We launched Heart Stood Still by Miriam Sharland on Thursday 9 May at the Palmerston North City Library with Bruce McKenzie Booksellers there to run a bookstall for us. A huge thank you to the team at the library and Bruce McKenzie Booksellers!
It was a fantastic evening, with lots of friends, family and community members. Thank you to everyone who joined us to launch this special book.
And a big thank you to Ingrid Horrocks for doing a fantastic job launching the book for us. Here's her speech from the night:
Tēnā koutou katoa,
Such a pleasure to be able to be here launching Miriam’s book, Heart Stood Still, four years after we started talking about this project – and longer since we started talking about creative nonfiction. For those who don’t know me, I taught for a number of years in creative writing and English here at Massey, with a focus on creative nonfiction and eco-writing. 
It’s a beautiful thing to read – consume – the final fruit when you’ve seen something grow from the seed. In many ways this book was a gift to Miriam – and so to us – born of a difficult season. It’s a book that takes us, with its narrator, through the four seasons in one place. It’s an eco-memoir and a hard won love song to the Manawatū. Part of what I’ve found fascinating in encountering Heart Stood Still in its final form is how organic it feels – how natural. In this way, it’s like a good garden, all the parts supporting each other. But it is in fact the result of enormous labour, painstakingly organized, made with blisters of hours digging tending – and much weeding.
The book begins with the arrival of the pandemic, which confined Miriam here rather than returning to her family in the UK as she had planned – or undertaking the quite different writing project she had had in mind. Heart Stood Still consists of 12 personal essays, 3 for each season.
Each of those essays is structured around an element of the natural world: Autumn is Soil, Fungi, Fruit, Winter Water, Star, Stone, Spring Blossom, Bird, Wind, Summer, Tree, Weed, Insect. This allows Miriam to not only move through the year, but organize explorations of the wider world. And across this a story develops: a shift not only in the world’s meaning, but in a life, as well as an understanding of the past.
The book has changed considerably from when it was submitted as a creative writing Masters, but it’s essentials are the same, so I want to read some of the comments of the examiners, both here and in Australia. They write, “This evocative memoir delves into Sharland’s life and memories while engaging thoroughly with the most pressing ecological, biological and political issues of our time. There is an undercurrent of grief running through Heart Stood Still, both personal and ecological, and this provides a powerful narrative thread, navigated by Sharland with great sensitivity and insight. This blend of historiography, ecology and personal writing makes for a riveting and urgent read". The structure they describe as ‘inspired’, moving through a ‘seasonal framework’ ‘which decentres the human experience by focusing on elements within the seasons,’ with the effect – and this is quoting Miriam herself writing of other writers working in this vein – of telling ‘new stories that offer ways to embrace our ecosystem, challenging the dominant stories that damage it.’ They describe it as an ‘assured, warm, generous memoir’ and a ‘beautifully-wrought piece of writing.’
And so it is: even more so in this tight, sharp final form, perfectly honed with the help of Otago UP – who I want to note have been great supporters of our students, in particular Sue Wootton. The books is also quietly beautiful in its design, with an image for each section.
Heart Stood Still is made from sensory detail and beautiful acute observations. In Autumn, with the beginning of the lockdown, the narrator sinks her ‘hands into the earth, extracting stones and weed’ (18). She finds “pointed oxalis bulbs with little clusters of bulblets” (18). Near the end of Winter, ‘Riding home, I watch the stars come out one by one; the darkness bringing forth light. / Starburst of white flowers appear on the plum tree’ (74). Spring brings blossoms and germination, tomatoes as ‘delicate, pale seedling… like hope in a pot’ (89) and broad beans – ‘who would have thought broad bean flowers so sweet’ (95).
Quite apart from making this book a gardener and forager’s fantasy read – it is gorgeous – this deep immersion is also what allows explorations of wider issues. Miriam is so good at moving between different scales. There is SO much research in here, worn so lightly. The effect is that the book can move back and forth between digging soil in a garden here, coming to understand that she inherited her ‘love of dirt’ (20) from her long-deceased father in England, and his beloved garden, to a UN report that suggests the world’s topsoil could disappear in 60 years (19). There is reading to understand that there are many words for soil in te reo Māori, including oneone, which has a cosmological dimension (25). Reading of a global 75% decrease in insects (158), which leads her to stop mowing her own lawns, and then to watch what happens in the months that follow. One of the most penetrating essays is one of the last, ‘Weed’, which she points out is defined as a plant in the wrong place (142). The mode Miriam has developed by this point in the book allows her to explore complexities like the fact that urban weeds are valuable pollinator plants – which is something we urgently need. This is interwoven with her own sense as an immigrant of being a person from elsewhere, like a weed (155), an approach that allows the narrator to come to see how she, too, might come to feel she belongs. A nod here to our Political Ecologies research centre here at Massey, which enabled some of this thinking.
Always, new stories are what the narrator leans toward, as well as re-connecting with old ones. Perhaps most striking, is the emergence of an alternate economy that develops across the period of the book, based on gifting and conversation. The most literal embodiment of this is there on the opening pages, in the form a pātaka kai, a community food exchange, where she drops off what she does not need as the lockdown begins, taking something in exchange. Heart Stood Still is never just a lament – though it is that at times – but a celebration, and a deep breath in which it feels possible to renegotiate and reimagine relations within the world – both human and nonhuman.
And of course, it all takes place here, in the Manawatū. Someone should be paying the writers of this city a PR budget – the vision of the region that come out of Heart Stood Still and Helen Lehndorf’s foraging book make it seem like a fertile paradise. Miriam zips about on her bike, rain or shine, foraging and talking with people, going to the river and Turitea stream, ‘the city awash with feijoas’ in the fruit section, Ashhurst lined with ‘rows of peach and apricot trees’ (94), the gorge made of stone changing beyond human timeframes, girls on roller skates in memorial park bringing out stories of girls on roller skates there in the 1950s. ‘Like everywhere,’ she writes, ‘Manawatū is a palimpsest, with layers of texts and meanings’ (84). But not everywhere is so lucky in its chroniclers.
On that note, I would put in a plug for buying the book. It is beautiful to read. But it would also make a brilliant gift, as it’s a beautiful book to hold, and also simply to dip in and out of. Beautiful for anyone, but even more beautiful if this is your home.
In the final Epilogue, Miriam writes that once she stopped ‘the past reappeared and everything began to fall into place’ (171). I want to end with the glorious final line of the book:
"Soil, fungi, fruit, water, star, stone, blossom, bird, wind, tree, weed, insect, human: I see how everything is linked in a shimmering net of connection, and I feel my heart beat."
Ngā mihi nui. It is my great pleasure to declare this book, and Miriam Sharland, launched.
Visit Heart Stood Still to purchase a copy.