The Interview

Jaren: What do you remember from your days at The School for Young Writers and/ or being published in Write On magazine?

Freddie: I remember getting my very first poem published at the age of around 12 and feeling this immense sense of pride and accomplishment that my work was physically in print in a magazine that you could read and show to people.

From there, Heather McQuillan, who was my Year Seven teacher and deputy principal at the time, introduced me to the School for Young Writers and the rest, as they say… is history. My main memories of our classes were a great mix of awesome lessons, and writing exercises with a lot of fun jokes and banter in between editing/critiquing each other's work. My main memories were the running gags of snapping jazz demons, Azriel’s Illuminati eye and of course the cult of Ally the Tree! The School for Young Writers also introduced me to my high school of choice for all five years of my career there at Hagley Community College, so SFYW is deeply linked to my development as an angsty teenager. Above all, the main thing I took away from my time at SFYW was the many wonderful ongoing friendships and relationships with tutors and mentor figures.

Jaren: Which early experiences/opportunities/classes have influenced your writing the most?

I think the main themes of my early work at SFYW had a lot to do with my personal experiences and interests that I had growing up, mainly related to memories or experiences that I had growing up as a kid with cerebral palsy. Writing allowed me to engage with this part of myself that I didn’t want to embrace for the longest time in a way nothing else really has since. A particularly traumatic recovery from major surgery at eight years old shortly before the first of the Christchurch Earthquakes affected my mental health and thus, there is an undercurrent of anxiety about my work as a young writer.  

One of the most influential classes that I remember early on was a flash fiction workshop by Heather and James Norcliffe. Realizing that I could write fiction so briefly without losing any of the impact was very eye-opening for me and influenced a lot of my later work. I also really enjoyed the way that Jim Norcliffe’s classes were structured, where every week he would read through different texts on various themes or genres/forms, so that either you could read along with him or start writing. That particular style of teaching really helped prepare me for the change from high school to university, I think. It introduced me to a lot of great writers that I might not have heard of otherwise and I still have all of them filed away in my big red creative writing folder. My favourite class James did was a workshop on Mysenome/memory.  At Summer School, the songwriting and character workshops with Lisa Tui and Karen Healey were fun, as well as Gail Ingram’s poetry and emotions workshop, which was very useful for my poetry.

Jaren: How has your writing evolved over the years?

Freddie: In the beginning a majority of my writing was drawn from personal experience, but as time went on  and I would feel more confident in my abilities as a writer I shifted into tackling different genres of fiction and prose namely science fiction, fantasy and flash fiction. My process at the time was either work on a lot of small things, or one longer thing and that’s pretty much stayed the same for most of my writing since then.

As I got older, I also became more aware of things politically as well as becoming more aware of myself personally, so I started incorporating themes of mental health and queerness more explicitly in my writing. In the second year of university, recovering from major surgery meant I got the opportunity to refocus my efforts on creative writing in a big way, especially poetry, longer short stories and theater.

Recently, I did a paper on creative nonfiction which led to me writing my first personal essay which was a lot of fun and will hopefully lead to me writing more things like that in the near future.

Jaren: What got you interested in writing about nature and ecology?

Freddie: I’ve always been interested in nature and rely on a lot of natural imagery in my work, especially sea imagery. I like exploring the connections between humans and the natural world. Climate change is one of the important issues  that I care about very deeply, and while my writing on the subject has been interpreted by some as overly negative or bleak, I think that the undercurrent of anxiety is a key aspect for any young writer writing on the issue to communicate.  How else are young people supposed to respond to a situation as dire and important in their near future? As for ecology, there is something I find really interesting about the connections and relationships that flora and fauna form with each other whilst trying to live and survive in their own ways. It’s dramatic whilst also being primal.

Jaren: I see you love drama, has it influenced your writing?

I do love theatre a lot as an art form! I’d say it has had a pretty big influence on my creative writing. Learning to inhabit a character on stage had a big influence on creating my own characters and vice versa. Collaborating with people onstage has a lot of the same elements as getting critique from your peers in a writing workshop, so doing one a lot of one will help you when doing the other.
In 2019 I directed my school’s entry for the Sheilah Winn Shakespeare festival, where I chose a scene from Midsummer Night’s dream. That play and its faerie characters were a particular inspiration to my creative ideas for some future projects down the line...

At the time of writing I’m currently half way through a semester studying Shakespeare at UC and I love it! A year before Sheilah Winn I also wrote, directed and starred in my first short film, which was a good experience in hindsight…

My last piece of straight theatrical writing was a monologue from the perspective of Tammy Wells, better known as the iconic Briscoes lady having an existential crisis, which was a lot of fun! I can definitely see myself writing and performing for stage and screen in the future.  It would also be a dream come true to write comics for DC or Marvel someday.

Jaren: Thanks so much. I look forward to that DC or Marvel comic!