Making time: A poem

Once upon a time I might have written a book about space and these walls and how things look About you in your place and me in mine the clock running down crisscrossed timelines About a life in the spotlight a story, a plot me, the protagonist likely or not About vaulting my hurdles big …

Writing is our bitch: But getting there is hell

The reason more people don't write novels isn't the writing. Sure, that's hard enough — but if you're a writer, writing is the juice. The reason is the moment before you write, in which all your fear, loneliness, self-doubt, insecurity, and anxiety, floods in like canal water through a sluice gate. And that's not the worst …

New fiction: A sneak peek at RECOIL

For the past few months I've been working on a movie treatment and script with director Amarbir Singh. We've written two versions of the treatment and we're now preparing the screenplay. It's a revenge movie, of sorts, that takes place following an assault in an Auckland dairy. The context of the story is the clash …

When God took Job’s teeth: Tommy Tiernan tells a Bible story

No one — NO ONE — tells Bible stories like Irish comedian Tommy Tiernan. That he tells Bible stories at all says something. Something about his Catholic upbringing, perhaps, and definitely something about where his faith is now. As he said in a recent interview on Irish television, ‘It feels to me that we're born with an …

New fiction: The Block Splitter

'Tell us the one about the kangaroo again,' said Brodie, warming his damp socks by the fire. His feet were still inside them. The end of his big toe poked out the top of one of them. He didn’t care. 'Not 'til you take your fuck'n feet away from them flames,' said Grundy. 'You'll burn …

Just Do It: A faith, hope, love reading of Abraham’s call narrative

I was charged by a game studio with taking my ideas of faith, hope and love and demonstrating them as a hermeneutical framework, or a way of reading a biblical text in order to apply it to the here and now. We began, as you do, with the Abraham call narrative. The following was the …

Easter Sunday: We don’t want no resurrection

My favourite resurrection scene is the one in Scorsese’s movie The Last Temptation of Christ, when Jesus calls Lazarus from the grave. I like to think that if this story actually happened, it happened as Scorsese pictures it. First off, Jesus is late. Because Jesus is always late. Like when Notre Dame almost burnt down. …

Good Friday: A face-off with anxiety at the edge of the ocean

Today, I walked alone to the edge of the ocean, to confront my cross. It's Good Friday, after all, it's what you do. But my cross isn't in the church. It's there on the beach, in the shadows of the cliffs, right on the line where the surf comes to the end of itself and …

Mud pies in the slums: The Wait of Glory

C.S. Lewis was wrong, I reckon. In The Weight of Glory he famously says that we satisfy ourselves making mud pies in the slums because we don't know how good it is to build sandcastles at the beach. WRONG. I've built sandcastles at the beach. I know what it's like to sit in the sun …