Connie is a Hamilton writer, who works as the Deputy-Editor of E-Tangata magazine. Her short stories and essays have been published in Landfall, Newsroom, Takahē, Headland, E-Tangata, NZ Geographic and elsewhere. She completed the creative writing workshop at Waikato University under the guidance of Catherine Chidgey and Tracey Slaughter.
During her residency, our fifth for the year, Connie is working on her debut novel, set in the central North Island of Aotearoa during the early 1990s. The novel follows the trajectory of an eight year old boy after he unwittingly rides his silver BMX past a savage murder scene. The crime and hunt for the baddie grip public imagination — just the boy’s precarious life with his mother is coming undone. Drawing on New Zealand’s history of abuse in state care, the novel explores the many ways we look away — and how we decide who’s a baddie, and who’s worth saving.