How did you first go about having your writing published?

I wrote a collection called The Art of Walking Upright, that’s the first book I ever had published, and when I went to Titi, I wrote lots and lots of poems about Titi, and I took them to a publisher just off the street, I didn’t even know how you did it, I didn’t have a clue. I just walked into Auckland University Press and gave them the manuscript, and they were quite encouraging initially, but said they weren’t interested, so then I went away and I re-wrote the whole thing, it took me three years, and I went back and I gave it to them again, and they said it’s better, but we’re still not interested.

So I had a friend who had published poetry, and I asked them and she said send it to these other places and I did, and one of them was Steel Roberts and they picked it up, and Roger Steel is my publisher who is in Wellington, and he is a small publisher in the sense that he is not a big organisation, and he published the book and it did well, and so after that it became easy to publish stuff, but it was getting that step in that’s hardest. But when I think of it, I was very unsophisticated, I just went straight in off the street, and said I’ve written this, I don’t know if it’s any good, are you interested? But I think the most important thing I did, was – it broke my heart when they turned it down, like it really did, like yeah it’s almost as bad as girls breaking your heart. But I remember deciding no, I’m going to start again, and re-writing that whole thing over three years, and I think if you want to write you’ve got to be prepared to have your heart broken and get back up off the ground, and keep writing.