Finding the space to write
Short Story Competition: Finding the right space to do your writing | The Post
September 15, 2024
Emily Makere Broadmore is a writer who never gets to use the writing space she created.
She’s raising twin 8-year-olds, running her business Heft Communications and producing her literary journal Folly.
“I joke that I created a writers studio based on what I would love to use and yet I never have time to use it.”
In 2023, Broadmore established the Wellington Writers Studio, upstairs from an art gallery corner of Cuba St and Ghuznee St in the 128-year-old Berry Building.
Once home to the New Zealand Photographic Company and William Berry, a popular portrait photographer, the building has been home to many artists over the years, including musicians and a dancing school.
Emily Makere Broadmore, left, and Emily Rosenthal of Heft, at the writers studio on Cuba St.DAVID UNWIN / The Post
These days the classic Edwardian building now houses five desks and a welcoming couch for writers to use 24/7.
Unlike co-working spaces, which carry commercial price-tags, Broadmore’s vision was to offer a cheap and quiet space members could pop in and out of.
And it works – not only is membership high enough that expenses are covered, the room is never so full that members can’t get a seat. Most importantly: they’re writing.
“When you're writing, you're so impacted by the energy and the environment around you,” Broadmore says.
“I know this sounds very woo and I'm not a woo-woo person, but this is what everyone says as well, that ‘the energy here is amazing’ or ‘I get so much done when I'm here’... There is something about the room.
“It gets beautiful sun, it’s very calm, there’s been this huge history of creatives working from the space, and you're not going to get that at home because you've got dishes to do and laundry and Lego.”
One key strategy for the studio is that there are no limits on what kind of writer you have to be. Members range from the commercially successful to the as-yet unpublished.
“We've got a lot of science fiction, amazingly enough,” Broadmore says.
“There are a lot of people who are coming through the doors who are writing fantasy and sci-fi, who would never get a residency because that's not the sort of writing that these residencies are looking for.”
Taranaki-born author Josie Shapiro did two back-to-back writing residencies.Supplied
For writer Josie Shapiro, whose debut novel Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts won the Allen & Unwin Commercial Fiction Prize in 2023, writing residencies have meant she actually gets to write outside of the two hours before her children wake up.
One tricky thing about writing residencies is you need a bit of a profile, Shapiro says. Before her first novel, she had none of that, and so most days wrote from about 5am until 7am at her desk at home until the book was finished.