spinofflive
Outline of a house with portraits of six women and a bunch of books inside.
The women who built The Sapling. Clockwise from top: Nida Fiazi, Briar Lawry, Jane Arthur, Thalia Kehoe Rowden, Sarah Forster, with Simie Simpson at centre (Illustrations: Giselle Clarkson; Design: Archi Banal)

BooksJune 29, 2022

Long live The Sapling

Outline of a house with portraits of six women and a bunch of books inside.
The women who built The Sapling. Clockwise from top: Nida Fiazi, Briar Lawry, Jane Arthur, Thalia Kehoe Rowden, Sarah Forster, with Simie Simpson at centre (Illustrations: Giselle Clarkson; Design: Archi Banal)

Books editor Catherine Woulfe on the website giving our kids’ books a home. 

Children’s books matter. They matter to booksellers and publishers because they make up something like 30% of the market. But much more importantly, they matter to families. They make shitty sick-at-home days better, they make bedtimes better, they build bonds between grownups and littles, they build brains. They help kids become adults who love to read. They are a reason to sit down and turn off the world for a bit; they provide ritual, and pause, in a society sorely lacking both. 

The very best children’s books matter in a way that’s something like magic. We carry them with us as we grow up, a box of paper talismans, and rejoice in bring out when our children have children and there are new bonds to build. Sometimes, too, they can help us honour already-beloved bonds. 

As my father was dying I sat beside his bed and read him my favourite picture book. It’s called The Value of Believing in Yourself. The glue in the binding is failing and the pages are yellow and it’s about, of all things, Louis Pasteur inventing the rabies vaccine. I used to make Dad read this book to me over and over, and scold him when he tried to skip words. Reading it to him at 3am, his last 3am, as he breathed in and out and in, the words felt like a spell, like a blessing. 

Children’s books are powerful like that.

I’m saying all this because you would think, looking at Aotearoa’s media, that children’s books don’t matter. They get hardly any coverage or critique beyond cute potted reviews that get bundled up into a quarter-page as “five new books about kiwi”, or whatever. Often these are just a couple of hundred words, or shorter; barely more than a chirpy plot summary and a gormless “my kid loved it!” Reviewers seem to switch off their brains when they write about kids’ books. Hardly anybody gets stuck in. (Notable exception: Dionne Christian over at Kete Books, who goes hard.) Therefore nobody reads the reviews. And round and round we go. 

There is one (1) media outlet in Aotearoa devoted to covering children’s books and doing it properly and that is The Sapling, a website that was conjured out of thin air by Jane Arthur and Sarah Forster in 2017 and carries the strapline: “We love kids’ books, and we take them seriously.” 

Screenshot of a website, looks bright and breezy and informed.
The Sapling, Saplinging (Image: Supplied)

The Sapling is now the home of children’s publishing in New Zealand. It’s built out of almost 800 essays and reviews and interviews and cartoons, all of them better than just about anything else out there, and all of them held in place by a vibrant and welcoming kaupapa. Women built this place – Jane and Sarah and a handful of others – week by week, around busy lives parenting and writing and bookselling. It wasn’t a job for them, it was an extra; they paid contributors before they paid themselves, and often missed out altogether.

The Sapling got me started on proper book reviewing, giving me the space, trust and open brief that helped me find my voice – I wrote for them about Lani Wendt Young’s Telesā series and Sherryl Jordan’s Winter of Fire

The Sapling does not settle for fluff or for once-over-lightly and their commissioning is gold: last year they published a kōrero between Whiti Hereaka and Gavin Bishop; they’ve published Cassie Hart interviewing Shilo Kino, they published Steph Matuku untangling what counts as a Māori story. “Our writing should encompass all genres and themes and worlds and structures. It should be whatever the hell we want it to be. But we need to give ourselves permission to do it, to break down those self-imposed boundaries. To be proud and excited that no matter what we write, it’s a Māori story … “

They have published a series profiling librarians of Aotearoa, and one on booksellers. They put out a bunch of great and weirdly specific lists to help parents and librarians pick up new books for their kids – books on experiences of disability; on starting school; on New Zealand nature guides.  Importantly, they make proper space for illustrators; cartoonist Giselle Clarkson is a fixture. They have always placed a real emphasis on Te Wiki o te Reo Māori: they publish a te reo version of each piece first, and drop an English one a day later. A couple of years ago, for that week, Nadine Anne Hura stepped in as a guest editor. 

Cartoon showing a girl crouched on the floor reading, text above her says 'There's this Margaret Mahy story I read when I was seven, maybe eight'
Giselle Clarkson, Giselle Clarksoning (Image: Supplied)

I think my favourite piece is an essay by Sarah, calling out the creepiness of the dude Alex Archer ends up with in Tessa Duder’s iconic Alex series: “Tom is eight years older than Alex, but that doesn’t stop him immediately falling in love with her. This, as an adult, made me uncomfortable, as do a lot of the things he does: blagging his way into the Olympic compound in disguise as a translator, watching her train, acting as tour guide after getting others to trust him; these are all what we’d call ‘grooming’ in our current era, given the power imbalance.”

Tom, eh. Always hated that guy.

I knew the editors were getting burned out, but I was still stunned in October last year when they announced they’d hit the wall. On Twitter: “The Sapling is dead, long live The Sapling. Just kidding. The Sapling is most certainly not dead – but we have run out of puff, and we are taking a break…”

And from their newsletter: “We have had to make this very difficult decision to help us pursue better balance in our workloads, family life, and wellbeing. However, we are hoping to take the next few months to rebuild the site, and seek to make the operation of it more sustainable.”

The editors undertook a survey, asking readers for their ideas and feedback. They planned for a glorious resurrection in August, in time for the announcement of the winners of this year’s New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults. They applied to Creative New Zealand for money to pay their contributors and editors, as well as cover running costs. They’re good at these applications; they were awarded $30,000 in 2018, $36,000 in 2019, $43,000 in 2020. What they asked for this time was not wildly out of line with those amounts. 

But last week they discovered they’d dipped out. 

We don’t know why, at this stage. I just hope the assessors didn’t consider the hiatus a sign of flakiness: surely, after the last couple of years, knowing when to step back and regroup – and doing so with forethought and grace – should be considered a strength, not a weakness. 

The editors have already sought permission to apply again in the next round. 

~

The children’s book awards finalists were announced early this month and of course Sarah at The Sapling had a comprehensive piece ready. She read all the books and ordained her favourites and pointed out a few notable omissions and introduced us to the judges and she did all of that with decency and great readability. Keep in mind she also did this with zero funding, around her fulltime work in comms, via a site that’s allegedly on ice. She did it because she cares very much. 

The Spinoff cares too, of course, and we give proper coverage to children’s books whenever we can (see our tribute to The Hunger Games, our profiles of Graci Kim and Chloe Gong, our patriotism as regards Hairy Maclary, our monthly children’s bestseller charts). I’ll go on and on about children’s books given half a chance. But there’s no substitute for focus and specialist knowledge, and time. Embarrassing case in point: this year I haven’t got to reading all the book awards finalists, let alone writing about them. (My only cogent thoughts so far: The Eight Gifts of Te Wheke by Steph Matuku and Laya Mutton-Rogers should absolutely take out the picture book category, and Spark Hunter by Sonya Wilson the junior fiction – both of these are triumphs. Gavin Bishop’s splendid Ātua is my pick for non-fiction, and for the Margaret Mahy Book of the Year.) 

So I urge you to head over to Sarah’s piece at The Sapling, and then have a nosy around in the big joyful house of kids books she and the other editors have built these last five years, and show them and the riotous cacophony of children’s publishing talent in this country that you care very much, too. Maybe you could even write a letter of support to the editors, to help them get across the line in the next CNZ round. And then, I suppose, cross your fingers. Long live The Sapling. 

Keep going!
Young woman with long brown hair staring serenely at camera, backdrop of arum lilies.
Rebecca Hawkes (Photo: Ebony Lamb)

BooksJune 26, 2022

One more for the bloodbath

Young woman with long brown hair staring serenely at camera, backdrop of arum lilies.
Rebecca Hawkes (Photo: Ebony Lamb)

Lily Holloway reviews Meat Lovers, the new poetry collection by Rebecca Hawkes.

“The 2023 Ockhams are going to be a bloodbath.” You hear this sentiment a lot, bouncing around the literary events of Te-Whanganui-a-Tara, in launch speeches and around the free booze table after readings. And boy howdy, they’d be right. This year has brought a glut of incredible poetry collections from powerhouses such as Chris Tse and essa may ranapiri as well as from first-timers: see Jordan Hamel, Khadro Mohamed, and Cadence Chung. Many more promising numbers are sitting in my to-read pile or are still forthcoming. 

Meat Lovers, the first poetry collection by Rebecca Hawkes, seems like a book that would thrive in a bloodbath. Broken up into two sections – Meat and Lovers – the collection is visceral, successful in its embrace of the sexy and lush as well as the strange and grotesque. Hawkes is particularly masterful in her precise and vibrant descriptions, the kind that leave you wondering how a fly-struck sheep, say, or cling-filmed supermarket meat, could be described any other way. 

Sometimes, the imagery is so intense it’s almost as if I can touch it: in ‘Waif & stray’ a ewe’s mangled eye is “iodine stained & pulpy, like a knot in a school desk stuffed with chewed gum.”

Or in ‘Flesh tones’, where swift rhythmic language mirrors the fast and indiscriminate processing of lambs “to an orderly beat of bleat-shunt-roll-pop-squirt-snip-snap-shove”. The sharpness of the language makes for a rich and often bloody examination of the farming industry, bodies, sex, and love.

It’s not just the way Hawkes describes things. At many moments while reading I was struck by her ability to pace poems in order to build impact. In ‘Is it cruelty’, two girls encounter a dying sheep on their way to swim in a river: 

“If the sheep tries to get up when it sees them but can’t?

If the sheep’s eye rolls back in its head, hazel

iris nebula billowing around the flat black

pupil? If they are two shadows that blot out

the sun reflected in said wet eye?”

This poem, which consists entirely of questions, amps up the gruesome horror-esque suspense by repeating: “If the stone hits the skull with a sick quiet thud that is barely a crack?” The traumatic image with its nauseating onomatopoeia builds emphasis with each repetition, giving the question “Is it cruelty if…” an increasing sense of urgency and desperation.

‘After the blizzard I followed my mother’ is another poem that struck me with its ending. This is a balanced and piercing piece where the speaker leaves the warmth of their home to care for cattle. The space in between each two-line stanza is reminiscent of paths made in snow:

“My mother said our service to the cattle came first, although the power

was out in the house and the needs of all the rest of us formed a torrent

 

like badly stacked firewood tumbling towards her, heavy enough

to crush.”

The connection between the dependency of cattle and the stark and frozen landscape to uncertain familial relationships is most striking in the final line of the poem, when the speaker asks about their mother: “And what if she dies while we are still angry with each other?”

Cover of Meat Lovers, featuring surreal painting of a great white cow.
Hawkes is also an artist; she painted this glorious cover (Image: Supplied)

Underlying the collection is an examination of the contradictory way we view animals as adorable embodiments of innocence while also killing them, often brutally. In ‘The Conservationist’ the farmer’s daughter has “hands flexing restless to snap necks/to caress”. Even the title – Meat Lovers – embodies this duality. Descriptions of sheep in ‘Flesh tones’ are horrific and then beautiful when the speaker remembers being “ankle deep in a bursting purple corpse” before cauterising the tailing wounds of lambs with “eyes the warm brown of sunshine on a cello”. 

‘Hardcore pastorals’, the seven-part poem that ends the first section, is the bloody and pumping heart of the collection (and is a sequence of poems that deserves a whole thumping review of its own). Its final section switches it up by changing to the first-person perspective of a cow about to be slaughtered. The cow speaks with power:

“I know all about your mistakes and am judging you

behind my placid bimbo-gaze I calculate

the leached nitrates the cargo of conflict phosphates

the torturous farrowing crates the ever inventive 

cruelties of efficiency”

The cow challenges the reader to reconcile their cognitive dissonance, to stop fucking around by pretending we aren’t all a part of the slaughter:

“so bitches you’d better marvel

you’d better eat drink and be merry

do not just cruise past in that decrepit subaru legacy

you feast from these paddocks already

even if you have never set foot in them”

In a similar way, discomfort is evoked by creating a parallel between meat and sexualised bodies. In ‘The Flexitarian’ “red ink from the slaughterhouse” is compared to lipstick. In ‘I’ll eat you up I love you so’ the speaker is “the slice / of wagyu tenderloin / in the softcore food porn”. The sexy body is the consumed body. Many of these sexy meaty moments are also very funny. ‘Mince & cheese’ details a sexy pie incident in which the speaker is splattered with 

“deflated pastry relieved of its high-protein load

the flimsy plastic sheath serving no protection”

The setting of ‘Denying that it was a phase (was a definite indicator that it was a phase)’ is a “dismal fetish ball” in a basement carpark, for Pete’s sake.

Meat Lovers is also a deliciously queer collection. The recurring motif of the werewolf is used to speak to the perceived danger of queerness to people around us. In ‘Werewolf in the girls’ dormitory’, the speaker hides what feels like a terrible secret:

“certainly you don’t want anyone else to

detect the unguessed danger inside you.

press the yearning moon to the roof

of your mouth like a dry pill.”

The idea of queerness as a danger to others is examined through the roles of predator and prey. The werewolf has internalised the idea that their sexuality makes them an inherently frightening imposter. This idea is also echoed in the brilliant and heartbreaking poem ‘I can be your angel or your devil (know your meme)’, when the speaker makes sure to clarify that they did not look at their drunk friend while helping them shower. Learning to accept your queerness often involves unlearning the idea that you are inherently perverse or monstrous. A lot of time is spent reassuring others (and ourselves) that we do not intend harm.

For me, reading and re-reading Meat Lovers has served as one of the only surefire ways to cut through the ever-looming gloom of winter. A much safer way to get that spark of feeling than licking batteries or engaging in intense Trade Me bidding wars for shit you don’t actually want. It is everything I crave in a collection: wild and never pulling its punches while also honed and balanced in its craft. The kind of collection you point to and say, “I want to do that” (or maybe “I’ll have what she’s having”), Meat Lovers is a testament to one of the biggest talents on Aotearoa’s poetry scene.

Meat Lovers, by Rebecca Hawkes (Auckland University Press, $24.99) is available from Unity Books Auckland and Wellington

But wait there's more!