Ellie Kivinen launched Sharni Wilson’s hybrid collection, One to many and other experiments, in Auckland on 17 August 2024. This book was the winner of the At The Bay I Te Kokoru 2023 flash manuscript award for hybrid writing, selected by David Eggleton and Harry Ricketts.

This month, we publish Ellie’s launch speech and celebrate Sharni’s book, with an excerpt. Ellie Kivinen co-founded the Writers Café Auckland, an organisation whose mission is to connect and support the Auckland writing community. She writes contemporary and speculative fiction, and we share her speech here.

You can find the book at the publisher’s page here.

 

From Ellie Kivinen…

Kia ora tātou and thank you for being here tonight for the launch of One to many and other experiments. And thank you Sharni for inviting me to speak about the book – which is actually really difficult because it’s like no other book I’ve ever read.

As you’ll know, it is the winner of the inaugural At The Bay | I Te Kokoru prize for a hybrid collection. Now, I don’t know how familiar you are with the hybrid form – I have to say I didn’t know a huge amount about it before reading this book, but hybrid literature refers to works that don’t follow a specific genre or literary tradition. Instead, it mixes elements from multiple sources – like fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction – creating something entirely new and unexpected.

This demands a great deal from the author, because they must master a variety of writing styles, which is really challenging. And Sharni does that with confidence and flair. In this book, you’ll find short stories, creative nonfiction, experimental pieces and even translations. It’s a very varied collection, but at the same time it also brings these starkly different elements into a cohesive and engaging whole.

Together these pieces become an exploration of relationships – the three parts of the book loosely focusing on beginnings, middles and endings. Each piece in the collection takes you on a journey of experience and emotion, reflecting the unpredictable nature of our connections with others – whether that’s through surrealism, sci fi, dystopian, or pieces that border on horror or chick-lit.

And if you read carefully, you’ll notice the pieces in this collection bouncing off of each other, you’ll notice unexpected parallels and contrasts between them.

I think the best word to describe this book is ‘mesmerising’. It gives you a reading experience that’s both audacious and thought-provoking. It keeps you on your toes, never quite knowing what to expect from the next page – which is very characteristic of Sharni’s writing.

I’ve known her since 2018, and we’ve been hanging out in the same writing groups ever since – and actually I thought this prize kind of had Sharni’s name written all over it, because this book is  kind of similar to being in a writing group with her and one week she might bring a bilingual poem and the following week it might be the opening of a dystopian short story, but they’re always distinctive.

So, to introduce Sharni – she hails from Hamilton, she’s a fiction writer and a Japanese-to-English literary translator. She has translated works by some of Japan’s leading contemporary writers; her work has appeared in publications like Landfall, World Literature Today and Words Without Borders. She has an MA in Japanese Literary Translation from the University of Auckland, and is a three-time graduate of the British Centre for Literary Translation Summer School. In 2020, she was a finalist for Lunch Ticket’s Gabo Prize for Literature in Translation & Multilingual Texts. Her debut translation, Swan Knight by Fumio Takano, was published earlier this year by Luna Press.

Thank you all once again, and I hope you enjoy diving into this remarkable book with Sharni.

*

An excerpt from the book

poached eggs

That morning Sarah was out of bed at the crack of dawn. Behind the blinds lay another clear, grey and gusty city morning, dazzling with hope and possibility, exactly like the one before it and all the countless preceding mornings, which had whipped away from her like wind through her fingers, and here she was, at this stage in her life. Not long to go until… She stopped herself there. Right place, right time.

Sarah grabbed her clutch bag and headed straight to the grotty bathroom to shower and redo her hair and makeup. When she was as shiny as she could preen herself – clean and fresh, with alluring ‘daytime eyes’ – she crept back naked into the bed, slid all the way across and pressed herself up against Jake’s hairy sleeping back. No response. She tried slipping her hand cautiously over his hip, but he rolled over onto his front with a grumpy ‘huh’.

The best laid plans, she thought. Ah well. Mornings were never his strong point. She struggled back into last night’s dress.

Out in the kitchen, the eggs were waiting up on a high shelf in the pantry. Jake’s flatmates, Ben and Andy, were never up at this hour of the morning, and she had the kitchen to herself, although she always had to wash, dry and put away their crusted dishes from the previous day first.

She had bought the eggs at the farmers’ market yesterday, so she knew they were really fresh, with that thicker white near the yolk that would hold a better round shape when cooked. They were organic and free-range, with authentic chicken poo on their speckly brown shells; from a small flock, with access to pasture and range enrichment: trees, shade, shelter. She didn’t want to consume a product of cruelty.

Her hands rested on the gentle curves of the eggs, and for a moment she drifted off into an idealised dream of hens. Warm, fluffy feathers, nestling in their boxes in the henhouse – until someone came along to collect the eggs, and then they would scratch and peck with frantic rage. Mad as a wet hen? Her grandad would call her a sentimental townie.

After carefully washing the chook muck off the shells, Sarah cracked each one into its own small cup with the ease of long practice, adding a splash of vinegar on top. Tiny bubbles were already rising in the shallow water in the pan. A stir, round and round to create a miniature whirlpool – let it slow and smooth. She slid the eggs in one by one, hand almost touching the water, so that the yolk stayed in the middle of the white. She kept her eye on them for the three minutes that was his ideal degree of cooked; lifted each one out onto kitchen paper to drain and trimmed off the unsightly straggly bits of white. The toast popped up with a crash, exactly on time, and a final slather of butter; the eggs were placed on top, salted, peppered, and ready to be served up.

Two plates, one for each hand, forks and knives on top, and she carried them into the bedroom, where the weak light slanted in through closed Venetian blinds. Jake’s shaggy blonde surfer locks were sticking out of the blankets in his big bed, where she’d left him. He didn’t surf, except the net, but he avoided haircuts.

Sarah put one of the plates on the bedside table and leant over to place the other right by his sleeping face, where he could smell it. It was one of the most effective ways of waking him up happy.

Jake stirred, nostrils twitching. Oh shit – she’d forgotten the coffee – too late now. This is the right place at the right time. She had her smile ready.

He threw his body over in the bed with a grunt, cracked his lids and saw the plate. ‘Thanks babe, you’re a legend.’ He heaved himself up, propped on a pillow and began to devour the offering. ‘Any coffee?’ he asked hopefully, in between mouthfuls, and she had to shake her head.

‘Not yet.’ She perched on the edge of the bed to eat hers. Two eggs, two pieces of toast for him; one egg for her, no toast.

She took the plates back to the kitchen and washed up again, made plunger coffee, while he showered and dressed. It was Saturday. He had no work or university commitments. She wasn’t going in to work either, barring emergencies. That was why she’d planned it for today.

(to be continued…)

Sharni Wilson’s book One to many and other experiments can be purchased from the publisher here.