Tracing bloodlines and fencelines: Poet Megan Fowlie wins Phoenix Prize

A powerful collection of poems telling a story both "personal and political" has won the Phoenix Prize in Creative Writing for poet Megan Fowlie.

Awarded each year to the most promising portfolio of work from a master of creative writing student at the University of Auckland, the prize comes with a $3,500 stipend to be put towards getting a creative project to publishing stage.

Fowlie says she’s very humbled to win this year’s prize for her manuscript Blindfolds & Bleach, and to be acknowledged and supported by the strong alum community of authors, novelists and poets.

Blindfolds & Bleach, she says, explores a world where information, people and places have been selectively erased or wilfully covered up.

“Wayfaring is disrupted and it takes a while, maybe a lifetime, to become aware of that. Enlightenment is haphazard at best, and then it’s blinding and shakes the world upside down.”

When she entered the masters programme, she says, she was “tossing around the idea of liminality, the state where the line between two worlds becomes thin, unpredictable and dangerous, and where normal rules are suspended”.

“I wanted to investigate and capture the experience of being in those sorts of blurred spaces. I didn’t know where it would lead me.”
 

Home seemed a good place to start.

“Our family were newcomers on the last farm at the edge of the county ward in Puahue in the Waipā [in the Waikato region of the North Island]. We were at the end of the power exchange, on a dead-end road on a segment of the Aukati line.”

This line drew the southern boundary of extensive lands that the Crown forcibly confiscated in the 1860s.

“In town, Te Awamutu, people didn’t seem to know that Puahue existed. This area was a flashpoint of tension during the New Zealand Land Wars and decades after, but the collection is not about colonial settler history.”

Blood & Blindfolds begins with the words of celebrated Māori chief Rewi Maniapoto to the Native Land Minister of the time, Donald McLean:

“Other days will be coming. Let the sun shine and the rain fall on the words now spoken. Only a pinpoint of light is visible, but like the dawn, it will spread.”

“Maniapoto knew this land and fought for it. My childhood-self, standing on this land in Puahue, is my pinpoint. It isn’t the story, it’s a viewing platform.”

There is a lot of “listening and looking across” in her poems, says Fowlie.

“The need to be attentive about who is present, what’s happening for various reasons: to learn rules and rituals, to make maps, to decode the nuances of language, to understand your place as an insider or an outsider, and to keep safe.

“Not all the answers arrive when you want them, or are comprehensible when they do, there are gaps and redactions, an entire inland sea goes missing. Violence is persistent, but so is care.”
 

Fowlie says once you start following bloodlines and fencelines, decoding and filling in the gaps, the world looks very different and connections become “as fantastical as Alice in Wonderland”.

A selection of her poems is on display alongside artist Jo Dalgety’s solo exhibition, Restless Ground, at Pūkorokoro (Miranda) Gallery until the end of November.

“I like this idea of collaboration, bringing together creative forms,” she says.

“Before I began the masters, I didn’t think I had a book in me, now my mind is brimming.”

External examiner Anne Kennedy, an award-winning poet and novelist, says Blindfolds & Bleach explores the ambitious area of Pākehā settledom – a rare topic for imaginative writing – with depth and vision.

“It shows a deep commitment to telling a story that is both personal and political.”

Master of Creative Writing convenor Associate Professor Paula Morris, who co-supervised Fowlie’s manuscript, alongside former Poet Laureate Professor Selina Tusitala Marsh and Dr Ruby Porter, says this is a rich collection, well-deserving of the Phoenix Prize.

“Megan is a thoughtful and imaginative poet deeply interested in New Zealand history as well as contemporary life.”

Previous University of Auckland creative writing prize winners have gone on to have, or continued having, successful writing careers. They include Angelique Kasmara, Amy McDaid, Karen Holdom, Rachel Paris, Gavin Strawhan and Cian Dennan.