S3E1: Chris Brickell

In this episode of Bad Diaries Podcast, Tracy talks with writer and academic Chris Brickell about ferreting in the Hocken research collections, the joy of collaboration, and editing writers’ diaries for publication.

Tracy’s just back from a 6-week residency at Robert Lord Writers Cottage in Ōtepoti Dunedin, where she met Chris Brickell and Vanessa Manhire who, with Nonnita Rees, edited Robert Lord Diaries (OUP 2013). In this chat recorded for the podcast, Tracy starts by asking Chris whether it feels transgressive to open another person’s diary.

Chris is also editor of James Courage Diaries (OUP 2021), and Tracy and Chris talk about some of the similarities and differences between these two New Zealand writers, and the challenges – and rewards – of editing and publishing their diaries.

Chris Brickell is a Professor in the Sociology, Gender Studies and Criminology Programme at University of Otago. He has written extensively on the history of gay men in Aotearoa New Zealand. His books include: Mates and Lovers: A History of Gay New Zealand (Godwit, 2008); Teenagers: The Rise of Youth Culture in New Zealand (AUP, 2017); Queer Objects (OUP, 2019, co-edited with Judith Collard); James Courage Diaries (OUP, 2021); and Robert Lord Diaries (OUP, 2023, co-edited with Vanessa Manhire and Nonnita Rees).

Find full show notes for this episode on the Bad Diaries Salon website baddiariessalon.com, or get in touch via Instagram or Facebook – we're @baddiariessalon everywhere.

Thanks for joining us for Bad Diaries Podcast! Don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review us, wherever you get your podcasts.

Bad Diaries Podcast Season 3 is recorded and produced in Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, on the iwi lands of Taranaki Whānui, and Ngāti Toa Rangatira. Seasons 1 & 2 were also recorded in Naarm Melbourne, Australia, on the lands of the Kulin Nation. We pay our respects to Mana Whenua, and to Elders past, present and emerging, of these lands.

Transcript

Tracy Farr: Kia ora. Hello. I'm Tracy Farr. A big welcome to this first episode of season three of Bad Diaries Podcast. My guest for this episode is Chris Brickell. Chris has been on my diaries radar for some time now, most recently as one of three co-editors of Robert Lord Diaries. 

If that title's familiar to you, one reason may be that I brought the book to our Christmas 2023 episode of Bad Diaries Podcast. What I didn't know back then was that I would be awarded a residency at Robert Lord Writers Cottage in Otepoti Dunedin for six weeks in April and May this year, 2025. In my first week in the little old brick cottage that was once the home of New Zealand writer Robert Lord, I read Robert's published diaries cover to cover in Robert's cottage, in the space described in Robert's diaries, with posters for Robert's plays hanging on the walls of the hallway watching over me. And it was really quite something, really quite an experience. 

While I was at the cottage I had a fantastic chat – sadly unrecorded – with Vanessa Manhire and Chris Brickell, two of the three editors of Robert's diaries. And then a few weeks after I returned from Dunedin, Chris and I caught up recently over zoom to record this chat for the podcast.  

Chris is a professor in the sociology, Gender studies and Criminology program at University of Otago. His research focuses on connections between sexuality, gender and identity, and he's written extensively on the history of gay men in New Zealand. In this chat for the podcast, we focus on two of Chris's recent projects, the published diaries of two New Zealand writers. James Courage Diaries, edited by Chris, was published in 2021 and was a Times Literary Supplement 2022 book of the Year. Robert Lord Diaries was published in 2023 and co-edited by Chris Brickell, Vanessa Manhire and Nonnita Rees. Both books are published very, very beautifully by Otago University Press. 

Chris was a dream interviewee – lovely, engaged, articulate, just a delight. I had so much fun asking him about and learning about the process and the experience of immersing himself in other people's diaries and some of the decisions and considerations involved in editing them for publication, and just how enjoyable he found the collaboration on Robert Lord's diaries.

Tracy: Welcome Chris Brickell to Bad Diaries Podcast. It's lovely to have you along.

Chris Brickell: Thanks, Tracy. It's going to be fun.

Tracy: And this is the moment when I remind myself and remind you and remind anyone listening that when we're talking about “bad” diaries, it's kind of a slightly throwaway line. And here we're talking about good diaries and the excellent diaries that Chris has worked on. So yeah, it's really lovely to have you here. 

Tracy: You and I met up in person a couple of weeks ago when I was in Dunedin at Robert Lord Writers Cottage, and we're going to be talking about Robert Lord today. So it's lovely for me to think back to sitting with you in that front room and talking about Robert and his diaries. We'll go there today. Just to kick off, it occurs to me that looking at the body of your work, diaries have played a huge part. They've been the central focus of Robert Lord Diaries and James Courage Diaries. And we're going to talk more about those books this morning. But also as a primary source in other of your books. I'm thinking particularly of Teenagers: The Rise of Youth Culture in New Zealand. And I imagine they were a key primary source in Mates and Lovers: A history of Gay New Zealand. 

Chris: They were yeah yeah yeah yeah. 

Tracy: And so you will have spent thousands of hours poring over other people's diaries and making your work from them. So my big broad question to kick off is, does it feel transgressive to you to open up another person's diaries and look? Because often, for those of us who don't make them our work, when we're opening up other people's diaries, there's a sense that we're breaching trust or we're stickybeaking where we shouldn't. So tell me what a little bit of what it's like to open up another person's diary for you.

Chris: Yeah, well, James Courage's diary, of course, the first page inside that diary says ‘For myself and no other’. And so there's that sense of going somewhere where you wouldn't necessarily think that you should have access. They weren't written for you. They were written for the person. But that doesn't over weigh, outweigh that kind of real sense of excitement and finding a set of really deep insights into the way that people live their lives. And one of the things I've always been interested in, in my research, is looking for things that aren't supposed to be there. So what do we learn about young people's lives that we didn't think that we would ever be able to find, or what slants on being gay? Do we learn about a man's life through a diary that perhaps tell a different story than the one that we were expecting? And because diaries are personal sources – because they were written for the person – in terms of the scholarly and research benefit of them, we actually see that they do give us an angle that we wouldn't otherwise necessarily see. So that sense of, I guess, incursion into somebody's private life is also outweighed by a sense of excitement about what we might learn about the way they live their life that may be surprising to us or give us new insight.

Tracy: I loved a note that you gave in the introduction to your book Teenagers, where you're talking about the text and image sources and resources that enabled you to start to ‘find the teenage’ in the writing of that book. You said, ‘diaries are the repositories for confessions and stories. We often assume these to be the preserve of girls and women rather than boys and men. But this is not the case in New Zealand’, and you give a reference for that. And that's a lovely little note and distinction there.

Chris: Yeah. Well see this was again part of my excitement at what isn't supposed to be there. But what I discovered with teenagers’ diaries is I found as many boys as I did girls, and the form of those diaries was sometimes different, so girls would talk more about the intricacies of their friendship. Boys would talk more about what they did together with other boys, whether it was going on cycling trips or hanging out or playing rugby or whatever. However, even within that, there were quite a lot of insights into boys’ inner worlds, and there was quite a lot of insight into girls’ work and their physical activity, which again, conversely, we would not necessarily expect to find. So what I discovered was a much more nuanced picture of young men's emotionality and young women's physicality than I was expecting.

Tracy: Lovely. Well, let's focus in on the two recent published diaries on which you've been an editor or a co-editor. And those are the diaries of James Courage and Robert Lord. I'm holding them up here so you can see that I've got them in my hot little hand. Beautifully, beautifully produced. And they just work together so beautifully thanks to Otago University Press. So you wrote a lovely piece for North and South magazine in 2023, and I'll link to that in the show notes, it's on your blog. You drew out some of the similarities or reflections to be found in the lives and diaries of these two men, even though they were more than a generation apart. They were both untypical New Zealanders, and they both wrote fiction and plays, and they both were, as you say, ‘not quite openly gay’, and both spent much of their time abroad.

Tracy: There's a lovely sentence you use: ‘Both writers strained against the limits of the possible’. And they both undoubtedly broke new ground in terms of queer representation. But both writers kind of dialed down or watered down or even gender-swapped gay storylines. Another lovely phrase from you: ‘a queer flame flickers in many of Lord's plays’. And then, as you also say, ‘both men's diaries give voice to their tentative inner lives’. So that's by way of a little bit of an introduction to these two volumes of diaries for people who perhaps aren't quite sure where we're going. 

Let's look at the James Courage Diaries first, which was published in 2021. It has a about a 40-year span, from 1920 to 1963 – so from James Courage as a very young man – as a teenager, aged about 17 – to a man in his 60s, close to his death. So let's get into it. How and when and at what stage did you first get involved in this project? Talk about its beginnings and and its trajectory.

Chris: Well, the diaries were embargoed until 2005. And one of the things I did when I arrived here at Otago University in 2001, was I started ferreting around the Hocken to see what lovely things were among their collections. I did the obvious thing: I typed ‘gay’ and ‘homosexual’ into the search engine and then up popped this. And I thought, well, the second those things become open, I'm going to be racing down to the Hocken. And that's exactly what I did in 2005. The embargo came off. I was conceiving Mates and Lovers as a project, was starting to think about it as a project. I wanted to include James's diaries in that project, and so down I went. And I started ferreting, and then ‘For myself and no other’ was the first thing I saw. And I discovered how incredibly rich the diaries were, and of course, how long they are. And so I only transcribed parts of the first few years, which I used in Mates and Lovers in 2008.

Chris: And then Rachel Scott, who was then publisher of OUP, became aware of the diaries through her various literary connections, and she was keen on in edition of them. And so it was Rachel who said, hey, how about this? And as luck would have it, I had had a research assistant working her way through transcribing them, because what I was thinking of doing was putting together a journal article or some piece of writing on Courage, and expatriate homosexual New Zealand author write. That piece has never happened, but the diaries happened instead. And Natasha, my RA, ended up transcribing almost the whole lot. And so we just got to the point where she had a full transcript. Rachel said, how about we do it? And I said, yeah, we can because we now have them transcribed.

Tracy: What a massive job. The finished book is 90,000 words? Or the total?

Chris: Oh, the total would be way more because there's one called ‘Diary of a Neurotic’. And then there's another one called ‘Part two’, which is presumably part two of ‘Diary of a Neurotic’. And the main one is at least double-sided entire ream of A4 paper. So I don't know how many words it is in total. An enormous amount, I would say.

Tracy: Tell us a little bit about the raw material. Was it all handwritten? Was there a consistency? Was it all in the same size book?

Chris: Oh yeah. No. So no, actually I just told a lie; the diary of a neurotic, I think may be typed. I'm not sure about that. Almost all of them are written. They’re in different sized small notebooks. The average notebook size is probably the size of the finished book. So that gives you a sense of the size. And they're thin notebooks of the size that you would buy from a shop that sells notebooks.

Tracy: A stationers, a newsagent. I wondered about the size, because there's one of the early images of a page. I love that in both of these volumes there are images of some of the pages, which gives me joy to see the handwriting and to see the pen strokes and the lines on the page or not. But yeah, one of those early notebooks in the Courage Diaries. It looks very small because there aren't that many lines on the page.

Chris: That's right. So that's reproduced roughly original size, I think, in the book. And on the writing: when Courage was sailing, I think between London and Buenos Aires, there was a little kid on the ship and the kid said, ‘watching you write is like watching the seaweed swaying under the sea’. So we've got a visual image of Courage writing, and what the motion of his hand looked like when he was writing.

Tracy: And the sense of flow as well. Yeah. Oh, that's marvellous. Thank you for that. In terms of volume, in terms of sort of space that it takes up in the collection in the Hocken, how does it sit? Is it in boxes? How many metres of shelf?

Chris: Oh my goodness. Now the Hocken catalogue would tell us the shelf metreage, but of course I never get to see the boxes as a researcher because they're brought out as individual items. But yeah, they will be boxed up. The Robert Lord collection is probably more because there's a lot of other material. But no, actually that's not quite true because the Courage collection has a whole lot of other things alongside the diaries. So it has transcripts of things that were published and some things that weren't published. I mean, short stories and poetry and also his novels, some of which never saw the light of day. And I mentioned them in the Introduction, and again, like Robert Lord’s … in Lord’s case there’s play transcripts and all sorts of things. So they're part of bigger collections of materials. Both collections have photographs, photographic collections, and Lord’s is quite substantial. So the diaries sit among other treasures. And so the introduction to both books, but particularly the Courage diaries, really, I dived into those other treasures and wrote about those as well. And so in Courage’s case, one of the interesting sets of things were letters from his parents, for instance, which I don't think anyone had looked at before. And that gives a sense of his changing family relationships across his lifetime, for instance, so the diaries can be put into conversation with other materials. Much of Courage’s writing is autobiographical, often just with people's names changed. So there are a number of stories of his experience with his grandmother, who he was particularly close to. And so the other materials in the collection speak to the diaries really nicely. And I really wanted to make those connections across what I was doing in the introduction.

Tracy: Something that you refer to in your introduction to Teenagers is the place of daily books that aren't necessarily what we think of as diaries. So, things like cash books and those kinds of records. And I'm thinking of some of the records that are amongst Katherine Mansfield's papers of, you know, bills paid and luggage packed and those sorts of things. I imagine those kinds of ephemera are a part of both the Courage and the Lord collections.

Chris: Yeah, there are all sorts of funny kind of things. I don't think we quite have things like receipts and that kind of thing. But Courage has got some funny things in there. There's a piece of marble from the floor of the Parthenon, which he's nicked as a kind of a souvenir. So that's a really cool-slash-shouldn't-have-taken-it ephemeral kind of item. Yes. which would be one of the more unusual, I suppose. in terms of Robert Lord, I mean, there's certainly a lot of talk about how he doesn't have a lot of money, but he doesn’t itemise the money that he does spend.

Tracy: There's a lot of chat about money, isn't there. And I don't know why, but I really enjoyed reading that. It felt immersive in a way. You know, it felt like being – yeah, something about it felt really drew me into his life and his concerns and, and the, you know, the life of being a writer, basically.

Chris: Yeah. And the way he punctuates it. ‘Complaint. Complaint. Full stop. Boring. Full stop. Oh, and then this happened and it was all a bit crazy. Full stop. Ah, life. Full stop.’ So there’s kind of punctuations of this experience, and that sense of being a writer, and of the economic hardships that could include. One difference between them is that Courage was propped up by his wealthy runholder father. And so there were remittances of quite substantial numbers of pounds going over to the UK. When he becomes a socialist, he talks about how he realises that this is all a bit kind of fake and that he's, you know, he's actually dependent on this sort of runholder’s money. And then he scandalises his family by, you know, by criticising the National Party and all of this kind of stuff, which, of course, was just being formed as a political party in the 1930s. So you get the sense of history as he's working through his life and other bigger political and social events that kind of punctuate his narrative.

Tracy: Including the Second World War.

Chris: Yeah, and one of my favourite pieces of the diaries is his talking about hiding out with others in the cupboard under the stairs that smells of boot polish and then, in the end, we went on our way and talked about other things because they had become somewhat habituated to the airstrikes, but then describing buildings with the front blown off and this kind of thing. So it's a very vivid description of wartime, I think.

Tracy: Yes. And something as sense-activating as the smell of boot polish in the cupboard just really is such a great connector to that bigger picture and those more accustomed senses and images and writings about the war.

Chris: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, he was interested in current affairs, and so you do get that kind of sense and, in fact, Lord was as well. And so he talks about Muldoon and Muldoonism and the effect of that on the life of the writer and the characteristics of New Zealand and comparing the US with New Zealand and what that Muldoonist moment kind of means. His parents, too, are politically on the right of politics; Lord is very much on the left of politics. So you get that tension between the two, which illustrates, again, his family life in additionally rich kind of ways. Robert Lord’s father was a banker. He talked the language of banking the whole time, and that makes sense of his play Balance of Payments, which is full of the language of finance. And so, like Courage, Lord really drew on his own family circumstances and language and idioms and so on as he kind of worked on his creative work, too.

Tracy: Yes. If I could turn to the sorts of decisions that, as an editor or as a team of editors, you need to make about what to leave in and what to leave out. And so thinking in particular at the moment of the Courage Diaries, how you made those decisions, how and why you made those decisions.

Chris: Okay. Now, Courage was fairly straightforward because most of the substantial aspects of the diaries I did reproduce, except for two main things. One was when Courage included chunks of prose from other people's writing and novels, or a play or poem that he wrote out in his diaries. And some of those took some space. So most of those have come out. I mean, there's Omar Khayyam and various other references are still in there. Yeah, but really just to kind of shrink that down a little bit. The other thing was we had to do some culling with ‘The Diary of a Neurotic’, and that's the time when he was writing about being under psychiatric treatment in the UK, which he was in the last kind of, you know, two and a half decades of his life. And Natasha and I had a conversation at the time, and we agreed that she wouldn't transcribe anywhere near all of that, partly because it was tough going and partly because there was no way the book could have included much of that anyway, and quite a bit of it was quite repetitive. So what she did there is she actually selected some representative material from that particular massive wodge of paper. So that's the big area where the editing happened, and it almost happened before it even came to me as a transcript, because we just had to agree on what the parameters were and what had to be left out there. So it was actually fairly straightforward in terms of his early years, almost all of it is there. So that's how I did that one.

Tracy: And interestingly, Courage himself had a bit of a say in the editing because there are pages that are torn or cut from the diaries, aren't there. And as well as being indicated in the text, there's also at least one image in the book that's reproduced of a page that has been cut or torn. And those gaps, those decisions that he has made of when and where and what to cut are intriguing, tantalising. We can't do anything other than respect them because we don't have the material that's missed.

Chris: One is so tantalising because it's not the entire page cut, but most of it cut. And then underneath the cut it says, ‘but enough of love’.

Tracy: Yes. Yes. Tantalising. Tantalising. That's a really interesting little touch into the impulse, with personal papers, to donate or to preserve or to destroy. And that impulse and that decision isn't necessarily made by the person who has created those personal papers. It's probably most often, more often made by a relative or a loved one who's remaining behind.

Chris: Yeah. Well, that's a possibility here that I mean, the papers were transferred to the Hocken by his sister, Patricia. And it's possible – I think it's probably unlikely, but it's possible that she did that. The reason I think it's unlikely is because there's so much other explicit material in the diaries that that why would you just take out those two bits of those two pages? So I suspect it was him rather than a relative, later on, going through excising bits that they thought were some way, you know, too raunchy or whatever. So I suspect it was him … because of course he was beset by crippling self-doubt much of the time. And perhaps he thought that this was something he didn't even want to read himself.

Tracy: It reeks of him having done it too, the specificity of what's been taken out and what's been left. You know, ‘that's enough of love’. You know, that's telling a story isn't it. Just to finish up on Courage for the moment, your sense of James Courage, did that change from the beginning or before the project to, to the completion of the project?

Chris: It actually kind of didn't in terms of the editing of the diaries, because I'd worked with some of the diaries early on. you know, ten years or more earlier. Yeah. But I think I got a better sense of him. One of the things I really loved was where he talked about his process of writing, because it's the same as my process of writing. And so there was that sense of connection, where he talks about moving the words around on a page until they basically come up to creation heat, and then at the point where the whole thing warms up, that's where the fluidity and the fluency actually happens, and you're moulding the words once it gets to a point where, like, you know, you've heated up the oven or you've kneaded the bread or whatever, there's that point. And when I read that, I had this moment of revelation thinking, oh my God, this is the same as me. And then I thought, I wonder if this happens to him, where it all starts to fall into place at nine o’clock at night, just like it does with me, you know. What's the time frame of this? And then I thought maybe it was, because for a long time he worked in a bookshop during the day and was writing at night.

Tracy: Right, right, right. Oh. How lovely. Let's veer over to Robert Lord … actually, before we do that, can I just say, about both of these volumes of diaries, they're they're so rich and grunty and thick, you know, lovely, lovely, meaty books, but they're so readable, both of them so readable as … ‘stories’ is the wrong word, but there's just somehow a lovely narrative or character drive in them. And it's partly because of the beautiful editing, and it's partly because of the really generous and lovely production so that you're, you know, you're reading a book that is good to hold and good to look at and feels good in the hand, but that just so lovely to read. So, you know, congratulations.

Chris: Yeah. Yeah. No, I think the diaries, I mean, the richness of the diaries, right, and the sense that that is what drives that readability. And both of these men were really good storytellers. But what I guess intrigues me about them as a form for both of these men is that they were both over-doers, like they wrote something and they wrote it again and again and again and again, and they weren't happy with it, and they'd write it again, Robert Lord in particular. But of course, the diary isn't written over and over again. It's written once. And, particularly if you're not typing it and revising it on a computer, right – which, of course, they were handwriting – so there's an immediacy to these that makes them in some ways richer than their literature, which is in places slightly overworked. And so there's that real sense of immediacy. I mean, perhaps one wouldn't publish something that said, you know, ‘I had a wretched day. Boring’. But it works in this format, and that's the way it came out. So they're both such engaging writers, in terms of putting themselves on the page.

Chris: We deliberately made the books the same size. The fantastic Fiona Moffat at the Press designed both of them, and there are some design similarities between them – the blocks of solid colour, for instance – so we actually kind of wanted to make them speak to one another. Deliberately the same size; they've ended up the same thickness; and that they both had that sense of, of richness. And I really enjoyed … I wrote the intros for both and really enjoyed that process of doing a little biographical stuff without writing a biography, because who needs to write the biography when someone's own words are so rich, right?

Tracy: Yeah, yeah yeah yeah. Oh, I love that. I love the intentionality of the design. That's a lovely element. So let's look in a little bit more detail at the Robert Lord Diaries and look at some of the same sorts of aspects that we've just talked about with the Courage Diaries. So, how and when and at what stage did you first get involved in this project? And of course, the Courage Diaries, you're the editor. And on the Robert Lord Diaries, there are three co-editors, so it's yourself, Vanessa Manhire and Nonnita Rees. So tell us a little bit about how you got involved in the project and your collaborators on this project and the roles you each had, and whether that changed as the project progressed?

Chris: Well, I was sitting in my office at work one day and Anita rang me up and she said, you've done James Courage’s diaries, would you like to do Robert Lord’s? And she and Vanessa and a few other people involved in the Robert Lord Trust had enjoyed the Courage Diaries and they thought, I wonder if we could do the same thing. 

Chris: So I kind of went, maybe not. And then I thought, well, why not? And then I thought, well, just because I've already done one, it doesn't mean I can't do another one. So anyway, I did. And so we ended up the three of us working together. I said, well, I wouldn't do it by myself, but I'd be super keen to do it with other people. And so this became a collaboration, and it was one of the most fun collaborations I've done. And so what we did is we divvied up the tasks. So I did the photo research, I wrote the introduction. Vanessa and Nonnita set about transcribing, and then my partner, Geoffrey, actually worked out how to work the optical character recognition on our scanner at home. So then we scanned most of the typed ones. And so once we had done the transcribing, we needed to work out how to edit them. And we all had a go. And so we would do stuff like going through and I'd go, let's take this out, this out, this out and this out. And someone else would say, oh, let's put this back bit back in. And so we'd put that bit back in, and then we'd go through another one and have a conversation about how we chop or otherwise. 

Chris: And so then Nonnita set about really trying to disentangle the plays and which ones were from when, and he gave them multiple titles through the early iterations. And so Nonnita really … she and I, I remember working over Christmas, in fact, I think we were emailing on Christmas Day about the plays … So she really set out to do that, and she contacted quite a few of his former friends, and chatted with them. So that sort of fit in.

Tracy: And she had known Robert Lord.

Chris: She'd known and worked with Robert, and she's in the diaries. He mentions her and her husband and kids in the diaries. So that's actually quite exciting, that she had those connections that she could draw on. Now Vanessa had lived in New York for a while, so this proved incredibly useful, and she … the footnotes, some of that’s Nonnita and some of that is Vanessa. So Vanessa really went to town on tracking people down and assembling all the biographical information in the footnotes, which is quite extensive. And so that's basically how we divvied up. I wrote the intro, but some of the sentences are from Nonnita;  and the image work is largely mine. And the Hocken – because I was here and at the Hocken, so I did much of the Hocken kind of stuff, and then going and to-ing and fro-ing with Hocken. But it really was a collaborative endeavour where people brought their experience, their knowledge, their connections, the people they knew. And in my case, I could bring the proximity to the materials. And so it all fit in together. And it really was the most delightful thing, and we produced something at the end that we are really, really happy with.

Chris: One of the things that Nonnita doesn't know – but she will once she hears this – is that she was staying at the cottage and I visited her. And the photograph, in the introduction, of the cottage … I just thought, well, she's making tea, I'll just sneak down to the front room and photograph it. And so she doesn't kind of know that I’ve nipped out of the kitchen, zipped down to the front, sneakily photographed the front room, and then gone back as if nothing had happened. And then it ended up in the intro. So I also got to know the cottage a little bit. I've been to the cottage a few times. I visited Margaret Scott there actually. That was my first visit to the cottage. Years ago. And but yeah, that, that sort of sense. 

Chris: And we argued about who the people in the photos were, and then we looked around and argued some more, and then we found the person eventually. And so, you know, there were a lot of the photos, we actually know who's in them. And that was quite a complicated process of showing photos to people and seeing if they could identify. And Vanessa went to some extraordinary lengths in terms of contacting people in the US and so on. So there were lots of our tentacles went out in lots of different directions, and then friends came forward. One gave us the transcript he'd written about his friendship with Robert as a teenager, and bits of that ended up in the introduction. So yeah, really, for someone who's used to working on my own, this was quite rewarding and exciting to do it this way.

Tracy: I love your description of working together with the dream team. Do you think, is there an element to which the Lord diaries were easier to track down some of the peripheral detail because they were more recently written?

Chris: Yeah, absolutely.

Tracy: Yeah. And so people were still around.

Chris: That's right. Yeah. That's right. And so because the period of the Courage diaries is 1920s, 30s, 40s, 50s. Basically the period of Lord’s diaries is the 70s, 80s and 90s. And that makes an enormous difference. And so friends of his, including people who were quite a bit older than him in the 1970s, some of them were still around. So, you do stuff like send off a photo and you go, don't suppose you know who is in this photo, and the person on the other end will go, yes, it's me!

Tracy: Love it.

Chris: So, yeah. That's been really cool. And things came to light later on. I mean, those beautiful slides of Robert and his friends at Milford Sound by Alex Ely, and Alex provided us with a couple of others as well. Bobby Miller's photographs are just beautiful 1980s really soft colour images. He sent some of those through to us. So again, being able to talk to and work with some of Robert's friends was really fabulous.

Tracy: Yeah. Yeah. I'm thinking we talked with the Courage diaries about decisions, about what to leave in and what to leave out. And I'm thinking in Robert's diaries of the big gaps, and the way you've arranged the text in those sections just allows beautifully for those gaps. And it kind of creates the space, the kind of breathing space for the gaps, I felt as I was reading the Lord diaries. And the little tiny lines of explanation about the gaps. Tell me a little bit about those decisions with the Lord diaries, about what to leave in and what to leave out.

Chris: Okay. So the gaps, the big gaps are gaps for those periods when they weren't diaries available, and Nonnita actually worked on the gap filler sections and drew upon a lot of her own knowledge because of course, she was involved with Playmarket alongside Robert, so she had a very keen sense of what plays were being worked on in those gaps. Some of the gaps are unfortunate, so that about 1986, where some of his plays became really quite well known, that period where he was becoming much more well known for his plays, are not represented so well in the diaries. What we did leave out was quite a lot of to-ing and fro-ing about the details of plays and rewriting of particular plays, because we figured that that's more for the theatre historian in the future probably, than for a reader now.

Chris: Yeah, so that was pretty much what came out. In places I sneakily, in the very late stages of the book's design, I found some new pictures, and so we actually did a last-minute edit of removing a few lines to fit in another picture or make it a little bit bigger. So there was a last-minute edit as well, but we wanted to get it quite tight, so the pace of it flowed quite nicely. And there were places where he used the diary almost around a working out of how he would deal with a particular plot device, or how he would develop a character that felt, in a way, like a somewhat separate project. And so we just we just trimmed there. We did take out a bit of angst. There was a lot of angst over Peppermint Twist, that TV series. So yeah, we just dialed back. We dialed that back.

Tracy: There's quite a lot of it left …

Chris: Quite a lot of it left. There was even more of it we took out initially, and then even more of it came out to make room for some photos. So it was actually a malleable, fluid process right up into the very end. That beautiful photo of him on Venice Beach on the back cover, I think I found that very, very late in the piece. And it just happened that the beautiful pink colourings in it matched the pink that Fiona had already used on the spine. So that was like a this is meant to be on the back.

Tracy: Absolutely meant to be. I love that. Navigating relationships and privacy, surviving family, friends and people who are mentioned in the diaries. There's a note in the introduction that indicates the choice to notidentify some people, to just use initials to identify some people. Could you talk a little bit about those decisions and the main drivers of those decisions; was it people asking not to be identified, or was it your choice as editors, your instinct as editors that drove that?

Chris: Bit of both? So if there were quite personal things written about people, we contacted them if we could and asked whether it would be okay in terms of his surviving family members, we contacted them and checked in with them. So that's why those people are named there. There were others, we didn't know who to contact, but there were quite personal details about their own sex lives or something. And we just decided that was best – polite and ethical and respectful – to put in a pseudonym if we couldn't find and contact that person just to check. Yeah, if people were dead, we left their names and material as is. We managed to contact a surprising number of people. There was the occasional instance of someone not wanting to be identified, and that was fine. We would just pop in a pseudonym and we'd take out the material. Yeah. So just trying to navigate it while not losing the historical and social interest. But also not wanting a situation where someone would find something really personal about them in a book or someone would say, ‘did you know you're in this book and there's this excerpt or this story of when you did this outrageous thing’ because we just didn't want that to happen obviously.

Tracy: Well navigated, and those decisions to name or not to name, or to identify or not to identify, don't interrupt the story – let's call it the story – here. It just feels nicely done and ethically done and respectfully done. And I'll ask you the same question about Robert Lord: did your sense of Robert Lord change from before your involvement in the project to after your involvement in the project?

Chris: Yes. I didn't have much knowledge of Robert Lord before. I knew that there was a body of material in the Hocken, and that this was embargoed, and that that meant I couldn't just hop in and have a look. And so I hadn't actually gone in to see. I think for me, the moment was when we discovered a piece of footage, a short interview that Rowena Cullen had done with him in the Robert Lord Writers Cottage, sitting, I think, in the kitchen. Oh, and I just thought, oh my God, I want to go and have a cup of tea with you and ask you all sorts of questions, and now I can't, but I think we I'd really like sitting there and having a chat. It was that moment when I saw him on film and I thought, you are really cool, and I think we would have had such a good conversation.

Tracy: Oh, what a lovely thought. I have to say that staying in his cottage, I got that same sense that was just, I don't know, something about the vibe. And because I read your Robert Lord Diaries while I was in the cottage, in my first week in the cottage, I had such a sense of him as a person and of being in that space as well. It was just, it was a really beautiful experience. So thank you for your part in that. 

Tracy: I just want to comment on your prolific output. So, Robert Lord Diaries was published in 2023. Courage Diaries published in 2021. Queer Objects in 2019. Your Teenagers book in 2017. And that's just going back to when my last novel was published. How do you do it? What's your your secret, Chris?

Chris: I think one of the things is that being in Dunedin is so good for this, because the Hocken is so fantastic. So we have really, you know, we have really good sources. And also I do really like writing. Yeah. And I think that I'm also curious about people's lives. You know, and I think writing social and cultural history allows us to really think about the way in which people's lives relate to the society around them. And my own disciplinary training and experience is a combination of geography, sociology and history. And so those are three really interesting disciplines that give you a lot of tools in terms of being able to go and then overlap between them. But of course, Courage and Lord got me into thinking about literature too. And plays. So I wrote an article on Robert Lord’s plays, the queer themes in Robert Lord’s plays, which was published last year, and that reminded me of doing seventh form English. So that was like going right back to high school and doing, you know, doing some English literature stuff. So I think, yeah, there's really cool stuff around to write about.

Chris: And I think that is, you know, it's always quite fun. But I think the other thing too, is that, you know, Otago University is an amenable place for doing this kind of work. You know, there is space and time and the kind of respect for academic writing here, maybe because we are further away from the rest of the world and some of the, you know, overly neoliberal pressures of the university have not been quite so overbearing here. So there's a bit more space, I think, but there's just always something interesting to write about. And once I start, I just keep on kind of going really.

Tracy: Before I let you go, I just want to briefly ask you about your own diary keeping practices. Are you someone who keeps a diary or a journal or process notebooks for your own writing and research? 

Chris: No, I haven't. I've got a couple of teenage diaries which I'm too scared to go back and have a look at, I do actually have a couple of those. But I have got back into writing letters again. And I think one of the things about diaries is that they live alongside letters. And in fact, some of Robert's diary entries are actually letters. And those, the form of those two things, does come together in a way? And so in some ways, those letters that have a lot of daily stuff about what I do, they're not diaries, but they're slightly diary-esque. Yeah. So I think one of the things about differences in historical time periods is that you have that move away from the diaries and letters which can be deposited in an archive. And so we're going to have real trouble doing this type of activity in the future, because the sources aren't going to be there. So I don't know. This is a massive existential question for people interested in letters and diaries. What we're going to do about this.

Tracy: Right? Yeah. What are we going to do? Save people's blogs in digital spaces? The interesting distinction, of course, between letters and diaries is that letters are written to somebody and a diary is arguably just for, you know, just ‘for myself and no one else’. Well, we all know that that's not, maybe not necessarily the case. 

Chris: Not when people like us end up publishing them.

Tracy: I know, or when we ask people to read their diaries on the stage at Meow in front of 400 people. That's right. Yeah.

Chris: Yeah.

Tracy: Now, before before I let you go, I'm going to hit you with our Bad Diaries Podcast questionnaire, Six of the Best. I haven't prepped you for this, so let's see how you go. So tell me, what's your best food or what's your best film?

Chris: Oh, food. Okay. So the thing I can cook and I cook quite well is paprika chicken. And I've cooked that since I was quite young, so I really love that. And the nicest one I had of those was not by me, it was actually in a cafe in Prague, I'm sort of ashamed to say, but that was just fantastic.

Tracy: Oh, I like that. When I was in Dunedin this month, I had a cheese scone from a cafe in St Clair, and when I went up to pay for it, I said, ‘great scone, smoked paprika?’. And the guy said, ‘oh my God, yes. Are you a chef?’

Chris: Oh, also cayenne pepper in a scone. Just a little bit.

Tracy: Yeah I like. Okay. Number two, tell us your best rule or your best room.

Chris: Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.

Tracy: I acknowledge your use of diminutive. And number three, your best shoe or your best snog.

Chris: The sandals I bought in Mount Gambier in Australia on a really hot day with stifling heat, and then that that feeling of the air being able to percolate around my toes. 

Tracy: Yes, I can almost feel it as you speak. Well, thank you so much, Chris. It's been an absolute pleasure to have you on the podcast and to talk about these beautiful books that you've worked on and that you've given us. Thank you so much.

Chris: Oh. Thanks, Tracy. It's been super, super fun.

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