Where the heart is

Michele Powles, Author and director of New Zealand Book Month

Having returned home to New Zealand and my west Auckland house recently, this topic has been hovering near the surface of my thoughts of late.

Being home has meant being able to unpack all my books (and there are lots of them), shake out the trunk of costumes from dancing days, plant vegetables, strip wallpaper, and paint grandfather clocks on the wall. It's meant eating feijoas and relishing the thrust and jab of their flavour, spitting watermelon pips at anyone who is close enough without being frowned at, and being the one who has to send Twisties, Tim Tams and Marmite overseas in care packages.

Home is hot sun, green unfurling fronds, black sand in the hairline, and sharp stinging mosquito bites.
But these are mostly nostalgic memories of what home means: these are memories of a never-ending Kiwi summer. Home now means never-ending rain and the land reaching slick muddy hands up to pull you down: squelching you into its boggy unhappy mire.

Home really, is a story. The fiction we pen to boost our spirits when it's raining, or to celebrate the glory of nature, or the sun, or the wide blue ocean. Home is in the emails we write to our poor friends still stuck in a European or North American winter; or in living on the beach, looking at a never-ending blue sky while breakers crash and people smother their burnt sausages in tomato sauce. Home, surely, is where we start from and what we compare everything else to. Home is in our words, our memories. Home is in our stories.

Nice piece from Michele which appeared in the New Zealand Herald, yesterday, September 27.

Nice to have you home again Michele, and you are doing a great job for NZ Books!