The first ten pages of this novel were published in Landfall (Dunedin: OUP, 2015). My thanks to the editor, David Eggleton.
Billy gleans his random facts about birds from various books and websites, some of which include:
Tim Birkhead, Bird Sense (London: Bloomsbury, 2012)
Andrew Crowe, Which New Zealand Bird? (Auckland: Penguin, 2001)
Dave Gunson, Big Book of New Zealand Wildlife (Auckland: New Holland, 2011)
Narena Olliver’s website, www.nzbirds.com; specifically the article on the pouakai.
Te Ara — the Encyclopedia of New Zealand (www.teara.govt.nz)
Iris reads The Dress Doctor: Prescriptions for Style, from A to Z (1959) by Edith Head (New York: Harper Design, 2008). Liam quotes two Emily Dickinson poems: “Pain expands the time” J 967/F 833 - Line 1 and “If I can stop one heart from breaking” J 919/F 982. Reproduced with permission from Harvard University Press from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1951, 1955 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © renewed 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1914, 1918, 1919, 1924, 1929, 1930, 1932, 1935, 1937, 1942, by Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Copyright © 1952, 1957, 1958, 1963, 1965, by Mary L. Hampson. The epigraph for Billy Bird is a haiku from Tomas Tranströmer’s ‘The Great Enigma’ in New Collected Poems, translated by Robin Fulton (Bloodaxe Books, 2011). Reproduced with permission of Bloodaxe Books.
Thanks to staff at Mirror Counselling, Musselburgh Medical Centre and the Southern District Health Board’s Children and Adolescents’ Mental Health Team, who all answered questions, showed me around their premises and loaned me reading material, as did poet and psychotherapist Michael Harlow. Thanks to Pete Swaab for returning me to Keats; to the University of Otago Robert Burns Fellowship for supporting the early writing stage of Billy Bird; and to the University of Otago Wallace Residency at the Pah Homestead, where the first draft was finished, and where the parakeet appeared in a sparrow flock.
Further drafts were made possible by the generosity of the Caselberg Trust, who granted me a short ‘Down the Bay’ residency, and Dame Gillian Whitehead, who let me use ‘Harwood House’. Thanks to Total Fiction Services (Chris and Barbara Else) for their super-league stamina, critical acuity and keeping me in the family. Thanks to Majella Cullinane. Thanks to Harriet Allan and Sarah Ell for their alert and warm editing.
Thanks tenfold to Danny Baillie, who has understood the strange compulsions of the writing life ever since we sat outside the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna, 1992, where we watched squirrels and ignored the palace’s ‘numerous attractions’, having found our own.