Talia Marshall’s debut book Whaea Blue (2024) is a force of nature. Abandoning neutral expressions of praise, New Zealand’s reviewers have spoken of it in tones of dazed warning: the book is ‘stunning’, ‘haunted’, and ‘alarming in its honesty’. But while it has its wild moments, it also has notes of humour and gentleness, ‘whaea’ means mother or aunty after all, and the whole is firmly anchored in the steady bass note of ancestors, family, and land.
Since publishing the book, Marshall has been regularly posting work on her substack I hold you to me by a thread, where readers can reliably find her unique blend of dark humor and humanity. Last month, Talia generously agreed to participate in an interview about what she thinks about her writing. What follows is the (edited) transcript of our conversation.
KD: For someone new to your writing, how would you describe Whaea Blue?
TM: Some people have described it as a novel. It’s not a book of essays. Maybe it is just a memoir, maybe I’m just remembering. But I was also in the process of living as I was writing it too, so the things from the present made their way into the book, but I guess that’s what happens with memoirs as well. It’s a book about me. I wanted it to feel fictional, but it’s very much not; there’s very little imagining in it.
I’ve got some kind of condition where I get involuntary memories. If I’m just lying around doing nothing (which is all the time) I’ll get simultaneous memories. Like a Filofax, like little file cards just flipping through, but all image-based. I remember in images. Apparently some people don’t. It’s quite debilitating, but I’m hardly ever in the present tense.
KD: I like that, “a book about you”. It’s not just about a series of events but it’s also about the interplay between memory and emotion and how your particular brain processes those events.
TM: Yes and the amount of history that I’ve put in it probably steers it away from memoir too. But that’s also just in my nature.
“At home, Mum helps me give my baby his first bath and something about her hands lowering him into the light steam, with my arms underneath him too, and his slight shock at the warm water helps me realise I have felt this before.
“The fresh insane love I have for my son is her old feeling for me.”
KD: I’m interested in how the text shifts between different times and different modes of telling. For example, the book shifts from vividly written historical excerpts to lyrical childhood memories to funny/horrifying scenes. I was wondering if you consciously intended that mix of modes or if it happened naturally?
TM: With each chapter, I thought, “What’s the best way to tell it?” And so that was conscious. If I was describing being with my girlfriends, that would tend to stay quite immediate. Whereas some of the stuff, where I was trying to deal with my whakapapa [genealogy, a core principle of identity in Māori culture], I would start it with something hopefully immediate and human that wasn’t me, for example starting off with my ancestor that got gored by the bull.
But the bit when Isaac was coming to get me, that also needed to be written so that I was back there in that moment. When I first started writing about Isaac, I didn’t want to feel like I was there, so if you weren’t reading it as a continuous narrative or as a book of essays, I realize now it could possibly be quite confusing. But I knew I was sacrificing sense sometimes for feeling.
“Isaac bays like a shot animal when the police wake him, oblivious, on my couch, and then he screams I love you from the back of the car as they drive him away. I am reassured by the cop taking my statement that he will be held in the cells for what he has done. That he won’t be popping up like that at my door again. I do not make too much of the fact I have been warning them for days that Isaac was coming back for me as the Valium is working and I am probably in shock.”
KD: When you say that you didn’t want to feel like you were there, was that a way of creating protective distance?
TM: It was more to see what I was capable of as a writer, really, if I was capable of ‘fictions’ that were based in truth. But when I wrote that Isaac was in the car, that was all true, that had happened. But when I wrote she had a waggly skin tag on her neck and he wanted to pull it off, that was imagination. it was just sort of like, “How can I put myself in the car? In him?”
KD: Can you talk a bit about the whole process of writing it?
TM: Well life kept intruding on it. So it was basically dictated by what was happening in my life. I didn’t give myself up to it completely until a month before the deadline—I’d set a deadline of a year. I read Grand by Noelle McCarthy and it was so good it really gassed me up to do my own thing. I didn’t want to do what she was doing. For example I felt like I was hiding my mother really quite a bit in the book because she was still alive, but I knew I could write about my dad and I knew I could write about my dead ex. So after I read that I wrote 50,000 words in a month.
KD: Wow! So it really gave you a big push.
TM: Yeah. And it was almost as if it was pouring out of me. And I was so absorbed in the book every day. So I think the whole manuscript was about 96,000, 100,000 words.
KD: So you really wrote half of it in that small amount of time.
TM: Yeah. And not in order, either. You know, I was moving back and forward.
I watched a documentary once where the white narrator said that Māori babies were given a meal of bellbirds, or korimako, to ensure their voices would be sweeter later in life. I remember hearing a talkback radio host say that everyone should go to the East Coast for a holiday because it is like going to another world.
KD: Did you play around with the order much? Or did you leave that to the editors more?
TM: I thought I’d leave that until after the first draft. And when I started doing one round of edits and more stuff in my life happened and I had to put it on hold, and then I rewrote—my poor editor!—I rewrote the whole thing. I changed the whole order.
Then we went into the next round of edits after I’d put it on hold for about six months. The middle wasn’t working and I re-ordered chapters realizing it was just better to move in a backwards chronological order. And that’s kind of how whakapapa works too.
KD: And that’s something you couldn’t really have seen beforehand. I guess you have to go through the process of writing and experimenting to find the right sequence.
TM: Yeah, I had to go through the process of realizing that people that knew me well couldn’t understand it. Cold readers. I was thinking, “If my friends, who are familiar with my work, can’t get what I’m up to, then I’ve got no chance.”
KD: Was there anything throughout the whole period of writing that surprised you or did you have realizations either about writing or about yourself? Did anything like that come up?
TM: I realized that there are a lot of chickens and eggs in the book. Like when I meet my dad, we have the chicken feet, but when I meet [my good friend] Kerry, her mum also puts chicken feet in the bed when I go stay with them in the [Marlborough] Sounds. There’s an egg-shaped bath.
KD: So there’s a definite motif.
And then there’s the bit in the dolphin chapter with the prophecy about Nephi and the hens of Israel or something. I realized that there were—consciously or not—chickens and eggs were all through the book. I don’t know why, they’re not my favourite bird at all. But Polly [Marshall’s ancestor] and then the swan eggs—Polly would go collecting swan eggs with her moko [short for mokopuna—grandchild/ren] and they used to also fry swan eggs in a pan that would take up the whole pan. Her husband died while they were out looking for swan eggs and, yeah, I just—and then I guess thematically it’s like what comes first, the chicken or the egg, you know?
After the trenches had served their purpose, my people were split through the head by one of our beautiful brutalist weapons and eaten or buried standing up in the used holes of their whenua to desecrate the mauri and wairua of their departed being. Te Rauparaha was punishing us for the arrogant double-headed insult of our Rangatira Te Ruaoneone, who had threatened him with a root pounder, a vulgar patu. He was still punishing anyone he could for the death of his children at Lake Papaitonga and his uncle, all butchered like piglets in front of him. Eyes plucked from the heads of children and displayed in front of their fathers could drive anyone towards a cold psychopathic insanity.
KD: I get the sense you feel a kind of responsibility to show up authentically as a Māori author. Not just for yourself but also for other Māori. One of the ways you do that is by acknowledging ambiguities and conflicts and maybe unpleasant aspects of history. Is that fair?
TM: Well, my thing with the Musket Wars was that it was very personal because I had ancestors on both sides very heavily involved, and when I realized what the death toll was, that it was between 20,000 and 50,000 people (which would have been about a quarter of the population) and how much changed geopolitically over that period. It just changed everything about how we fight, and not better. And when I realized how missing it was—it’s not taught or talked about because of the cannibalism and because it can be used as a weapon to say, ‘Oh, you were always just fighting.” Whereas so was Europe, you know? Hardly any peaceful people. That it could be seen as a sign of savagery, I wanted to say, “No, it was very organized and very technical.”
And also there’s my experience of coming to my Māori family late but to have always felt culturally Māori because of who my peers were, who my mates were, those friendships and then having a baby with a Māori man. I’m not entirely comfortable in a marae setting [Ed. a marae is a space used as the setting for sacred and social events] but no one is. But I do feel like I get it. My dad was so middle class, he had such extravagant tastes. He didn’t really feel comfortable at a marae either.
KD: Right, I like that you point that out. That you can belong but also not feel as if you belong at the same time.
TM: Well for me, being Māori is relational. You can’t do it alone. It’s something that you do together. And the whole culture is built on everyone’s always doing everything together [laughs]. Like you can’t get away from your relations. And even though my dad was kind of a maverick figure, he grew up on what was known as the pā [village or defensive settlement]. He grew up on the bones, the oldest bones that we have here in Aotearoa.
He grew up on land that had been ours since the first migration. And a huge family, like maybe 150 of them all living down this one road. He was a Māori boy, he went to Māori school with Māori kids. It was in his not just his DNA but also his cultural DNA.
And I just, I felt a responsibility with the Musket Wars because it was undertold and our particular iwi [tribes] were erased from the story—there are eight iwi at the top of the South Island that aren’t Ngai Tahu [which is popularly supposed to be the South Island’s only iwi]. My goal there was just kind of writing that story back into the record.
And then with the contemporary stuff, it’s just like…yeah, wanting to be truthful but with a soft heart.
Elena Ferrante has described better than me how a betrayed woman becomes coarse. I swear a lot in real life—it’s all fucking this and fucking that—but after it ended I would be like: that motherfucker needs to die. My language had become too specific; I was both the maggots and the corpse where Ben used to be. In my search for closure I ignored the black hole of the full stop. It had ended. The End.
Now I’m an opal in a shipwreck’s lost chest, wishing I could ascend like the jellyfish hovering above, wishing I could shapeshift into their sweet empty rise to the top. Wishing I could shake off the literature as easily as a dog shakes off water.
KD: One of your strengths as a writer is your vulnerability. I think of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s line, “Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!” What’s your relationship to being that vulnerable in your writing?
TM: I know that people see it that way. I actually left the worst stuff out. Like there was stuff in there…it’s just Hemingway’s iceberg theory that most of the story is sitting under the iceberg.
Being that honest about one thing is a way of obscuring something else. I was writing about one chaotic episode after another and I’m not that chaotic. I did feel like I have to be open about some things. And there is a release about that that can be cathartic. But also I found writing about Isaac, that was hard.
He still sometimes tries to contact me. He got in contact with me after the book came out because he had seen it somewhere.
Also, I put off the bit about when I went mad after meeting that person on the bus. Because I was worried it would put me back in that state.
KD: That makes sense. You’re still being vulnerable and open but still protecting yourself in some ways. And being selective.
TM: My first degree is the theater degree, so get ideas about how to tell a story doing theater. But also when I did my social services degree, I learned about—it sounds like a terrible word—but ‘safety’, you know, like how to hold a story, and also that sense that when people come to you for help, how much help they get depends on their storytelling abilities. Also, that no one will ever tell you everything and that works in that iceberg way as well.
I know metaphor is a gift in terms of being transformative. I’m not into trauma porn myself. You’ve got to make something out of it, something bigger than the actual event.
I have no money but I do have a gold tote bag and my impossible Jack Russell — although the leash is long gone with the car. No matter, rummaging through my bag I realize I also have wine, cigarettes, dog biscuits, a dead iPhone, dead iPad, and my spiraling sense of not giving a fuck to keep me company. I could die here tonight like this, I think happily. If no one attacks me I can walk into the sea.
KD: I was curious about which writers, if any, you would consider role models or people whose writing you find a template. Who influences you in literary terms?
TM: To be honest, John [Dolan] influenced me at a writer’s festival in Bluff. We were doing some group exercise with other poets. John was in our group and he was just listening to me blather on, and he said, “You should write like you talk.”
I’d always read everything. You always want to try out other voices, see what someone else is up to when you think, “Oooh, that’s so good! I could do that!” But that basically gave me full permission to write with my voice, and to write like I’m talking.
I was huge Alice Monro fan but I’ve realized I’m never going to write like her and now that’s poisonous after that terrible scandal. But I will still read her because I think she needs to be read even closer now, you know? To try and understand how someone can obscure the horror and her failure to deal with [her daughter’s sexual abuse at the hands of her husband]. She did, after it happened, fictionalize it in small ways over and over again.
There’s a long piece in the New York Review of Books by Anne Enright picking apart some of her stories and referring it back to what happened with [Monro’s] daughter.
What Monro does is she disappears. And I can’t really do the disappearing act.
KD: Maybe her tendency to disappear in a story might be related to how she dealt with the abuse?
TM: Like not dealing with it. I think she was more faithful to her stories than life. I think her writing was more important than her life.
KD: At the moment you’re writing a novel. How is the experience of writing outright fiction different from writing a book “about you”?
TM: It’s not going great actually. There’s a cruise I need to go on for the sensory experience. Half of it is set on this freighter cruise that goes around the Marquesas Islands. It’s sort of like an ethical cruise. And there’s only 200 passengers. The Marquesas are where we [my ancestors] bought jewelry in the first migration and they were buried with those [ancestral] bones where my father grew around at the Wairau Bar.
And also they found a waka [canoe] at Anaweka , which is just below the Farewell Spit, you know the little hooky bit that sticks out the top of the South Island. And that waka had a turtle [carved] on it and they think it’s about 600, 700 years old. The only place they found other waka like that is in the Society Islands, which are part of the Marquesa Islands. So there is a personal buy-in for me.
I got the idea for the novel from an infamous gang family. I was at Buckland’s Crossing in 2007 and I was reading F. Scott Fitzgerald, I think it was Tender is the Night, down by the river while [my son] was playing. And the sisters of this family—they were all beautiful, they all looked like Pocahontas—and they had their kids with them. So I kept being nosy about them, sorta looking up from my book, seeing what they were doing, playing with their kids and watching my son play with them. And I’ve held that day in my mind for a long time.
Gradually I’ve had to move away from them into my imagination.
KD: Right, but they were part of how it germinated.
TM: Right so it starts with these sisters I’ve moved it to Motueka; it’s all before you get onto the cruise ship. So I’ve spent a lot of time imagining them but I’m not really that engaged with writing it. Every time I start writing it, it’s not good enough yet.
You know, with fiction and stuff you have to get out of your head and talk about where stuff is in the room, like where’s the couch? But at the same time, I need to go on that cruise to have my eyes, ears, mouth… to have that experience. Because as much as I’m in my head, as a writer, writing is still, I think the best writing is sensory. Not just thoughts, you know?
KD: It seems your writing brain is working hard even if you’re not putting words on paper yet. You have to build a world that you’re not familiar with.
TM: Yeah, and I’ve got this whole backstory. They tell you to kind of avoid—you know when they do tips for writers? “Leave out the backstory.” So I’ve spent time naming all their pets. I’ve named their donkey and their chickens they’ve got two Dobermans called Milly and Vanilly.
And I guess the woman who ends up on the cruise, the mother of these girls, she’ll be the most like me, because she can’t get out of bed [laughs]. But not like me in key ways.
KD: You’re also working on a poetry book?
TM: Yes. That’s what I’ve been thinking about right now. Poetry—you can really escape and not reveal too much about yourself. So much energy went into Whaea Blue and then I felt like maybe I was never going to write again and that I just had nothing in the tank.
But then poetry started coming back to me and I was like, “Oh, I don’t have to write a novel! I could just do some poems.” Because I’ve been meaning to for some time. I’ve got this new thing. I don’t know what it is but it feels different from what I’ve done before…not relying on the same tricks anymore. I need a new bag of tricks!
KD: So you’re going to write completely new poems for the book?
TM: Yeah. Sorta like not with line breaks, just kinda like prose poems. Maybe not that many. Just kind of like. I don’t know, there’s some stuff I need to work through by being oblique. But also I don’t want to lose my directness either. I just think, poetry used to draw on a pretty small pool—going out and looking at daffodils and just the amount of media we’re saturated in now, you can get a poem from anywhere. Like movies have changed the way that people write poems, this huge vat of stuff and images that you would never have seen. Even all the AI animal reels.
After the hāngī — the coconut fish cured in lemon juice, the steamed pudding, and custard — I go out to the car park for a smoke. Singing begins to float out of the hall across the marae ātea. It is so beautiful, particularly the voices of the women, I start to cry, possessed by the pentagonal harmonies Māori have uplifted from the tangi of the birds.
And I forget it is Easter Sunday even with all this waiata rising like bread into the air.
Read an excerpt of Whaea Blue here.
Subscribe to Talia’s substack I hold you to me by a thread.
