PhD Project Profiles
On this page:
The International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML) launched New Zealand's first PhD programme in creative writing in 2008.
The writers who have joined the programme are already working on a wide range of topics, and their supervisors come from an equally wide range of academic departments. While primary supervisors are all staff from the IIML, co/secondary supervisors have come from from Architecture, Art History, Gender and Women's Studies, the Graduate School of Nursing, Midwifery and Health, the English and Theatre programmes of SEFTMS, and Te Kawa a Māui / Māori Studies.
Regular group meetings have also been established where PhD students (and their supervisors) can discuss their work in progress and take turns to present aspects of it in an informal and supportive atmosphere.
Our first PhD graduate, Marian Evans, was capped in December 2010.
Here are some updated descriptions of PhD projects as of mid 2011.
You can also read about some of our MA graduates on our MA Graduate Showcase page.
Pip Adam (commenced 2009)
Pip Adam is a Wellington fiction writer. Her first collection of short stories Everything We Hoped For was published by Victoria University Press in 2010 and won the 2011 NZSA Hubert Church Best First Book Award for Fiction. Her work has appeared in Sport, Glottis, Turbine, Lumiere Reader, Hue & Cry, Landfall and Blackmail Press. Her work has also appeared in publications produced in conjunction with two exhibitions at the Wellington City Art Gallery and her reviews have appeared in Metro.
The aim of Pip's PhD project is to explore new ways of representing our relationships with the large built forms of architecture and engineering. In order to gain a new perspective on buildings, tunnels, bridges and dams Pip is analysing a variety of texts written by structural engineers. Through this critical work she has identified ways of incorporating characteristics of engineering's technical language into her imaginative writing to produce stories in which buildings become the generators of narrative.
Maxine Alterio (commenced 2009)
Maxine Alterio is a short story writer and novelist with an interest in narrative research practices. She graduated from the University of Otago, with an MA awarded with distinction in Education. Maxine also holds a Diploma in Teaching (Tertiary). In 2010 she won an Ako Aotearoa Sustained Excellence in Tertiary Teaching Award. She lives in Dunedin.
Her first fiction collection, Live News and Other Stories, was published in 2005 by Steele Roberts (NZ). A number of her stories have won, or been placed in, national and international competitions. Several have been broadcast on radio. Others have appeared in anthologies such as Penguin 25 New Fiction (Penguin Books, NZ, 1998); Home: New Short Stories by New Zealand Writers (Random House, NZ, 2005); Best New Zealand Fiction Volume 3 (Random House, NZ, 2006); and Myth of the 21st Century (Reed, NZ, 2006). Maxine's best-selling first novel, Ribbons of Grace, was published by Penguin Books (NZ) in 2007. She is also co-author of Learning through Storytelling in Higher Education (RoutledgeFalmer, UK and USA), voted in 2007 by Questia Librarians as one of the sixteen most influential books in higher education.
The creative component of Maxine's PhD in Creative Writing will be a novel entitled Lives We Leave Behind, which traces the experiences of New Zealand nurses on active service in Egypt and France during the First World War. Her aim is to foreground the nurses' stories and background the soldiers' because until late in the twentieth century there was a tendency to highlight 'trench' experiences, and to focus on the histories of fighting men and medical innovations, rather than the work of those who healed and cared for the wounded.
The critical component of Maxine's PhD, a thesis of 30,000 to 40,000 words, entitled 'Memoirs of First World War Nurses: Reflections on and insights into traumatic and transformative experiences', aims to establish the ways in which nurses, as a group and as individuals, reflected on and made meaning of their wartime experiences through the writing of memoirs. Using a framework of narrative inquiry, as interpreted within the field of cultural history, Maxine anticipates that her research will contribute to the historiography of wartime nurses' experiences and reveal how narrative inquiry can intersect with cultural history to inform, support and enrich our understanding of nurses' experiences during and immediately after the First World War.
Relevant links:
- Visit Maxine's website
- Penguin Group Ltd (NZ)
- RoutledgeFalmer (UK & USA)
- Steele Roberts Publishing Ltd (NZ)
- New Zealand Book Council writer page
Angela Andrews (commenced 2011)
Angela is a poet who has previously trained and worked as a doctor. She completed the MA programme at the IIML in 2005, and published her first book, Echolocation, in 2007. Her poems have appeared in Best New Zealand Poems, Sport and Landfall. Angela's PhD explores the relationship between medicine and poetry.
Angela writes: Over recent decades, in parallel with the general rise of 'the medical humanities', poetry has increasingly appeared in undergraduate medical school curricula, medical journals, medical websites and anthologies. I'm interested in what has brought about this growth, what poetry offers doctors and medical students, how it might contribute to their clinical acumen, and ultimately, in what ways it might help medical professionals achieve the goals of their clinical practice.
I'm particularly interested in the ways in which poetry offers a 'way in' to the clinical encounter, which is completely different (and complementary) to the conventional biomedical approach. In academia, amongst the general public and within the medical community itself, there is concern that the biomedical focus of the clinical encounter has become too dominant, at the expense of other ways of thinking. The shortcomings of the biomedical approach, with its 'objective' gaze and focus on the body as an object to be studied, have been the subject of much discussion within medicine, philosophy, ethics and the medical humanities over recent years. Failure to take a wider, more integrative approach to the clinical encounter has arguably constrained doctors' abilities to achieve the fundamental goals of medicine.
The PhD has both a critical and a creative component. These two parts of the whole are, in themselves, an exploration of the ways in which experience can be approached from different directions, through different modes of 'seeing', 'understanding' and 'knowledge'. The creative component is a collection of poems about my experiences as a medical student, doctor and patient, as well as a family member and friend of someone who is unwell. The critical component encompasses a survey of the history of clinical medicine, an examination of the fundamental goals of medicine, and an exploration of the literature concerning phenomenology* and medicine, in an attempt to answer the questions: what are the components of knowledge and understanding required in clinical practice, and what are the limits of biomedical knowledge and the biomedical approach? In what ways can poetry contribute to clinical knowledge? Is medicine an art or a science? If the clinical encounter has – as many critics claim – become mired in its over-emphasis on science, to the extent that its fundamental goals and core values have been obscured, can the arts, and in particular poetry, offer a way back to the humanistic tradition of the profession?
*Phenomenology studies consciousness itself – the act of perceiving – searching for the true nature of the objects of experience. The phenomenologist aims to set aside their taken-for-granted perceptions about the world, and instead tries to pare back reality to immediate experience. In doing this, the idea is to recognize the ways in which experience is coloured by factors as culture, gender, profession and modes of thinking, and make them explicit. Although it is not necessarily deliberate or conscious, or always the case, it seems to me that poets are often concerned with this sort of thing too.
Michelle Arathimos (commenced 2009)
Michelle writes: I write stories and novels. I've had some short stories published, some turned into radio plays (in 2009) and have spent the last two years writing a novel, Pelagia's Baby. I did an MA in Creative Writing at the IIML in 2006, which was a fabulous year of wonderment, joy and full-time writing for all involved (I think).
My PhD project has grown out of themes that emerged in my MA portfolio of short stories – predominantly cultural clash, alienation, and fractured identity. As a Greek New Zealander, born in Wellington but raised speaking another language, I find that my writing slips in and out of cultural settings as much as I do. I started to explore these issues in more depth in my novel.
Then, in 2007, the 'Terror Raids' occurred. Seventeen, mostly Māori, activists were arrested, denied bail and accused of being involved in 'terrorist' activities. The terror charges were later dropped. In the furore that followed I was fascinated by the media's sensational depiction of the activists, and by the impassioned discourse this event provoked in Aotearoa New Zealand. The novel that will form the creative component of my PhD relates to this. It will be about two 'freedom fighters' whose linked stories cross timescapes and cultures. The first of these stories will be set in contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand, and will follow the paths of a Māori 'freedom fighter' arrested in the 'Terror Raids'. The second part of the story will centre on a 'freedom fighter' in the Greek Civil War (1946-1949).
For the critical component, I will be studying the construction of 'otherness'; not in authors' work but in the way we read authors themselves. Often in contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand, stories from authors outside the dominant norm are actively celebrated, often for their 'authenticity' or their 'exotic' qualities. How much does this positive celebration of 'otherness' re-enact and re-enforce stereotypes of difference? How exactly is status awarded? Who is it that is doing the awarding? I will examine the media's construction of six authors: Patricia Grace, Keri Hulme, Witi Ihimaera, Tusiata Avia, Karlo Mila, and Kapka Kassabova. My aim is to analyse the language used to describe, promote, and critique these authors, so as to understand whether we approach a writer's work differently depending on what we know about the writer’s ethnic background.
Read Michelle's work online:
Stephanie de Montalk (commenced 2010)
Stephanie de Montalk is a former nurse, documentary filmmaker and member of the New Zealand Film and Literature Board of Review. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from Victoria University. She is the author of the memoir/biography Unquiet World: the Life of Count Geoffrey Potocki de Montalk (Victoria University Press, 2001; also published in Polish translation), the historical novel The Fountain of Tears (VUP, 2006), and four collections of poetry, the first of which, Animals Indoors (VUP, 2000), won the 2001 Best First Book Award at the Montana New Zealand Book Awards. In 2005, she was the Victoria University Writer in Residence.
Stephanie writes: I propose a study of the language and state of being of physical pain. My dissertation, Beyond Words: Literature, Language and Pain, will interweave the degree's creative component, a pain memoir, with the critical research component, an assessment of the effect of pain on language and the effect of language on pain.
Of special consideration: chronic pain, 'the wild west of medicine' (Alice Sebold); physical pain's 'unsharability' and 'resistance to language' (Elaine Scarry); the proposition that while emotional and mental suffering play central roles in the creation of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, the number of literary texts that deal with bodily torment, although growing, remains small; the suggestion that physical pain is under-represented in literature because literature does 'its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind' (Virginia Woolf); and an examination of the lives and works of selected writers in pain, including Alphonse Daudet who believed that, for victims of incurable pain, literature 'is a solace and relief ... a mirror and a guide'.
Relevant links
New Zealand Book Council writer file
Victoria University Press author page
David Fleming (commenced 2010)
David Fleming is a writer from Boston, Massachusetts. He holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop (2008), and his short stories have appeared in Mississippi Review and Chicago Quarterly Review.
David writes: "The creative component of my PhD will be a novel about a family of fundamentalist Christians living in the western United States. I am interested in the increased prevalence of these 'closed' groups in American society, and the ways that these groups reflect (and react against) the larger culture.
My critical component is still in formation. Partly, I intend to research the ways authors have used God-and-Devil figures to reveal the conflict inherent in the development of individual identities within changing social contexts. Starting with Melville's Moby Dick, and proceeding to specific works by William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, and others, I will discuss the ways that writers have framed their analysis of changing social contexts by creating figures that embody religious archetypes. What is gained in this process, both within the novel and as an element of craft? How has this pattern evolved in literature?"
Marian Evans (2006 – 2009)
Marian Evans’ PhD, 'Development: Opening space for New Zealand women's participation in scriptwriting for feature films?' found that New Zealand women writers' and directors' participation in feature filmmaking is very low. Marian continues her writing, research and activism within her post-doctoral Development Project.
Read about Marian's MA experience.
Relevant Links:
Laurence Fearnley (commenced 2009)
Laurence Fearnley has written seven novels. She holds an MA in Creative Writing (Victoria University, 1998). In 2004 she went to the Antarctic under the NZ Artists to the Antarctic Program and in 2007 was the Robert Burns Fellow at the University of Otago. She lives in Dunedin.
Laurence writes: I couldn’t believe how much space there was. Everywhere I looked, I saw uninterrupted views of either land or sky. I thought that if I set out walking I would still be traveling well into the night and throughout the following day and perhaps, even, the day after that, as well. I remember turning to Dudley and saying, ‘You could walk for ever,’ and in response he looked across at me and nodded and I could see – I could honestly see – that he felt the same way. Like me, he was transfixed.
I saw tiny pin pricked holes made in the snow where drops of water had fallen from the tussocks. I saw the way the snow was an intense blue in the patches where it was shaded by the larger bushes. I saw footprints made by rabbits and hares, a crazy zigzag of steps which went nowhere in particular.
It was more beautiful than anything I had ever seen and I didn’t have the words to describe it. I felt it though. I let out an incredible whoop of joy and skipped into the air, laughing and laughing; there was so much joy inside me. I couldn’t contain myself. For the first time in all my memory, I could not contain myself. (An extract from The Hut Builder describing Boden – age 7 – sighting the Mackenzie Basin for the first time.)
I enrolled in the PhD course in March 2009 and began writing a novel, The Hut Builder. The idea for the novel grew from a failed attempt to write a memoir about my love of tents – and the places I have camped over the years. One section of that memoir was devoted to my childhood trips to Aoraki/Mount Cook where – as a child from age three upwards – my parents took me and my brother tramping and skiing on the Ball Glacier. I have very fond memories of the area around Foliage Hill and White Horse Hill – now excavated to create a car-park for camper vans. I realized how much of what I loved back in the 1960s-70s no longer exists: The camping area has been diminished, the Ball Glacier ski-field has gone due to the retreat of the glacier and the settlement at Lake Pukaki and the road we traveled along are now underwater – a result of the dam. So, added to this is the threat of turning the spacious Mackenzie basin into dairy units – large, open areas and the sense of a big sky being reduced.
I set The Hut Builder in this region but in the years 1938 – present day. The central character, Boden Black, grows up in Fairlie (where I come from) and lives a pretty quiet life. As a young man he travels to Aoraki/Mount Cook where he helps build a climbing hut on the slopes of the mountain. The people he meets over the summer have a profound influence on him – cause him to re-think his ideas about national heroes and open his eyes to the possibility of becoming a poet.
The critical side of my PhD has focused on Aoraki/Mount Cook but concentrating on the first attempts made to climb the mountain from 1882–1915. What my research hopes to show is that there are differences between New Zealand and overseas climbers – both in how they climbed and how they wrote about their experiences. The first New Zealand climbers were largely self-taught with little mountaineering experience prior to attempting an ascent of the mountain. European climbers tended to climb with professional guides and came to New Zealand after spending a few seasons climbing in the European Alps. Travelling to New Zealand, to the 'virgin peaks' was, in itself, an adventure and one they detailed in the books they wrote.
Aoraki/Mount Cook was first climbed in 1894 by New Zealanders Tom Fyfe, George Graham and Jack Clarke and yet it seems to me that these names are not so well-known as that of Freda du Faur – the first woman to climb the mountain in 1910. Mountaineers – like du Faur – tended to come from the better-off middle and upper classes, people who had the money and time to mountaineer. Fyfe, Graham and Clarke, by contrast, were labourers and would eventually find employment as guides – leading clients such as du Faur up the mountain. The 'voices' – that is the written word – associated with mountaineering tended to come from those from of the upper class – George Mannering, A.P Harper, Freda du faur, E.A. FitzGerald – whereas the response of the 'working' climber is relatively unknown.
I see myself as a novelist and have found the critical component of the PhD pretty daunting. I find myself latching onto interesting snippets as I research – creating characters out of the people I am supposed to be studying and story-lines from the events depicted.
New Zealand Book Council writer page
Lynn Jenner (commenced 2010)
Lynn writes: I began my PhD in 2010, six years after I started writing with a year of fulltime study at Whitireia Polytechnic. In 2008 I completed an MA in Creative Writing at the IIML. My MA thesis, which was the first version of Dear Sweet Harry, won the Adam Foundation Prize for Creative Writing in 2008. Auckland University Press published Dear Sweet Harry in 2010. Dear Sweet Harry won the 2011 New Zealand Society of Authors' Jessie Mackay award for best first book of poetry in the New Zealand Post Book Awards. It was fantastic to think of a jury of strangers reading the book and enjoying it.
My thesis explores the human activity of searching for, documenting and re-constructing what is lost. This includes people, species, cultural practices and words. The thesis examines artifacts constructed with the intent of preserving memory, and the tools and processes used to construct these artifacts. It explores some contemporary ideas about memorials, including the possibility that once an event has been memorialized, everyone can safely forget about it. It examines memorial at a very large scale and at an intimate scale. It also examines the roles of chance and deliberate re-use and re-cycling in rescuing stories and objects from the process of disintegration or loss. It will also explore the question of whether the presence of the past is only apparent to those who are already familiar with a certain piece of history.
The thesis will be a single work which is a hybrid of critical and creative writing. It is also a hybrid in terms of genre.
Activity Theory, a theory of learning with origins in German philosophy, the writings of Marx and Engels and the Soviet cultural historical psychology of Vygotsky, Leont'ev and Luria, will provide a steady drum beat behind the writing in the thesis, drawing attention to questions such as 'What makes this system tick?' 'What moves it?' 'What are its mechanisms? Its interconnections?' 'Who does what work?' 'How are they rewarded?' 'What tools do they use?'
The PhD is a fantastic opportunity to read really widely and to write as part of a community of practice which includes the PhD group and my two supervisors. In this way it feels a bit like the MA programme. But over three years there is time to learn more about other resources in the University and to develop some other skills which you may not have thought you wanted to learn but are helpful in a writer's life, such as applying for grants and scholarships. The structure of the PhD with its regular supervision and goal setting has been extremely helpful to me in keeping the project moving. Having supervisors for three years is another interesting aspect of doing a PhD. It means that your work is always being read by excellent writers who know your aspirations for it and are committed to the end result almost as much as you are. Who wouldn’t want that?
Read Lynn's poems online:
Best New Zealand Poems 2008, 2009 and 2010
4th Floor Literary Journal 2008, 2009 and 2010
For a glimpse of Dear Sweet Harry see: Auckland University Press 2010
Kerry Hines (commenced 2007)
After the Fact : Poems, Photographs and Regenerating Histories
Kerry commenced her doctorate as the IIML's first PhD student in June 2007. In her research project, After the Fact : Poems, Photographs and Regenerating Histories, she is writing a book-length series of poems and a critical work that investigate and respond to a collection of nineteenth-century New Zealand photographs by William Williams (1859-1948). The poems – which are intended for co-medial presentation with selected images – test, draw and build on readings of the photographs and contextual information about them, and incorporate actual events, people and contexts, as well as imagined elements.
Kerry is also exploring issues such as how nineteenth-century images are currently interpreted, the meanings of Williams's photographs and the contexts in which they were produced, how they have been used, and how they can be positioned in terms of other New Zealand photographic work from the same period.
Conference papers arising from the research and incorporating both creative writing and critical work include 'William Williams's Photographs of The Old Shebang ca 1883', presented at 'The Rise of New Zealand Photography 1839-1918' Symposium held at the University of Otago, Dunedin, 6-8 December 2007; 'Archived Landscapes and Regenerating Histories', presented at the International Visual Sociology Association Conference, University of Cumbria, Carlisle, 22-24 July 2009; 'Beyond the Illustrative: Photographs as Resource', presented at the Association for the Study of Australian Literature Conference, University of New South Wales, 7-10 July 2010; and 'Image, Archive and Creative Practice', presented at the Tertiary Writing Network Colloquium, Victoria University, 2-3 December 2010.
Kerry's PhD research to date has been supported by a Victoria Postgraduate Scholarship for PhD Study, and by Faculty Research Grant funding towards obtaining photographic reproductions of images for close reading.
Christine Leunens (commenced 2008)
Born in Hartford, Connecticut to an Italian mother and a Belgian father, as a teenager Christine Leunens moved to Paris, France, where she had a close relationship with her grand-father, Guillaume Leunens, the Flemish painter. Christine holds a Master of Liberal Arts in English and American Literature and Language from Harvard University. Her Master's thesis, 'Henry James and the Late-Nineteenth Century Aristocracy under the Napoleonic Code: Madame de Vionnet and a Contextual Reading of The Ambassadors' won the Dean's Thesis Prize in the Humanities. Christine and her family made New Zealand their home in 2006. In New Zealand, she became a violinist in the Manawatu Sinfonia and received a Victoria University of Wellington Doctoral Scholarship to write a third novel as part of a PhD Programme in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters. Her thesis, 'Literary Mothers-in-Law – A Can of Sunshine (novel); and Evolution of a Thorny Nature: Novels in English and the Mother-in-Law (critical study)' has been submitted for examination.
In 1996, Christine received a prize from the Centre National du Cinéma in France for best scenario. Leunens's first novel, Primordial Soup, was published by Dedalus in the UK in 1999 and received praise in The Times, The Sunday Times, Independent, Publishers Weekly, Scotland on Sunday, etc. Her second novel, Caging Skies, was published by Random House New Zealand in 2008 and received praise in the New Zealand Listener, NZ Women's Weekly, El País, La Stampa, Le Nouvel Observateur, Le Monde, etc. Film rights have been sold to Taika Waititi/Defender Films Ltd in late 2010. Her novels have been/are being translated into Dutch, Italian, Czech, Spanish, Catalan, Russian and French. The French translation of Caging Skies was shortlisted for the Prix FNAC and the Prix Médicis.
Leunens's third novel, A Can of Sunshine, is to be published by Editions Philippe Rey (France/Canada).
The critical component of her thesis consists of a study of the mother-in-law figure in literature in English. It will explore the cultural stereotype of the mother-in-law in proverbs from around the word, theatre, lyrics and literary references. Then it will focus on the findings of psychological, sociological and anthropological studies to gain a deeper understanding of the role of the mother-in-law and the universal vulnerabilities and contradictions attached to this role, particularly as limited to mother-in-law/daughter-in-law relations. The main questions of this thesis are: Why is it that of the over twenty works in English to be examined in this study, which range from the fourteenth-century to the twenty-first and encompass four continents, all contain a mother-in-law figure who is presented as jealous, possessive, manipulative, and whose dealings with the daughter-in-law are, at best, catty and unpleasant and, at worst, dangerous and deadly? In other words, why is she – in relation to her daughter-in-law – so nasty? How does each writer who dares take on this character bloated with stereotype deal with her artistically?
Relevant links:
- Read reviews and more on Christine's website
- Dedalus
- Random House (NZ)
- Christine Leunens in translation
Tina Makereti (commenced 2009)
Tina writes: I completed an MA Creative Writing in 2008, which formed the basis of my short story collection, Once Upon a Time in Aotearoa, published by Huia in 2010. The seed of my PhD project was planted in 2002, when my daughter was born and given the tupuna (ancestral) name of her great great great grandmother, who we believed was Moriori. For years the seed germinated: Who was our ancestor? What does it mean to be Moriori? How do we go about claiming this identity? When I heard about the PhD Creative Writing, I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to find out.
Both the critical and creative components of my project will explore how stories are central to the reclamation and revitalisation of identities that have been decimated by colonisation. The primacy of narrative in understanding, explaining and transmitting cultural and familial identity will be explored.
Using textual analysis for the critical component of the research, I will examine key texts by Patricia Grace, Edward P. Jones, Michael Ondaatje and Leslie Marmon Silko. How do each of these authors change our personal, cultural and national understandings of ourselves by re-imagining the accepted historical stories or national myths? Is it valid to seek societal change through literature? Why do historical stories require changing? Indigenous perspectives on how Story is used as a way to recognise, question and understand identity will be addressed.
The creative component will consist of a novel that addresses the complex web of interrelationships that occurred between Moriori, Pākehā and Māori settlers from the early 1800s through to contemporary times. The invasion of Rēkohu, the subsequent survival of the Moriori people and their exceptional pacifist culture have not been addressed in fiction very extensively. One reason for fictional re-visioning of historical stories is that it may help indigenous points of view to continue to gain new cultural and societal life and replace long held national fallacies. It is hoped that centring the Story around Moriori cultural perspectives may bear witness to the renewed understanding, pride and assertion of Moriori identity.
Visit Tina's website
Read Tina's work on Turbine
New Zealand Book Council writer file
Gavin McGibbon (commenced 2009)
Gavin writes: The subject of my thesis is the process of adaptation; I will be looking at the manner in which a scripted work needs to be altered in order to successfully move into a new medium such as from stage to screen. I will be exploring this by adapting my own work from theatre to film and vice versa with two different pieces, while also examining established works which have crossed the mediums.
The differences between the two forms, the reasoning behind the changes and examination of how dialogue, location, character, scale and narrative - among numerous other factors - need to be considered and the method in which these operate differently for stage and screen will be detailed.
Adaptation became very interesting to me when I had to heavily alter a stage play of mine 'Stand Up Love' for radio; a process I found both thrilling and challenging. A lot has been written about adapting novels into films but the adaptation of works of theatre into film is generally overlooked, which is surprising considering the number of Oscar-winning or nominated films that originated on the stage.
My background is in film, having graduated from both the New Zealand Film School and Waikato University where Film (along with History) was my double major for my BA. It was at Film School that I discovered my love of writing and began to write these little scripts with no idea where they would go.
I was very fortunate to be accepted in 2005 into Ken Duncum's MA course in Scriptwriting. It was here I discovered the amazing world of theatre. I began to dabble in play writing which I soon fell for in a major way. I'm thrilled to now be able to combine my two loves in such a unique way. To date I have had four plays produced ('After Service', 'Stand Up Love', 'Shipwrecked Beneath the Stars' and 'Handy Man'), and two radio plays produced ('Captive Truths' and Stand Up Love').
My fifth play, 'Hamlet Dies at the End' (which I'm also adapting as a film), goes into production in June 2011.
Hannah McKie (commenced 2011)
Hannah is a scriptwriter and PhD candidate focussing her attentions on the New Zealand stage. The contextualizing critical component of Hannah's research has a working title of 'Keeping Mum, Performing Marriage and Growing Women' and shines a spotlight on the representations of women, and particularly mothers, depicted on stage in New Zealand between 1920 and 2012.
Alongside her research, Hannah is writing several full length plays that explore the changing representations of women and mothers within New Zealand’s theatre history.
Hannah graduated from the IIML's MA Programme in Scriptwriting in 2009. Her MA play, and arguably the start of her fascination with writing family drama, was entitled 'McKenzie Country'. 'McKenzie Country' was joint winner of the David Carson-Parker Embassy Prize in Scriptwriting for the best major project, received the Dominion Post Scholarship, was read as part of Writers on Mondays, shortlisted to the final four for Write Out Loud Wellington 2009 and recently received its stage premier at BATS Theatre in June 2011, produced by Hannah and mounted by her company of Page Left playwright producers.
Hannah's first theatre script after completing her MA was a second family drama entitled 'The Avon Lady', which made the shortlist for the Adam Play Award (for best NZ play) and was joint winner of Write Out Loud Wellington in 2010.
When Hannah's not at the IIML or in the theatre, she writes for a Government department and is involved with a great number of creative projects including short films and role playing events. Hannah has a passion for acting and the visual arts and often employs these skills on stage or around it though designing stage posters, flyers, and theatre programmes etc.
Hannah spent many of her formative years abroad but has always called New Zealand home. Alongside her love of language and literature Hannah has a passion for cricket, Rockabilly, classic Hollywood and 1950's Broadway. Above any genre, Hannah has an unswerving interest in people and their stories. Whether on stage or screen, what moves her most are credible characters and their incredible journeys which begin in the everyday.
Lawrence Patchett (commenced 2009)
Authenticity and form in biographical fiction
Lawrence writes: Many writers have turned to biographical fiction in recent decades. What's behind this surge of interest in fiction about real people, and what are the limitations and possibilities of this borderline genre? Are writers constrained by the need to write an 'authentic' account of the life and times, as per the conventions of traditional biography?
My critical component explores attitudes towards authenticity and form in the work of some contemporary writers, including Colm Toibin and Joyce Carol Oates, before focusing on three New Zealand novels: Mansfield, Lovelock, and Biografi. Early findings of this project are outlined in Booknotes 168 (Autumn 2010).
The creative component is a collection of short biographical fictions set in New Zealand and focused on frontier themes. Stories from this project have appeared in The Long and the Short of It and Sport, and Nth Degree: New Australian Writing.
My academic background is in English literature (BA Hons, Canterbury) and creative writing (MA, IIML). I am literary co-editor of the art and literary journal Hue and Cry.