'joyful queer tangata Tiriti ways': Dr liz breslin

Cover art credit Jessica Hinerangi and author image credit Kat Heap

What do you get if you cross Pākehā stories from the rural south of Te Waipounamu with scissors, glue and a want to reveal structural and personal violences of settler colonisation? It’s not a joke but some parts of Dr. liz breslin’s third full length collection, show you’re working out, are funny. Dr. liz’s experimental and engaging marks on the pages of this collection include poems about complicity, crocs, cycling, DIY, domestic abuse, the queerness of hands, Pride, Pilates, needlework, what gets called nature, reality tv, scissoring, sharks, Sharon from the Speight’s ads, wellness culture and white supremacy.

Kete is excited to feature this interview with Dr. liz, exploring in more detail the intricacies and stories contained within show you're working out's pages.

Kia ora liz! Exciting that you have your third poetry collection out. Can you tell us a bit about it? Loving the cover with its scissors symbolically chopping through the images.

Kia ora Erica! Thank you, I’m obsessed with the cover too. Jess Hinerangi designed it after reading the collection, and I feel really privileged to have her workings out of my workings out on the outside. I’m getting a tattoo of the scissor bikes. On the inside, the book is in three sections, which happened after I wrote the bulk of the poems. The first, ‘when I leave the house I smile’ shows my workings out of a long abusive marriage I was in. The second, ‘And seeing that’, is a scrappy dive into another particular Central Otago story, a Pākehā woman from the late 1800s called Hannah Hayes, whose public-facing story both upholds and challenges patriarchal norms. It continues the themes of the previous section in poems like ‘Colonise your own adventure’, and ‘Should women cycle: it depends’. And then the third section, ‘born to deviations’, moves towards queer, often rural, joys, like imagining backstories for Sharon from the Speight’s ads. That’s a very brief and segmented overview…

And the title has many meanings? (Note to readers: the cover of show you’re working out. has the apostrophe and e of ‘you’re’ in a different colour, so it can also be read show your working out.)

I love it when language does the many-meaning thing. The slippage. With the ‘you’re’ I was thinking about the pressure to work out in a small town, or a rural setting, working out like fitting in. And the pressure to work out/work on my marriage. And then the ‘your’ takes me back to the working out of maths class. Show your working out. Show how you made it all add up. In that regard, I wanted to capture the landscape of leaving my marriage in a way that is honest about my ongoing inability to join up sentences about it in my head, let alone on the page. I’ve read that trauma is when things are still fragmented inside us. So I let myself show the fragments rather than trying to make some kind of sense. Which means it most often doesn’t all add up in a maths page way but I hope it does affectively/effectively. And the other aspect of the working out is physical work outs. Pilates (which could happen to anyone), yoga, biking, dance. Apparently it’s great to have a body and live in it.

It does feel like a collection with a lot of experimental form in it. Would that be fair to say?

Absolutely it is. A lot of these poems started off as scraps of writing literally cut and pasted together. ‘Admit impediments’, for example, was a ‘cunt up’ (after Dodie Bellamy) of Shakespeare’s sonnet 116 and some other unhelpful things I’d memorised. And ‘in our own hands’ came from lines from a zine I’d made from a collaborative project with other rural-adjacent poets in Te Waipounamu. I tried to keep in my working out of the gaps and scraps, show my own ‘complicit white hand’ as I cut into the fabric of colonised stories and joined it up differently. While I was doing my PhD (Show You’re Working Out: a Queer Exploration of Gender, Space and Violence in Pākehā stories of the Rural South of Te Waipounamu) I read about something called ‘queer scavenging’, which I understand to be combining scraps to tell stories that undermine/reveal/critique normative power structures while at the same time making material join up in often queer, sometimes joyful ways. And it was one of those aha moments when I was like o there’s a name for what I already do.

The examining of domestic life and colonisation across the ages comes through strongly. Not only scissors and sewing but husbandry amongst others. Jo Randerson said ‘fresh and zingy’ and I’d agree. Did you set out to do that?

Thank you. I’m really glad that comes through, and yes, I definitely wanted to scavenge from all things domestic. The scraps of Hannah Hayes’ life that I found revolved around domestic(atable) objects. On the one hand it feels like her time was far away from this time, and on the other, one of the things I’ve learned is that colonised time is all the same time, re-cycling the same stories, so yey for having the metaphor of her bike. And I love that you’ve used the word ‘husbandry’ here, because it makes me think that my poems show a flipside/queered kind of care and cultivation that I didn’t have in my marriage. I wanted the queer joy moments to counterpoint some of the heavier parts so I love that Jo Randerson was a) generous enough to blurb the book and b) called it fresh and zingy, I’m such a fan of theirs. I’m also super grateful to Jeanette Wikaira, Alison Glenny and Rushi Vyas for their blurbwords on the back cover, my poems feel really held by all their noticings.

What made you write it now?

I found Hannah’s story of being a rural cycling saleswoman for three months in 1896 as a one-paragraph scrap in a folder at Hayes Engineering in Ōtūrēhua in 2020. I was on a spoke’n’word poem tour down the Otago Central Rail Trail with Laura Williamson and Annabel Wilson. And it made me think if this is true, and has been erased, what else could be true and has been erased? I thought a queer exploration of Hannah’s life might be a good basis for a creative critical PhD, which it was. And then my own story (queer, erased) kept getting in the way. I was very firmly absolutely not no way looking at my own life when I was reading Imagining Decolonisation and got to the part where Mike Ross writes about the Pākehā government’s treatment of Māori under Te Tiriti being like an abusive marriage. And then I made excuses not to go there for a while longer because as a Pākehā I have so much structural privilege and because I was scared and ashamed. And then I read Tina Ngata’s ‘What’s required from tangata Tiriti’. And then I was out of excuses, and once I let them, the poems showed up. When I started the PhD I couldn’t say the words ‘I was in an abusive marriage’, let alone imagine more joyful queer tangata Tiriti ways of being in the world and now here’s this whole book. I’m so thankful to have had the support of friends, and at the Uni and from the Dead Bird Books fam to help me show my working out.

show you're working out (Dead Bird Books) is available in bookstores now.