As I walked towards home, I thought about this place where I lived; how strange it was in its familiarity. It was almost indescribable; this glum acceptance of where I lived, and an almost downbeat appreciation of whatever was right or wrong about this place, it was formed out of these moments of routine. The track the cows walked on was built from local scoria, cambered for drainage, yet I still know its potholes as intimately as the cows that formed tracks around them.

The music-loving bohemian was tall, solidly built with dark hair, strong features and a thick moustache which nearly obscured a bemused half smile. He was an imposing figure, more like a confident big brother or an indulgent uncle than a stern father figure.

When I saw them last year I had the impression that they had been carefully lifted out of the political into the world of the musée imaginaire.

If I have any advice to give to a beginner it is this: do not think too much. That makes for bad novels. By the same token, you must read, read extensively, read other authors, be curious about their work and respect it (behind the finest texts there is real suffering), the classics as much the moderns, from Marcus Aurelius to Michel Houellebecq, from Erasmus to Elfriede Jelinek, and write, write a great deal, scribble and scribble some more, and throw away much of it too, in order to give birth to the marvel of a hitherto unknown thought that surges out of its own self thanks to that unique act, for thought is neither external to nor anterior to the text, but consubstantial with the act of writing. Writers do not think, they allow themselves to be borne along.

In interviews, when I mention that one of my favourite short-story writers is Hemingway, invariably there is an awkward pause, and often a bemused reaction. Surely I would name someone more fashionable: Alice Munro, maybe, or Lorrie Moore. My reply is always that Hemingway’s best work is important because he crafted a style and tone that approximated his ongoing themes and subject matter. For that alone he is worth reading.

My own feeling is that the current climate of mass communication is so Orwellian, you have to find some other way of broadening the bandwidth. Debate mode will never do anything other than short-circuit any attempts to achieve a sane perspective. Maybe we have to go into the imaginative space of fiction, whether in literature or film, to do the work of exploration more freely.

For some, and I’d venture that with poets it is more than ‘one-fourth’, lithium does involve losing these times of heightened artistic facility and productivity. Of course many poets have no affective illness, and many who do find lithium works for them, but if Shelley had lived under a medical absolutism that insisted all manic-depressives should be on lithium, he may never have said that ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’.

Of the several New Zealand poetry books which I have looked at recently, the most interesting are those which have set about exploring the spaces that constitute and reconfigure ideas of home. Perhaps it’s not without coincidence that these books are written by women, as women might be more readily inclined to define themselves in relation to family and kin, and through the occupation and management of domestic space. Certainly, for all these poets, family is a central focussing force, and integral to the idea of ‘home’.

I was raised with ghosts. They were always there, lurking about the upright piano and watching me as I slept. They wrote notes to my parents on the big sheets of butchers’ paper which were spread across the living-room floor each night.

When we inscribed our addresses on the flyleaves of our schoolbooks, did we write down our exact, elaborate locations in infinite space in order to reassure and steady ourselves? Or was it the expression of a childhood confidence, now long lost, that we knew exactly where we were?

No matter how much my father had drunk, he never muffed a line when reciting Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Raven’.

I’ve become Australian to the extent of understanding that locals would have to have a different optic despite the legitimacy of the foreign view. However, chauvinism and parochialism remain as issues in themselves.

Their language was not Ukrainian, but equally it was not Russian. It was a mixture. “We are not Russian, we are Ukrainian,” my grandmother says to me in Russian whenever, as a child, I ask her about her language. My grandmother asks my mother a question in Ukrainian, my mother answers in English.

The classic struggle: of course the writer is alone. It’s voluntary house arrest. Cocteau said you can never be alone enough – his fantasy being some basement where people would leave the food outside the door.

Two rocks clink onto the far side of the balcony. I once thought children were throwing these rocks off the building’s rooftop, secretly hoping to disturb someone they couldn’t see, far below them. But I’ve decided that the rocks blow off the higher, set-back balconies and then onto ours. For months I’ve been stacking them in a small teacup, thinking I’ll ride the elevator up and return them to their original garden beds – if I can work out which they are.

And you find the book, you get the rights, you publish the book, it’s a great book, and no attention whatsoever is paid to it, absolutely no attention. And you realise that that’s what we’re there for, to publish. This is our great deficit, and also our great virtue, the fact that we’re willing to continue to be foolish and impractical.