Close Reading with Catherine Chidgey
Edition Six
You are about to read the six edition of Close Reading, a dispatch of literary obsessions, published by Woolgather. Each edition features a guest writer who shares one word, one quote, one poem, one book, and “one other thing”. This edition is by Catherine Chidgey, an award-winning writer, based in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Catherine Chidgey is "one of New Zealand's greatest living writers" (Radio NZ). Her debut, In a Fishbone Church, won Best First Book at both the New Zealand Book Awards and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (South-East Asia and South Pacific region). It also won the Betty Trask Award and was longlisted for the Orange Prize. The Axeman’s Carnival and The Wish Child both won the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction – New Zealand’s most prestigious literary award. Other honours include the Prize in Modern Letters, the Katherine Mansfield Award, the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship, the Janet Frame Fiction Prize, and the Nielsen Independent New Zealand Bestseller award. Catherine also xlectures in Creative Writing at the University of Waikato. Her latest novel is The Book of Guilt, published by Penguin in 2025.
In this edition, Catherine shares words of memory, history, and the beauty of wild places.
Illustration by Lachlan Conn
One Word:
Vergangenheitsbewältigung
This marvellous German compound word means ‘coming to terms with the past’, most often used in relation to Germany’s reckoning with its 20th-century history. When I lived in Berlin in the 1990s I saw this process everywhere: in the overhauling of the old displays at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp memorial that ignored post-war East German brutalities; and in the small brass plaques – Stolpersteine, or ‘stumbling stones’ – set into pavements outside the homes of those who were deported, reminding passers-by of lives erased. The fact that there is a word for this speaks, to me, of a willingness to look the past in the face. In Aotearoa we are only beginning to teach our difficult histories in schools.
One Quote:
Surrender to the sky / Your heart of anger
This line is from James K Baxter’s brief and beautiful poem ‘High Country Weather’. I used it as the epigraph for my novel The Axeman’s Carnival, set in Central Otago’s high country and narrated by a magpie observing the actions of a farmer who is volatile and violent towards his wife. The line carries an extraordinary sense of release and lightness – the possibility that anger might simply rise like a bird into the wide Otago sky and vanish. It takes on an added, uneasy resonance when you know that Baxter’s own letters reveal violence within his marriage. The poem was put to music by Jordan Reyne on the 2000 album Baxter – a brilliant, haunting interpretation.
One Poem:
The Song of Wandering Aengus
I first encountered The Song of Wandering Aengus by WB Yeats in my teens, and it lodged itself deep. I love its mystery, its romance, its melancholy – and the way its music works like a spell to carry you forward. It was one of the first poems that made me aware of rhythm as a living force in language. I still find myself reciting it.
One Book:
An Angel at my Table
When I read Janet Frame’s 1984 autobiography as a young writer I felt something unlock: here was a New Zealand life rendered with honesty, strangeness, absolute authority. Frame’s account of her early years – of poverty and misunderstanding, but also the stubborn persistence of the imagination – made the writing life seem absolutely necessary to me.
One Other Thing:
Leather & Chains: My 1986 Diary
In her newly released memoir Leather & Chains: My 1986 Diary, Kate Camp revisits the diary she kept at fourteen, responding to those entries with the wry, perceptive eye of the adult (and poet) she has become. The result is funny, unsettling and strangely tender – a vivid snapshot of teenage life the 1980s, complete with recklessness and longing. Reading it, I kept feeling jolts of recognition – the texture of adolescence in New Zealand as I remember it, with all its bravado and vulnerability.