Ruia Taitea: The World is Where We Are

The world is where you are. Where else can it be? What you do and what you listen to, and your experiences are the things of value to you as a writer.

– Patricia Grace on the importance of expressing your world, to a class of teenagers

We wrote mainly of second-hand experience from books and comics that we had. It was all based on writing that didn’t belong in this country [...]. I never thought of ‘a day at the seaside’ about being at the beach or ‘a day in the forest’ about being in the bush. [...] They [the stories] didn’t just have togs they had bathing costumes [...]. I’d write about tinkling brooks or bluebells, things that I’d never seen or words that I’d heard spoken...

– Patricia Grace, on her early writing as a child

Waiariki made a considerable impact. This was partly because it was the first collection of stories in English, by a Māori woman — but as well as that it was the sheer quality of the writing.

– Patricia Grace’s one-time publisher Phoebe Meikle, on Grace’s first short story collection