Returning to Wellington, the city of her birth, after an absence or 30 years, writer Kirsty Gunn took up the Randell Cottage Writing Fellowship and began work on what became her ‘Katherine Mansfield Project’. In this extract from the BWB Text
Thorndon, Gunn explores a theme she shares with Mansfield: the importance of ‘home’.
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Wellington writer Kirsty Gunn. 75 Tinakori Road – where her family lived, home. For in all this writing, in her stories, journals, in her letters home, are ideas of being home. Home obsessed Mansfield. And from the beginning, as a schoolgirl in Thorndon, the best of her early stories show glimpses of a domestic world that was familiar, established, a place of richness and of intimacy and ease – all qualities she would find hard to claim again when she left New Zealand behind her and went first to London then Europe.