Don (D.S) Long

FROM THE OXFORD COMPANION TO NEW ZEALAND LITERATURE

LONG, D.S. (Donald Stuart) or Don (1950 –), is a poet, publisher and, as Don Long, children’s author. Born in Walla Walla, USA, to an American mother and New Zealand father, he was a leading figure in the 1970s avant-garde movement of young poets (Gary Langford, Alan Loney, Ian Wedde, et al.) to make New Zealand poetry more international, eclectic and adventurous. His own volumes were Borrow Pit (1971), Storing Stones for Winter (1974), In Search of a Poem (1976) and Poems from the Fifth Season (1977). He was also the innovative editor of Edge, 1971–77.

Moving in 1979 from Taylors Mistake, Christchurch, to Days Bay, Wellington, he began a collaboration with Witi Ihimaera, again with a mission to break down old assumptions and encourage diversity and innovation, but this time by fostering Māori writing. Their co-edited anthology, Into the World of Light: An Anthology of Māori Writing (1982), was a crucial vehicle for the then nascent Māori voice in written literature. It has been followed by their five volumes (to date) of Te Ao Mārama (1992–96).

Working for School Publications and its successor, Learning Media, Long began in 1988 to edit children’s books by contemporary Pacific nations writers. He has published over one hundred, some in up to seven separate language editions. He edited Matariki (1990–94), Te Ata Hāpara (1990–91) and the Tupu series (1988–), all for Learning Media. He founded the Samoan language journal Fōlauga (1997- ). By fostering publication of New Zealand writers working in Cook Islands Māori, Niuean, Samoan, Tokelauan and Tongan, Long contributes to what he calls ‘the breakdown of the idea that New Zealand literature is essentially a Pākehā/Māori art form’.

He summarises his career as ‘contributing to three sea-changes to the face of New Zealand literature’. Each is in retrospect consistent with the multicultural character of his own work, both in his earlier poetry and recent children’s writing, where the affirmation of multiple ancestries and rejection of restrictive categorising can be seen as the core of work that retains its freshness and conviction.

Note: Macrons have been inserted into the text

WRITERS IN SCHOOLS INFORMATION

Long is available to talk to school children of all ages as part of the Writers in Schools Programme. He is prepared to talk about Pasifika children's literature and reader's theatre. He would prefer to talk to classes of 30 or less students. Don is happy to run writing workshops for children by arrangement, including reader's theatre scriptwriting workshops, as well as lead Professional Development sessions for teachers.

Kapai: Kids' Authors’ Pictures and Information

Where do you live?
At the moment, I live in a house on the beach at Day’s Bay. I used to live in a cave house and a bach at Taylor’s Mistake, until the cave house was washed away by a storm.

What books do you read?
I love to read travel books and detective stories. I like reading about people travelling in really awful places doing things I know I couldn’t do. For example, I’m scared of heights so I like reading about people tramping in the Andes or Tibet. One of my favourite detectives, Aurelio Zen, happens to be frightened of heights, too.

Who is your favourite author?
Tony Hillerman. I love his Navajo detective stories about Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn. I love the way he weaves Indian traditions into his crime stories. It’s easy to see why he’s won both the American Indian’s Ambassador and the Navajo Tribe’s Special Friends Award.

How do you think up your ideas?
I use a technique Keri Hulme taught me and keep a writer’s diary/scrapbook. In this, I record story-starters, rough drafts, tape in newspaper clippings, and note interesting things I read in books or overhear people saying - really anything at all that interests me. Then, whenever I need an idea (maybe just to keep a paragraph going), I look back in there.

What is the best thing about being an author?
The best thing is the travel. So far, writing has taken me to American Samoa, the Cook Islands, Fiji, France, Hawaii, Japan, Niue, Samoa, Scotland, the Solomon Islands, South Africa, Tokelau, and Zimbabwe.

What sort of pets do you have?
I have a cat, of African origins, called Lorenzo. I’ve always loved cats: Java, China, Foghorn, Bilge Pump, Smokey and many more. Smokey was probably the strangest cat I’ve ever had because he ate dogs. He was part lynx and I suppose we shouldn’t have really brought him to the city.

What is your favourite food?
I once tried fruit bat in Niue and while it is interesting, I can’t really say it’s my favourite. My brother once tried to get me to eat dog in Hanoi. My favourite is octopus and even though I once got really sick from eating bad octopus in Fiji, salty octopus tentacles are my favourite food. (Now that you know this, see if you can find the sentence in my book Mum’s Octopus that the editor added.)

What is the most fun thing about being an author?
I like finding out stuff I don’t know too much about in order to finish part of a story. For example, I had to find out a lot about tÄ«vaevae before I was able to finish A Quilt for Kiri and it turned out to be really interesting. For example, I found out that you only put a tÄ«vaevae over a person in bed with the pattern up if the person is dead, otherwise you turn the tÄ«vaevae over with the pattern down.

Some Questions from Primary School Students
How do you make books?
Writing a book is like getting dressed and then realising you’ve got too many clothes on. What I mean is, first I write a first draft that includes everything that occurs to me. Then, in second drafts, I take unnecessary things out or turn things around until the story starts to feel more interesting.

Where do you go for your holidays?
We usually go fishing up near Turangi. I love fishing in the Tongariro River and in Lake Otamangakau, when the wind blows cicadas off the flax bushes into the water.

What was the naughtiest thing you ever did at school?
I put a dead rattlesnake into the drawer of our teacher’s desk. Dad was born in Christchurch but Mum is an American and we lived in California until I was twelve. In those days, teachers put their desks up in front of the classrooms, just below the blackboard. When she opened the drawer to take out the class roll, there was the rattlesnake, all coiled up. Instead of closing the drawer, the teacher stood on her chair and jumped on to the desk. The impact of her landing on the desk sent the rattlesnake flying up into the air and after that she and all the other children tried to run out the door at the same time. I’d love to write a story that has half that much impact.

Some Questions from Secondary School Students
How did you get started?
When I was at boarding school I ran away to sea one summer. Since it was a German ship, all the sailors spoke German, but I didn’t (although they taught me how to swear in German). It was kind of so I would have someone to talk to that I began to write in the cabin I shared with one of the other sailors. After I got back to Christchurch my great-aunt, who was a Jindyworobak writer, wrote letters to encourage me to keep going. Which I did, even though I wasn’t very good at English at school.

What advice would you give an aspiring young writer?
Don’t write so much to get things off your chest as to please a reader. I don’t really think of writing as something I do to please myself. It’s more like singing a song in front of an audience. Stories and poems are things you make in order to interest and entertain other people. So if something doesn’t happen in one of my stories the way it did in real life, then that’s fine. Always feel free to make something up if it will make a better story or a more interesting poem.

Is it difficult to make a living writing in New Zealand?
It may once have been harder. These days, New Zealand writers often write for more than just a New Zealand audience. For example, even though my stories have been published here in Māori and English, they are also read overseas in French, Spanish, Swedish, Samoan, Cook Islands Māori, and many other languages. Some of my books bave been published in South Africa. I also edit books for a publishing company, and I developed a course on multicultural children’s literature for a college of education. So, doing things like that all forms part of it too. Spending a week in Tokyo editing a book is a really fun thing to do and while you’re there you can gather material for future stories.

What were you like as a teenager?
I know I was too independent for my parent’s liking. I not only ran away to sea, I used to go hunting a lot in Fiordland, and I once hitchhiked from South Africa to Libya. By the end of my teenage years, I was even living in a different country from my parents and looking back, I think I must have often broken their hearts.

Is there anything else you could tell children about yourself?
I was hopeless at languages at school, where I failed Latin, Spanish, and French, but I can now read children’s books in Cook Islands Māori, Māori, Niuean, Sāmoan, Tokelauan, and Tongan. I wasn’t particularly good at English in school but here I am now, the author of over twenty books. This tells me that what they say you are good at, at school, isn’t always true. It might be that you just need to learn something in a different way or that you might be more interested in doing it later on in life. So I don’t think anyone should write themselves off as a writer. You are never really going to know unless you give it a go.

There were times when I felt quite sad and lonely as a teenager. One evening when I was working on the Cap Finisterre, we were somewhere to the north of Tahiti, going past a huge chain of atolls. I was alone at the back, peeling onions and scrubbing potatoes. The bridge of the ship looked forward and no one could see me. At one point, we were really close to a small motu, the sea was very still and I was sure I could swim to the beach. The only thing that worried me was the ship’s screw. Would I be able to jump far enough out from the ship not to get sucked back down to the propellers and get all chopped up?

As I stood at the rail, trying to make up my mind, the moment passed and the island began to slip away behind us.

But here’s the strange thing. As soon as I decided not to jump, a huge shark came up to the surface and looked right at me. It was almost as if it had been waiting to see what I would do.

Sometimes, when I’m thinking about writing a story it feels just like that again. Usually, I don’t write those stories. But when I do, they always chew me up.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Don Long was the course director of the National Diploma in Children's Literature course 'The Multicultural Experience of Children's Literature', which he wrote.

After working for Learning Media for nineteen years, where he published the Ministry of Education's current suite of resources for teaching Māori as a second language and then founded Learning Media's Pasifika section, Don became the publishing manager at South Pacific Press/Lift Education in 2005.

The Battlefield (2003) was written by Don Long and illustrated by Phillip Paea. This is a story about a girl who discovers that she mal have had ancestors who fought on both sides during the colonial land wars. What were those wars really like - and what does it mean to be of mixed ancestry? The Maori translation, Te Tahuna, won the 2004 Te Kura Pounamu Award.

The Lacquered Box by Don Long was published in 2004. It is focused on a journey to Hanoi with a New Zealand-born Vietnamese girl.

Glow-Worm Night by Don Long, illustrated by Tracy Duncan (Reed Publishing, 2004). This is a story about two children who go glow-worming with their parents at Matariki.

Don Long is currently an editor at South Pacific Press | Lift Education, the publishing company that edits and designs instructional series' (including Ready to Read, the Junior Journal, the School Journal, the School Journal Story Library, and Connected) for the Ministry of Education. He is currently editing a new English-Samoan bilingual series of literacy resources for new entrant classrooms for the Ministry of Education, and a series of picture books with kura kaupapa Maori for the NZ Transport Agency.

An article about the last child to touch a living moa (Alice McKenzie at Martin's Bay in 1880) appears in Connected 2013 Level 2. His award-winning short story 'Finding Owl' appeared in the UNESCO story collection Journey Around Asia in 2014 and his Chinese New Zealand story 'Barry and Jim' was published the same year in Eastbourne: An Anthology along with a World War II story 'The Submarine Boom', also written for young people.

With the Honolulu-based Cook Islands writer Johnny Frisbie, Don Long has co-written a series of linked stories set in New South Wales and Rarotonga for The School Magazine in Sydney.

MEDIA LINKS AND CLIPS

• The Battlefield features in the 2003 Spring Issue of BRAT: Books for Readers and Teachers