Contributors 2012 - 4th Floor Literary Journal

Coral Atkinson

Coral Atkinson is an Irish/New Zealand writer of fiction and non-fiction. She has written three historical novels, The Love Apple, The Paua Tower and Copper Top (for children), as well as some non-fiction titles. Her work has won and been short-listed for short story competitions in New Zealand and overseas.

Pamela Berard

Pamela Berard emigrated from the ranch lands of Western Canada to the South Island in 1986. She has a background in visual arts and road trips which link the narratives of two families from two countries and feed her stories. She studied creative writing at Whitireia in 2009 and completed the Diploma in Creative Writing (Advanced) in 2010 with Anna Taylor.

Bronwyn Bryant

Bronwyn Bryant lives in Auckland. After an early retirement from classroom teaching in the 1990s she began taking writing classes for adults. Since then she has taught writing up and down New Zealand to Rural Education Activities Programmes (REAP), prisons, mental health trusts, community arts and poetry groups, as well as piloting a writing course for the housebound. In 1999 she spent a year at the creative writing programme at Whitireia, where she discovered a passion for poetry.

Fay Cameron

Fay Cameron lives in Napier. She completed the Graduate Diploma in Creative Writing at Whitireia in 2008. Her two linked short stories, ‘The First Family Photograph’ and ‘Another Family Photo’, were inspired by old family photos. They are, however, works of fiction. Fay Cameron is a pen-name.

Kate Camp

Kate Camp’s most recent collection, The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls, won the 2011 New Zealand Post Book Award for poetry. She was also the Creative New Zealand resident writer in Berlin for 2012.

Aaron Carter

Aaron Carter grew up in Papakura, South Auckland. He has spent the last ten years working at Greenpeace New Zealand in the fundraising department which was a great outlet to express the concerns he has about our natural environment. He is currently studying the Diploma in Creative Writing (Advanced) at Whitireia, where he is working on a collection of poems.

Mary Cresswell

Mary Cresswell is a Wellington poet who lives on the Kā Coast. Her book Trace Fossils was published by Steele Roberts in 2011. Cresswell’s poetry has been published in literary journals all over the world: in Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States.

Lynn Davidson

Lynn Davidson is the author of a collection of poetry and essays, Common Land; three collections of poetry, How to Live by the Sea, Tender and Mary Shelley’s Window; and a novel, Ghost Net. Her poetry has appeared in Sport, Landfall, The Best of Best New Zealand Poems and PN Review.

Natasha Dennerstein

Natasha Dennerstein lives in Wellington and was born in Melbourne to a family originating in Russia and Poland. She has been working as a psychiatric nurse for over twenty years. In 2011, she completed her MA in creative writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML) at Victoria University. She is currently working on a collection titled The Rainbow of Injury.

Mary-Jane Duffy

Mary-Jane Duffy is a poet and essayist. Her recent projects include catalogue essays for All the Cunning Stunts and Chain of Being – the Art of Andrea du Chatenier. She is currently working on a poetry manuscript, part of which has been performed as Sigh After Sigh with singer Lee Hodson and guitarist Jim Perkins.

Nicola Easthope

Nicola Easthope is a poet, a teacher and an Enviroschools facilitator. She lives on the Kā Coast with her partner and young daughter. Her first collection, Leaving my arms free to fly around You, was published by Steele Roberts in 2011. Easthope was the guest poet at Lembas Cafe’s Poets to the People in February, and she performed at the Queensland Poetry Festival in August 2012. This poem, ‘Working the Tang – Birsay’, was inspired by an old photograph of two Orcadian women ‘wirkin’ the tang’. Easthope’s roots on her mother’s mother’s side lie in several Orkney parishes, including Birsay.

Penny M Geddis

Penny M Geddis hails from the sunny Hawke’s Bay. For the last 11
years she’s worked as a bookseller on the other side of the writing desk. She completed the Diploma in Creative Writing at Whitireia in 2011, and is currently completing the first draft of her novel for the Diploma in Creative Writing (Advanced). ‘The Plan’ is one of the sparks that set off the fire behind her novel.

Rob Hack

Rob Hack has lived in Paekāā for nearly seven years after returning from his third attempt to move across the ditch. He has been writing poems since 1997 though he remembers wondering about the indefinable yet pleasing ache he felt after reading Keats and Milton in his third form, a mere thirty years earlier. He writes about his Cook Island heritage, his early years on Niue, and about current events, poets who inspire him and other stuff.

Mandy Hager

Mandy Hager is the author of seven novels, including the Esther Glen Award winner Smashed, and the 2010 New Zealand Post Book Awards Young Adult Fiction winner The Crossing, the first book in her Blood of the Lamb trilogy. She tutors the novel course for the Whitireia creative writing programme. The Nature of Ash was published in June 2012 by Random House New Zealand.

Helen Heath

Helen Heath is the author of Graft, a collection of poems published by Victoria University Press in 2012. In 2009 she completed an MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML), where she is currently working toward her PhD. Her writing has been published in many journals in New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman lives in Christchurch where he is a research fellow
at the University of Canterbury. His latest book of poetry, Shaken Down 6.3, published by Canterbury University Press in June 2012, is a collection of poems from the Christchurch earthquake of February 2011. His next book, a memoir, The Lost Pilot, will be published by Penguin NZ in 2013.

Sue Jamieson

Sue Jamieson has a degree in French literature and a Diploma in Creative Writing. Between these two ventures lies a lifetime of work as a health professional. She loves good writing in all genres and has a special interest in the writing of Katherine Mansfield. This interest has recently taken her to Paris, Poland and Slovakia.

Lynn Jenner

Lynn Jenner is working on a PhD about human actions in the face of loss at the International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML) at Victoria University. Her first writing course was at Whitireia in 2004, and she has since been awarded the Adam Prize in Creative Writing at Victoria University in 2008 and the Jessie McKay Best First Book of Poetry prize in 2011.

Valerie Kirk

Valerie Kirk has been writing for about fifteen years, beginning with stories in the School Journal and other magazines as well as stories broadcast on Radio New Zealand: National. However, not truly satisfied with any of these niches, Valerie decided to enrol in the Diploma in Creative Writing at Whitireia, and discovered the joys of poetry. She has since had a poem published in the New Zealand Listener, and is now a freelance writer.

Kirsten Le Harivel

Kirsten Le Harivel is a poet, traveller and youth development worker based in New Zealand, with ties to Scotland, England, France and India. Thanks to two poetry papers at Whitireia she has a wonderful group of women writers around her.

Rewa Morgan

Rewa Morgan (Ngā Toa, Ngā Raukawa, Te Ā Awa) grew up and currently resides on the Kā Coast. She completed the Whitireia poetry course in 2011 and attended Hinemoana Baker’s Whiti Te Rā poetry workshop during the summer of 2011/2012. Her interest in creative writing was influenced by her mother Heneti who wrote stories and read to her from a young age.

Samiha Radcliffe

Samiha Radcliffe was born in Canada and raised in Te Wai Pounamu, the South Island of Aotearoa/ New Zealand. Her ancestry, and poetry, mixes India with the Isle of Man, England with France, and Persia with Russia. She lives by the sea on the Kā Coast. Radcliffe studied the Diploma in Creative Writing at Whitireia in 2007, and in 2008 she completed an MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML) at Victoria University.

Maggie Rainey-Smith

Maggie Rainey-Smith is a child of the 1950s, who loved the 1960s, travelled in the 1970s, raised a family in the 1980s, built a business in the 1990s and fell into writing in the twenty-first century.

Tina Regtien

Long-time Kā Coast resident Tina Regtien has spent twenty-four years as an actor, several as a teacher, ten as a parent and many more as a student of writing. She started this journey with Whitireia back in 2001 and has also studied poetry through the International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML). This piece in 4th Floor 2012 is a narrative, character-driven poetry sequence which is part of a larger piece with the working title Dochtertaal (daughter language). These are the first three of approximately fifty poems begun in 2004 after attending Shannon Welch’s Iowa course at the IIML and whilst rehearsing a play about a fictitious meeting between Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf by Craig Thane – Telling Stories.

Sandi Sartorelli

Sandi Sartorelli (also known as Abra Cadabra) was born in the Hutt Valley and has lived there ever since. She is a third-year student in the creative writing programme at Whitireia. Her work has appeared in Blackmail Press, Valley Micropress, Eye to the Telescope, Conversations Across Borders and Poems in the Waiting Room. She is currently working on a collection of poetry.

Hannah Schenker

Hannah Schenker lives in a yurt on a hillside in Golden Bay, perhaps the most ideal writing spot a girl could wish for. Apart from joyously studying the Diploma in Creative Writing by distance through Whitireia in 2012, she also works with words in other ways – proofreading the local paper each week and dabbling in sub-editing and freelance journalism. She lives happily ever after with her husband, stepdaughter and two cats.

Lorraine Singh

Lorraine Singh completed a Graduate Diploma in Creative Writing at Whitireia in 2009. Her tutors were Lynn Davidson and Hinemoana Baker. Singh has had poems published online in 4th Floor (2007, 2009, 2010 and 2011) and Blackmail Press (2009). She has also been published in print in the Paekakariki Xpress (2007) and the Wellington Sonnet competition (Earl of Seacliff Art Workshop 2008).

Elizabeth Smither

Elizabeth Smither’s latest publications include The Commonplace Book: A Writer’s Journey Through Quotations, a journal published by Auckland University Press in 2011, and The Sea Question, with photographer Jane Dove Juneau published by South Pacific Light Press in 2010. A new collection of poems, The Blue Coat, will be published in 2013.

Robert Stratford

Robert Stratford works part-time and divides the rest of his time between family, writing, reading, the outdoors, Buddhist meditation and disrupting the status quo. Stratford has published poetry in previous editions of 4th Floor as well as anthologies of the New Zealand Poetry Society. His next big adventures include cycling the Molesworth Station and scoping a PhD about education policy for environmental survival.

Rachel Tobin

Rachel Tobin’s ancestors lived in Ireland, France and England. For the last fifteen years she has made her home in Wellington, where she currently leads classes, workshops, retreats and private sessions in the Feldenkrais method, qi gong, wellbeing practices and Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) counselling. Woven through Tobin’s story is her enduring enjoyment of words and their power to move, inspire and invite new ways of seeing. She writes poetry to express the richness, challenges and love she experiences on the journey towards living fully and beyond the confines of self.

Mercedes Webb-Pullman

Mercedes Webb-Pullman completed a Diploma in Creative Writing at Whitireia before gaining her MA in Creative Writing in 2011 with the International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML) at Victoria University. Her poems have been published online in 4th Floor, Turbine, Danse Macabre and Blackmail Press, among others, and her work has appeared in print collections. Her first book, Numeralla Dreaming, was published in 2012 by Bench Press.

Felicity Yates

Felicity Yates writes poetry and short fiction that turns repeatedly to the landscapes that have harboured her: Greece, the Republic of Ireland, England, and, latterly, New Zealand, where she also grew up. She has worked as a journalist and travel writer. She began writing poetry while living on the island of Lesvós, perhaps because intensely listening to a language you don’t understand makes you more alert to sound and rhythm, and perhaps because without the distraction of speaking yourself, observation is more acute. Tzidrá and Hídera are villages in the mountains of Lesvós, Páscha, the Greek Orthodox Easter.