Interview: Ingrid Horrocks and Michelle Duff talk short stories

Kete's pretty excited to feature this conversation between Ingrid Horrocks, author of All Her Lives, and Michelle Duff, who wrote Surplus Women. Both books are short story collections published by Te Herenga Waka University Press in 2025, and are made up of stories focusing on women's lives and fascinations.

Read on to hear about their writing processes, what they're writing next, and acts of resistance within writing.

Author photos from authors' websites. Michelle's photo credit Ebony Lamb

Ingrid: Kia ora Michelle, I’m so happy to be able to have this conversation with you! For both of us, we’ve done plenty of writing, but All Her Lives and Surplus Women mark our leaps into fiction. How has that been for you? For me, it has definitely been harder than I anticipated. 

Michelle: Kia ora e hoa, and congrats on your collection! Honestly, part of me is still surprised I wrote a book. I started writing the manuscript that became Surplus Women while studying my masters, the day after I quit my job as a journalist. The last time I wrote fiction before that was at high school. I thought I knew how to tell a story, but fiction is so different, right? No facts to rely on, for one thing. I didn’t know my voice in fiction, or my process, so it was a massive learning curve. How did you find it after poetry—do the two forms complement one another? And what was the hardest part for you?

Ingrid: I think from poetry I knew how to shape a moment around an image or a feeling, and I knew how to pay attention to language. I also come to fiction from creative nonfiction. In Where We Swim - which is memoir - I’d consciously taught myself how to write scenes. But yeah, storytelling in fiction, right? That feels different. I’ve read so much fiction, and I’ve written about it and taught it, but writing it still felt utterly bewildering. Turns out it’s harder than it looks! I read with a whole new appreciation now, thinking how did they do that. What have the pleasures of writing fiction been for you? 

Michelle: Figuring out how they do it is half the pleasure, eh. When you’re reading a story and appreciating it for the language and the craft. At the time I was writing my collection, short stories were all I read. The ability of some of our best short story writers — Fiona Kidman, Patricia Grace, Tina Makereti, Paula Morris, Alice Tawhai — to get in at the right place, create a moment, and leave you feeling like you want more and not like you’ve been TOO sated. For a long time I thought I wasn’t clever enough for short stories, to write or understand them. So to answer your question in a rambly kind of way, the pleasures have been in discovering a new joy for reading and for writing with a kind of freedom that I didn’t find in non-fiction.  The happiness you feel when a character comes to life and you can hear their voice. Like, I have a subconscious?! Amazing.

Ingrid: I want to add to your list of our amazing short story writers — Airini Beautrais, Tracey Slaughter, Emily Perkins, and if we go back, Janet Frame, who I’ve been re-reading. I’m a massive re-drafter — it takes me a lot of writing to get from that kind of hum of feeling something’s interesting, to knowing what a piece of writing wants to be about. I love the freedom you have in writing short stories to realise, Oh, this character is seventy not forty, or, oh, her lover is a woman, or, maybe this character actually says the opposite of what I thought she’d say? Then you can write the whole thing through again. Obviously, you can’t do that in nonfiction. Nor, actually, as easily in a novel. Short stories have a unique manoeuvrability. I also wanted to write a book that brought together very different lives and experiences. Shall we talk about that? What drew you to your focus on women’s lives in Surplus Women?  

Michelle: This is so true. It sounds like we have a really similar process. It’s like the first draft is just smashing something down, and then the re-writing is when you find out the surprising and magical stuff. But also I’m trying to write a novel now and it’s like um…this could be a very long process! It’s one thing re-writing 5000 words. But I do think that’s where the gems are. For Surplus, I don’t think I consciously focused on women’s lives. I just focused on lives, and it turned out women were centred in them, because those were the stories I found most interesting. There are men in my book, and some of them are even nice ones. A couple of them are protagonists. I quite liked writing men. It felt sort of evil. And you could kill them off if you didn’t like them. What about you?

Ingrid: My working title was ‘Nine Lives’ and I did have this idea from the beginning of writing about women’s experience in the broadest possible sense. Nine women. Nine different time periods. Nine different times in their lives. I guess I was curious about how they might vibrate differently by being read together. I think that when I was in my early twenties and wanted to write, I got this sense that what I wanted to write about - ordinary lives - wasn’t ‘interesting enough.’ I seem to have got old enough to think, fuck it, that’s what I want to write. That’s the stuff of fiction. There’s also a politics to that. A mother living in a damp flat with a hyped up dog. A sister haunted by her return from war. A young woman discovering her identity at a Berlin party in the 2000s. I didn’t want the stories to be chronological, as though history were a matter of ‘progress’. In your book, I really love how your historical story ‘Surplus Women’ sits there right at the centre and radiates out, as a kind of question posed to the other stories. 

Michelle: Yeah, like it’s a political choice to say these lives that have been historically sidelined are worthy of attention. And it’s an act of resistance to write them. It’s a cool way of thinking about it, because who has traditionally told the stories (white dudes) contribute to what we are conditioned to think a story should be. The way you describe your short story collection has me thinking about why these can be so powerful, and how the stories can speak to each other and work together. Because the stories don’t sit alone, even if they’re not deliberately interconnected. ‘Surplus Women’ was one of the later stories I wrote, but once I did, it really opened up for me the heart of what the book was about, what I was trying to get to, which I wasn’t aware of initially. Was there any story that did that for you? And Ingrid, I want to know if you always know what you’re writing — are you a pantser or a plotter (or whatever that weird analogy is)?

Ingrid: Definitely a pantser! I have no idea. I have a feeling or a curiosity - a character, or often just a setting. And I have a ‘Writing Journal’ Word document which is how I pretend I’m not really writing. I get a first draft by simply going in there each day and making myself write something. Somehow that makes scene, and people talking, and I find out things, and eventually I’ve got some words I put into another document and call a draft. But some of my stories in All her Lives are long. 12,000+ words. I ended up using index cards to plot out subsequent drafts.  I’m thinking about your question of whether one story opened things for me. There are some directly political stories in All Her Lives. There’s ‘Marvellous Instruments’ which has Truby King and eugenics and the control of women’s lives at its heart, and there’s the one about early feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, and one about an assault at a rural high school. But I think it was seeing these alongside the everyday ones that opened up the ‘book’ for me. The valuing of all these stories. And the way characters re-appear in more than one story in the collection was a complete surprise - that came from my characters, not me, and I went with it. You do that too. How deliberate was that? I think it does something really interesting to the feeling of containment a short story has - it sort of blasts it right open.  

Michelle: I love that you trick yourself into writing—genius. One of my favourite short story collections is Tim Winton’s The Turning, which are all interconnected, in different time periods in Western Australia. I think it has the effect of rounding out characters and the world. I didn’t  do mine deliberately either, I think it was more that I followed where the stories went. For example I wrote ‘Gracie,’ about a young girl who lives in transitional housing, where we meet Alexandra, Gracie’s best friend’s mum. She does something in Gracie’s story that is well-meaning but changes everything.  And I found Alexandra ridiculous, and also complicated. So then we have a story with her, ‘Monstera,’ exploring her psyche as a neurotic real estate agent. And now we have two stories exploring housing and privilege, from different perspectives. Which yeah, I think shows experiences don't exist on one plane. Your book is out now—exciting!! Are you working on something new, or going to enjoy the ride?

Ingrid: Some of my short stories got so long it was sort of ridiculous. So now I’m trying a short novel (gulp). Working title, Seeds. It’s a contemporary novel set on an island over a single week and it brings a whole lot of the characters from All Her Lives together. The main character is Diana’s daughter - Diana who was a young activist in the 1980s Devonport story,  ‘The End of the Fair’. And there’s Ben and Eileen, who were drunk twenty year olds in Berlin in ‘Women’s Choice Night.’ Everyone’s sort of aged up a generation. A bit Big Chill (I wish!). But I do love returning to characters at different moments in their lives.  The way we can be strangers even to ourselves. I think Tim Winton has characters appearing across books. Elizabeth Strout is definitely one of my touchstones for this. Lives are so weird and unpredictable. There can be something hopeful in that. So you’re trying a novel too?

Michelle: Yes I remember asking Tina (Makereti) once how long a short story should be and she was like 'How long is your breath?' which was very enigmatic but also now I kind of see what she meant. Your stories feel novelistic to me, if that is even a term. Like I wanted them to continue into new chapters, and it felt like the characters had more to say. So I’m excited for your actual novel! Are we just going to follow each other around in different forms now? Should we try for a short film next? A light doco series? Also I’ve just recently stopped saying I’m TRYING to write a novel, and telling people I am writing one. In the famous words of Lisa ‘Left Eye’ Lopes, believe in yourself, the rest is up to me and you. Sorry, just vibing with your story set in 1995 there. What would our collab be?

Ingrid: I have no idea! But I’m keen. We’re both restless souls, I reckon. So good talking to you!

Michelle: You can’t see this but in our side chats Ingrid has been making an apple pie, folding washing, wrangling kids, and is now off to teach a class. What a lady. Lovely chatting to you too, and long live the short story, which women can read and write in between our busy and full lives. Working title: What Women Want: Time To Write.

All Her Lives and Surplus Women are available in bookstores now.