The End of the Beginning, Jenna Heller, At the Bay | I te Kokoru, 2024

Drawing lots

We go searching, digging deeply, soil on our hands and knees, earthworms wrapped round our fingers, digging in the dirt beneath the germination and tangled roots webbing a map to the underground where memory sings and rivers cry through crumbling rock and fault lines to the heat of the heart of the underworld. We build into the sides of mountains, thatch roofs, paint mosaics on stamped earth, scribble chalk drawings, dance for rain. We sleep with our ancestors, live on shells baked into the land, tend to flowers growing fire-wild and free like the sparking of pine and birch up the flue past wasps buzzing and humming, a hive caught between light and dark. We watch clouds braid through island skies and learn their mythology by pulling them apart as they reel past—on our backs, on our skin, on the compost of our gardens-in-waiting. Lurking underground, the edible legend flowers amongst the weeds, hardy like the southerly spinning through our mountains, ripping across our plains, shooting up our dry riverbeds, tearing at young gum bark drooping back to the ground just as sure as bare branches scream toward the sky.

Jenna Heller

The readings

‘The Change’

‘Sometimes I Wish I Didn’t Have Breasts’

Jenna Heller grew up in the United States but has lived in Aotearoa New Zealand for the last 26 years, mostly near the beach in Ōtautahi Christchurch. In 2021, she was runner-up for the Caselberg International Poetry Prize. As a fiction writer, she has won a handful of awards including National Flash Fiction Day in 2020 and she has appeared in three editions of Best Small Fictions (2020, 2021, and 2023). The End of the Beginning, a collection of flash fiction and prose poetry, was published by At the Bay | I te Kokoru (Ōtepoti Dunedin) in June 2024. Her second book, a collection of poetry, will be published by Sudden Valley Press (Ōtautahi Christchurch) in late-2025.