Tēnā koe,

In 2021, while we were all staying home and caring for whānau, the Association for the Study of Literature, Environment & Culture–Australia & New Zealand (ASLEC-ANZ) hosted the first Strange Letters symposium, an online, curated series of conversations focused on correspondence and its many forms. In 2025, we look forward to revisiting “strange letters” through a new kaupapa–in person, in place, and in retreat. Strange Letters Tuarua will offer a space to explore the various forms of intimacy that letters invite, and the ways such correspondence might extend to address our relations with place. For (as the examples further down reveal) there is something poignantly, earthily located about letters and postcards – unlike emails or social media comments.

So, from May 23 to 25, 2025, we will be adapting the mode of symposium to consider place-based modes of reciprocity and exchange. Who or what is a guest? The retreat will encourage diverse and speculative methodologies for responding to place. And these will surely depend on whether or not we are from that place, whether or not we feel from that place. Some questions on our minds include:

• From manuhiri to mana whenua to everything in between: How do we cultivate our own relationships with the place(s) and land(s) where we find ourselves?
• How do we respond to–and correspond with–the beings, people, things, and environments who find us there?
• What is it to be a good guest, in the short term or long term? Invited, or not?
• What is the difference, relationally, between visiting a place one whakapapas to but does not reside in, and living there as ahi kā? And how might we stay in touch?
• How do people make connections to place and between places?
• What narratives connect us, to each other and to the more-than-human world, and how can we keep our narratives alive to the differences and power differentials between us?
• What forms of correspondence might slow us down sufficiently to tend to all of these delicate, located nuances of relation with the requisite care?

Strange Letters Tuarua opens a space for participants to reflect on how we locate ourselves–in particular in relation to our writing, research, and making practices. ‘Strange letters’ offers a place to begin; or to continue. Participants may write letters, or take time to read; writing may dissolve into marks of other kinds–textual, artistic, symbolic, representational, abstract–whose modes and meanings begin to overlap. Writing may dissolve into singing, or kōrero, or karanga, or hīkoi–oral and embodied ways of knowing, exploring, and corresponding.

Participants’ material practices on site may also be informed or inspired by historical letters, like Te Wharepapa’s homesick 1864 missive from England, or Kiingi Pōtatau Te Wherowhero’s 1843 letter to Queen Victoria, asking that Pākehā settlers be good and kind (these from a time when manuhiritanga was pressing indeed–and the potential for alternative pathways to now was still open; a time worth revisiting.) They may connect to the need for an embodied, offline life and artistic practice, like the postcards in Sarah Hudson’s book Mana Whenua, an art and mātauranga exchange between 11 Māori artists over the course of Matariki rising 2020. They may be written together in ‘correspondence’ and under constraint, like Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart’s The Hundreds. They may become gestures/compositions towards a posted, analogue newsletter bundle (TBC!) or journal. Or they may, conversely, consider how today’s relationships are woven as much through digital texts as through live conversation, asking how this phenomenon yet has ties to the long, long whakapapa of correspondence across distances.

This call for proposals, then, is an invitation to write us, the organisers, a letter. Further details are below.

WHERE

Tauhara is the place.

WHEN

May 23–25, 2025

WHAT TO EXPECT

The goal of the weekend is to nourish ourselves and each other–as when we receive a good letter from an old friend. It’s a space for meeting, talking, and sharing–for meeting across divides, and for reading together, slowly and with care.

We will arrive on Friday afternoon for whakawhanaungatanga followed by kai.

Saturday morning through Sunday afternoon will be spent in an array of pursuits: writing alone or in community; reading; sharing texts that are important to us; conversing; crafting; walking; and–critically–coming together to respond to the whenua / mana whenua where we are.

We will finish with lunch on Sunday, departing by 2:00 p.m.

Retreat participants will also be invited to contribute to a special issue of Swamphen / Pūkeko, ASLEC-ANZ’s biennial journal of cultural ecology. Collaboration is encouraged but not required.

WHO WILL BE THERE

A community of 10–15 retreat participants, with priority given to applicants from Ngāti Tūwharetoa, upon whose whenua our wānanga will take place.

Strange Letters Tuarua will be hosted by Hana Pera Aoake, Su Ballard, Cassandra Barnett, Raewyn Martyn, and Jess Wilson.

COSTS

Mana whenua to the rohe of Tauhara: Free

Unwaged or low-waged participants, or participants without institutional funding: Koha/ pay what you can

Everyone else (including 2 nights’ accommodation and all food):

• Camping: $285 total
• Bunkroom/cabins: $315–$455 total

Carpools will be organized from Wellington and Auckland.

HOW TO PARTICIPATE/APPLY

We invite all participants to email a letter of interest to strangeletterstuarua@gmail.com, no later than 7 April 2025 expressing your relationship/ research/ connections to this gathering’s overarching kaupapa, in its broadest and wildest imaginings: How do you work through your position in the world–in relation to where you are and to where other people are? How do you attend to your edges? How do you correspond with others while doing no harm (but staying true to your course)? How do you slow down enough to pay attention to what is needed, and offer that? Whom do you correspond with? Topics and approaches may include:

• Gardens and geologies
• Material skills (especially care/grief work and thinking about ways in which Māori communities continue to resist)
• Radical inclusivity / allies to listen to
• Intimacy and accountability
• Insurgent ecocriticism, eco-poetry, eco-epistles!
• Hīkoi / walking the whenua
• Expressions of guesthood
• Gestural and performative offerings
• Experimental pedagogies
• Explorations of the 2nd person, the addressee (also of the 1st person, singular or plural; also of all pronouns…!)
• Deconstructive, reconstructive mark-making from script to whakairo; the additive, the subtractive, the redactive 
• Karakia, waiata, pao, taonga pūoro
• Letter writing as activism (both historically and as a way of addressing this time we’re in)
• Any other way you know to love, communicate, listen and connect across space and time.

You can include images as well. The letter and image(s) might function as an abstract of a longer piece, performance, artwork, or may be a work in their own right, or there might be slippage between image and text. Your letter might be addressed to us, or to the environment, or to its kaitiaki. It might be from you; it might be from more than one of you. It might foreground a sign, a mark, a font. The letter could be part of an ongoing conversation, or commence a conversation. (We, the retreat organisers, are attaching postcards of our own to this call.) Consider who or what you are addressing, and why. Your letter will be shared with all participants in advance of the symposium.

Think of your letter–and of the Strange Letters Tuarua retreat–as the start of a conversation that we would like to grow over time. We’re getting the ball rolling by including some e-postcards from us to you.

Ngā mihi nui,

Hana, Su, Cass, Raewyn, and Jess

STRANGE LETTERS TUARUA – IN PARALLEL

We, the organisers of Strange Letters Tuarua, also wish to extend an invitation to other members of ASLEC-ANZ to organise a parallel or subsequent event, in your own places, building on the kaupapa–a sort of rolling continuation of the project that remains in conversation with Strange Letters Tuarua at Tauhara. What does guesthood mean where you are? What do the questions asked by Strange Letters Tuarua look like when filtered through the lens of the peoples, histories, cultures, and ecologies of your place? Or the place where you are at this time. What, in your context, feels like a fruitful way to engage those questions? If you would like to host your own iteration of Strange Letters Tuarua, please get in touch through strangeletterstuarua@gmail.com to discuss ideas, logistics and support.

Think of your letter–and of the Strange Letters Tuarua retreat–as the start of a conversation that we would like to grow over time.

We’re getting the ball rolling by including some e-postcards from us to you.

Ngā mihi nui,

Hana, Su, Cass, Raewyn, and Jess

23/02/25

Dear kahikatea —

It was a while before I learned your name. White pine, they said, when I got here, and I thought, Oh, I know that one — or at least, I thought I knew you as well as I knew the Eastern white pine, Pinus strobus, which is still not very, because even though I loved running around in the New England forests as a child I was lost in stories more often than I was looking at what was in front of me. A false friend, the name, white pine — this land has its own trees, its own names. It was a while longer before I learned your body:

seeds scattered by birds rather than locked tight inside a cone; a cone itself so transformed it looks like a berry. As an adult, half a world away from those childhood forests, I am trying to see what is here, in Aotearoa, underneath the smooth English appellations serving as veneer of convenience. I am trying to learn a new home. I am trying not to be a false friend.

Love

Jess

ADDRESS:

TO: A nearby Volcano ℅ Lake Taupō

Elevation: 452m

Coordinates: 38°48′20″S 175°54′03″E / 38.80556°S 175.90083°E

Rock age: Pleistocene – Meghalayan (0.3–0.0018 Ma)

23 February 2025

Here you go! A postcard from Karori showing a layer of tephra from your eruption 26,500 years ago. Just opposite the Karori Anglican Church. When I reached up through the gorse and broom, my skin caught on your rough mix of rock and lava, and the dust stuck to my fingers. Even here it is clear that your gift of fertile ash and rocks allowed seeds to take hold and begin to grow. Do you know the dinosaurs, the fish, the miniature leaves of the seed ferns we call the Glossopteris species? I read that there were gum trees, connecting the shimmering edges of Gondwana.

I’m coming to visit in May, so can we please continue this conversation then?

Noho ora mai,

Su