Children's book author Stacy Gregg has sold more than 3 million books, and now she's written about cats. Photo / Alyse Wright
Jane Phare talks to author Stacy Gregg about her latest book The Last Journey, autocratic governments, power plays, reconnecting with her Māori heritage, but mostly about cats.
Stacy Gregg’s publishers are marketing her latest – and 39th – novel as suitable for anyone between 8 and 88.
With that in mind, and fitting neatly into that demographic, I read The Last Journey while tucked into my bunk, rollicking along on The Ghan train from Darwin to Adelaide.
Wifi goes off (for hours) in the outback stretches and The Ghan’s mini library is limited largely to books about the railways and informative tomes like Growing up Aboriginal in Australia. But Gregg’s latest book is no second choice. It’s one of those page turners where you just have to find out what happens next.
It’s a kids’ book for sure; Gregg writes for middle grade, ages 8 to 12. But there are adult, and real-world, themes running through it: love and loyalty, autocratic officials, the rounding up of “enemies” on flimsy evidence. Human silliness set in a cat dystopia and the helplessness of those caught in the wake.
It’s Gregg’s first foray into the world of cats, having made her name publishing a series of successful pony books.
Her stories come from what she knows – she learned to ride while growing up in Ngāruawāhia and later, as an adult, rode in dressage events on a horse she inherited from her daughter Isadora.
It was the behaviour of cats, including two of her own, in a Ponsonby cul-de-sac more than two years ago that inspired The Last Journey.
Torrential flooding in January 2023 forced Gregg, her partner Brin Beachman and Isadora to wade through waist-high flood waters outside their Ponsonby home leaving their furniture and belongings floating around the house.
Clutched in their arms were a Russian wolfhound puppy, Iggy, and the two cats, Ferris and Pusskin, then a kitten. It was Pusskin who became the star, and the hero, of her next book.
Camped in a rented house in Herne Bay’s Saratoga Ave while her home was restored, Gregg observed Pusskin, a burmilla, make himself known in a cul-de-sac “full to the brim with cats”. (Ferris, a chinchilla, is more of a homebody).
From her window she watched Pusskin navigate bromances, quarrels and allegiances, and make himself thoroughly at home in just about every house.
“He’s like a UN ambassador. He’s up and down the street making friends with everyone.”
Gregg was waiting for the go-ahead to work on storylines and scripts for a third season of TVNZ’s murder mystery series My Life is Murder and thought she might as well fill in time by writing a story based around Pusskin.
A fan of Richard Adams’ 1972 novel Watership Down, in which a group of rabbits embark on a journey to find a new home after their warrens are destroyed, Gregg pondered on a story in which cats become the dispossessed, disenfranchised “refugees on the run” from an autocratic government.
It’s a “slow lobster-in-a-pot” control of the cats at first, she says, starting with curfews, then the culling of ferals and then; “The Curiosity”, the rounding up of domestic cats to be euthanised once they reach the age of 9.
The cats are blamed for a dramatic fall in the bird population – later found to be caused by other reasons.
Once she’d written The Last Journey, Gregg had no idea what to do with it. Her agent had retired and she didn’t have a book deal. She eventually sent the manuscript off to a selection of publishers, including Simon & Schuster in London, expecting to wait months for a reply, as is usual in the publishing world.
Within 12 hours she had a response from Simon & Schuster, an offer within two days and a signed contract within a fortnight.
“It was the best deal I’ve ever got for a book and I didn’t have an agent.”
And it’s her first book with illustrations, black-and-white drawings of Gregg’s cat characters by United Kingdom children’s illustrator Suzie Mason.
Gregg is a born storyteller – although she argues that storytelling is like a well-used muscle and by now, after 39 books, she is the Schwarzenegger of muscly storytelling.
She effortlessly weaves a tale of a bunch of cats under threat who decide to escape to the haven of a cat island. But once there they come up against threats and violence from a dominant feline settlement who resent the cat immigrants. Real-world themes indeed.
Threaded through are the inevitable conflicts in the human-animal world. With no humans to open tins of food on the island, the cats become natural predators. Pusskin, the hero, scoops baby fledgling sea birds out of crevices in the rocks for dinner, a slightly squeamish moment in the book for bird-loving readers.
“That was one of the challenges of writing it,” Gregg acknowledges.
The cats themselves discuss what they’ve become after the ferrets accuse them of being “killers like us”.
“Are we the baddies?”, the cats want to know.
Pusskin’s answer to that is “we’re not killers, we’re predators”.
They do what they need to do to survive. When asked for her view on the “cat question” Gregg hesitates before saying, “I guess I’m firmly pro cat”.
Humans are quite happy to dish out meat from a can for their carnivorous cats but then are horrified when that cat kills a mouse or a bird, she says.
“I’ve always been fascinated by the fact that we domesticate our animals and purpose them to our will, and then we’re quite surprised that there are problems associated with that.”
Gregg’s in favour of people spaying and neutering their pets and acknowledges feral cats are a problem in the wild.
But she thinks that widespread eradication of cats without a well-thought-out plan is too simplistic an answer.
She points to what happened on Australia’s Macquarie Island where cat eradication started in 1985 and continued for the next 15 years.
As a result the rabbit population exploded, devastating the island’s vegetation, and the number of other vermin like rats and stoats increased.
Humans can’t take a giant piece out of a jigsaw puzzle and hope that there won’t be consequences, she says.
After Gregg had written The Last Voyage she discovered her story about The Curiosity eradication plan was not as far-fetched as she had imagined.
In the early stages of the Covid pandemic, the UK government feared cats could spread the disease and considered asking the public to exterminate every cat (nearly 11 million).
Now Gregg is working on a book about dogs roaming loose in the woods and fending for themselves.
She’s not giving much away other than the story features “a different kind of environmental dystopia”, and that she’s not using Iggy, her enormous Borzoi (Russian wolfhound) for inspiration.
Too maddening, boisterous and downright disobedient, she says.
“It’s like having a racehorse in the house,“ Gregg says.
“He crashes about like a moron so even on a good day he’s not exactly a muse.”
Gregg knows that eventually the puppy she rescued from her flooded home will grow up and calm down.
“Eventually they just become giant aristocratic sofa ornaments.”
In the meantime she’s settled on an Irish terrier as the hero of her upcoming book, with a cavoodle as a sidekick.
In conjunction with Kurawaka Animation Productions, Gregg’s also working on an animated short film and a feature film adaptation of Nine Girls, a book she wrote after embracing her Māori heritage ( Ngāti Mahuta; Tainui, Ngāti Pūkeko; Ngāti Awa; and Ngāti Maru; Hauraki ) on her mother’s side.
The story is set in 1970s and 80s Ngāruawāhia, where Gregg grew up, and revolves around the heroine Titch who sets out to find a box of gold hidden long ago on her family’s land.
The treasure hunt takes place with the help of her tūpuna, in the shape of a giant river eel.
A kid’s treasure hunt for sure, but threaded throughout Nine Girls are themes close to Gregg’s own journey – understanding her heritage, growing up Pākehā on a farm beside the Waikato River with a Māori mum but disconnected from her taha Māori.
Gregg’s mother Glenda died at the age of 42 from an allergic reaction during an angiogram, further severing the author’s connections with her Māori roots.
Reconnecting in such a public way – in the form of a book – was hard, she says. So much trauma buried in a kids’ book: Ngāti Whātua’s occupation of Bastion Pt in the 70s and the Springbok tour protests in the 80s; the land wars; the confiscation of land affecting Tainui’s wealth; the massacre at the undefended settlement of Rangiaowhia in the Waikato; Governor George Grey’s role in it all.
It was, Gregg says, a “giant Frankenstein’s monster of all these colonisation issues I wanted to address”, a book that left her emotionally exhausted.
As for the book’s title, there are no nine girls. It’s a reference to a mnemonic used to help kids remember how to spell Ngāruawāhia: nine girls are running under a wharf and here I am.
Says Gregg, “I pushed quite hard for the title because it is quite obscure”.
Her reconnection with her taha Māori, including a full immersion te reo Māori course, was a long time coming. After Glenda died, Gregg was sent to board at King’s College in Auckland, a sharp culture shock after a childhood in Ngāruawāhia.
“It was like going from decile zero to decile 1000.”
In hindsight, Gregg views that culture shock as “quite healthy”. Suddenly she was surrounded by wealthy kids who had grown up with expectations and an assumption they would go to university.
Attending King’s College, she says, gave her confidence to go out into the world and bluff her way through. It helped her deal with the bumps and knocks working as a journalist in a newsroom and later to launch her fashion website, Runway Reporter.
Isadora was a baby and Gregg was juggling work with motherhood when she wrote her first book, Pony Club Secrets. It languished on a publisher’s shelf for five years before someone decided the time was right for a tweenager book about horses.
After that, Gregg was off at a gallop: that first book became a series – later made into a TV series – and more than 30 horse-themed books followed, including The Princess and the Foal based on the real-life story of Princess Haya of Jordan who, aged 6, was given a foal by her father, the late King Hussein of Jordan, three years after her mother, Queen Alia, died in a helicopter crash.
Driven by her journalistic background, Gregg wanted to know more and wrote to the princess.
As a result she was invited to Dubai to meet Haya when she was married to the emirate’s ruler Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, and to visit the Jordan palaces where she grew up. (Princess Haya has since fled Dubai and her husband, with her two children, and now lives in London.)
Jane Phare is the New Zealand Herald’s deputy editor of print.
Fire burned through Speight's beer lines and ended up dousing the flames.