Johanna Emeney grew up in Coatesville. After more than a decade away, she moved back and now lives on a lifestyle block with her teacher husband David and a menagerie of animals. Since 2011, Johanna has taught creative writing at Massey University’s Auckland campus, where she also gained her PhD, and has published two books of poetry, ‘Apple and Tree’ and ‘Family History’. In April, the Friends of Takapuna Library and Massey University Press launch Johanna’s third poetry collection, ‘Felt’. Christine Young asked Johanna about her North Shore connections, and her poetry.
CY: Please tell us a bit about your background.
Johanna Emeney: I’m a Shore girl as much as I’m a country girl, really. When I grew up, on a pick-your-own orchard ten minutes from Albany, the North Shore was the ‘Big Smoke’. From 18-32, I was based in the UK and travelled widely, all the time wishing only to be back in New Zealand. Nowadays, there is little that tempts me more than 25km from home, and I’m lucky to have a husband who shares these homebody tendencies. If you can walk two miniature ponies there, we’ll go. If not, it’s a no.
CY: You attended and later taught at Kristin. Tell us about the changes you observed between being a pupil and teaching there.
JE: Some of my dearest friends are the women I went to school with at Kristin, and the women who taught me there. It was and is a school that knows you and makes you feel that things are possible. When I returned to teach there in 2007, I was gratified to find that Kristin, like most of our North Shore schools, had a far more diverse roll than back in the ’80s and ’90s, and a student population that was cognisant of the global rather than just the local.
CY: Please tell us about the Michael King Centre Young Writers Programme and your role in that. Are you still involved?
JE: In 2009, my then-publisher and forever-mentor, Dame Chris Cole Catley introduced me to Ros Ali with whom she ran the Young Writers Programme. She asked whether I’d like to come along for one session, and I ended up staying for all of them. Chris died in 2011, aged 88. Her loss is a gaping hole in the North Shore literary world, as it is elsewhere. She had expressed the wish that Ros and I should continue the programme, and so, until March 2020, when Covid-19 cancelled our first two workshops, and we decided it was time to step down, we co-facilitated the YWP. The programme grew from 15 young people meeting four times a year at Devonport Library to one that involved around 130 students per annum, from schools all over Tāmaki Makaurau. My working relationship with Ros has been, and still is, the most productive, equable and positive of my 23 years in teaching.
CY: Last year you edited the ‘New Zealand Poetry Yearbook’. What did that involve, and how did you get the role?
JE: This was entirely a case of “who you know”. Jack Ross, who edited PNZ from 2014, is my colleague at Massey. He wanted a short break, and asked me if I’d like a go. It was a fun task on the whole, apart from the very rare email from a disgruntled poet whose poem didn’t make the cut.
CY: In addition to two earlier poetry books, you have also written ‘The Rise of Autobiographical Medical Poetry and the Medical Humanities’. Please tell us (briefly if you can! It sounds complicated) about this book and what you aimed to achieve with it.
JE: This book looks at the way in which reading poetry about illness or medical treatment helps trainee doctors to understand and interact with their patients. Poetry uses multiple viewpoints, ambiguity, ways of telling which can be antilinear. A patient’s history will involve most of the same things, and a doctor who is able to take a good history will come to a diagnosis earlier than one who cannot grasp the story.
CY: Finally, please tell us about your new book, ‘Felt’.
JE: ‘Felt’ is a collection about the things I puzzle over and struggle with. By connection, it may remind readers of the things that they, too, find difficult. Poetry is a helpful medium for puzzling and struggling, because although it doesn’t yield an answer, it nearly always makes things more bearable.
‘Felt’ also attempts to capture the fleeting tender things, like the sight of two horses grooming each other, and how it reminds you of the way your mum would sweep your hair up into a bun for ballet; the elderly woman who embraced you at the communal pools because you looked like her long-lost sister. It has poems about lost friendship, therapy, past students, cats, goats, horses – the whole menagerie of sorrows and joys. I hope that readers will find it honest and empathetic.
Johanna Emeny’s ‘Felt’ is launched at an event at Takapuna Library on 13 April.
