Saige England is the author of the debut best-selling historical novel, The Seasonwife. She is interviewed by Thom Conroy.
Thom: Your historical novel The Seasonwife was published last year by Bateman Books. What’s the origin story of this novel?
Saige: Twenty-five years ago, prior to my master’s degree at Victoria University of Wellington, I took an undergraduate creative writing course with Bill Manhire. During that time, I had a vivid dream about a young white woman who seemed to be on a coast with whalers. I woke up and couldn't shake it. I wondered whether such women existed. At that stage very little had been written about shore station whaling wives.
I wrote a short fiction about Betty Guard and the first major altercation between Māori and the British; this was published in an anthology by Penguin in 1995. I was approached by Geoff Walker with a view to writing a novel. Geoff was then the publishing director at Penguin. From there the novel meandered and morphed and became a more fictional story.
Thom: Was it difficult to sustain the novel during that time from the 1990s till now? How did your ideas about the novel change over this period?
Saige: It was and it wasn't. I think I learned how to write a novel by writing a novel and my next novels will be faster but the research does take time. And some of the conflicts I experienced during that period—the human rights abrogation; the false, flaccid world of expat communities—shows that the impact of colonialism and imperialism is still present today. I have been in dangerous situations, which informs the way I write about trauma.
I don't think we can avoid facing the hard, tough aspects of life—not unless we are very privileged and not even then—but we can face the wrongs of the past and the present, and we can find characters who navigate towards the light.
After living and working overseas in Samoa and the Middle East, I returned to Aotearoa for peace and quiet and to raise three young boys on my own. I arrived just in time for the earthquakes in Ōtautahi (Christchurch). We lost our city, we lost people we knew. Since then, we've had the mosque massacre and of course the whole world was affected by Covid. The challenges in life, the damage to the environment and the impact of invasions is ever-present. During the course of writing the novel, I grew into myself. Certain themes drive a novel. I’m an activist and writing is an active journey into the field of possibility. I don’t take anything for granted and like all of us, I’m on the edge of change. I ask the novel why, what and how.
Thom: What happened during the writing of the novel that surprised you? What turns did the novel insist on that you may have resisted?
Saige: There were a couple of things. When the characters didn’t feel real, I interviewed them. This changed the novel exponentially. I can still recall that Manaia said of her original name: ‘Well, for a start that isn’t my name.’ The characters all told me their names.
I wrote verbatim from the interviews while the characters spoke. By creating an opening—a conversation with the characters—something mysterious emerged. Manaia turned out to be a special and significant name to Māori people who are close to me. I’m glad she declared herself.
If a novel isn’t working, if it is stuck, then it is probably insisting on its own life. Set it aside, give yourself a breather, let it breathe; and then return and interrogate the voice of the narrator, the characters, the themes. It should be a process of discovery, so be prepared to massacre large swathes.
The part I resisted was when Geoff Walker, my super-insightful mentor, told me that the missionary character needed to be developed. I didn’t see the missionary as significant at that stage. I realise now that this was partly personal. I was resistant to making the religious figure more significant because my grandmother grew up in a repressive religious group and this had quite a toll on her and my family. But Geoff was right; I needed to interrogate the missionary further.
I needed to move beyond research about the Christian Missionary Society to find the individuals, explore their journals. I did this, and as a result I developed a character who was more nuanced, who wrestled with regrets, who grew his conscience. He had experienced hardship as a child on ships. I found the missionary thanks to listening to that external advice. As a result, the missionary’s moral paralysis and consequent actions became credible.
Thom: How would you define historical writing? Is there a difference between a historical novel and a novel that is set in a different time in history?
Saige: Learning about history is a treasure hunt. We find clues that have been buried. If we could press pause in the past, we could find the key to turn towards a different future. The historical writer is a time-traveller. They can bring secrets of the past to the present. The people of the past are not much different to us—they had the same dreams and desires, wants and needs. It is merely the details that are different.
Thom: Your novel has a Māori character and engages with Te Āo Māori. Did you have anxieties about crossing into territory that is not yours?
Saige: Yes. I spent some sleepless nights and even shed some tears because I knew I could cop some flak but I had strong friendships with Māori and have been strongly influenced by Māori. I already had Māori mentors and I had spent several years covering the Ngāi Tahu land claims, during which I learnt so much.
I also did not want to be part of erasing Māori. I don't enjoy picking up novels and finding no Māori or Pasifika—we are not a little England; we are a country that was inhabited first by other very important people, who deserve to be heard and seen.
I needed to be humble; to know what I didn't know. I am indebted to my mentor Buddy Mikaere who read the novel twice, who encouraged me and supported my writing; that meant so much. So I had a Pākehā mentor in Geoff Walker and a Māori mentor in Buddy Mikaere. I am so grateful to these talented people who gifted me their wisdom and insight.
Thom: I once heard a fiction writing guideline that suggested we draw the line at writing characters from other ethnicities from their point of view. In other words, writing about say Māori characters would be acceptable but writing from their perspective would not. Have you come under any criticism for writing from a Māori point of view?
Saige: As a journalist covering the Waitangi Tribunal hearings I learnt about the impact of colonisation. I could have reported through the lens of the Crown, the lens I had grown up with, emphasising the justification of Empire perspective; or I could do my utmost to show the experience of real people who had suffered the loss of their land, waters and language. I stayed on marae around Te Waipounamu, experiencing the whanaungatanga and manaakitanga of the people. I learned from the tangata whenua. I found the losses sad and shocking, and I wanted readers to feel empathy for Māori by reporting from that perspective.
Likewise, as a novelist, I could not find a way to show the damage wrought by colonisation without showing the perspective of a character or characters who suffered from that impact. I chose a third person perspective with psychic distance that draws in and out. If we want to know about suffering, we should show the impact from the sufferer’s perspective, not from that of the oppressor.
I know some authors are strongly against traveling with the lens of the other but authors do this all the time in some way. If we only write what we know, we only show a limited world view. We run the risk of boring readers, but worse, we run the risk of othering the other—creating one-dimensional or shadow characters.
The writers who are trying to avoid the perspective of a character who has a different ethnicity will also find it hard to shed a Western colonial or capitalist lens. Writers need to be very conscious of their own perspectives and how to challenge and erase these. I suggest that writers undertaking other perspectives need to be self-aware, aware of the danger of ego, and have the ability to challenge their own presumptions.
The brilliant author Toni Morrison encouraged writers to draw from the well of imagination beyond their life experience. She told students at Princeton who had been told to write what they know to chuck that advice. She told them to write about a Mexican waitress in the Rio Grande who can barely speak English or a Grande Madame in Paris. Shed the self. Likewise, Grace Paley said writers should write what they know but into what they do not know.
We are all human beings and we can find ways to connect in that being. Writers who access empathy for characters will convey that empathy to readers.
Interestingly, I found it easier to write male characters than female. When I interrogated this, I realised it is because I had been abused and I needed to understand the oppressor for my own survival. Understanding the oppressor was easier than understanding myself, the victim.
Victims often internalise the oppressor’s perspective and that is why we need to move beyond the oppressor’s narrative: to reveal the perspectives of those impacted by oppression who are suffering. This can lead readers to reflect and that can inspire change.
My advice to writers wishing to lift their own lens and adopt another is to do so by all means but do so carefully and cautiously. What we must not do is fall back on stereotypes or colonial assumptions – when writing about any characters avoid the tropes of then and now. We are not all champions or kings or queens. Find the apprentice, find the girl weaving the cloak. There are many aspects to the lived experience of culture.
I am also a little wary of sensitivity readers for this reason. Their interpretations can be superficial, neo-liberal and shallow. A fix applied afterwards is different to care taken from the outset. Writing from another perspective shouldn’t be easy and it needs to come from a place of respect and care. The relationships, the friendships, the deep understandings must be genuine. In my view, the perspective should not be layered on afterwards simply to appeal to a certain market.
In any area that is not in the realm of our own experience, we need to be respectful and use our own experience of being dismissed or rejected or objectified. Writing is the passing of a baton, one to another. I know others will explore this area and I hope some will do it far better than me. My Māori friends have loved the book and that means a lot to me. Strangely enough, friends who lived in the same street as me, and whose mother meant a great deal to me, asked if I knew that their great-grandmother's name was Manaia. I didn't, but there we are, and this meant something to them and to me. That’s why the character insisted on changing her name. There are moments of serendipity in writing that are special.
Thom: So would it be fair to say that this novel grew out of your personal relationships to some degree?
Saige: It was influenced by people who guided me. Kuia, whaea, kaumatua; their voices and other voices. An author has their own voice—the narrative voice, and then there are the voices of characters and these are drawn from a deep well. Understanding that people are complex—a prismatic approach—is important to me.
Writing is a combination of being introspective and seeing extra perspectives. We don’t see ourselves as others see us and this provides rich territory for writing. We also don’t necessarily analyse the systems we grow up in but I’m glad I embarked on that journey. My relationship and experiences with people in different societies and cultures caused me to interrogate society and the histories we have been fed; the pushing of some people to the background when they should be in the foreground.
I write about the people who have less agency in the system because I want to find out how they manage and I want to shed light on the wrongs that have transpired through this system. I have multiple disabilities that are not particularly noticeable to anyone else but I am never not aware of them. This makes life harder but it also comes with the gift of empathy, of seeing the unseen.
In researching one of my next novels I came across a reference in Erasmus Darwin’s treatise on female education from back in the early nineteenth century. This Darwin—Charles Darwin’s uncle—quoted a woman who said that if she had read a novel she would have learned that not all men are good, and she would have chosen a different kind of husband. Reading a novel would have changed her life. Two hundred years ago, women, by reading novels, received knowledge outside their own sphere of experience.
I could relate to that because it isn’t only people who have changed my life, it is books. Reading changed my life; it gave me perspectives and put me in positions I could not have otherwise experienced. Personal experience of trauma and disability affected how I viewed the world. Reading and writing provide paths for empathy outside of our own experience.
Thom: Would you describe your book as anti-colonial?
Saige: The system of colonisation is cruel and it runs parallel with slavery. It is interlocked with financial capitalism, so yes but I also see that most people had little agency in the system. It is impossible for everyone to benefit when they don’t all have an equal stake. It is a system that caused suffering, conflict and premeditated mass murder.
In The Seasonwife, I drew on real events and real people caught in the trappings of colonisation—and people are still caught in those trappings today. We only need to look at the unequal statistics to see the devastating effects. The system is breaking people and the planet.
Art should be challenging; it should provide a space for contemplation and prompt reconsideration. We need paintings and books that shake us.
My roots include Irish, Scots, Romany, French Huguenot and English East End. Some of my people died in workhouses. I wear a locket around my neck that is my great-great-great-grandmother's. It contains a photo of her when she came to this country as a young woman in 1842. I wear the locket to marae, protests and writing events. I carry her along so she can see what went wrong and what could have been different and where we are now. The locket is a talisman—or ‘taliswoman’.
We need touchstones that cause us to wonder and rethink our cultural landscape and the damage wrought by those who came before us and to prevent damage by those who come after us. So, yes: the novel is written with a strong anti-colonial perspective.
Thom: The Seasonwife shows some brutal destruction of the environment. Do you think this makes it an environmental novel or are we at a point where all novels need to be environmental novels?
Saige: I came to see that whalers were used in the system of colonisation. These men were a link in the chain of the class system with the aristocrats at the top. Whaling was one of the many trades that caused mass destruction and those who made the profits weren’t on the ground. The massacre of forests, the massacre of people. Empire is a destructive machine and nature is still begging for mercy. That damage continues and we need to wake up and plant the roses so that we can smell them later. We need to stop the destruction. We need literature that is eco-literature and we need to explore the damage wrought in the past to understand the destruction in the present, because it isn’t stopping.
Thom: I know you spent many years as a human rights journalist. How do you think this experience and your aims as a journalist fed into your approach to The Seasonwife? Is there a documentary aspect to the novel?
Saige: I don’t know if this answers the question but I have tended to take risks and step outside of my comfort zone. In doing so, I have learned that life is not comfortable for most people. Novels are a form of escapism and they can be shallow or they can be a vessel carrying writers and readers to another shore, to truths they might not otherwise access.
I have the most tremendous empathy for people who are the victims of invasion and human rights atrocities because I have seen them and I can’t shake them and I don’t think we should turn off our screens or close our books. We all benefit when we support all human life.
I have always connected with people at the bottom of society, the ones who are hurting, the ones who suffer most in a harmful system and this has led me to the best people. It is true that the people who have the least give the most.
Writing is a way to lift the lens we have come to accept, to challenge the status quo that provides real comfort and security only to a very small minority at the top of the ladder. In such a system, those on the tiny rung at the top are further rewarded when they shove others down. My book has gone out into a market and it has its own life out there but the writing of it is different; that is the book’s meaning, its soul.
Thom: What's your writing process?
Saige: I rise very early, about 4 am. I write from that time till about 11 am or noon. Sometimes in the afternoon I rest—I call it a siesta if I sleep and a fiesta if I read, listen to an audiobook or escape by binge-watching something on TV. Then I resume again in the late afternoon and finish by tea-time.
The wild geese call, the waves crash, nature is louder; but the human-made world is quiet. I'm usually woken by voices—this sounds psychotic. I know I am not psychotic because I can return at will to the other world! I come back to face the dishes or feed my pets or to discuss something with a son. But this other world runs parallel to this world. While writing The Seasonwife and the novels I'm working on now, I come to a point where I find it really hard to shake off the world of the novel.
I mentioned that dream that woke me all those years ago. I felt like Bridie came to me, so I had to meet her. I had to try to do her justice. I feel like that with all my characters. Bridie or Manaia or even Robbie, this bad dude, would shake me awake and tell me his case, and I would go and write. Hearing and writing the voices of characters is almost like taking dictation.
Some people call that channelling but I see it as simply letting some sort of consciousness flow. Rationally, I can say that the voices in a novel come from really hard work after total immersion—being immersed in research until it is a culture shock entering the world of here and now. After researching thoroughly, the world of the characters becomes second nature. At this stage something else seems to be at work and it seems to derive from the harmony of being deeply immersed in craft. In that space, connections develop on another level.
Writers need to be open to serendipity, to the tohu or pointers. If something insists on itself—like a character insisting that I change her name—then listen deeply and act. Listen deeply and respectfully to what the voices in the novel are insisting.
Thom: Since Headland is a journal for new and emerging writers, I always like to ask authors for their writing and/or publication advice. What advice would you give to someone who is closer to the beginning of their writing journey, perhaps someone who may be about to embark on the journey that is writing a historical novel?
Saige: The only deadline is your personal deadline—the deadline of writing the best book you can write. Forget about the market, forget trends and forget commercialism, forget impressing people. Impress yourself. Your novel might enter that world but you are writing your best book and that means you will leave a legacy, published or not. You are interrogating time and characters, real people or fictional, and you are interrogating themes. You are writing to discover meaning.
You might have a structure, you might have a plot and you will learn techniques. All this crafting can be carried out at great university courses such as the one you run at Massey, Thom, or other courses around the country. I found it helpful gaining a master’s, but the most helpful aspect was having my supervisor, Jane Stafford, and then using the guidance of mentors such as Geoff and Buddy. Join the New Zealand Society of Authors and join writing groups in your community or at libraries.
I recommend that writers write but that they then test the book in the world. It takes work to hone craft, develop credible characters and to write well, so do the mahi. But do it to please yourself and be kind to yourself. People will try to tear you down but you’ve got this.
Write the book you want to read, and take risks. Don’t copy another writer’s work, don’t filch other people’s ideas; be the master of your craft in this journey of discovery.