Documented Reality
We streamed live to your homes at 7.30pm each evening on Saturday 11th, Sunday 12th & Monday 13th September. You can rewatch here, or on Youtube (where we urge you to follow Going West for new content updates).
Saturday 11 September 7:30 pm
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman
How does our view of the world change as we age? Does the reality ever meet our dreams? In an hour of discussion and readings, authors Charlotte Grimshaw (The Mirror Book), Lana Lopesi (False Divides), Alison Jones (This Pākehā Life: An Unsettled Memoir) and Ghazaleh Golbaksh (The Girl from Revolution Road), interrogate their lives as young woman. Session facilitated by Amy McDaid.
Author, art critic and editor Dr Lana Lopesi was the founding editor of #500words and former editor-in-chief for The Pantograph Punch. She is currently editor-in-chief for the Creative New Zealand Pacific Art Legacy Project. Her forthcoming book is Bloody Woman.
Charlotte Grimshaw is the critically acclaimed author of seven novels and two short story collections. She has been awarded the Sargeson Fellowship and the Katherine Mansfield Prize, been shortlisted for the Asia Pacific Commonwealth Prize, shortlisted twice for the Frank O’Connor International Prize, been a fiction finalist in the NZ Post Award, and won the Montana Fiction Award and Montana Medal for Book of the Year. Her novel, Mazarine, was longlisted for the Ockham Award in 2019. She recently published her memoir, The Mirror Book.
Alison Jones is an Auckland writer and a professor at Te Puna Wānanga School of Māori and Indigenous Education, at the University of Auckland. She teaches and writes as a Pākehā about Māori-Pākehā relations both before Te Tiriti and today. Her latest book This Pākehā Life: An Unsettled Memoir was shortlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards (General Non-fiction) 2021.
Ghazaleh Golbakhsh is an Iranian-New Zealand writer, filmmaker and Fulbright scholar. Her first book of personal essays, The Girl From Revolution Road was published in 2020. She was awarded the CLNZ/NZ Society of Authors Research Grant in 2019 and recently completed her PhD with creative practice in Media and Communication at the University of Auckland. Ghazaleh continues to write and direct in television and film and is currently working on her first feature film. Photo by Ainsley Duyvestyn-Smith
Amy McDaid has a Master of Creative Writing from the University of Auckland. The draft of her first novel Fake Baby won the Wallace Foundation Prize in 2017, New Zealand’s richest prize for a creative writing student. She lives in Titirangi, and while not writing, works part-time as a newborn intensive care nurse. Fake Baby was published by Penguin Random House in June 2020.
Sunday 12 September, 7:30pm
Queer Agendas
Mark Beehre’s new book A Queer Existence is composed of beautiful and intimate portraits of queer men born after the Homosexual Law Reform Act passed in 1986. Jack Remiel Cottrell’s debut book Ten Acceptable Acts of Arson features stories from his life as a queer man of that generation. Facilitated by playwright Victor Rodgers, they discuss what might now be on the ‘queer agenda’ as we move through the 21st century.
Mark Beehre initially trained as a specialist physician and worked for several years in medical practice before studying photography at the Elam School of Fine Arts in Auckland and Massey University. His forthcoming book A Queer Existence (September 2021) is in many ways a sequel to his earlier book, Men Alone — Men Together, which explored the lives and relationships of an older generation of gay men who grew up in the pre-Law Reform era. Photo by James Gilberd.
Jack Remiel Cottrell (Ngāti Rangi) grew up in Wellington and now lives in Auckland. He specialises in writing flash fiction and received the 2020 Wallace Foundation Prize for his collection of flash and microfiction Ten Acceptable Acts of Arson and other very short stories. Jack won the Flash Frontier Winter Writing Award in 2020, was shortlisted for a Sir Julius Vogel Award, and was nominated for Best Small Fictions twice. His novella-in-flash, Latter Day Saints, was published in 2018. When he's not writing, Jack is a volunteer rugby referee. Photo by Vetiver Pictures
Victor Rodger is a writer and producer of Samoan (Iva) and Scottish (Dundee) descent. As a playwright he is best known for his play Black Faggot (2013) which has been performed nationally and internationally. As a producer he helped develop Tusiata Avia's one woman show Wild Dogs Under My Skirt into an award-winning six-woman play which, last year, made its Off Broadway debut. Victor currently convenes the Maori and Pasifika creative writing workshop at the International Institute of Modern Letters and his short story Donny's Dialogue is featured in the upcoming LGBTQIA+ anthology Out Here. Photo by Edith Amituanai
Monday 13 September, 7:30 pm
Multiverse
Performance poets Angela Zhang, Simone Kaho, Takunda Muzondiwa, Kyla Manalili Dela Cruz deliver a powerful poetic discourse of resistance, in this energising session. Muzondiwa’s TEDxYouth talk, Dear Racism, was widely acclaimed, while Kaho was recently named as Emerging Pasifika Writer in Residence at Te Herenga Waka. All are poets to watch. Curated by poets and provocateurs Aiwa Pooamorn and Gemishka Chetty, who co-created Fringe Festival performance Go Home Curry Muncha.
Angela Zhang is a writer and performer based in Tāmaki Makaurau, whose work explores migrant and queer experiences. A geotechnical engineer by trade, they are interested in the connection people have with the land and the built environment, as well as the supernatural and uncanny in the constructed world. Angela has performed in Scenes from a Yellow Peril, I Am Rachel Chu and OTHER [chinese].
Born in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Simone Kaho is well known as a performance poet who published the critically acclaimed poetry collection Lucky Punch in 2016. She has a Master of Arts in Creative Writing from the IIML, and is their 2022 Emerging Pasifika Writer in Residence. As a journalist Simone directed the E-Tangata documentary series Conversations and wrote the editorial and stories for WAKA. She now works as a reporter for Tagata Pasifika.
There is a lot of power in spoken word, and even more so coming through the lived experience of young Zimbabwean, Takunda Muzondiwa. Following her participation in the annual national Race Unity Speech Competition, Takunda’s spoken word poetry continues to make waves nationally and globally. Through spoken word, Takunda expresses the importance of identity as a tool for both self-empowerment and for the betterment of one’s own community.
Kyla Dela Cruz is a performance and page poet. She writes to navigate and celebrate everything around her. She started sharing her stories through the Word – The Front Line Inter-High School Poetry Slam programme – in 2014. Since then, she's been the runner up in the inaugural Justice Slam, a finalist in the NZ National Poetry Slam, and won the Rising Voices 2016 Grand Slam.
Aiwa Pooamorn is a Thai-Chinese mother, poet, theatre maker and performer. Gemishka Chetty is a poet, artist, writer and performer, who is still failing at rolling perfectly round rotis. Aiwa and Gemishka are co-directors of Creative Creatures, an arts collective featuring migrant POC. Their theatre show Have You Ever Been With An Asian Woman? won Auckland Fringe's 2020 Unfuck The World award.
Stranded in Paradise, Going West’s 2021 Live season
The world has shifted. A pandemic has altered the way time and geography work here in Aotearoa, changing our physical connection to the world. Are we stranded in Paradise? Or are we reweaving the strands of our reality into something new? It’s a conversation ripe with possibility — and we’re inviting you to join it.
Going West Live brings four truly unique events to Lopdell House, Te Uru Waitākere Contemporary Gallery and the Glen Eden Playhouse. Across these iconic west Auckland venues, our most potent storytellers, musicians and performing artists will engage in oratory, discussion and performance.