Liz Breslin PHOTO: Supplied

SUE WARDS

"I don’t think I’m particularly high-output,” says Liz Breslin: writer, poet, playwright, columnist, editor, MC, performer, coordinator of Mount Aspiring College’s Students in the Community programme, and author of one of New Zealand’s recently chosen best 25 poems of the year.

"I’ve always thought ‘if you want something done: do it’,” Liz told the Wanaka App. "I just find the time. If I get an idea I have to work on it or I lose it - and I lose way more ideas than I work on.”

It helps that her family are "very kind” to her, and she meditates when she remembers - something she learned from fellow poet and rapper Dominic Hoey.

Her work isn’t all zen though. Liz reckons it’s cool to use art as a response to issues. "It’s the opposite to having trolling as a response to things,” she said. Case in point would be her "Dear Val” poem, published in response to a popular online poem addressed to Jacinda Ardern in the lead-up to last year’s election. It was pointed, political, and entertaining.

It’s fair to say Liz’s writing covers a wide gamut. It has appeared in Landfall, Cafe Reader, the Listener, the New Zealand Herald, the Press, the Dominion Post, Takahē, OH baby!, on magazine, Kiwi Diary, Blackmail Press and Bravado. She’s had short stories developed for Radio New Zealand National. Her regular column, Thinking Allowed, runs every second Saturday in the Weekend Mix section of the Otago Daily Times.

She performed a spoken word piece and a collated-audience-response poem at the 2016 TEDx Queenstown, came second-runner-up in the 2014 New Zealand National Poetry Slam, and came third in the 2016 Charles Causley Trust International Poetry Prize. Her plays The Last Call Centre EVER in New Zealand, It’s Your Shit, and Losing Faith, have been staged in Wanaka, and her first pantomime, Cindy and the Villanelles, was performed here last December.

Her first collection of poems, Alzheimer’s and a spoon, was published by Otago University Press last year, and one of the book’s poems, The Lifestyle Creed, has just been selected as one of the best 25 poems in the country this year, appearing in the annual Best New Zealand Poems published by the International Institute of Modern Letters. The 25 poems were selected by poet laureate Selina Tusitala Marsh to show the vitality and range of current writing.

Born in the UK, "up north - rugbyville”, Liz spent her childhood in Liverpool and Bedfordshire, but "always knew I was going to get the heck out of there”.

Her background was a little bit conservative, she said, and the University of Sussex in Brighton, which she attended after school, felt like "the whole world”. She studied English, with a focus on American studies, but - characteristically - the best part was she was able to study a bit of everything: opera, Japanese theatre, Greek tragedy, and more.

Her world expanded further when she went to Japan on a JET teaching scheme for recent graduates, and even further when she trained as an educational tour guide and began touring the world (mostly Europe). Tours usually comprised "London, Paris - and somewhere else”, Liz said.

She was "a bit of an itinerant”, and even had a stint in the Antipodes when her firm opened an office in Australia, post 9/11. She also taught English as a foreign language there, and met a well-travelled friend who told her the only place he would consider raising kids was New Zealand. Liz noted it, and also noted the "the very attractive new guy” in the office back in London where she was planning and running tours in Europe and the middle East.

That guy - Kiwi Jimmy Rimmer (now Liz’s husband) - returned to New Zealand a few years later. Liz went too. They set off from Auckland on a road trip of the country. Liz remembers driving towards Wanaka and coming to a road sign (no longer there) which announced Wanaka and Hawea. "I had this sense of coming home,” she said.

They’ve been here ever since. She got a job at Cinema Paradiso and soaked up Wanaka. They tried to move to Auckland when Liz became pregnant (twins Lauren and Dylan are now 14), but Liz insisted they return to see Woolly Man (Paradiso owner Calum MacLeod and Simon Rasmussen’s superhero spoof film).

She has spent time as a quality assurance assessor for Tourism NZ, and as a Lord of the Rings tour guide in this region. "It’s all stories - isn’t it? Whether you’re in a tour bus or writing a poem - it’s all stories.”

Liz, Laura Williamson and Annabel Wilson onstage at Good Rotations on Friday evening. PHOTO: Supplied

Liz joins fellow Wanaka poets Laura Williamson and Annabel Wilson on stage this weekend for a whistle-stop tour of some of their favourite southern haunts: Wanaka (Friday night at Good Rotations - described by one audience member as "inspiring and world-class”), Dunedin (last night at Inch Bar), and Lyttleton (tonight at the Hellfire Club). The three met when Liz and Laura ran Poetic Justice Wanaka.

Liz reckons she’s always been a poet. She loves it. "Every word matters, so you can’t be sloppy with it. It’s such a great vehicle because everything you do with it matters. It’s the tightest feat of engineering with words.”

She was "super happy” to be chosen in the Best Poems list. "Here, we don’t come from anywhere big. That I even got noticed was like, wow.” Some of the other poems in the list were "next level”, she said. "To think I stack up against them: that’s huge.”

Click the website below to read The Lifestyle Creed - one of New Zealand’s best poems, a cut-and-paste of the Catholic Nicene Creed and nutritional advice found on a blog about Alzheimer’s. That mash up seems so apt for Liz - a well-travelled polymath, right at home in Hawea Flat.