New Zealand is weird. I mean, it does not seem of this earth, not to me. It really is like something made up.

Yes, I love poetry, both to read and to write it. A first love.

Wanted to write fiction since I was 11, since I first read 'In Our Time' by Hemingway.

I just love when the learning curve is steep. And I love being in nature, in the wild.

The great thing about fiction is that everything you care about ends up going into the book.

I wrote strong advocacy stories, and when I got to fiction, I made a deliberate effort to leave that behind and enter a country where I had no ax to grind, no advocacy issues that I was carrying with me.

I'm fascinated by characters who are faced with big losses and have to put their lives back together again.

There's always been in my life that tension between living and writing. For me, because I'm so physically exuberant, it was extra hard to sit still at the desk and put in the hours that you need to put in to write.

With fiction, I felt like I could bring to bear my full imagination, my entire heart, and so you feel very vulnerable. It's not your physical life, but it's everything else, so it felt like a lot was at stake.

Writing nonfiction, you're responsible to posterity, to history, to other people because the events happened, and you feel responsible to record them as they happened.