New Zealand writer Wallace is the author of four collections of poems, including This Is a Story About Your Mother, published in 2023. She is the founder and editor of Starling, an online journal showcasing the work of young writers from Aotearoa New Zealand, and the editor of Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems 2022.
Her debut novel Ash, published on 2 September, features the following blurb:
Thea lives under a mountain – one that’s ready to blow.
A vet at a mid-sized rural practice, she has been called back during maternity leave and is coping – just – with the juggle of meetings, mealtimes, farm visits, her boss’s search for legal loopholes and the constant care of her much-loved children, Eli and Lucy.
But something is shifting in Thea – something is burning. Or is it that she is becoming aware, for the first time, of the bright, hot core at her centre?
Then comes an urgent call.
A summons to women everywhere, Ash is a story about reckoning with one’s rage and finding marvels in the midst of chaos.
We asked Wallace 5 questions:
Hi Louise! What was the motivating incident or idea for Ash?
‘Ash started with voice. I was on holiday and Thea’s voice arrived in my head – she was strong-willed and pulled no punches – and I started writing these little observational vignettes down, like a series of prose poems. Summer holidays are often a really fruitful time for writing ideas for me, I think because I’m able to slow down and be really present.’
‘The motivation was to challenge myself by working with narrative and character, which requires consistency across a book – something you don’t often have to stick to in poetry. I wanted Thea to feel under pressure and to find where the line was – how far I could push a character before they would break.
‘So, I unfairly piled things on top of her. She moved from being a female rural vet to a mother of two as well. As I was writing Ash, the world also began navigating the Covid-19 pandemic, so the overwhelm from that experience came to haunt the book.’
ArtsHub: 5 best new books to read in September 2025
What have you learned about writing, and yourself as a writer, in the process of writing Ash?
‘I’ve learned (or perhaps relearned) to look at writing in a very open way – to just write and worry about genre or categories later. As a younger writer, you’re often encouraged to become comfortable with declaring yourself as a poet or novelist. And I do think there is a power in being able to claim that part of your identity.
‘By the same token, I think I inadvertently put fences up for myself over time, where I had come to believe that poetry was the only genre I could work in. It’s been really freeing to have had those fences smashed down.
Ash is your debut novel, but you’re a widely published poet. Do you see novel writing as a transition from writing poetry, an extension of writing poetry, or something else entirely?
‘It’s definitely an extension – I couldn’t have written Ash without having written my four previous collections of poems.
‘Each book has come out of the skills I’ve been able to advance in the one before it. But I enjoy that – I don’t see much point in doing the same thing over and over again. Like most writers, I always want to feel I’m pushing myself further.
‘I think poetry has taught me a lot about form – how to play with structure and shape language, which you can then transfer into other genres. Poetry can do a number of things, but one of its strengths to my mind is its ability to convey emotion. It felt completely logical to draw that into the narrative of Ash, like the best of both worlds.’
You work with young writers in the online journal you founded, Starling – what’s the single most promising trait you see in young writers writing today, and why?
‘I think young writers today seem a lot more comfortable with who they are and where they fit in their world, and they’re able to express that on the page with an honesty and specificity that I don’t think I came anywhere near in my early twenties. It means that the writing they’re able to produce is really unique to them and that’s half the battle won in developing a distinctive fresh voice.’
If you chanced upon Ash, somehow, with no memory of writing it and no author byline, how would you know it was by you? What would be the tell-tale signs?
‘Wonderful question and the instant answer is that there are hundreds of tiny remnants from my wider experiences that I would identify and that have come together like a collage in the book.
‘Again, that’s due to my poetic practice I think. Poets are magpies. We collect small pieces of the world that go some way to capturing its magic – things we hear or see – and those pieces are often so much better than anything I could invent.
‘An example in Ash is when Thea describes witnessing a client sing to his horse as it’s sedated. This was something I saw happen myself on a field visit with a local equine vet, as part of my research for Ash.
‘Afterwards, I asked the vet about it and it turned out the client had been an opera singer, if I recall correctly. In the moment, I was so distracted by this small but amazing detail that I probably did not pay a lot of attention to what happened next in the horse castration process! I was too busy thinking about how I couldn’t wait to write this scene down.’
