Extraordinary Anywhere: Essays on Place from Aotearoa New Zealand

14 July 2016

This collection of personal essays, a first of its kind, re-imagines the idea of place for an emerging generation of readers and writers. It offers glimpses into where we are now and how that feels, and opens up the range and kinds of stories we can conceive of telling about living here. Contributors include Tony Ballantyne, Sally Blundell, Alex Calder, Annabel Cooper, Tim Corballis, Martin Edmond, Ingrid Horrocks, Lynn Jenner, Cherie Lacey, Tina Makereti, Harry Ricketts, Jack Ross, Alice Te Punga Somerville, Giovanni Tiso, Ian Wedde, Lydia Wevers, and Ashleigh Young.

‘To investigate something properly we need all three: archives, dreams, memories. [...] And so the liberation of a collection like this becomes possible.’ —Martin Edmond

Ingrid Horrocks is the author of a travel memoir, Travelling with Augusta: 1835 and 1999 (Victoria University Press, 2003), and two collections of poetry. She did a PhD at Princeton University and now teaches creative nonfiction and English at Massey University, Wellington. She has published articles in various journals and her book, Women Wanderers and the Writing of Mobility, 1784–1814, was published in 2017 by Cambridge University Press. More recently she has become interested in exploring relationships between mobility and place in a New Zealand context, as well as in bringing critical and creative writing into closer conversation. Recent projects a pair of essays which take Martin Edmond’s work as their springboard and which appeared respectively in Sport 43: New Zealand New Writing and Biography: An Interdisciplinary Journal.

Cherie Lacey received her PhD (Film) from the University of Auckland and MA (Literature) from Victoria University of Wellington. Her research explores the ways in which place affects our psyche, drawing primarily from psychoanalytic and postcolonial theory. More recently, she has approached these ideas through creative nonfiction writing, and is currently based at the International Institute of Modern Letters (Victoria University of Wellington), where she is writing a memoir of a failed psychoanalysis. Cherie also lectures in Media Studies at Victoria University of Wellington.