S01E07: Laura Williamson - Writer. Dean’s Bank, Albert Town

Laura Williamson arrived in Wānaka the week of the big flood of 1999. The water had just receded, the high water mark was still visible on the supermarket walls, and her partner immediately found a job taking apart, cleaning, re-lubing, and reassembling flood-damaged bikes. She’d initially come to Aotearoa from Toronto, where she’d been dying on the inside at an overwhelmed EFTPOS machine call-centre, asking herself where the furthest place from her cubefarm hellscape might be. New Zealand had been on her personal hard drive since she was nine years old, when she’d had her young mind blown by seeing the confluence of the Clutha and the Kawarau - one river had been brown, the other blue, violently bleeding into each other. After some time in Methven, she thought she was coming to Wānaka for a season. That was over twenty-five years ago.In that time she’s built one of the most prolific and multi-faceted writing lives in the country. She’s written for the ODT, North and South, Kia Ora, The Dominion Post, The Melbourne Age, Theatreview, and Mountain Biking Australia. She edited mountain bike magazine Spoke. She wrote The Bike and Beyond, a book about cycling that in a very meta way became the thing that changed her life again. She taught English at Mount Aspiring College for a decade, ran the performing arts festival The Festival of Colour Te Kaupeka Rau, toured poetry through Central Otago village halls with all production equipment towed behind electric mountain bikes, and co-founded and now edits 1964 magazine - the quarterly “mountain culture” print journal out of Wānaka that the UK’s Guardian called “an example of how print might be reinvented”.We meet at the entrance to the Dean’s Bank Track, precariously straddling the exposed roots of a row of massive creaking pines overlooking the Clutha. It’s a river she comes to think beside, and a track she enjoys riding, highly appreciative of the work of those who designed and built it. It’s also a good spot to explore the essence of what writing’s actually for, and the communion she felt as a reader that made her want to get to the other side of the words. Laura explains how the flow state she finds on a bicycle opens words up, the Rail Lines poetry tour that turned her love of cycling into a short film about a series of Pied Piper-esque performances, where poems were drawn from envelopes pegged to a spinning bike wheel, and new poetry fans were baptised in echoey village halls across Central Otago.We get into what mountain towns do to creative people and what happens when things get expensive, why the arts have a branding problem, what print offers that screens can’t, and her belief in, and advocacy for, the depth of culture and creativity in our remote places.If this conversation resonates, please subscribe to 1964 at 1964magazine.co.nz. You can learn more about Laura via Instagram (@laura_willwritefor). This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theunmakingpodcast.substack.com