Sometimes at Going West, things just connect.

When writer Sarah Laing found out she was pregnant she bought a bottle of folic acid and a children’s book, Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen. 

In 2008 Associate Programmer Nicola Strawbridge, met Sarah at the Mt Albert Playgroup. Both were there with their small boys. Nicola was impressed with this freshly minted author, illustrator, and graphic novelist. 

Nicola was also aware that the award-winning poet Karlo Mila, who had agreed to be the Going West Festival’s Curnow Reader for 2008 also had young children, and a blog called the Night Kitchen. She confessed to working in the Night Kitchen due to relocating and having no daytime child-care. 

A light went on for Nicola; these two women could get together to talk about what it meant to be a writer, a creative person, while also parenting small children. Journalist David Larsen, who was home-schooling his children, was the perfect chair.

During the session, poet Karlo Mila reads from her award-winning book A Well Written Body (2008):

• Victory to the People: Nikolasi is born
• Nine Months No words
• I am not a Play Centre mother

Sarah Laing reads her short story Afterbirth, from her first published book Coming Up Roses (2007).