Home is where the words are

A new collection of essays from New Zealand authors contemplates the concept of home. Carly Thomas had a read.

Home is a word heavy with substance. It hums with association, takes the mind by the hand and leads it back to memory. It’s a personal space where connections run deep and it’s those connections that have spilt over onto the page of a book where the title Home is stamped in tangelo on the cover.

It is a collection of new writing, essays from 22 New Zealand writers, both established and emerging. Edited by Manawatu’s very own Thom Conroy, the book has given space for three other local writers – Tina Makereti, Helen Lehndorf and Nick Allen.

Conroy is a senior lecturer in creative writing at Massey University and author of two novels. Editing this collection was one of the most rewarding projects of his career, he says.

‘‘Home includes work from some of New Zealand’s finest authors, so I expected a high calibre of writing, but what has surprised me is the tremendous range of the work. In the essays of this collection, home is political, personal, melancholy, euphoric, around the corner, and tucked away at the farthest ends of the Earth.’’

Author Lloyd Jones’ reflections on home took him on a thought journey to Budapest, where he met some Syrian refugees at the railway station.

Ockham New Zealand Book Awards winner Ashleigh Young found her moment in a kiss and Martin Edmund associates home with the death of a circus elephant in Ohakune.

When Palmerston North author Helen Lehndorf contemplated the theme, the first thing that occurred to her was the complexity of home, ‘‘when life is challenging and ‘home’ loses a little of its role as sanctuary’’.

The first line of her essay is ‘‘Home was hell for a while’’, and it falls from there in an urgent tumble of communication about what life was like when her son was diagnosed with autism.

She drew from a collected 60,000 words, written as ‘‘therapy writing’’ and Lehndorf says that writing out her truths, as raw as they are, made her vulnerable. But in the next breath she says it is her ‘‘super power’’.

‘‘People say when you have children it is like you walk through the world with your heart outside your body, vulnerable. Writing things leaves me feeling a bit this way also, but the payoff of the connections forged with people who read and relate to the things I write makes it all so worth it.’’

Makereti felt some vulnerability in her essay as well. She writes novels, essays and short fiction and, like Conroy, teaches creative writing at Massey University.

She knows her style, but for this, she made a choice to go in a different direction – Jamaica.

‘‘Sometimes it is quite fruitful to have two far-apart ideas and actually make them bang up against each other and it’s nice to change expectations.

‘‘As a Maori writer, if somebody says ‘write about home’ then we all think we know what that means. I always write about origins and things like that and I just wanted to do something different.’’

We walk the streets of Jamaica with Makereti, experience the food, the people, her observations as a person ‘‘not from there’’ but also as a New Zealander thinking about home.

The result is an essay that is Makereti’s voice, but with a new tone, a tilted intonation from a person who says she tries to look at New Zealand as if she is in a

‘‘Home includes work from some of New Zealand’s finest authors, so I expected a high calibre of writing, but what has surprised me is the tremendous range of the work. In the essays of this collection, home is political, personal, melancholy, euphoric, around the corner, and tucked away at the farthest ends of the Earth.’’ Thom Conroy, editor of