Tracey Slaughter on the transporting power of writing

Tracey Slaughter. Photo / Joel Hinton

Place takes us. Give us words that speak it – silt, weed, snowfall, tidepool, breeze block – and our senses are there, alive to any flicker of whenua, poised to travel its textures. Books might want to say deep moral things, but to get there they have to travel the surface – the felt, the bodily, the human, the grounded, engage us by sense and skin with real spaces.

That's because we're creatures of road and room, we're dwellers of shore and alley, shed and whare – animals of place. It's so often an unexamined element in writing, or left for last on the exercise list – but the more I write, and teach writing, the more my approach becomes soaked with physical place, the more my advice to students will push their practice back to where their feet first wandered – back to the cool gloomy floor of the statehouse, the sunlit hay bale itch, the school chainlink, the car bodies chocked in the yard, the shadowy creek slick.

That's where the stories live – or at least, the clay and salt and cloud and concrete where the characters can start calling, the aerials and diesel, the church or pub doors, the waves of flax or breakers or tenement washing, those characters need to get started. Plot? That'll come from their footsteps hitting the real. Yeah it's good to have a map, but the map can never be mistaken for the landscape – it's nothing to the seaweed or sheeps*** on your soles, the rain on the fence wire, the black drop from the bridge rail, the neon on your high heels. A skin-level read on a square of earth can talk the rest of your character's life into shape.

Placing your character will always be more crucial than planning them. You might know zero about them to open your story but stand them in a tangible place, feel their body moving through it . . . that will soon light up or smoke out who they are, where they've come from and where they want to take you.

The imagination likes to touch down in local dust. It craves a stretch of gravel to run on, a small town where it can kick a can down the main street – it has to have what poet Richard Hugo called "a base of operations", a place from which the senses grasp and move forward. Small specific bases work better than big ones: a fingertip in black sand or warm milk or running a crack in cement or the wairua in an ochre whorl.

There's a saying in writing that "nothing happens nowhere" – if there's no solid sense of place for events or scenes to unfold in, it often feels as if nothing happens at all. Nothing takes place: there's a reason why our metaphors for being, experiencing, knowing so often have space or location at the core. There's a reason too why in lockdown so little felt real, felt happening, our senses stalled in the featureless flatland of the screen. Our bodies were starved of places to be taken to.

Okay, so a book is a flat device too – but I believe, wired to all our senses, it can still transport us better, wider, deeper. We love to wake in the shock of fresh places, our awareness triggered, our temperature tripped by the new.

I write short stories, and maybe one of the reasons is that I don't get locked down in any one zone too long: I can snakeskin-shimmy the fire-escape to play a gig at a colonial pub, zig-zag a beach in a swarm of bluebottles, wait for a lover in a post-quake hotel room with plaster chipping from the ceiling, get pissed and grieve on a cherry picker with club-mums overlooking the rugby field, crash everything from funeral parlours to the London Blitz to honeymoons.

If you want to send your senses a series of swift hotblooded postcards, read short stories – or poetry. Flick through the latest Poetry New Zealand Yearbook for instance and you'll leap through a feast of place: under the black cape of the photographer; pissing beer into the compost heap; suckling sticky stonefruit under the peachy shower-mould of a "slumlord's ceiling"; bathing four at a time in a detention-centre sink; charting a raindrop landing on the neck of a lover in a lamp-lit city park; working silver-gloved on the night-shift killing-floor; sipping water that tastes "like blood//like kissing" from an iron bore; staring through a "knot-shaped hole in a fence paling" to catch your first dark glimpse of sex; night-swimming with only the motorway for stars.

If this sounds less like a stock tourist brochure than some New Zealand poetry has a tendency to do, then good: no offence to kererū and cabbage trees but we probably don't need quite so many poems that pretend they're all we're planted and populated with. As one young student recently declared, it's not cool for poetry to "look at the pohutukawa and forget the violence".

In one – or all – or a mix of the small towns where I grew up (and yes, I get to mix them because I write fiction) "the pub was by the church was by the dump was by the graveyard was by the TAB". The bus was a low-gear deathtrap to high school that ground us through eons of maunga till we couldn't wait to leave. The girls mostly did it by getting pregnant: maternity fashion was for black bush singlets.

The roads out of town liked to eat Holden station wagons: that was mostly the exit for boys. The sea smashed you daily in the iris with beauty – that was the only thing the postcards would register. For the rest of it, for the real of it, I had to write my own stories and poems. If Hugo is right and everyone possesses a town that is theirs by right of obsession, it may only take a twist of tree limb or skim of stone or flash of street sign to set off into the stories that visit yours.

Devil's Trumpet by Tracey Slaughter (VUP, $30) is out now.