In Conversation: Dominic Hoey of Dead Bird Books

Talking about independent publishing, touring as a poet, grief, loss, humour and more.

Selected Works is a regular newsletter by the Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa (Wellington, New Zealand) based freelance journalist, broadcaster, copywriter, and sometimes DJ Martyn Pepperell. Yes, that’s me. Most weeks, Selected Works consists of a recap of what I’ve been doing lately and some of what I’ve been listening to and reading, paired with film photographs I’ve taken + some bonuses. All of that said, sometimes it takes completely different forms.

Dominic Hoey is a poet, author and playwright based in Auckland, New Zealand. When I first met him in the late 2000s, however, all of this was still on the horizon, and he was spending his days recording and performing hip-hop under the alias Tourettes while working an endless succession of dead-end jobs.

Over the last decade, Dominic has taken his talent for words and used it to create a seemingly endless succession of smart, funny and unpredictable poems that tap into the often unacknowledged but commonly felt aspects of life while offering up cutting social and political commentary when the moment feels right. He’s written two celebrated novels, Iceland (2017) and Poor People With Money (2022), and compiled two collections of his poetry, I Thought We’d Be Famous (2019) and The Dead Are Always Laughing At Us (2023).

Along the way, Dominic has written two one-person theatre shows about bone disease and his inability to get arts funding while developing his Learn To Write Good creative writing program and working with young people at the Atawhai program, where he teaches them teaching art, yoga and meditation to help with their mental health and self-esteem. Simply put, he’s a smart, funny and kind guy who didn’t have access to the tools he needed to fully unlock his potential earlier in life. However, through tenacity, luck, bloody-minded perseverance and talent, he’s been able to transform his situation while remaining committed to paying it forward.

Since 2019, he’s also been helping give opportunities to a new wave of poets and writers through Dead Bird Books, the indie publishing house he co-runs with Samuel Walsh. Between the 30th of November and the 8th of December, Dead Bird Books is hitting the road to perform in Takaka, Dunedin, Christchurch, Auckland and Wellington, where you’ll be able to catch Dominic Hoey, Isla Huia, and Liam Jacobson live, along with special guests. All three poets will be selling copies of their brand-new poetry collections.

Earlier today, I jumped on Zoom with Dominic. You can read the transcript of our conversation below.

Martyn Pepperell: Hey, so what’s been going on lately?

Dominic Hoey: I just got back from Detroit. And then I'm staying at my mum’s place at the moment. I'm hoping to do some housesitting over the Christmas period.

Have you been on one of those housesitting websites where you try to pretend to be a reputable person that people can approach about looking after their homes?

I went on one, but it just seemed like it hadn't really been updated in the last couple of years. My mate's mate has a mansion in Mission Bay that they said I can housesit, but we'll see.

Yeah, I know a few people were doing the housesitting thing. They just move around the country, looking after different houses.

One of my mates did it. They saved up and bought a house by doing that for two years.

What were you doing in Detroit?

I was just writing my next novel. The working title is Homesickness, but I don't think I'm going to call it that. I thought I had three months to finish it, and then Penguin said we need it in six weeks. It was a little bit of a mad dash, but I got it done.

What were your impressions of Detroit? You probably didn't get to see as much as you would have liked to if you were madly writing all day.

I wasn't writing all day [laughs]. I can never write more than four or five hours, but it's cool. The inner city is pretty cool. The rest of it is kinda like a lot of strip malls and a lot of car parks.

When you were younger, did you ever think your life might eventually look like it does now?

In what sense? Like writing books and living on my mom's floor? [laughs]

Look, there's a lot of stuff that we can complain about, but a lot of great stuff has happened as well.

I think the life I have is probably what I always wanted. I always wanted to teach, and I always wanted to work with different people and make books and stuff. I actually forgot about this until someone brought it up recently, but from about the age of 21, I had several different manuscripts that I'd carry around and try to get published, and no one would publish them. It was always a dream to do this stuff, but it seemed impossible.

I remember you telling me that when you were doing music, magazines would interview you and talk about what an amazing writer you were, but then they didn’t want you to write for them.

I think all of that has really informed the way that we do Dead Bird Books. So often, you'd go to people and say, “Look, here's this thing I got.” It'd be a mess, but obviously, there was some promise. I would have assumed that people would say, “Okay, we need to clean this up,” but they'd say, “Nah.” So with Dead Bird, quite often, we'll be given a manuscript. I’ll read it and think this needs a lot of work, but I can see what it can be, and as long as the person is open to that, I think it will be okay. Two of the most successful books we've published have been those sorts of books.

Is that one of the guiding principles for the publishing house? Looking at what something could be rather than what something is?

Yeah, sometimes. Most recently, the two books we've done for Isla Huia and Liam Jacobson came in finished, so not always. I think it’s about understanding that for some people, organising a book is not their fucking strong point. You don't expect them to turn up with this finished product. But yeah, it's been going amazingly well.

It's funny. We just signed a new writer recently. She got so excited she started crying. When that happened, I was like, fuck this actually means something to people. I think that was quite special because it's just something that Sam [Walsh] and I do for free when we can, and it's grown into something that can have that impact.

Making someone feel like they've arrived.

Giving people an opportunity is such an amazing thing to be able to offer.

After all, when we were younger, there weren't a lot of opportunities going around.

Nah, certainly not. Especially for people doing weird shit. I think the best shit is happening within the weird sort of; I don't want to use the word marginalised because they're not necessarily marginalised but off the beaten track.

Sometimes, people who aren't well-adjusted are really talented.

Yeah.

It's very easy to get support when you're well-adjusted. I remember the producer and DJ DLT talking about how he wants to work with the glassy-eyed person who looks like they're gonna go crazy if they can't make their art. Society at large often considers these people very scary, but they often show us things we need to see or hear.

Definitely.

How long have Dead Bird books been going for now?

We started at the beginning of 2019. I think we got three books out before the pandemic. We sold a lot of copies and had started to get some money coming in. I think it was good because it made us reassess what we're actually doing. As a result, I'm much happier about where we've come to as an organisation. Saying organisation seems weird because there are only two of us.

What have been the easiest and the most difficult things about running an indie publishing house?

I think finding writers has been really easy. That's kind of my job. Sam has put forward a couple of people, but he loves systems and budgets and doing all that kind of shit.

The hardest thing, which I didn't really think about, has been managing people's expectations. A few people have been like, where's my royalties? All of them sell the initial runs, so they get some money, but sometimes that's it. Now, when we have the initial meeting with people before we sign them, we're like, look, if you sell 200 books, you make this much. If you sell 500 books, you make this much.

I think it's helpful to think of these things as business cards. That’s how I approached my recent photo zine, Places.

Yeah, it's a foot in the door. We've published a couple of books that have sold enough that the author got some decent royalty checks. The average poetry book in New Zealand sells between 100 and 200 copies. All of ours have sold more than that.

It's tough, right? Something I've always been really conscious of is when you bring someone into something, take someone on, you have to try and help create a trajectory of progress for them.

Yeah.

It's sort of an unspoken thing, but if they're going to continue down that pathway, they need to feel like things are happening. Part of that is on them, but part of that is also on the people who are getting them to do things. It can be really difficult to manage that stuff.

Generally, people who become poets don’t necessarily have the best organisational skills or make long-term plans and all of those things. I think it’s sort of about managing that, and again, I feel like we've done a pretty good job oftentimes.

I guess part of selling more copies than the average poetry book comes down to things like touring.

Yeah [laughs]. That's where you sell all the books.

L to R clockwise: Isla Huia, Liam Jacobson, Dominic Hoey

This brings us to the Dead Bird Books – Aotearoa Tour, which kicks off on Thursday at The Mussell Inn in Golden Bay. What’s the formal concept for this?

I guess it's getting back to what we were starting to do pre-pandemic: doing Dead Bird Books tours, taking the writers, hitting the road and just doing it that way. We want to make it at least an annual thing for the people that are published that year.

Class of Dead Bird Books 2023.

Like I say, it's an amazing way to sell a lot of books [laughs]. We're driving the South Island and then flying around the North Island. We're probably just going to break even with this one. We're just getting it started again. For the following ones, we'll try to get funding, or hire a van, drive the whole thing, and do more shows.

I guess the amazing part of this is you get to spend all this extended period together, which can be quite valuable or dangerous.

It's going to be interesting [laughs]. Liam [Jacobson] and I have spent a little bit of time together, but the rest of us, maybe not so much. I think it'll be fine. It's only three or four days at a stretch, whereas I've done those where you go for a month, and it doesn't matter how well you get on with someone. There's definitely going to be points where you're like, “Fuck.”

It's all about the group adventure.

Yeah, it's gonna be great. I think Liam and Isla are two of the best poets in this country. I really want people to see and hear that; they're both great performers, too. It's gonna be really tight, basically just over an hour of quite quick turnaround poetry.

It's interesting, right? Like you say, they're performers, too, and not everyone who can write a poem can perform a poem, or vice versa.

We don't really publish people who can't do both. I say that, but someone might come along who's just incredible on the page, and we would like fuck it. Again, it's just so hard to sell work if you can't perform. Even if you're a university poet, you are still expected to get up and read your work.

What can you tell me about your new poetry collection, The Dead Are Always Laughing At Us? I know it’s a collaboration with the graphic designer Trudi Hewitt.

It's been in the works for at least two years, but I guess she likes to take her sweet time [laughs]. In saying that, I got signed to Penguin Random House New Zealand in the middle of doing it, so we had to shelve it while my book Poor People With Money came out [laughs].

It's mostly all the poems I wrote during lockdown and a few kinda longer ones. Trudi took them and made them look really beautiful on the page. She had a lot of direction over the layout, order and all that kind of shit. I basically just gave her the manuscript, and she did her thing.

When I saw you perform in the past, there was a thing that would happen where you'd read some of your more controversial poems that took on their own life on social media. Everyone would be cheering and loving it, but when I think back, they were nowhere to be found when you were getting strips torn off you in the comments.

I definitely included those ones that are like the hits, the ones that are sort of semi-viral or whatever. There are also a lot of ones that I posted online and got 200 likes, but no one really paid any attention to them. They were objectively good poetry. I don't want to get in that position where I'm writing for engagement or writing for the algorithm, which I think would be really easy to do.

There are some longer ones. I didn't really have anywhere to put them because they're not the kind of thing that The Spinoff is going to publish or Landfill is going to publish. I know those are two different outlets. There's a lot of stuff about [my friend] Todd [Williams, aka Louie Knuxx], a lot of stuff about my partner, and a lot of stuff complaining about capitalism.

The good stuff, relationships and money! I always think about what it must be like for artists and writers who got started on Instagram, found some social media success, and have to find a way to make it work for them without completely giving in to the beast.

I was actually thinking about this yesterday because I just posted something making fun of [the New Zealand First political party leader] David Seymour that got a lot of traction. There was a point, especially during the pandemic, where I was just reacting to whatever was happening in the news. It wasn't a cynical thing; I was quite inspired, and then that inspiration just ran out. I found myself trying to do it, but knowing that as long as you're engaging with whatever's in the zeitgeist, it gets picked up, that's not creatively satisfying. I had to stop myself. It just wasn't worth it.

It's a combination of talent, luck and timing. If it happens, it happens.

It's got to have the fucking twist of lemon in it, especially with the shit that I'm writing because it's so simple, but I always have that little bit of subtext. I think if you're just reacting to everything every day, you can't have that. If it doesn't have that, it's basically just a tweet.

For sure, daily commentary. That's how you become Mike Hosking.

Yeah [laughs].

It’s been over two years since our friend Todd [Williams, aka the hip-hop artist Louie Knuxx] passed away. How do you feel about him these days?

I don't know. I guess it's not that raw grief anymore. A lot of times, it's just annoying because I wish he were still here. There's just so many things that have happened. Even with this government getting in, I think he'd have really important takes on it. I think with falling in love, I want him to meet my girlfriend. The fact that I'm sleeping on Mum's floor, I wish he was here to tease me about it. It's all those sorts of things.

I'm writing this play about him, which I periodically start and stop, but it's getting a little bit of momentum now. I think there's a producer attached, so I'm gonna try and do that at some point next year.

At a certain point, it becomes frustrating when people aren't around anymore.

Yeah, I know you've lost close people. I still do that thing occasionally, especially when I've been drinking where I go to message him.

Death can be really tough on friend groups as well.

In some ways, his death brought a lot of people closer, too, especially after he passed, because there was so much to do.

Here are two things that happen when people die. First, you start to get a clear idea of their influence and legacy. Two, it becomes easier to begin forgiving you for things they did that pissed you off.

I think with Todd, I knew that he was popular, and a lot of people cared about him, but I didn't really understand the extent of it. It's not just that bullshit thing some people do when someone dies because it still goes on. People come up to me at shows or contact me on social media and talk about what he meant to them. It's people I've never even fucking heard of as well because he was that person. You'd go to his house, there would be some different person there, and he's had this whole other kind of life with them. The other thing is he made art that really meant a lot to people.

On a less heavy note, what's happening for you over at Penguin Random House New Zealand?

Well, they've got the new novel. I'm just waiting to get the edits back from them. After that, we'll go back and forth, and then I've got to find someone to make the cover. I'm going to put it out in July or August.

Do you feel like you can see some cycle emerging for you of writing books, promoting them, and doing your youth work, plays and other activities around that?

I've got an agent in the UK, and I'm really hoping we can get a deal over there with this book. Because I can't really see how much further I can really take it in New Zealand. It's not that I'm ungrateful about where things are at because it's more than I ever thought would happen. I just think that as far as having a sustainable career, I really need to get a deal overseas.

This is the thing about being in the arts in New Zealand: you can exceed your expectations and still not have as comfortable a living as a mid-level office worker.

I mean, if you work out the amount you make an hour doing art, it makes you want to shoot yourself. Obviously, it's not about that, but when I talk to some of my friends who have book deals in the UK and The States, I wouldn't mind some of that either.

Speaking of North America, you did some readings there last year.

Yeah, I went to Canada and America and performed with Irvine Welsh. He really loved the book. I know it will happen if I can get it out there. Even performing in Canada at that big writers’ festival, I realised I could hold my own with some of the best in the world, but getting on those stages isn't easy.

That must have been an interesting moment when he told you he loved the book.

It fucking blew me away. We were just chatting, and I was like, man, I hate to be that person, but one of the reasons I write fucking novels is because of you, so I'd be remiss if I didn't try and give you one. He's like, oh yeah, cool, and then he came up to me in the hotel before we left and said it's one of the best books I've read in years. It's not often that you get that kind of feeling at this age.

As it turns out, local stories can be universal stories as well.

Definitely, my agent was just saying that. I mean, Poor People With Money, people are buying it in Australia and The States and reading it, you know, so it can transcend that I think.

For sure. Do you have anything else you want to say before I stop recording?

Nah, I think that's everything. Come to the shows! Buy a book!

Over late November and early December, Dead Bird Books is hitting the road to perform in Takaka, Dunedin, Christchurch, Auckland and Wellington. Catch poets Dominic Hoey, Isla Huia and Liam Jacobson, along with special guests. All three poets will be selling copies of their brand-new poetry collections. Check out more details and purchase show tickets here.

FIN.