How I write:

The Going West Books and Writers Festival is celebrating live poetry with Different Out Loud, a collection of video collaborations between Aotearoa poets and film-makers. Wellington poet Hera Lindsay Bird’s piece, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Goodnight, will be available from May 10.

What’s your writing routine? Do you have a certain time of day you like to write?

I write for an hour a day every morning, before work. More on the weekends. Occasionally I take a day off to watch TV.

And where do you write?

Mostly in a cafe, but only out of necessity. My favourite place to write is in bed.

Can you share a piece of good advice you’ve received about writing?

Make all your characters as smart as possible – Mark Leidner. Hold yourself to a higher standard than anyone else is going to.

What advice do you give to writers starting out?

Don’t be afraid to try on different voices, copy, steal. Nothing is original, not really.

What kind of books do you like to read for enjoyment

I only read for enjoyment. I read a lot of humour, 20th-century crime fiction, fantasy, people like Elizabeth Jane Howard and Elizabeth Strout. I’m a children’s bookseller, so I read a lot of middle-grade books about magic and art heists too. Non-fiction – particularly science. Interesting biographies.

Do you read physical books or digital ones?

I read both, but mainly digital. That’s probably a bad thing to admit as a bookseller, but when you work in a bookshop you tend to accumulate a lot. I only buy books I’ve already read multiple times and plan to read again. I also listen to a tonne of audiobooks.

Do you write in the margins of books? Absolutely not.

What ‘‘must read’’ book have you not read? Go on, fess up.

Nothing is must read. And some books you have to wait for the right moment in life. There’s no point reading Middlemarch at 15. I’m saving Virginia Woolf for my 40s.

Hera Lindsay Bird’s Do Not Go Gentle Into That Goodnight takes its name and its starting point from the famous work by Dylan Thomas, but relocates Thomas’ classical form into the more immediate and slightly surreal parlance of young modern lovers. Director Luke McPake’s hand-drawn and rotoscoped animations shy away from illustration towards a visual poem in their own right, almost haiku like, complementing Bird’s text while leaving it ample space to do its uncanny work.