That’s what I like to do. I just start out and follow the characters. - Patricia Grace

It's what I like to do--describe settings and circumstances, create images, and in so doing expose my own emotional responses to time and place. Underlying it, though, is an anxiety, the concern that it could all slip away, or that we could slip away from it; that we who walk the Earth, treading so heavily and selfishly, could be the authors of our own demise. We have to do better. (chapter 27 p297)

In a snow-covered field death is contorted, limbs are angled or unjointed, torsos are splayed or crumpled or torn apart. Eyes are the frozen eyes of statues. Men are marble, broken angels. (chapter 12 p98)

I think the time was just right for myself and for people like Witi Ihimaera and Hone Tuwhare. The real pioneers were JC Sturm, Rowley Habib, Arapera Blank, Rose Denness and Mason Durie and those writers I had started to see published in the journal of the Māori Affairs Department, Te Ao Hou.