An Interview With Laurence Fearnley

By Jessica Thompson Carr | Posted:

Landscape is the most exquisite aspect of our country, and Laurence Fearnley’s writing is influenced by it. An author of fiction and non-fiction, Fearnley was awarded the University of Otago Robert Burns Fellowship in 2007, and completed a PhD in Creative Writing in 2012. She has published ten novels, including The Hut Builder, which won the fiction category of the New Zealand Post Book awards in 2011.

Pulling up to the café for a hot chocolate and a chat, both of us drenched by the recent storm, Fearnley looked at me and produced a beautiful yellow notebook out of her bag.

“I assume you’re a writer?”

I accepted the gift as professionally as possible, secretly bursting with excitement. There is nothing fresher than a new notebook, and to receive one from such an established writer was a genuine thrill.

The focus of our meet-up was to talk about her success in winning several national awards in the past year. Most recently, she was awarded the Janet Frame Memorial Award, a grant of $3000 which is offered to an author to support their career and assist them in whatever project they aspire to. Fearnley explained that “because the award is very open, it allows me to experiment. It’s not a book deal, so I’m granted some freedom with my project.”

Fearnley has been working on a collection of non-fiction and short stories that approach her interests not only in landscape, but also in scent:

I’m very interested in approaching landscape through the vehicle of scent. An awareness of smell forces people to slow down and grow more aware of their surroundings. The piece I’ll be working on as a result of the award is ordered into a series of essays and stories, representing the three notes of traditional perfume. The top notes, the short written pieces, will capture the reader’s attention and set the scene. Following this will be the heart notes, the overall theme of the book. This section will be divided into three parts. The first looks at the Signal Hill walk in Dunedin; the second will look into my research on the grand Māori perfume; the third section will focus on a tandem bicycle trip in the 1980s, from Athens to Amsterdam, and all the scents picked up on this journey. The final section, the base notes, will focus on my writing life.

Both the Janet Frame Memorial Award and the Auckland Museum National Research Grant have allowed Fearnley freedom of travel: she has taken trips to Auckland Museum as well as field trips with botanist Peter Johnson in search of plants, such as the sweet-scented grass Kāretu, which appear in the grand Māori perfume.

Along with this project, Fearnley is also working on a mountaineering anthology with Paul Hersey, a Dunedin-based adventurer and writer. This collection will involve non-fiction, fiction and poetry, and was made possible through a research grant from the Friends of the Hocken Collections. The research focuses on mountaineering both in New Zealand and by New Zealanders overseas. Fearnley has looked specifically for writing by women and Māori.

We also talked a bit about her trips to Antarctica in 2002–03 and 2003–04, and the absence of smell there: “It was quite a challenge to pull an entire book out of such a desolate area. I was only there for two weeks each time, so there was pressure to gather as much information as possible. In such a small community I focussed on the detail of daily life.” From this experience, she produced the book Degrees of Separation.

On the process of her writing, Fearnley explained that she spends “two days a week on the Janet Frame Award, and three days a week on the mountaineering anthology. Because there is no deadline for the scent project, I make my own. To write a book I usually allow myself a year of thinking, then a year of writing.”

With these awards Laurence has permission to expand her boundaries, and is enjoying the opportunity to work on a passion project.