The list of credits in The Axeman’s Carnival is a quirky roll call of high country farmers and Cromwell woodchopping royalty.
Throw in an aviator, a climber, a district councillor and a magpie, and you have got the district covered.
The book will be officially launched in the South Island at the Queenstown Writers Festival, which started yesterday, where award-winning author Catherine Chidgey is the keynote speaker.
It will be her first trip to Central Otago in a long time.
"I lived [in] Dunedin during the early 2000s.
"I grew up in Wellington and [Dunedin] felt like Wellington on a smaller, more intimate scale.
"I really loved the place and it was only because of family changes with my elderly mum that we left there.
"I did [spend] a lot of time enjoying Central Otago when we were down there.
"The landscape definitely got under my skin.
"It is such a beautiful, stark, kind of lonely, and spiritual place ... a place of contradictions, which I really find interesting."
Chidgey wrote most of the book under Covid lockdown at her home in the Waikato.
"I was lucky enough to talk to half a dozen sheep station owners in Central who were generous with their time and advice, correcting my gaffes about the ideas I had about farming down there.
"[It] was very valuable being able to talk to those people — including Shrek’s dad [John Perriam]."
Chidgey also "cannibalised" stories from her husband Alan Bekhuis, who grew up on Centre Hill Station in Southland.
"Watching superphosphate trucks drive out, dressing up as a cowboy when he was a kid and pretending to shoot the driver, a passage about picking wild mint — all that is straight from Alan.
"I always say to my creative writing students that specific details and sensory details from the physical world will bring your writing to life."
Chidgey could not attend live wood-chopping competitions but watched many online clips.
She found trophy-winning woodchopping champions Bradley Pako, of Cromwell, and Mikhayla Tainui-McLean, of Otorohanga, were very generous with time and advice.
Nor was wood-chopping commentator Peter Templeton, of Cromwell, short of a word.
"He was really helpful about getting the rules around those events right and getting the patter of commentary right."
Despite anchoring herself in Central Otago mentally during lockdown, Waikato was very much home for her and her family.
"We would love to go back to Dunedin and have access to that side of the country but our work is here and it is just not possible.
"I am a real nomad and for probably two decades, I was living in different parts of New Zealand: Christchurch, Auckland, Wellington, Dunedin and then overseas for a while.
The Axeman’s Carnival is entirely narrated by Tama, a magpie.
The reader never gets inside the head of the main human characters, Marnie and Rob — not even at the traumatic end.
"I was really aware when I was writing it of the phenomenon of relationships, where from the outside people wonder, ‘why don’t you just leave?’, but from the inside of that kind of situation [leaving] can seem impossible.
"You just can’t leave, for financial or emotional reasons that might just not make sense to anyone else.
"So Tama was witness to this and observed this the way we might as well ... I wanted it to seem to Tama to be something inexplicable, the way it might seem to us."
Chidgey has magpies around her house in Ngarawhahia, but not the scary swooping sorts.
"My routine is to start work quite early morning, usually about 6am, before starting my other job at the University [of Waikato].
"Every morning when I open my writing diary I hear the magpies warbling away with a beautiful, melodic song and I see them walking around outside my window and they are a constant presence to me while I am writing.
"They just forced their way in ... It was at a time when I was casting about for a new story and a new narrator and I wanted it to be an unexpected narrator and there they were.
"Books for me always come from several different sparks or seeds ... one is Alan’s childhood, the other is what I am hearing outside my window."
Chidgey also collects memories, like a magpie might pick up shiny things.
For example, holidaying in an avocado orchard cottage, she found a magpie cage trap and instructions on how to kill birds.
"[These were] fascinating to the writerly part of me.
"I put this away and forgot about it until years later when I got to thinking about magpies ... and it came back to me.
"So there is that seed there, starting to sprout alongside the others."
The Axeman’s Carnival has been in shops since October 13.
The North Island launch was on October 27 at the University of Waikato, alongside the launch of her second children’s picture book, Jiffy’s Greatest Hits.
At a glance
Queenstown Writers Festival
- Who: Whiti Hereaka, Stephen Davis, Kate Hall, Rebecca K Reilly, Bethany G. Rogers, Catherine Chidgey, Noelle McCarthy, Paddy Richardson, Kate De Goldi, Kevin Chapman, Christine Leunens, Laura Williamson, Annabel Wilson, Liz Breslin, Claudia Jardine, Ray Shipley.
- When: November 11-13.
- Where: Te Atamira, Dart House, Remarkables Park Town Centre.
- More info: website https://www.qtwritersfestival.nz
