Acknowledgments

This novella was written in the first half of 2020, during my time as a visiting artist at Massey University and the Square Edge Arts Centre in Palmerston North, Aotearoa New Zealand. It was my first writing residency, although not my last, and is likely to remain the strangest. Only a few days after I arrived, the country went into strict lockdown in order to tackle the global COVID-19 pandemic. I was confined to the Square Edge flat for weeks. The building was deserted. The entire city center was deserted. The university was closed. Everyone stayed home. I went to the supermarket once a week, masked and socially distanced. Everything else was rigid isolation. I read articles about how people in lockdown were missing animals; how nature cams like the one focused on albatross down in Taiaroa Head, Dunedin, were suddenly experiencing a massive upswing in views. We were ecologically deprived and desperate to connect. Not so surprising, then, that a story of reaction to ecosystem loss came out of a residency defined by absence.

Thanks are due to the staff of the School of English and Media Studies at Massey, who did their best to make me feel part of the academic community even though I never met most of them in person, and was never able to visit the office they had arranged for me on campus. Thanks are also due to the staff of Square Edge, who were enormously kind and supportive. Particular thanks should go to Laura Jean McKay and Thom Conroy from Massey, and Karen Seccombe from Square Edge, who took with good grace my daily emails full of increasingly revolting animal facts, proof that I was still there, still working, and at least relatively sane under very trying circumstances. I am enormously grateful for their support.