How does The Mires connect with or depart from your previous work?

It’s all connected. In fact, I didn’t know until I was writing The Mires that all of my books have been ‘about’ racism in some way. That sounds silly and obvious now, but I just thought I was writing about identity, which I was. Each new book reveals the other work afresh.

I’m also feeling weird about saying they’re about any of those things as it gives the wrong impression. I don’t sit down and think, right, now I’m going to write a book about racism… The books are really about the characters in them and things I don’t understand in the world (which happen to include identity and racism!)

Can you tell us about the imagery of ‘mires’ and the powerful foreword about swamps - how did they become an inspiration?

It started with walking my dog around my neighbourhood. It’s a pretty powerful landscape around Paraparaumu Beach, but so suburban, so bogan, plus a real mix of very wealthy and very not wealthy. There have been times I’ve mistaken it for being a bit depressed. I don’t think it is, but it doesn’t have the same glamour as Paekakariki or Raumati for example, even though it’s just as beautiful. I always wondered why that is. I read Elif Shafak’s Ten Minutes and 38 Seconds in this Strange World and just fell in love with the way she wrote about Istanbul - it felt very vivid and alive to me even though it also seemed exotic because I’d never been there. I love international fiction because it takes me places like that, and I found myself wishing I could write about where I lived that way, and assuming I couldn’t because where I live isn’t nearly as interesting. But I also realised that I was making assumptions about what is interesting and colourful and exciting to write about. Could I write as evocatively about Paraparaumu Beach as Shafak wrote about Istanbul? I have no idea, but it was a fascinating exercise, and it made me look even more closely at the place I lived, and if you do that it doesn’t take long to realise it’s all swamp.

Swamp is powerful. Once the swamp had a hold of the book, it didn’t take long for all that imagery to arise and for it to clearly signify so much more about the historical moment we find ourselves in, but more importantly the moment my characters find themselves in. Repo are essential elements of our ecology, our lungs, our ability to survive and sustain ourselves, especially in Aotearoa. But there is this darker way of looking at them, of not understanding them, of thinking they’re a waste of space, of suppressing them. Words like mires and bog have other meanings. I probably can’t think of a better word for the moment we find ourselves in right now as a country and a planet than mire.

Ha - I just googled it to check I wasn’t saying something stupid, and this is what came up:

1. a stretch of swampy or boggy ground.

2. a complicated or unpleasant situation from which it is difficult to extricate oneself.

Yep - that sounds about right.

We love the framework of the stories of three women intertwined, which Saraid da Silva also used recently for Amma and Amy Brown for My Brilliant Sister: in those cases familial, but here of neighbours. What’s special about these tripartite viewpoints and the way in which they allowed you to write?

Well, it made it very complicated to write, especially with an omniscient narrator too! There is something very key and strong and instinctive about the number three though and tripartite characters or viewpoints. I just realised all my novels have either three perspectives or three key characters in relationship with each other.

These three families came together I guess because of the concerns I had about this moment that we’re living through. The Pākehā family in The Mires come out of my own Pākehā upbringing, not that I’ve ever known a Connor, but I had witnessed a lot of so-called ‘casual’ racism growing up and I wondered to what extent it’s related to more extreme forms. The Māori family in The Mires comes from my own experiences as a single parent when my kids were young. I always wanted to write a family like that because the reality of it is so stark and so common but you don’t see it a lot in the wider literature. The refugee family were key because I don’t think the story of racism in Aotearoa is complete, for want of a better phrase, without inclusion of our immigrant whānau. I have always had a strong interest in and admiration for immigrant and refugee populations who share many of our experiences of racism and displacement, and indigeneity, and I’m deeply concerned about how few refugees we are making room for. For whatever reason, this story needed all three families and perspectives, and they needed what I think of as narrative equality - to be shown from the inside, if that was possible.

You were already mulling on white supremacist terrorism and the concept for The Mires prior to the terrible mosque attack in Christchurch 2019. How did the locality of this attack shape the novel?

It’s one thing to imagine something is possible in our ‘neighbourhood’ and another thing entirely to see it happen. It was just so devastating and unbelievable (but shockingly real). I had wanted the book to tackle some ideas around how we are complicit in such things and at first I thought I would continue to write the book as I had first thought about it. But eventually I realised I couldn’t do that anymore. What I had imagined was possible had become real, but it was much worse than I could ever imagine. It forced me to go deeper - much more domestic, more personal, more quiet. I thought about harm a lot - who I could or could not write about, and how. It’s not simple. If we as a society create an environment where this kind of extremism occurs, and then begins to gain ground, how do we show how damaging it is without also showing victimised and damaged brown people i.e. without causing further harm to those people? I have to thank my daughter Kōtuku for her help in developing my thinking around this.

More broadly, you’ve described the book as exploring the relationship between ‘casual’ racism to extremism. What do you think the place of a novel is in exploring these issues?

This book can be hard to talk about because it’s so easy to just talk about the big themes and those big themes are all capital letter Big Themes! But then people read it and it’s just a story about three families, and going to your neighbour’s for a cup of tea, and picking up the wrong guy at the pub. A novel works at the level of character, and in identifying with those characters, maybe the reader feels something in response to the events of the book, and maybe they feel reassurance or anger or hope or despair, but they kind of do so in community with those characters and the writer and other readers. I only write about what seem like big questions because they are literally around us every day now - it’s not like I have to go out of my way to find extremist views. I was writing during the 2022 occupation of Parliament and it felt like the extremism I was writing couldn’t meet the reality of what was in the news every day.

But a book, maybe a book can remind us just a little bit of our humanity and what really matters. I do hope, whatever I’m writing, that it connects and lifts the reader to a sense of possibility. To be honest, if writing can elicit change then let’s do it. Some will say that’s not what it’s for, but I think that’s what it’s always been for, even when it’s pretending to do something else!

You’ve been living on the Kāpiti coast while writing - to what extent is this community an influence on The Mires?

Ironically, I don’t think I had much of a community in Kāpiti. I found it hard to connect there. It’s probably one of the reasons I no longer live there, though the land and waters are obviously a massive influence and I adored living on that coast. But while I was living there I did reconnect with my papakāinga and whānau in the South Island in a more regular and involved way before, and that has been massive for me.

Community has always been incredibly important to me because it wasn’t something we had growing up, but for various too-much-information reasons, I can find it very difficult to build community, so when we moved to Ōtautahi, I decided I would need to work harder on it. And it’s gotten easier because I have people around me who are very good at it. I have even learnt to small talk effectively in recent years. I still resist doing it, but I see the reasons why it is useful!

What is your hope for this novel, or who do you hope might read it?

The only hope is that there are readers - I don’t mind who they are! It’s been lovely already to have the feedback from readers and reviews. And I am really enjoying having the opportunity to be read more widely in other countries. Having a wider conversation with a new audience is fun in a different way than the home audience - I feel like there is an opportunity there for not just me but other Māori and New Zealand writers to gain new readers.