Xiaole Zhan
A question I was asked at the Auckland Writers Festival last year for the launch of AUP New Poets 11 was ‘What does it mean to be a ‘new’ poet?’ I’ve been thinking a lot about this question since! A word that pops up often in our culture today is ‘original,’ and there’s this obsession with the word solely in the sense of new. But the word ‘original’ actually holds another contradictory meaning: original as in the origin of something, as in the source, something likely very, very old. And the more I thought about newness, or our obsession with originality, the more I came to realise that newness is really the default state of life; we are constantly in a state of forgetting, calling it a new day when we have experienced hundreds of sunrises and sunsets just like this one. Newness is very much the natural order of things. Perhaps memory is the rare miracle.
This was a big lesson for me as a writer: the importance of remembering and interrogating history, especially the history of places I live in and pass through every day, the places that I otherwise take for granted. I find it fascinating how we like to travel to faraway places deemed to hold ‘lots of history’ when history is really the only thing that is equally distributed on earth; no square metre is suffused with less history than any other; only some histories have been rendered invisible. For writers, this means there is no place on earth that is not worth writing about. It means considering the places you pass through every day with deeper curiosity. I learnt recently that my hometown of Tāmaki Makaurau is built upon fifty-three volcanoes – it is the city with the most volcanoes in the world! I also learnt that of those fifty-three, only two maunga have not had their volcanic cones damaged by quarrying upon the arrival of settlers. For us in Aotearoa, writing involves remembering and witnessing the ghosts and scars of colonisation.
Another big lesson comes from one of my favourite writers, Yiyun Li, who writes in an article on Lit Hub: “One of the questions I often ask my students, while reading their work, is: what is a character’s livelihood?” Your livelihood impacts everything in your life. You can’t write about life without writing about livelihoods. This also means being critical of what you read. It’s incredibly important and illuminating to ask: what is the livelihood of this writer? How did a poem or a collection or a novel come into being? Who was writing it? What enabled them to write, and to be read by you, now? Who are those who cannot afford to write? Who are those who cannot afford the leisure time to read? What are the stories going untold? This also means asking yourself: what is my livelihood, and how does writing fit into this?
For myself, I have the time and space to write because I work a casual job at a university and because of regular applications for arts funding opportunities, fellowships and grants. Without this livelihood, I would not be able to live or write. I also benefit from the privilege of a tertiary education in Naarm and of citizenship status in Aotearoa and Australia. I benefit from generations of sacrifice and labour: my mother migrated to Aotearoa as a single parent and cared for me while working and studying; my grandmother never learnt to read or write and worked in a Mao-era plantation scraping rubber trees.
The livelihoods of contemporary Aotearoa writers are often stories of privilege or otherwise, of extraordinary resilience and the dire realities of arts funding. Living a life of writing means asking these questions that bring to light the stories that matter most.
m
Xiaole Zhan (詹小乐) is a Chinese-Aotearoa writer and composer based in Naarm. Their work features in Auckland University Press’s New Poets 11. They are a 2025 Creative New Zealand Fellowship recipient, a 2025 Red Room Poetry Varuna Fellowship recipient, the 2024 Kat Muscat Fellow, as well as the winner of the 2023 Kill Your Darlings Non-Fiction Prize and 2023 Landfall Young Writers' Essay Prize. Their name in Chinese means ‘Little Happy’ but can also be read as ‘Little Music’.