June saw a range of projects produced locally for National Flash Fiction Day. In Ōtepoti, a call for submissions went out for emerging writers to write a micro around the theme Climate and Creativity, and then Otago-based artists were invited to pair their work with a micro. The result was stunning, both visually and in contents, and included secondary school students as well as adults, with visual artists lending their talents from all around Otago.
The pairings:
Angela Trolove + Manu Berry
Anna Hoek-Sims + Nigel Brown
Brenda Finlayson + Dee Copland
Jasmine O M Taylor + Kirstie McKinnon
Layla Wainwright + Felicity Cutten
Leina Isno + Bridget Reweti
Lockee Stapley + Tōrea Scott-Fyfe
Lunda Scott Araya + Pauline Bellamy
Pam Morrison + Madeleine Child
Sara Litchfield + Kim Pieters
Susan Luus + Claire Beynon
Tōrea Scott-Fyfe + Jess Nicholson
Here we present a small set of these beautiful collaborations.
Brenda Finlayson | Inside out
Denise (Dee) Copland | Still life – Still hope XII
I walk downhill from home, milk bottles clinking as the bag strikes my shin. At the dairy, I queue behind a man in muddy gumboots and a checked Swanndri. We listen to the news on the radio – the American president has ended his government’s climate change program, sacking scientists and researchers. We shake our heads, sharing dread like we might once have shared a cigarette. Where will we find the joy, I ask. The man smiles from under his eyebrows, places a hand on his chest and moves it in and out, slowly, like a heart beating.
Story by Brenda Finlayson / Art by Denise (Dee) Copland, (2011-12) Charcoal, chalk pastel
Brenda Finlayson is a poet and writer who lives at Koputai Port Chalmers, on Otago Harbour, with the birds and sea creatures.
Denise (Dee) Copland has exhibited extensively in NZ and internationally to include Print Biennales in Europe, Asia and in group exhibitions in Australia, Japan and France since 1978.
Leina Isno | 7.3 and still counting
Bridget Reweti | TAU #3
Vanuatu shook – again. A 7.3 quake, no stranger. No Christmas, no bonne année, just 7,000 aftershocks. The Pacific Ring of Fire cracked beneath us; mother nature roared. I remembered Santo, 1990. The earth rumbled like a train. Tisiri lagoon surged. Nuwombxh and Neyarxh trees torn out, Uncle Jesse’s wedding forgotten. We fled uphill, barefoot in our mother hubbards. Chaos. Dust. Fear. At dusk we return to eat golden hybrid yams. Now, during Bislama Language Week, we speak our truth: Climate change is real. This is not legend. Not metaphor. This is lived memory. And we must protect life.
Story by Leina Isno / Art by Bridget Reweti, TAU #3 (2021), Hand coloured silver gelatin stereoscope
Leina Isno is a Ni-Vanuatu writer and health researcher currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Otago. Raised in South West Bay, Malekula, she draws inspiration from her cultural heritage and Vanuatu’s landscapes. Leina is a member of the Vanuatu Creative Writing Committee and blogs at www.adenemustribalgirl.wordpress.com, where she shares stories of her Denemus tribe and experiences bridging Pacific and Western Worlds.
Bridget Reweti is a Ngāti Ranginui, Ngāi Te Rangi artist and curator. Bridget is a member of Mataaho Collective, editor of ATE: Journal of Māori Art and co-curated the survey exhibitions ‘Māori Moving Image’ and ‘Marilynn Webb: Folded in the Hills’ publishing respective books by the same name. Bridget was the 2020/21 Frances Hodgkins Fellow at the University of Otago.
Jasmine O M Taylor | A glacier speaks
Kirstie McKinnon | Everything is present, all at once
From beneath the rubble of a moraine / beneath the ice itself / it emanates outward upward / while she moves / Writhing slowly / deeply down / down to her terminus / terminal living / Sit silent among crushed schist and dust / She groans / birthed bergs thrust into grey blue milk / Earth is alive and whether you listen / or hear only the sounds of your boots / she groans and squeals / Her blanket shifts across kilometres / flashing cyan hints of radiance / This mother / overheats / Her voice calls out / from within her crumbling daughter / Do you listen?
Story by Jasmine O M Taylor / Art by Kirstie McKinnon, watercolour on canvas
Jasmine O M Taylor [she/her] is a tangata Tiriti, pākehā, bisexual poet with a fixation upon mukbang and the sky. She lives in Ōtepoti and is part of the Octagon Collective team. You can find her work in Landfall, NZPS Anthology (2018 and 2021), Catalyst, Overcommunicate, Mayhem Literary Journal (2020), Poetry New Zealand Yearbook (2021), 1964 and takahē.
Kirstie McKinnon lives, writes, surfs and paints in East Coast Otago. You can find more of Kirstie’s writing and paint work on her Substack newsletter A History of Kindness.
https://kirstiemckinnon.substack.com/.
Susan Luus | Reflections
Claire Beynon | Where there is ice, there is music (i)
A Christmas decoration, holy trinity of pinecones, brittle and stuck fast in ice to a submerged cloud worshipping at the foot of the mountain where snow melt slips from crags, lines gullies.
You remind me of summer days, sweet perfume – roses, lavender, tūī’s flash, silk rustle of wings.
But now I am a detaching snowflake from a purple sky adrift in this upside-down, mirrored world in shades of shist green and grey, speckled silver and hints of gold
in this my place, my home.
My veins run cold. I relinquish myself to sleep, forever one with my landscape.
Story by Susan Luus / Art by Claire Beynon, pastel on paper
Susan Luus is a writer/artist who calls magical Arrowtown/Kã-Muriwai home. She was born in South Africa, and as a child imagined travelling the world in a caravan, sharing stories around campfires. Instead, she immigrated to Australia in 1992 and then to Aotearoa in 2014. She’s a member of the Queenstown Creative Writing Group, and her work has appeared in Flash Frontier: An Adventure in Short Fiction.
Claire Beynon is a visual artist and poet, based in Whaka Oho Rahi Broad Bay. She has an extensive exhibition history and her short stories, poems and flash fiction have been widely anthologised. Her second poetry book, For when words fail us | A small book of changes was published in 2024 by The Cuba Press.
Tōrea Scott-Fyfe | Glacial Time
Jess Nicholson | Maukatere Cubby
Time compressed into horizontal records: the clean sweep of winter’s oblivion, the grit and dirt of summer melt. In a crevasse deep in the glacier, we run fingers over frozen time. The weight of repeating events presses the past into clarity. Promises made, promises broken; over and over.
See there: that’s the year that desert dust filled our lungs. Snow stained red-brown while Australia burned.
But last year has melted away, and the year before last, and the year before that.
If we etch words with ice axes on the bare rock, will we finally learn to change?
Story by Tōrea Scott-Fyfe / Art by Jess Nicholson, from their 2024 solo show Whakawhanaukataka at Blue Oyster in Ōtepoti Dunedin; recycled clay and glazed with a variety of rocks from places where the artist has lived, or places they have whakapapa to illustrator. She loves painting nature and natural formations.
Tōrea Scott-Fyfe (Kāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe, Ngāi Pākehā) is a writer and ecologist from Ōtepoti. In the summer of 2020, they traversed Kā Tiritiri-o-te-Moana from Arthur’s Pass to Te Rua-o-te-Moko, visiting many glaciers along the way. You can find more of their writing in Headland, Turbine | Kapohau and The New Zealand Alpine Journal.
Jess Nicholson (Waitaha, Kāti Māmoe, Kāi Tahu, Pākehā) is a ceramicist whose practice focuses on cultural and environmental sustainability, incorporating local uku, pōhatu, sand, and ash into their work to make real and permanent the emotional and cultural connection they feel to te taiao. They reject capitalist notions of ceramic production, prioritising highly laborious and intimate processes to create works that explore feelings of belonging, domesticity and acceptance.
Pam Morrison | Songlines
Madpanic & Sons | Dorodango / Mudball
You might think she was praying, the wee girl, the way she’s bent over like that, soles of her feet pointing to the sky all covered in mud, small thighs pressing on bare calves, back curled over like a baby animal, not hunting, not playing, not resting, something else. See her hands, how they’re overflowing with small clods and loose dirt, black and brown, both, and her mouth, look, her mouth is there in her hands, in the dirt, her lips open and grubby. Listen now. She’s singing. She’s heard the story. The one about songlines. How they sung up creation.
Story by Pam Morrison / Art by Madpanic & Sons
Dunedin-based Pam Morrison is a writer of poetry, flash fiction and short stories. Her writing has been shortlisted for the Sargeson prize and has been placed and shortlisted in international flash fiction competitions. She has been published in a range of journals and in the Reflex and Bath flash fiction anthologies, Her book, Fields of Gold, was published in 2004.
Madpanic & Sons is an artist collective in Ōtepoti Duendin.