Grape Harvest (Jematva), Croatia: 13.3.25
My cousin Helena and I were willing pickers for our grandfather, Nono. Each morning at 4am Nono would stand under the window of the room we shared and softly call, only once, “Ni-na”. We would be up and out of bed quickly, dressing in the dark and scrambling down the old stone stairs to the cellar kitchen our mothers ate their meals in when they were children. Under a single bulb Nono would drink his coffee while we dipped crusts of yesterday’s bread smothered in delicious honey into ours.
Helena and I walked to the vineyards which are in the Stari Grad plain, now a UNESCO World Heritage site: grapes have been grown here for over 2400 years. Nono rode Hassan the donkey with bags roped to the saddle.
Here we bend over to pick the grapes which are very low, and soon our backs are giving in—but we will not give up. We both want our grandfather to be proud of us. We pick until the sun burns too brightly and Nono nods to us to stop.
Nono tends Hassan’s saddle with care.
In 2024 Helena and I sit in our favourite coffee bar while my sons do the picking.
Whangateau—paradise midway between Matakana and Leigh: 12.3.25
When I’m not at the end of our dining table closest to the french doors with the fabulous view, I’m out on the property planting, tidying, watering, pruning, chopping, mulching, feeding, and any number of other rural tasks that can easily fill a day. A writer sits at their keyboard for most of their working hours—a solitary, quiet, potentially lonely time—so breaks out in the sun and wind and (please, PLEASE we need some right now) rain are a must. At this time of year my favourite pastime is stacking the wood that Richard chainsaws from the branches fallen on our property. With an extensive range of mature trees, we have no shortage of sawing and tidying each autumn.
So Saturday was a very happy day for me: we assessed the mature oak half way up our drive and cut the limbs that were struggling after this taxing dry summer. There was more wood than I had hoped: my stack now has a second row. I’m mixing large logs and smaller, thinner ones so that when we race out to the shed in the middle of winter we can grab a handful and there will be starter and more serious logs in the same basket to burn. The beauty of the drying wood is so pleasing I could just stand and look at it…but back to the keyboard!
Far North, Houhora (almost the top of New Zealand): 11.3.25
Our two sons are developing a property 40 minutes by car from Cape Reinga, one of the most spiritual places in the country, known as “Te Rerenga Wairua” or '“the leaping place of spirits”. The land in Houhora is also a magical place of beginnings and endings: when Viktor and Alvaro found the five hectares, little did we as a family know how much we were each to contribute to the project. Richard designs for them, their “architect on tap”, while I cook and plant and garden and help them with publicity.
The row of bamboo is a fabulous shelter belt, but the pines are now all gone and replaced with natives. Every bit of wood on the property has become a floorboard or a wall lining, the scraps firewood. But here Vitkor and I are just wandering over the land, discovering the extent of the waterways and the watermelon-picking crates left by the previous owners. I had my eye on these for compost bins.
Houhora has become a settling place for me where I go to help the boys but also retreat into myself to think and write. There is something so primal in the land that time seems to move barely at all, and the days merge into nights with skies so full of stars they are like a blanket tucking me in so that I can dream about my next piece of writing.
Grape Harvest, New Zealand: 10.3.25
It’s been so hot and dry this summer the posts between the vines in my brother’s vineyard in Matakana are moving in the baked earth as we pick. There is a team of nine of us who brave the heat and the wasps—not that many this year, thank goodness—to pick the Syrah. The berries are delicious, but many are parched and useless, and we must look out for the rotten ones that will spoil the vintage. Our pruners are thin and dangerous, our hands protected by black plastic gloves that soon render them bathed in sweat.
It makes me think of the sumptuous Palomino that we picked in our family vineyard in Pukekohe, a box nearly filled by two or three bunches. Here I am with my mother celebrating the harvest which my father acknowledged by taking us all for the first time to Yugoslavia. I am barely capable of holding up the bunches they are so heavy, the berries perfectly ripe, firm, sweet. It is 1973. I am about to fly around the world and meet my mother’s family.
Fast forward to 1985. The vines are about to be pulled out, the vineyard over. There is a glut of grapes in New Zealand. I have just returned from my OE. My mother and I hold the same variety for the last time. Our harvest is bittersweet.
Thirty years later my mother, now 86, is still picking grapes.
Entrance to the Stari Grad harbour, Croatia 9.3.25
Every time I take the ferry from mainland Split to my mother’s village Stari Grad I have to leave the saloon and lean over the rails to greet the harbour. I have taken this trip many, many times—every year apart from the Covid years when we were all homebound—and I never fail to be moved beyond words as the village draws near. In my head I am reversing my mother’s journey when she farewelled her own mother and father, her sister and two brothers, not to see them for 15 years. What must she have gone through I ask myself each time I hear the ferry’s horn blasting it's sorrowful departure, and how must if have felt when she made the first trip back married with three children, two of them teenagers.
Here I am 40 years ago imagining my mother’s emotional turmoil. It has haunted me the forty years since. In ‘The Goat Girl’, the novel based on my mother’s life which I am now working on—in earnest while my publisher edits my first book The Way to Spell Love— I’m trying to capture the yearning I feel for my mother’s village. I become someone else in this village: I talk louder, I gesticulate more freely, I laugh at silly things and I feel unencumbered. It is as if I am already slipping into my mother’s childhood skin as I disembark the ferry at the small, chaotic port.
Photo selection for The Way to Spell Love: 8.3.25
Which images to keep, which to discard?
I aimed to choose around 40, spanning more than 70 years, with those to be culled to about 30. As I trawled through the large plastic storage bin in which I had collected all my photographs and half-filled photo albums—and those awful small plastic photo books that fell apart as you flipped through them—the task seemed impossible. So many images begged questions, and as I looked closer, I saw details that I’d missed time and time again.
Did my mother struggle to cut the straps of her embossed paisley cocktail dress evenly? She’d barely learned how to sew, my father driving her to lessons as she hadn’t yet mastered driving—nor the language. Only a handful of years earlier she was running barefoot on the cobbles of her village in a hand-me-down, the sumptuous fabric of this dress a dream. And Aunty Ivy, her large bust gripped by her satin sheath dress with the extravagant rose sewed above her left breast…what did she think of her younger, naive new sister-in-law?
They smile easily at the camera, my mother taller, slimmer, younger, more beautiful than my aunt. I loved them both. I wanted them both to love me back.
This photo didn’t make the cut.
My next book—set in Stari Grad, Croatia: 6.3.25
My cousin Helena sent me a video this morning of an amazing old custom from my mother’s village in Croatia. It’s called Jure Karnevol, a figure put on trial for everything has gone wrong over the past year—the fall guy. A procession through the village streets is noisy with lots of yelling and bumping, clanging of bells, banging of pots, and the shrill trill of whistles as the people in it drive out the evil from the village and the houses. My mother’s village calls it “Procesija Lancuni” which means “Procession of the sheets”. Everyone is wrapped in a white sheet (and you can bet they are spotlessly clean!) Check out the Dalmacija Danas video here too.
I will have to put this wonderfully pagan annual event in my next book. It has the working title “The Goat Girl” and it’s based on my mother’s childhood in Stari Grad and her wartime refugee experiences. How many more old practices are there like this one that I will discover? When I asked my mother she said she’d never been in a Lacuni procession: it was suppressed in Tito’s Yugoslavia.
Since I posted this, Helena told me Lancuni has appeared on Croatian TV.
What I’m reading: 5.3.25
Just finished romping through the first part of the very dramatic and colourful life in Cher the Memoir: Part One (2024). Had to Google “I Got You Babe” to hear how clonky Sonny’s voice really was. It was startling to see young Cher so prepossessed. How many memoirs have I read where the author laments a missing mother, a family separation? Fun, troublesome, an easy read. I’m waiting for Part Two.
Dr Tony Fernando also calls on his life experience to illustrate the principles he explores in Life Hacks From The Buddha (2024). Catchy title, easy tips to follow, very relatable. Tony was my guest at the University of Auckland where he spoke to first year students on how to keep it together—he made a difference. Read this book!
You might think a book with a tile like The Empathy Exams (2014) would be taxing, and it is, but it takes its toll on you in surprising ways. Author Leslie Jamison writes gob-smackingly moving prose that shocks and instructs alternately in these essays on topics ranging from her experience as a medical actor to how she navigates the abysmal realities of narcotic-soaked central America. Come to this book ready to be humbled in so many ways. Much more than memoir.
A Vintage Classic, John Williams’ Stoner (1965) appealed as it is set in the University of Missouri English Department. Spanning the life of the lecturer William Stoner, and two world wars and the Great Depression along the way, this quiet story is in turns depressing and uplifting, at once joyous and tragic. Based on Williams’ lifetime dedication to lecturing, The New York Times called it “perfect”, promising that “it takes your breath away.” It does. Prepare to be breathless.
The Road Back: 4.3.25
This still from the short film The Road Back, adapted from one of Amelia Batistich’s most beloved—and more disturbing—short stories of the same name, shows three generations of my family. The lead village woman facing the camera is my mother who celebrates 86 years today; the small child with the frilly white hat is my elder son Viktor, now 30; and I am holding him among the group of women turning their back on the film’s protagonist, Vinka. Vinka is holding a small mirror which she carries with her everywhere so that she can see her reflection and imagine it is another woman offering her companionship. The film portrays the trauma of migration; working on it with my mother and son was a rewarding experience. My mother was once that migrant who yearned to return to Yugoslavia, but could not. Here she shakes her head at Vinka, telling her, and herself, that there is no going back.
Anniversary: 21.2.25
Seventeen years ago today—at this exact time, 7 pm—I looked up at my father who was lying in a hospital-care bed and noticed his hand changing colour. The creep of blue along his fingers gave his hand a surreal quality. I stared at this horror for what seemed like an eternity, but it must have been only a few seconds before I pressed the ‘Nurse Call’ button. I needed reassurance. But I didn’t receive it. My father was gone twenty minutes later.
I wrote about his death and the fallout from it in my family. It took many years to shape the stories that were a part of his life, his dying, and what he left behind. The Way to Spell Love is that book. There are so many things I would do differently if I had my time with my father over again, but also things that I would not change. Some things happen for a reason only time can reveal to us. Some should never happen in the first place.
Our Summer Holiday: 15.2.25
With wind most of the summer, Richard and I took the opportunity of a few fine, calm days to go sailing on Starlight, our beloved Townson, around Waiheke Island. Here we are anchored off West Bay on a scorching still day. I took a pile of books with me as usual, read most of them, rejected a few. The sea was crystal clear, buoyant, joyous. It was not easy heading back to Westhaven marina in the city, but it’s always comforting to drive back up to our farm 45 minutes on SH1.
My Big Year: 11.2.25
2025 is my big year: my first book The Way to Spell Love is due for publication by Cuba Press in November.
I am busy trying not to repeatedly edit my manuscript—Mary McCallum has told me that it’s hands off until the official editing process begins in April—but it’s hard to put down, and impossible to stay away from the keyboard.
I’ve just changed the title: it was “The Best Way to Spell Love”, but as you will read in the epilogue, that was not to be.
Watch as we edit and polish my memoir ready for you to read the end of the year!
