What I'm Reading: Splore Festival's performance director Emma Herbert Vickers

Emma Herbert Vickers. Photo / Supplied

What I'm Reading: Emma Herbert Vickers

Coming back to reading books is like coming out of a social media coma and being unsure how to digest anything solid again. This was me when my youngest requested I start reading the Wings of Fire series by Tui T. Sutherland, that he and his fantasy-loving friends are obsessed with. Short chapters, large font and an exciting, in-depth fantasy dragon world was a great way to kickstart my appetite for fiction.

After last year's Splore Festival finished (and lockdown began), I fled back home to Wānaka with a proper grown-up fiction book lent to me by my close friend and Titirangi sanctuary provider, Tina. Level 4 was perfect to escape into The Signature of All Things, by Elizabeth Gilbert.

Taking me on a virtual adventure from Philadelphia to Tahiti, Amsterdam and more, I learned incredible things about the commerce, evolution, botanics, and politics of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It couldn't have been better in providing a delicious and absorbing escape - a great reintroduction to what it feels like to lose oneself in literature, rather than vacuous Facebook scrolling.

The book I'm currently reading is Gender Born, Gender Made, by Diane Ehrensaft.

Having a gender-fluid child, I'm researching as much as possible as they go through various childhood stages. I have always embraced and supported the unfolding "in-betweeny" identity of our child but want to have all the most open-minded progressive thinking to hand, should more complex issues arise.

As a 19-year-old punk squatting in 1990s New York City, I witnessed runaway kids working as prostitutes to fund their hormone medications and lining up in soup kitchen queues. It gave me an early insight into the genuine and harrowing plight of these teenagers. We have come a long way since then and I am grateful my child is growing up in a mostly informed and supportive school and society.

The cabarets I curate and produce, from Splore Festival to Heavenly Bodies at the Auckland Arts Festival, always celebrate the human body. I have a love and appreciation of all the beautiful blends that exist and can educate and entrance an audience, with my hope being that this further encourages non-binary and gender-fluid acceptance in society.

Emma Herbert Vickers is performance director for the Splore Festival, February 26-28.