Fiction, Essays, and Other Things

  New Zealand is no stranger to invasive species imperiling its fragile ecosystem. Island nations are especially vulnerable to the devastating impact introduced animals have on native wildlife. One need not look further than what 12 million feral cats have done in Australia; nothing short of the extinction of at least 36 species of small native animals. There is historical precedence as well. Most famously the dodo decimated in part by the introduction of rats on the Mauritius island. Larger introduced animals also pose a problem. Wild horses, Asiatic buffalo, feral donkey and goats and even camels have had a significant impact on the Australian landscape. In our own country wild hogs and abandoned pythons have menaced the South for years. New Zealand too hosts many exotic species of deer, including our own native elk. This is not ideal but there is one introduced species that, if it still resides in the Fiordland of New Zealand, I for one hope there is one more confirmed sight...

  Few things induce more frustration or spark imagination like unfinished work of a literary canon. The more of it completed the more tantalizing the evidence. What was a writer thinking when their vision was cut short, either voluntarily or by tragedy? Death is the primary culprit in aborting works in progress but occasionally outside interference and even an author’s temperament have played a part. No matter, here is where readers become sleuths piecing a guess of what the finished work could have looked like. Sometimes notes were left behind but at other times the clues are more obscure, derived, for instance, from knowing the writer and their time. It’s detective work through biography. Harder and more frustrating is evaluating how the work, if completed would have measured against the writer’s body of work. Of course, despite the patterns, cases are unique…and so are the fates of these half-formed works. Jane Austen was working on a novel which would come to be titled Sand...