After three years as books editor, Catherine Woulfe is off for a stint editing New Zealand Geographic magazine. 

I always read the acknowledgements before getting stuck into a book. The best ones are fascinating, revealing, like getting a look inside the story engine. Other times they read like a tearful, half-cut launch speech. My version – my way of farewelling this amazing job and readers and colleagues and the writing community – is potentially mostly the latter. There will be cheese. Indulge me. I’m nearly done. 

Thank you to Duncan Greive for hiring me at 31 weeks pregnant and as stressed as I thought I could possibly get (lol, this was March 2019). The decision seemed so completely risky on his part that I tried to talk him out of it, to the point of offering a bunch of other candidates’ names as I left the interview. Thank you for ignoring that and then quietly setting about rebuilding my confidence. I am aware that I sound like a rescue dog. 

It’s hard to step back into work when for five years plus your whole world has been kids. But The Spinoff made it almost easy, and they did that by removing the guilt, by making it clear that kid stuff comes first. The number of times I said sorry, sick kids, or sorry, no sleep, or sorry, school holidays, and they were like “Cool, what do you need?” Extraordinary. That attitude permeates the whole place. It made me determined to level up for them. And it’s deeply, pragmatically, efficiently feminist. I’ve never seen anything like it in New Zealand media. 

Thank you to Mad and Leonie and Simon and Sam, Alex and Alice and Catherine and Mark and Tina and Calum. Thank you to poetry editor Chris Tse and his predecessor Ashleigh Young. Thank you to Unity Books. 

Thank you to Toby Manhire, for building a space so safe that it felt OK to write about hard things, as well as my embarrassing forever obsessions ie Twilight and The Hunger Games. Sorry I never got round to ranking the opening lines of great New Zealand novels. For the record the only one I remember, and therefore the best, is Sherryl Jordan’s: “Always at the heart of my life there has been fire.” Now you’re glad I never wrote it, eh.

Thank you to everyone who trusted me with their own hard stuff, and took risks, and the people who wrote their hearts out, and for all the times I opened an essay or a review and went, Oh holy shit, this is great. That’s the best part of this job, by miles. 

Thank you to Toby Morris for drawing me as Katniss.

Thank you to Paula Morris for only getting publicly pissed off at me once. I maintain my innocence.

Thank you to Paula Harris for writing me a poem when I was self-flagellating over not understanding poetry. 

 

you are the bath filled with green marbles

I slip into at night to wash myself

 

you are the letterbox overflowing with sleeping ladybirds

I check compulsively for mail

 

you are the curtains of pink candyfloss

I pull closed after the moon comes up

 

you are the couch made of turnips

I lie on as I wait

 

you are the carpet made of ripe figs

I dance over on summer mornings

 

none of this makes sense so it’s possibly a poem

none of this makes sense so 

 

you are the wheelbarrow full of silver bullets

I feed to the garden to make it grow

 

Thank you to Alice Tawhai for sending me a painting. It’s called Box of Birds and it’s bright blue and turquoise, with a shock of scarlet birds hooning out of a box up into the sky. I first saw it on her website in May, when my darling Dad was in his final agonising weeks, and even just seeing it as a thumbnail helped me to understand his death as a release, a bizarre and soaring thank fuck. The real thing lives beside my desk now, a humming, comforting presence, a gift. 

Thank you to Bingo and Bluey and Bandit and Chilli. 

Thank you to my daughter, who turned out to be a sleeper, and who snuffled and snored on my chest while I wrote this review and this one and this one. Thank you to my son, who learned to read while I had this job and reminded me just how cool that moment is, that moment you realise you can read anything. Anything! Thanks to my husband for eating so many puddings. Seriously, so many.

Thank you to Linda Burgess, who emailed effusive praise and support whenever I wrote anything. Thank you to Alex Stronach who answered all my gormless genre questions with enthusiasm and lols and repeatedly tapped into his mysterious networks to come up with writers and yarns. Likewise thank you to Sarah Forster and Briar Lawry, who let me bounce children’s publishing stuff off them endlessly. Thank you to the Brilliants, a group of mothers who write and look after each other. You remain the only good thing about Facebook. 

Thank you for The Absolute Book and Grand and The Mirror Book and Kurangaituku, for Āue and Sprigs and The Eight Gifts of Te Wheke and Atua. Thank you for all the superb books I’m forgetting. There are so many. Thank you to the couriers who traipsed up our shitty driveway many many times a week to drop off … I make it something like 2,200 books? I’m sorry I couldn’t rave about more of them. 

Thank you to the OGs Maurice Gee, Jack Lasenby, Sherryl Jordan, Gaelyn Gordon, Tessa Duder. 

Thank you to the world of New Zealand letters, for not being nearly as bitchy as I was braced for. 

Thank you for the Edward Cullen T shirt. 

Take care.

You can reach Catherine at bycatherinewoulfe@gmail.com