pretty confident that yes people would love poetry more if they saw it performed – really performed – yeah.

I first performed my poetry when I was 11 lol. I got wheeled onstage in a wheelbarrow and I wore pajamas and a top hat. Wow… not as much of a Whole New Woman as I think.

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Duncan Greive
— Founder

You’ve been wonderfully honest in the past about how difficult it can be trying to be an artist in New Zealand. What would make it feel less demoralising do you think?

Okay doing Show Ponies in Auckland for Pride and Samesame But Different was like, extremely undemoralising, and the reason was: I had a real producer. I.e. not just me flying by the absolute seat of my pants, trying and failing to know what I’m doing the whole time. And that producer, Izzy (mononym, powerful), also procured a team of several people to do what I have been attempting to do in various degrees of alone-ness with Show Ponies for over three years. Tears come to my eyes to think of it!!!

I’ve never had enough funding to pay a proper producer, only enough to underpay me to produce (because I’m not a proper producer and I’m always lowballing my funding applications). I won’t do Show Ponies again without one, because I can’t go back now. The whole week leading up to the show I was going, how on earth do I feel this mentally okay? This has never happened before. I think a lot of artists accept a fairly high degree of mental fuckery tryna make stuff, because how else will it get made? But then I had Izzy going, Freya it does not have to be like this, I am here to look after you and the show, I don’t think artists should have to feel destroyed by their work. So, what would make being an artist less demoralising in NZ? More Izzys. How do we get more Izzys? Perhaps there should be (more?) specific arts administrator funding/training/mentoring/databases/community-building. Not all artists hate producing, but fuck, it’s not in my wheelhouse, it’s not where I feel confident. Where I feel confident is in the dreamy thoughty weird chaotic art-making artist-feelings-nurturing place, and the art is not as good when I can’t afford to spend time there.

But yeah, Izzy working on the show and getting that team together was possible cos of funding. It’s always funding, obviously. This time most of that funding came directly from the community – through the crowdfunding campaign that Nathan Joe absolutely busted his ass to make successful – Pride Elevates. Oh funding. Just… you know. Govvy baby… can u chuck more money in tha arts pls and a UBI thanks x

What are your hopes for Whole New Woman?

Do it again, for sure. Tour it. Make it bigger. Get backup dancers. Do it with three drummers onstage. Not kidding. I feel like it’s got some legs. Also my hopes is, while it goes around on its legs, that I can also be doing something the fuck else. I been living with this show in my head for so fucking long and I have more new shit to make. I have ideas!

Imagining you’re being forced to convince someone who a) says they hate poetry; and b) also isn’t into theatre; how would you try and convince them to give your show a go?

To toot my own horn (or to absolutely own myself, can’t tell which) a lot of people have told me they don’t like poetry but they do like mine. So, suck on that for one thing. I’m a gateway drug baybee. For another, the theatre aspect is really just that it’s in a theatre. I’d say, do you like live music? Do you like badass people going hard? Do you like Sam Duckor-Jones’s visual art? Do you like a really interesting cool time???? This show is not like other girls. (However it is in a community with other girls and loves and respects other girls and will help you to love and respect other girls too).

Whole New Woman by Freya Daly Sadgrove is playing at BATS Theatre on 9 – 11 March (currently sold out but worth trying your luck on the door). You can purchase Head Girl by Freya Daly Sadgrove (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $25) from Unity Books Wellington and Auckland.

Keep going!

Image: Archi Banal

BooksMarch 5, 2023

From mountains to the sea: (re)reading Helen Dunmore’s Ingo series

Shanti Mathias

Contributing writer

Image: Archi Banal

Shanti Mathias explores what the quartet of underwater adventure novels meant to her childhood self, and what they mean to her now.

There’s a wave on my bookshelf. The spines of Helen Dunmore’s Ingo books, a collection of differently sized editions, make clear lines of blue and purple and green. I’m rereading these children’s books in the sticky Auckland summer, diving into their ocean of adventure where it’s possible to breathe underwater and you can ride ocean currents like a rollercoaster.

The Ingo series has four books – Ingo, The Tide Knot, The Deep, and The Crossing of Ingo, with a standalone addition, Stormswept, published later with different characters. They’re children’s books by the acclaimed late British poet and novelist Helen Dunmore, set in the rocky cliffs and azure sea of Cornwall in the southern part of Great Britain. Published between 2005 and 2008, the series features the adventures of protagonist Sapphire and her brother Conor, whose father mysteriously disappears at the start of the first book. Living in a cottage by the coast, Conor and Sapphy meet Elvira and Faro, two young Mer – never mermaids – before they discover that they, too, can dive into the lush underwater world the Mer inhabit, where seals are guardians, sharks do their duty, and, if you listen hard enough, it might be possible to talk to dolphins.

Sapphy and Conor can travel in Ingo, they learn, because they have Mer blood. Initially, travelling between worlds feels “like a knife”, then it becomes easier; soon, Sapphy can breathe on her own underwater, not needing to hold Faro’s wrist to stay oxygenated. Over the four books, Sapphy and Conor go deeper and farther into Ingo, becoming involved with Mer politics, making friends and enemies, finding that the world underwater is more beautiful and dangerous than they could imagine.

I read the first book in the series as a child in Christchurch, wearing fluorescent yellow vests to walk, two by two, to the public library. I stroked the plastic binding, the book an alluring blue with a picture of a mermaid. I read it, loved it, slid the book back into the stainless steel slot a few weeks later, just one of many books that had to be returned when we moved to India to live deep in the mountains, far from libraries.

In that new place, we were bound by mountains, but I still dreamed of the sea. I begged and wheedled my parents for the rest of the Ingo series, and strings must have been pulled with godparents and visitors: they were unpacked from someone’s suitcase, all of their ocean colours bright and new, and they were mine.

Cornwall, the setting of the Ingo books, was almost unimaginably far away. But the setting, both on land and in the water, was so evocative that it was easy to imagine myself there. A seaweed forest has “thick stems and feathery branches, schools of silvery flickering fish [and] sea anemones and limpets making their home on the fallen stones”. On land, “cliffs loom, old and hoary as dinosaurs”. An autumn breeze has a “clear, tingling taste”. Sapphy walks over the heather-covered downs to get to the whitewashed cottage of Granny Carne, local wise woman and/or witch, and I felt the grass under my shoes too.

Fifty million years ago, the Indian tectonic plate collided with the Eurasian plate, propelled by the currents of magma that move the earth’s crust into new formations above the deep interior heat of the planet. This ongoing collision turned what had been sea floor into the world’s tallest mountain range, the even density of the plates meaning that neither was subducted. It was muddy down there, and shellfish lived their ordinary lives, sucking on saltwater; as the earth rose, they were covered in sediment, compressed by mighty forces, fossilised.

Millions of years later, I was a nine-year-old living 3,000 metres above sea level, thousands of kilometres from the ocean. But there were traces still of that ancient ocean that had rippled and folded to become the world’s highest mountain range: there were fossils. In walks in the hills, across dry scree slopes, we spotted them: curvy preserved ammonites, often crumbled, kind of ugly. They were easy to collect, to tuck in a pocket. I lined up fossils of this forgotten ocean on my windowsill, and I read Ingo over and over, and the sea didn’t seem so distant after all.

When I re-read Ingo this summer the story of adventures found and obstacles overcome were as familiar as the feeling of walking into the sea. But I found I was also reading as the child I’d been – the one who was so immersed in these books, utterly convinced of their importance. I know that if I read them for the first time now, I wouldn’t realise they were so special. Why did I love them so much then? The attention to place is certainly part of it: in the books, the ocean is deeply mysterious and alive, but it’s also shaped by the actions of humans. Climate change gets more than one mention; Mer rail against underwater mining, trawling, pollution, nets that kill dolphins.

The Ingo books are dotted with pieces of the Mer language, based on Cornish, a Celtic language that has been revived since the early 20th century. Sapphy’s father has abandoned his family for the call of the ocean: still he calls her “myrgh kerenza”, darling daughter. This is one of the first phrases of the Mer language that she understands. By the fourth book, she’s completely fluent: she speaks in front of an audience of Mer who want to prevent her from making the Crossing of Ingo, the journey by which Mer children become adults. She can converse with dolphins and whales; she speaks, too, a little of the language of the adult world, trying not to tell transparent lies, seeing things from her mother’s point of view. These fragments of another language makes the world seem dense with possibility; Sapphire learns so much, and there is so much she still doesn’t know.

Like Sapphy, I often was surrounded by a language I didn’t understand. I had awkward pieces of classroom Hindi, but it wasn’t enough to follow my friends’ jokes. Even when I understood the words, I missed the context, just like Faro and Sapphy trying, and failing, to make each other laugh with anecdotes about schools of fish, or schools of children. I longed to understand and be understood, but I didn’t have the words for it. Sapphy does: she is angry and jealous, wishing she could be one of the people, under and above water, who “know they’ll never have to choose between one world and another.” Instinctively, she understands that life in the ocean and in the air are completely different, nearly inimical, but united by the fact that she can, and does, go between them.

The Ingo books, too, are a dream of children’s independence. In one particularly striking scene in The Deep, Sapphy returns from Ingo, having accidentally spent a full day and night underwater. Her mother is out; her brother has lied for her to conceal her disappearance, saying she stayed the night with friends. She throws her jeans into the washing machine to rinse the salt out then realises that this is a tell-tale sign of her presence. She pulls the wet jeans out, puts them in a plastic bag, and hides them in the garden, demonstrating a presence of mind, and domestic competency, that I admired.

When Sapphy and Conor know that Ingo is growing stronger – that the breaking of the Tide Knot is going to cause a flood – they tell the adults around them to rouse the town and move to higher ground. They don’t have any evidence, but they are believed, and lives are saved. The word “magic” is rarely used in the Ingo books: if it comes up, it’s scorned, because working with the power of air and water is something organic to the characters, not magical at all. Instead, if Ingo is a fantasy, it’s one where children are loved and taken care of by the adults around them, but they still have space to exercise agency and power.

I continued to swim through Ingo as I got older, the paperbacks getting a little ragged at the edges. As a 13-year-old I would jump in pools with my legs pressed together, imagining that they were a tail: mermaids were beautiful and powerful, fully at home in their element and their bodies. In the water, I felt the same way, even if the rectangular, chlorinated school pool – reached by walking through a forest filled with monkeys and, once, a dead flying squirrel – was nothing like the living ocean that Sapphy and Conor explore.

I can find old photos of myself on a school trip with a sand mermaid tail that a friend had sculpted. The symbolism is nearly too obvious. Mermaids perfectly represent a split: dual nature, water and land, India and New Zealand – maybe even child and adult. In the Ingo books, Faro, with his strong seal tail, proclaims that he is not half of anything – he’s all Mer, but Dunmore subtly suggests that there are reasons he’s been so compelled to the surface when most Mer stay in their shadowy caves and jungles of kelp.

When I read the books as an adolescent in India, surrounded by trees and hills, I felt the pull of the distant ocean, alive within me. Monsoon, three months of cool grey rain and mist in your hair, was an ocean. I imagined the warm water on Bay of Bengal beaches evaporating in the seasonal winds, lifting and curdling across the plains, the sea coming to me. The rain that twined down the hills, gathering into the downhill logic of big rivers was returning to the sea.

The love of the ocean connected me to New Zealand, too. I had read in a book of facts that nowhere in Aotearoa is more than 75 kilometres from the coast, although I’m not sure this is true. We had an anthology of children’s books from New Zealand: I traced my finger over the illustrations in The Man Whose Mother Was a Pirate by Margaret Mahy, remembering beaches in Aotearoa where “great, graceful breakers moved like kings into court, trailing the peacock-patterned sea behind them.”

It was easy to read my life into books, to draw lines of connection even if my ordinary school days and my ordinary family weren’t embroiled in a quest to, say, save the world from a kraken. My identification with these stories were children’s books functioning as they are meant to: the immersive possibilities of adventure beyond normal life were facilitated by slightly blatant dialogue, unambiguous plots, brave but ordinary protagonists.

That doesn’t mean that children’s books don’t hold potential for adult readers (or rereaders!) too. In her essay Why You Should Read Children’s Books Even Though You Are So Old and Wise, children’s author Katherine Rundell says that she writes for both her child and adult self. “My 12-year-old self wanted autonomy, peril, justice, food, and above all a kind of density of atmosphere into which I could step and be engulfed. My adult self wants all those things, and also acknowledgements of fear, love, failure; of the rat that lives within the human heart.”

I know exactly what she means: it’s why I’ve kept the tatty paperbacks of my Ingo books with me as I have moved from India to Aotearoa, from Wellington to Auckland. My copy of The Crossing of Ingo is singed from the winter in a chilly concrete house where I huddled close to the electric heater, reading until the shiny embossing on the book blistered. I will never be able to breathe underwater like Sapphy and Conor; I have never been to Cornwall, but I didn’t have to for the books to mean something to me. The Ingo series isn’t simply about children exploring the magical ocean: they’re a reminder that I have grown – am growing – up, but things my child-self wanted remain with me now. I still crave a sense of belonging to two places. I still cherish my uneasy un-fluency in Hindi. I’m still drawn into the fluid possibilities of stories, as uncontainable as the sea.

‘Media is under threat. Help save The Spinoff with an ongoing commitment to support our work.’

Duncan Greive
— Founder