Maddie Ballard reviews the debut essay collection of Pōneke writer Flora Feltham.
In ‘The Raw Material’, the longest essay in Flora Feltham’s dazzling debut collection, the author heads out for a run after hours of weaving and sees the world turn to textile. “Pounding along the Parade, I saw the seawall like a hem against the ocean,” she writes. “The ice flowers and rocks lining the shore resolved into the motifs of a rippling twill.” Feltham finds that weaving allows her to see the world as something as mutable as cloth: “To look at the world through weaving eyes … is to become hyper-aware of the qualities that allow me to make and remake – to drape, fold and ply an object.”
It’s a fitting symbol for the entire collection, because what Feltham demonstrates across her 13 essays is a gift for seeing things from a different angle. These are fiercely multivalent pieces, unafraid of uncertainty or complication. Bad Archive touches on everything from tapestry weaving to a bender in Croatia to historical baby photography – but perhaps the question humming beneath every essay is really “what does it mean to change your perspective?”
In my favourite essays, Feltham draws together seemingly disparate topics to inform each other, such that readers themselves experience a change in perspective. ‘The Raw Material’ starts off as an essay about weaving, but eventually enacts the very practice it describes – “weaving is a process of transformation, of two entities morphing into a fresh, surprising third” – by threading through scenes in a marriage counsellor’s office. By the end, Feltham has indirectly offered an elegant thesis on coupling: what it means to draw together multiple threads; what it means to live alongside another person. Meanwhile ‘The HEA’, an essay about attending a romance writers’ convention, also becomes about women’s sexuality and the author’s courtship with her husband. Sentences like “there is great skill in taking a second-hand plot and making it new” have acquired new resonance by the end of the essay.
If changing one’s perspective is the central rhetorical move of this collection, memory might be its primary theme. This is beautifully framed in the opening essay, ‘On Archiving’, which tells the story of Ella Mary Marriott Watson, a young woman who was sent from Christchurch to London in 1893 in the hope she’d fall out of love with a local bricklayer. Alongside excerpts from Ella’s diary, we get scenes of Feltham at work, archiving the diary. Not only is the piece a fascinating peek into the archivist’s world of UV-protective glass and acid-free paper folders, it offers meditations on the archivist’s practice that have wider implications for the collection. What and who gets remembered? How much can fragments tell us? Who decides? Feltham’s collection, as its title suggests, is a “bad archive” by traditional Pākehā standards: subjective, emotion-rich, riddled with unknowns and inconsistencies. But she shows us all archives – all memories – are incomplete and shaped by the biases of the people who touch them. What we select for inclusion doesn’t necessarily reveal “truth”, but it does reveal what we value.
If an archive reveals the interests of whoever compiles it, Bad Archive suggests Feltham is deeply interested in the world around her. The collection is varied and constantly surprising. It contains a healthy dose of journalistic essays, such as an interview-rich gem about Wellington’s seagulls (delightfully titled ‘Bogans of the Sky’). But Feltham is also brave enough to interrogate the personal, with a striking lack of defensiveness or sentimentality. Her essays about her family – especially ‘Proust Yourself’, ‘My Mother’s Daughters’, and ‘Meccanoman’ – are a masterclass in the form. Meanwhile, her relationship with her husband Pat unfurls across several essays, sometimes in the background, sometimes front and centre. Feltham offers a complex and loving portrait of long-term partnership, through all the ups and downs.
Amazingly for an essay collection, I felt there were no duds in Bad Archive. I was there for the essay on worms; I was there for the world of Meccano enthusiasts; I was unbelievably there for an imagining of the life of Julian of Norwich. None of these were subjects I’d have guessed I’d find enthralling. I found each essay to be illuminated and complicated by another one, giving the book a shapely balance. As a result, Bad Archive really feels like a collection, rather than a miscellany. It enacts something Feltham herself asserts in ‘On Archiving’: “the more you look at something […] the more it starts to change shape and bleed into its surroundings”.
I should also mention that the book is full of gorgeous sentences and casually brilliant ideas: the observation that “in the morning [silence] is a presence; in the evening an absence”, for instance, or the description of weaving as “a practice poured from the vessel of your body”. And it’s important to note that Feltham is incredibly funny – whether she’s researching seagull effigies on the internet or attending a session about writing sex scenes at a romance writer’s conference (“a woman in her fifties asked, ‘So, would we say metal cock rings are for more experienced people, then?'”). Feltham handles even the most serious material with a light touch and a willingness to laugh at herself. It’s an endearing quality, one of the most important for any essayist, I think, because personal essays are only as loveable as their writer. Feltham’s voice – smart, hilarious, curious, and disarmingly wise – is one I’d read on any topic.
I inhaled this collection and urge you to seek out a copy. It will certainly be a standout of the year.
Bad Archive by Flora Feltham (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $35) is available to purchase from Unity Books.