Paula Morris Zooms to writers from her dining table

Paula Morris. Photo / Mike Brooke

Last year, almost every Sunday morning for three months, I sat at my dining table interviewing writers in many different time zones, sitting at their own desks and dining tables, via Zoom.

The big Covid lockdown had scuppered the Auckland Writers Festival, so director Anne O'Brien created the 2020 Winter Series. Over 12 weeks I interviewed 37 writers and Tina Makereti interviewed another three on my one Sunday holiday. Total views for the series were more than 72,000, with people tuning in from all over the world – especially for big international names like Bernadine Evaristo, fresh from her Booker win, and Neil Gaiman.

The format was simple: each Sunday at 9am we went live for an hour. I interviewed three writers in turn – four in the final week – and then we had a group chat, four faces on the screen like a bemused, brainy version of The Brady Bunch. Audience members watching on Facebook or YouTube could submit questions. What could go wrong?

Actually, very little – thanks to all the activity behind the scenes. One week, at the last minute, Hamnet author Maggie O'Farrell had an emergency, so Christine Fernyhough, the best of sports, was summoned from her bed (and her holiday). Luckily, I'd already read her book, Mid-Century Living: The Butterfly House Collection, and she turned out to be one of our most eloquent and interesting guests.

Every week, the people you couldn't see on the screen, cameras off and mute buttons on, were working. Francis Van Kuijk ("van Kow-k", I typed into my script) was the Auckland Live whiz who kept everyone quiet or visible at the right time. Festival staff were trawling for viewer questions and then typing them into a Google doc open on my laptop: I'd check it during the live-reading interludes.

Also up on my screen: a 2000-word script with lots of possible questions and all the necessary thanks, warnings, intros, outros and timings. If I started talking to a writer at 9:03, I had to ask them to read from their book at 9:10 and then ask them follow-up questions at 9:14. By 9:20 I had to move on to the next writer, otherwise we'd run out of time. By 9:55 I had one instruction from Anne: "Have a final quick chat with everyone." The questions for that chat were rarely in the script.

Every week my husband, Tom Moody, set up my laptop, stand and mike, using the hefty works of Norman Mailer (useful at last) to prop everything up. He moved all the mess of our lives away from the gaze of the nosy public. Then he sat across from me, holding up cards that read ONE MINUTE LEFT or GO TO READING NOW. Tom also did masses of research for me every week, creating files for each writer so I could put the scripts together every Saturday.

I'm a fast and retentive reader but last winter, Saturdays were fuelled by absolute panic – finishing reading the books for that week, reading through the notes Tom compiled, then writing the script. Sometimes, I confess, I was still finishing the script early on a Sunday

morning. I had barely enough time to disguise my grey roots with – thanks to a YouTube lockdown tip – daubs of brown eyeshadow.

Some interviews increased my panic, if the writer was shy or unused to the military pace of a Zoom salon. For some New Zealand writers (and me), it was very early to be articulate on a Sunday morning; for some overseas it was very late on a Saturday night. Cass Sunstein's dog wouldn't stop barking, to the irritation of his fellow interviewee (and wife) Samantha Power. I just smiled into the camera and hoped for the best.

Personal highlights were my writing heroes Deborah Eisenberg and Colin Thubron, and Chanel Miller, author of Know My Name, who had me and all her fellow writers in tears. But so many of the writers were dynamic and fascinating: Alan Bollard on Economists at War; Robert Macfarlane on the worlds beneath us in Underland; Peter Stanford on a history of angels. You can watch the whole series on video at the AWF site or listen as a podcast via Spotify or iTunes.

This year the festival is happening in person – next week! – and Anne O'Brien has decided to include what she calls "a mini-series of salons because they were so well-received last year." On Friday, Saturday and Sunday mornings, these salons will be livestreamed in the Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre of the Aotea Centre. Up on screen there'll be international names — Marilynne Robinson, Gabriel Byrne, Isabel Allende — alongside New Zealand writers who live overseas: Mohamed Hassan, Miro Bilbrough and J.P. Pomare.

And I'll be at home, at the dining room table, my laptop propped up with novels by Norman Mailer, smiling into the camera.

Tickets for the Autumn Salon Series – chaired by Paula Morris and livestreamed in the Aotea Centre each morning of the Auckland Writers Festival (May 11-16) – are available through Ticketmaster.

• Paula Morris is a New Zealand novelist and short-story writer.