Laurence Fearnley has spent the past twenty-six years writing and publishing fiction, essays and longer works of nonfiction. Most of her work is grounded in Te Wai Pounamu/the South Island, with a strong focus on the rural areas of South Canterbury, Otago and Southland. Her latest novel, At the Grand Glacier Hotel, was shortlisted for the Ockham Awards.
She is interviewed by Thom Conroy, senior lecturer in Creative Writing at Massey University and Chief Editor for Headland.
Thom: Kia ora Laurence. First of all, let’s acknowledge that your novel At the Grand Glacier Hotel was shortlisted for the 2025 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction. Congratulations on this remarkable achievement!
Laurence: Kia ora Thom. Thanks very much for your kind words and for asking me to take part in this kōrero.
Thom: When my co-fiction convenors for the prize, Tania Roxborogh and Carole Beu, were discussing At the Grand Glacier Hotel, we all agreed that we just couldn’t put your book down. In terms of plot, I think it’s fair to say that it’s pretty subdued, right? Your protagonist, Libby, spends most of the book gradually rediscovering her self-confidence and mobility as she recovers from a soft tissue sarcoma in the leg, but somehow the novel manages to absolutely captivate.
This is perhaps what I most admire about your work—your willingness to sidestep the almost universal centrality of plot in fiction. During the Ockham NZ Book Awards: Fiction Round Table 2025 with Paula Morris, you said, “I like writing detail and am most interested in creating immersive (tonal, atmospheric) works where plot is secondary”. This stance strikes me as one of many bold positions you take as a writer. Would you mind talking a bit about this tendency and what gives you the courage to follow this instinct?
Laurence: Okay, so having worked on a series of novels based on the five senses (I’m about to start on the fifth—although someone suggested recently that I should write another, based on the sixth sense), I’ve come to the conclusion that writers have an individual, in-built, natural approach to story or narrative. I think that some writers “see” a story and so their writing tends to be visual, or cinematic. Some “hear” a story and their approach centres language, rhythm, cadence—the poetic, read-aloud qualities. Some are interested in “telling” a story—so these are the writers who are interested in plot, the natural story-tellers. And some, like me, feel their way into a story, so they’re interested in creating tone and atmosphere, and moving through story like cloud curling around a mountain top. I’m also a very visual person: I like looking and even staring at things for a long time (scenery, art work, groups of people). So, when it comes to plot, I almost write sub-plots rather than through-lines. At the Grand Glacier Hotel has a couple: Libby recovering in the hotel, the quest with James (which I based on The Pilgrim’s Progress), and the fragments around sound: the storms, Libby’s husband’s/daughter’s voice on the phone, the bird-calls, the Esperanto group, the musical evening, and the silences, etc. The plotlines are carried by the characters, and serve the characters. In turn, the characters serve the tone and atmosphere. The tone of the work is what holds all the bits together: it’s the shopping bag and the rest is groceries. The essence of the novel is its sense of tenderness (between people), and its delicacy and strength (like a spider’s web). It’s a novel as a precious object.
Thom: In a review for Kete Books, Jackie Lee Morrison writes of Libby, “She often falls a little too far into navel-gazing and finds herself easily bored in the company of others, preferring to meander through her own thoughts”. While I don’t disagree, I found myself being drawn to Libby as a character in spite of these shortcomings—perhaps even because of them. It’s often debated what goes into a compelling character. What do you think is most important when crafting a character that readers are going to spend time with for a few hundred pages?
Laurence: I’m always interested when reviewers suggest that one or other of my characters is guilty of navel-gazing, self-indulgence, or self-pity. I remember that Siân, the protagonist of Scented, was described as being self-absorbed and I felt quite jolted by that response. She is a fifty-something woman who has been made redundant from her university position, is unable to find any employment (and her age plays a large part in this), has lost her friend in an accident, loses her beloved apartment, and becomes homeless—winding up in a caravan and selling home-made perfume oils at the local farmer’s market. In other words, she’s lost everything and to criticise her for being self-absorbed at a time like that seemed pretty harsh to me. It raises questions of empathy and compassion, and made me wonder if readers have become impatient with characters that are simply trying to survive.
The same applies to Libby. She’s almost died, has spent months undergoing treatment and surgery for cancer, has worried that her leg was going to be amputated, and now despite being “cured”, her body is in constant pain and she moves with limited mobility. She is alone in a hotel (that was meant to be a holiday with her husband) and finally begins to really process everything that has happened to her: the impact her illness has had on her and her family, her independence, her thoughts about the future, her recovery—knowing that she is never going to get back to “normal”. Like Siân from Scented and Roland from Winter Time, she prefers to process her thoughts in private. She needs space and time to think things through, to make sense of things, to “absorb” things. She is also testing herself, mentally and physically, which takes a great deal of courage.
All these characters are, to a degree, broken, and they internalise life’s challenges and joys. They don’t seek an audience or validation—they’re not people who share and they’re not emotionally performative. This doesn’t play well with readers who want characters to “do something” (read self-help, talk to family, get a therapist, put yourself out there). All my characters are seeking time—time to resolve questions and problems in their own way, in a way that works for them. This means that there’s rarely a tidy “closure” for any of my characters. Much of what they’re facing and processing is unresolved and open-ended. They don’t so much change as carry on, and that’s a risky personality for an author to create because they tend to be less dynamic or likeable. Yet, to me, they feel organic and true. People adjust and “carry on” all the time when faced with personal tragedy. The idea that a character has to grow and change (over a five-day period in Libby’s case) feels very manufactured.
Thom: I hope you don’t mind me mentioning that Libby’s experience with a leg sarcoma seems linked to your own cancer diagnosis, a condition which you mention in your Acknowledgements in Winter Time. As I’m aware that many of our readers are aspiring and emerging writers themselves, I wondered if you might want to talk about how you draw boundaries or create guidelines for yourself around using personal material in work that is fictional?
Laurence: I think many writers use personal experiences in their novels but because they’re universal experiences (family, leaving home, work, marriage, parenting, death) they aren’t read as personal or autobiographical. All of my novels relate to aspects of my life. Butler’s Ringlet drew on my personal experience of having a child, for example. The Quiet Spectacular relates to becoming aware of the invisibility of middle-age and the need to reclaim space after menopause. Winter Time is about the grief of losing a family member, and of thinking about “home”. At the Grand Glacier Hotel similarly draws on one of my life experiences: having cancer. The difference is that whereas many important life experiences occur within a kind of natural time-frame and have blurry edges, the experience of having cancer is very condensed, precise, and profound. As a writer who is attracted to observation and detail, I found the whole experience absolutely fascinating. It might sound crazy, but it was a very precious experience—most similar to being pregnant and giving birth. However, if I had written a novel based on being pregnant and giving birth, it probably wouldn’t have been described as “auto-fiction”. So, the suggestion, then, is that autobiographical fiction relates more to exceptional stories and trauma than the everyday. That doesn’t make sense to me. As far as I’m concerned, most of my life experience has fed my stories: both the mundane and the challenging aspects. They’re all autobiographical.
The one bit of advice regarding boundaries I would give, however, when using autobiographical material is to think through the impact re-drafting, editing, reading, workshopping, and speaking about that material will have on your mental health. Writing about something deeply personal or traumatic might start off as cathartic or “good material” but it has the potential to become quite triggering when you’re on your third draft or your “story” is being workshopped, reviewed, or you’re giving interviews. There is a passage in At the Grand Glacier Hotel (p.101) that just fills me with dread when I read it. I can see myself so clearly in that day-room: the sense of abandonment, the utter helplessness that felt like emptiness, and the relief when it was finally over... Writing that scene could have been a means to “taking back control” or “reclaiming the story” but that isn’t how it worked for me. It just brings it all back, no matter how much distance I try to put between myself and Libby.
Thom: I was rereading your essay, Sniffing Out the Neighbourhood: A Scent Map of Home (Massey University Press) the other day, and it dawned on me that this essay was likely written around the time you were conceiving your sense series novels, which began with the publication of Scented in 2019. Would you mind telling us a bit about this series and how it was conceived? I have a part two to this question as well, if you don’t mind. I’ve read that you’ve already started in on the last two novels in the sense series, and I have to say that I’m impressed that you saw this concept through to completion over such a long period of time. Is this larger ambition linked to an overall vision of fiction and its purpose for you?
Laurence: In many ways, I’m a fiction-nature writer. The natural world, the environment, and place feature large in my work. I spend a lot of time looking: I’m happy to rest my eyes on a view and just watch what is going on, whether seasonally or in the moment. Before my surgery, I used to walk my dogs on the hill above my house—Signal Hill in Ōtepoti/Dunedin. I always went up around dawn, and I used to watch the dogs, fascinated by what attracted their attention. In this country, we kind of sell ourselves on the “grand view”: the fiords, the mountains, the lakes, and the forests. I’ve became interested in trying to appreciate—or honour—landscape through non-visual means. For me, because I’ve always been interested in perfume, this began as a scent experiment. Could a landscape be appreciated via scent rather than sight? In the nose of the beholder? The answer was “yes”. The hillside I walked on that was scarred by forestry slash, carried the most incredible scents as the ground heated and the dew evaporated around dawn. I walked through scent tunnels and wrote a couple of essays based on the experience—one was in Home and the other in Landfall. I then wondered if I could write a longer essay about scent in the form of a novel, which led to Scented. I conceived of it as a fictional essay, in a way. Then, I thought more about the five senses and started sound-mapping my walks, just as I had scent-mapped them. This was a remarkable experience as I’ve been a bit of a birdwatcher since I was a kid. I now began to really notice bird-calls and how they relate to seasonal change. Today (4 September) was the first day since summer that I have heard a kingfisher in the Northern Cemetery. That, for me, marks the beginning of (natural world) spring—as opposed to meteorological spring. These little experiments with scent and sound not only really enriched my life, but also my writing as I became more and more intrigued about how using the five senses could really flesh out description and story. It’s on the level of “attentiveness” that attracts me, and the sense of wonder that comes with that. The only novel that I was unsure of approaching was the taste one because cooking and food aren’t really interests of mine. I remembered that the only times I’ve really been interested in food were when I was doing something physically challenging—like when my boyfriend and I rode a tandem from Athens to Brittany. Sitting on the back of the bike, I would conjure up my favourite meals, dinners that we never ate because we had a budget of $27 per day. Kayaking trips were another source of food imaginings—and so my next, and final, novel will centre on a woman kayaking the length of Mata-Au/the Clutha River as a protest against a planned open cast gold mine in the Bendigo area.
Thom: Your novel Winter Time—the touch book in the sense series—is one of my personal favourites. In it, you manage to convey a visceral sense of the bleak, whitewashed landscape of the Mackenzie Country—I’m thinking especially of that scene where Roland is biking out to what you call Lake Christiana in the book, and he’s caught in a white-out: “From his position on the ground he looked up, but the fog and the snow were the same colour, and he had no sense of space or depth.” For me, this is a terrifying scene in the book, as well as a moment of utter aloneness, a kind of existential isolation that seems, in some way, at the centre of the novel. I’m thinking not only of the setting—the isolated fictional town of Matariki—but of all the unanswered questions that pile up as Winter Time continues. I’ll admit that on a first read, I felt a little frustrated by all that we don’t know, but on a second consideration, I wondered if this was the point: touch is blind, and life is largely lived in a state of unresolved questions. Most of the big questions in life go unanswered in the end. Was anything like this on your mind as you wrote the book—and, in general, is theme a major concern of yours as a writer?
Laurence: You’re such a generous reader, thank you. There are two elements of touch in Winter Time. The novel began in my head as an image of crusty, large-crystal snow over a hollow base. When you step onto that snow, your foot falls through and the edge of the circle made by your boot is very sharp, it can graze your shin. There’s a ring of blue just under the surface. That was my starting point, but I was also thinking of non-visual responses—specifically grief-related—that relate to touch: groping, clutching, aching, wading, and so on. People grope for answers. One of my favourite things to write is contrasts: light/dark (I always write night-scenes), sound/silence, drama/humour, a beautiful setting/destruction of nature. When it came to touch, I also wanted to write absences: human contact/isolation/aloneness.
To answer the last part of your question, one of the major impacts on my life centres around my twenties in the 1980s when, over the period of a few years, a number of my friends were killed in mountaineering accidents. These all began in a similar way: They would be overdue (often a storm would be involved). There would be no radio contact or sign of them, and so a search would be mounted. Something like a piece of rope, or a bit of climbing equipment, or footsteps in the snow would be spotted... All this time we’d be waiting, listening to the hourly news on the radio, as the story of their disappearance went from the leading news item to second, third... Four or five days would pass and you’d know in your head that they were dead but you still hoped they were okay, in a snow-cave somewhere or walking out, that they would come back...
That’s the mood I wanted to capture in Winter Time.
Thom: I was wondering if you would mind talking for a moment about the role of disappointment, red herrings, and romanticised or sensational plotlines that fail to come to fruition—or at least don’t come to fruition in any conventional sense in your fiction. I’m thinking here of the quest for the grand Māori perfume in Scented, the suggestion of nefarious forces behind Eddie’s death in Winter Time, and the search for the extinct South Island kōkako in At the Grand Glacier Hotel. Conventional wisdom might dictate that we shouldn’t lead readers on, but it’s a risk you don’t seem to mind taking.
Laurence: I’m interested in characters who never quite make it. Good people who don’t have many friends or who haven’t found love, creative people who fail to be seen/heard (Maggie in Mother’s Day), people who have dreams or vision that get distorted (Roland and his food-truck/whole foods shop in Winter Time). I’m attracted to the fragility of their dreams, and the way their dreams are cut short because life gets in the way.
It seems natural to me to write about disappointment, about things that fall by the wayside—it’s where self-knowledge comes from and it makes characters human.
I should probably mention that I plan to include four of the characters from my “senses” project—Siân, Roland, Hannah (daughter of Libby), and Caro from Dedication)—in my fifth and final sense novel, Rise and Shine, so closure might happen…
Thom: In an Arts Foundation interview marking your 2019 Laureate award, you said, “Art to me is all about wonder. I think it’s a bit like nature in that sense. It has the ability to stop you in your tracks and amaze or challenge or inspire you. Art makes your world bigger. I think imagination and curiosity are crucial to the way we inhabit this world, and art gets that.” I love this quote, and I find it inspiring. I know that you’re a novelist and not a cultural commentator, but do you think we’re in danger of losing our access to wonder in the world today? If so, what can we do about this?
Laurence: For me, Te Waipounamu/the South Island provides a sense of community and its landscape provokes a sense of awe. I feel that the current government’s attachment to pushing through projects that threaten the environment and heritage are, essentially, an attack on “wonder”. I’ve been following the progress of the Santana Minerals proposal for an open-cast gold mine, a massive development that will produce 13 million tonnes of toxic tailings in an area of outstanding natural landscape in the hills near Tarras/Bendigo, in Central Otago. I’ve spent time in the Dunstan Mountains, around Thomson Gorge and the Rise and Shine Valley. The colours and textures of the hillsides are so beautiful, almost serene, and the views are incredible. It’s often deeply quiet and the air clear, but there’s also a sense of history that instils the area with human story. To put four open pits in that area would be a crime. Access to “wonder” is something we have to fight for. Assaults on nature, discrimination, cuts to arts funding, bans on books... All of these attacks make our world smaller, meaner. It’s important to stay curious and engaged, and to speak—or write—out.
Thom: In a Poetry Shelf post with Paula Green, you said, “Writing about the South Island is a political act–I’m digging my heels in and see myself as a regionalist writer”. As a writer who also lives in smaller regional centre—i.e., not Auckland, Wellington, or Christchurch—this comment really resonated with me. I agree that it is a political act to write about the South Island, or any region that’s outside the country’s main centres. What do you think this position says, and do you think it’s cost you any readers?
Laurence: I feel my best when I’m writing about the South Island (although I have written about other places, such as France and the Antarctic). Although I can’t claim to belong to the South Island, I grew up here and my feeling of connection creates a sense of responsibility, the responsibility to pay attention and record. I have a background in art history and working in art museums, and so I was aware of the work of the Canterbury regionalist artists from the 1930-40s (Rata Lovell-Smith, Doris Lusk, Bill Sutton). Their work has a great sense of place that appeals to me and I identify with their preoccupations—the endless fascination with looking at and depicting the local environment. In literature, I look to Blanche Baughan, Ngaio Marsh, Dan Davin, Keri Hulme, and Owen Marshall, and to contemporary poets such as Sue Wootton, Rhian Gallagher, Brian Turner, and David Eggleton. My writing is a means of getting to know and explore place, and to bring it to public attention. My novels cover issues that feel important to me: regional lives, the environment, changes, and destruction of the natural environment. These stories are just as much a part of New Zealand literature as urban, big-city tales. We’re not the “other” to the main centres. (One strange thing is that a couple of my novels have been described as “gothic”. I have always viewed my work, in tone, as straight-forward realism and I think that part of the reason why they have been viewed through the gothic lens is simply because they are set in small towns, away from the academic centres of literature—so they disrupt the status quo.)
I don’t know if concentrating on the south has cost me readers. Probably being a bit of a loner and not being on social media has cost me more.
Thom: As you know, one of the hats I wear—other than Chief Editor of Headland—is that of a teacher of creative writing (thanks for your visit to my undergraduate course some years ago, by the way). With both of these hats on, I feel compelled to ask: how can what we do as a journal serve our student writers? What advice would you give to a writer who is just beginning their journey now in 2025? What habits should they form? What are some aspirations and guidelines you would recommend? And what do you think the role of fiction will be in the future? Sorry in advance for ending on such hefty questions!
Laurence: Thanks for the invitation in the past. It was a great experience.
First thing: Ask yourself how you approach reading/writing. Do you want to tell a story or do you see a story, hear a story, feel a story... etc. If you can identify your approach, you might be able to write to your strengths rather than pushing yourself into a style that doesn’t work.
It helps to feel connected to what you’re writing. Connection gives your work depth and weight. It may be more commercially sensible to be strategic or calculating (anticipating the next “big thing” and writing towards that), but that might not feed your creative spirit. I believe writing has to be meaningful to the author/creator in order to be successful, otherwise it reads flat or hollow—more like an exercise.
Figure out your priorities in terms of writing. You have limited writing time so where do you want your focus to be? Do you want to spend your time on short stories, novels, poetry, etc. —working on your craft, building up your body of work—or do you want to spend your time on social media platforms, blogs, promotion—building up your audience? Try not to compromise on what you want to do by spending too much time on what is less important.
Understand that the teachers and people in your class/workshop are sympathetic readers. They are careful, close readers and what they have to say may be worth listening to. Even if their taste in literature is different from yours, they may come up with something that is unexpectedly helpful. They are reading your work through to the end—and that is a gift that you should not ignore.
And finally, consider the role of fiction. It’s going to become even more important, more relevant, a means to keeping the truth.