After Michelle Elvy’s excellent book launch at Aurelia Books on Sunday, here is your chance to hear a panel with Michelle and two other authors with new books coming out soon.
A lunchtime reading and discussion by three authors with new books: Leanne Comer, David Coyle and Michelle Elvy.
Thursday 15 October, 6-7.30pm: Launch of And How Are Things With You by Mia Farlane
Unity Books Wellington, 57 Willis St
Event begins 6pm, speeches planned for 6.30pm
I’m really looking forward to the launch of Mia Farlane’s new novel. From the cover being created in the window of Unity Books to some great panels and events, Mia and Mākaro Press have done a great job of the publicity – now the book itself is revealed to the world!
Sunday 18 October, 4-6pm, Poetry and Music at Newtown’s Office Bar – Pōtihia / Vote
Office Bar, 124 Riddford St, Newtown
Free entry.
“With this country’s General Election coming up in November, we have decided to make the whole programme Open Mike and encourage people to share work with a political theme if they would like to – with the definition of ‘political’ being as broad and accommodating as it needs to be….. This can be spoken word or song and your own work or the work of others. And for the musicians out there, some instrumental interludes would also be welcome!
About the venue:We use their upstairs space and there is no lift, so if you might need some assistance with the stairs, please let us know. Also, they don’t serve tea or coffee, but you are welcome to bring a flask from home or pick up a take-away to bring in.”
Tim adds: Remember – if you want to vote to get rid of this Government, you must enrol by 25 October!
At the end of August 2026, I stepped down after four years as President of Living Streets Aotearoa, the national advocacy organisation for pedestrians. (Do you sometimes walk from A to B? Then you should join!)
That was very worthwhile mahi – but it was a lot of work, and it wasn’t till after I stepped down that I realised just how tired it had made me. So I’ve been largely lying fallow for the last few weeks, as the world of events slid by outside.
I’m starting to recover my energy, though, which is a good thing as there is plenty going on – even without referring to the upcoming election, which presents a sharp choice between the potential for positive action, and a further descent into a fossil-fuelled, regressive, racist hellhole. (My tips: don’t vote for the hellhole parties, and do vote strategically.)
There are quite a few events worth your time in Wellington this month! Here is Part 1 of Coming Attractions – watch out for Part 2 early next week.
Friday 9 October:Motonormativity: How we struggle to see the problems of car dependency
6:30pm – 8:30pm
Lecture Theatre 1 (LT1), Te Kura Hoahoa | School of Architecture and Design Innovation Wellington,
Why do we expect pedestrians to stand and wait in the rain while people in cars are given priority? Why do our media present deaths and injuries on the road as unpredictable, and outside our control? Why do people think nothing of transporting four empty seats around with them at all times?
This talk suggests that these outcomes all arise from a shared blindspot within our culture, known as motonormativity. This makes us see driving as the default mode of transport, and makes us see the many problems arising from living with cars as inevitable.
Ian Walker looks at how motonormativity arises, how it is shaped, and most importantly what we might do about it if we want to enable healthier, more inclusive and more sustainable lifestyles.
I’ll be one of the discussants after Ian Walker’s speech. I may discuss an $3 billion example of motonormativity that the current Government is trying to push right past the Architecture School’s front door.
Sunday 11 October: Launch of Michelle Elvy’s new poetry collection Motion Sickness
With guest readers Reihana Robinson, Bram Casey, Gill Ward, Madeleine Slavick, David Coyle, Noa Noa von Bassewitz, Tim Jones, Ya-Wen Ho and Vivienne Plumb
Motion Sickness was Shortlisted for the 2025 Kathleen Grattan Award and runner-up for the 2026 John O’Connor Award. More about Motion Sickness.
My new poetry collection Dracula in the Colonies is launching at Unity Books Wellington on Wednesday 1 October from 6-7.30pm. It’s a double book launch: my Dracula in the Colonies and Mandy Hager’s new novel Revenge and Rabbit Holes.
All are welcome – no need to RSVP. And if you invite your friend, friends, partner, partners, or large and lavishly remunerated workplace* along, even better!
*Possibly fictional.
Dracula in the Colonies has received a couple of very nice endorsements from poets whose work I admire:
Janis Freegard:“Tim Jones’ powerful new collection takes us from Grimsby to Antarctica, traversing family life, migration, politics, climate change and loss. This is honest, tender, funny and intelligent writing from a story-teller poet.”
Erik Kennedy: “Eminently readable but never comfortable … Dracula in the Colonies is full of characters you’ll love to hate from a poet whose work we know to love.”
Thank you, Erik and Janis!
All the details
The launch will be at Unity Books, 57 Willis St, Wellington, from 6-7.30pm on Wednesday 1 October 2025. There will be drinks, nibbles, and books for sale and signing.
You and your friends are warmly invited to a double book launch at Unity Books on Wednesday 1 October: my new poetry collection Dracula in the Colonies and Mandy Hager’s new novel Revenge and Rabbit Holes.
All are welcome – no need to RSVP!
The launch will be at Unity Books, 57 Willis St, Wellington, from 6-7.30pm on Wednesday 1 October 2025. There will be drinks, nibbles, and books for sale and signing.
I heard Mandy Hager read the first chapter of Strays & Waifs on a climate fiction and poetry panel at Newtown Library. It was a gripping description of a house destroyed by flood as the person living there, the novel’s protagonist Bella, can only watch in horror.
We learn that Bella is a climate fiction author and former climate activist, and both these aspects play into the narrative, but this is a murder mystery with a supernatural component. The novel does not follow the path I was expecting, but once I had recalibrated my expectations I got fully on board with the new direction.
I called Bella the protagonist above, because we meet her first and gradually learn about her past as a climate activist and how what happened then has led to deep trauma that still affects her in the present. That, and an unwelcome reminder of her past who turns up in the present, is one of the ghosts present in the story, but far from the only one.
That brings us to Freyja, the other protagonist – I think she is central enough to this story that she crosses the porous line between important secondary character and protagonist. Freyja has some unusual abilities which Bella initially recoils from – as did I as a reader at first; but Mandy Hager shows with great skill how Bella comes to tolerate and then accept those abilities, which come in mighty handy as the pair become involved in bringing justice to the dead and rescue to the living.
I know people very like Bella, so I had no difficulty believing in her as a character; I don’t know many people like Freyja, but she is so well-drawn that I soon found myself believing in her as well.
Mandy Hager writes with tremendous immediacy. And this is no drawing-room mystery: there is action too, vividly described action in which the skills Bella learned as a committed direct activist come into play. As a reader, I felt myself slipping in mud, I felt branches slap my face as I ran through the bush with a bad actor in hot pursuit.
The identity and nature of the villain is all too plausible – all too depressingly plausible – but they’re not exactly subtle, and I would have welcomed a bit more misdirection in that regard. Though, looking at the world around us, villains now delight in boasting of their villainy – so maybe I’m the one clinging to outdated expectations?
There are some really satisying punch-the-air moments in this book, and if the biggest one for me is when Bella turns to the New Zealand Companies Register database to find vital information, equally satisfying moments are also there for people who are less interested in deep-dive research into corporate villains than I am!
Strays & Waifs does justice to its premise, to its main and secondary characters, and to the reader, and starts to pull on the dangling threads of Bella’s past in ways that make me excited for the possibility of further “Chasing Ghosts” mysteries. Very little stays hidden forever.
But we’ve been somewhere similar before – John Key’s Government tried to fast-track a similar range of projects. I was involved in stopping one of those projects, a motorway flyover the Government intended to build at the Basin Reserve cricket ground in Wellington.
It’s been a while since I’ve written any flash fiction, so I’m especially pleased to have my short-short story A Long Ball published in the Circle | Porowhita issue (December 2024) of Flash Frontier. Check them out!
Submissions on the Government’s odious Treaty Principles Bill close at 11.59pm on Tuesday 7 January. The Government recognises that Te Tiriti o Waitangi is a barrier to the resource expropriation they want to carry out – which is why Christopher Luxon has let ACT off the leash on this one.
If you, like me, think that this Bill is a betrayal of the fundamental basis on which our nation was established, please submit against the Bill. There are many excellent submission guides out there – Together for Te Tiriti has a good one. I know it’s the holidays (and I’m enjoying my break!), but this is too important to let slide.
Koe: An Aotearoa ecopoetry anthology launches on 22 August – you’re invited to the launch!
I’m delighted that my poem “All That Summer”, first published in my collection New Sea Land (2016), has been selected for this new anthology of environmental poetry from Aotearoa / New Zealand, edited by Janet Newman and Robert Sullivan. I’ll be one of the poets reading at the Wellington launch, which is at Meow, 9 Edward Street, Wellington from 6pm on Thursday, 22nd August – the same day the anthology becomes available in bookstores.
Koeinvites readers to explore human connections with nature through a selection of over 100 poems composed in Aotearoa New Zealand from pre-European times to the present day. Including a substantial introduction and editors’ notes, Koe is the first anthology to provide a comprehensive overview of ecopoetic traditions in Aotearoa and to locate these traditions as part of the global ecopoetry scene.
In Koe, editors Janet Newman and Robert Sullivan reveal the genesis, development and heritage of a unique Aotearoa New Zealand ecopoetry derived from both traditional Māori poetry and the English poetry canon. Organised chronologically into three sections—representing the early years (poets born in or before the nineteenth century), the middle years of the twentieth century, and the twenty-first-century ‘now’—each segment presents a diverse array of voices. Across all these time frames, speaking from the conditions of their era, the poets delve into themes of humility, reverence and interconnectedness with the nonhuman world. They challenge traditional Eurocentric perspectives, highlight the significance of indigenous narratives, and wrestle with the impacts of European colonisation.
With more than 100 poems of celebration, elegy, apprehension, hope and activism, Koe gives us the history that holds our future.
New Poems Published in a fine line and Tarot
I’ve recently had new poems published in a fine line and Tarot – thanks very much to respective editors Gail Ingram and Kit Willett for selecting these poems for publication!
Where To From Here webinar for Our Climate Declaration
In July, I spoke to an Our Climate Declaration webinar about the nexus between climate writing and climate activism, referring both to my novel Emergency Weather and to the current political moment.. Thanks to Our Climate Declaration for the opportunity – check out the webinar below!
A Change In the Weather: The Climate Crisis In Poetry And Fiction
Tim Jones, Kay McKenzie Cooke, Michelle Elvy, Tunmise Adebowale, Mikaela Nyman, Jenny Powell – thanks to Kay for the photo!
I spent a couple of weeks in the south of the South Island in late June and early July, travelling with family and visiting friends. Along the way, I took part in a writing event in Dunedin, A Change In the Weather: The Climate Crisis In Poetry And Fiction on Thursday 4 July, which Michelle Elvy, Kay Mckenzie Cooke and I organised. The event was held in the Dunningham Suite at Dunedin Public Library – thanks very much to Ali and her team for setting the venue up & being such good hosts!
and everyone read wonderful pieces! Then, afterwards, we had a really good discussion, covering both climate & environmental writing and climate activism, with the audience. Books got sold, drinks were drunk, nibbles nibbled (thanks to Kay and Robert for getting the drinks and nibbles) – it was a very positive event and I enjoyed it a lot. I lived in Dunedin from 1976 to 1993, and I felt very welcomed by the Dunedin literary community at this event.
Tuesday 12 December 2023 dawned a fine summer’s day in Wellington. But in mid-afternoon, the weather changed. A southerly front raced up the country, bringing very strong winds, heavy rain and hail to Wellington and the Hutt.
I was sitting at my desk, and I felt and saw the change: the temperature dropped abruptly, and sunshine was abruptly replaced by cascading rain. It was all over within 90 minutes, and despite over 20 mm of rain falling at our place within a few minutes, we got off fairly lightly.
But friends I’ve talked to since weren’t so lucky. One was inside a mall that rapidly flooded; another had part of their roof torn off their house – one of a number of buildings in the Hutt that suffered serious damage.
“A day after finishing this book, a sudden and savage storm struck Wellington. At 2.50pm the sun was shining on what seemed to be a pleasant summer day. Ten minutes later the sky turned black, violent winds blew out windows, hail was smashing into the deck and sheets of water poured from the gutters. And that was in a less extreme part of the storm’s path. Elsewhere it was much, much worse.”
My novel Emergency Weather begins and ends with storms – the first causes death and damage from north to south, while the second and stronger storm zeroes in on Wellington. Wellington has always been prone to storms, but climate change is loading the dice, making it more likely that when storms come, they will be damaging and destructive.
My novel is set against the context of a government in which (some) Ministers are at least trying to do the right thing. But the recent election, which Labour lost by a combination of its own timidity and many voters’ desire for something different, has brought to power a government including climate deniers, environmental vandals, and worshippers at the altar of the car. If climate change is on their agenda at all, it’s well below culture wars.
But physical reality doesn’t care about ideology. So long as we keep loading the climate dice by burning fossil fuels and forcing cows to produce milk, piss nitrates and burp methane, the storms and the fires and the flooding will get worse. If we stop, the climate will have a chance to recover. No amount of denialism changes that.
(Excuse me, Tim! It’s just before Christmas and you’re supposed to be encouraging people to buy your book!)
Err … buy my book if you’re looking for a good summer read – it’s not all, or even mostly, doom and gloom! – and have a great holiday! Here’s to lots of good reading, and good organising for change, in 2024.
Mandy Hager launches Emergency Weather. Photo: Stephen Olsen
I was nervous heading into the launch of Emergency Weather. Unity is a great place for a launch, but it looks very empty if no-one comes – and there were other launches, as well as election meetings, on in downtown Wellington at the same time.
I needn’t have worried! Around 100 lovely people came to the launch, we sold plenty of books and I had a great time. It was good to see old friends, new friends, and people I’d never seen before!
Kate from Unity Books introduced the launch, then we heard from Paul from The Cuba Press and Cadence from the Whitireia Publishing programme before the book was launched by author Mandy Hager, whose speech really moved me. Then it was time for me to speak, read the very beginning of the novel, and sign lots of copies! If you missed the launch, the YouTube video is available or you can read Stephen Olsen’s report: https://wellington.scoop.co.nz/?p=155655 (he also took the photo above).
If you didn’t make the launch but would like to get on trend and buy a copy of Emergency Weather, it’s available:
* At Unity Books and Good Books in Wellington, and other independent bookshops nationwide, including UBS in Dunedin – if it’s not available from your nearest independent bookshop or Paper Plus, please ask them to order it in.
Tim Jones signs a copy of Emergency Weather (photo: Kate, Unity Books)
Well Reviewed
It’s also been good – and again, a testament to the hard work of The Cuba Press and Whitireia Publishing – to see reviews of Emergency Weather appearing. Online reviews:
It’s not quite the Taylor Swift Eras Tour, but here are some upcoming Wellington events I’m involved in that you’re warmly invited to attend:
Unity Books Panel, Wednesday 18 October, 12.30-1.30pm: “Talking Up a Storm: The Making of Emergency Weather”: https://www.facebook.com/events/288705720676072/ (Facebook event link). Find out how a novel is written, edited, published and marketed.
Verb Wellington event, 11 November, 3-5pm – this one is for Remains to be Told, but I might weave in a mention or two of Emergency Weather as well.
