Dominic Hoey’s sore, but strong backbone

Award-winning poet, author and youth advocate, Dominic Hoey, has just released his third novel, 1985: a coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of Tāmaki Makaurau in the mid-80s. With his blind pomeranian tucked under his left arm, Dom spoke to Eda Tang about his craft and his new novel. 

The book begins with the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior, Centrepoint is Centrepointing, and we experience Grey Lynn through the eyes of 11-year-old Obi, whose family is part of the Mr Asia drug syndicate. 

The story isn’t too far from reality; Dominic Hoey would have been eight years old during the real historical events that the book draws from. Hoey grew up in Grey Lynn, an Auckland suburb that was once a poor, run-down, working-class suburb, now gentrified. It was around that age that Hoey learned to read and write. He’d write poems and began rapping as a way to use his words. “I guess it’s a compulsion”. 

But it wasn’t until his early 30s that he pursued writing as work. “I was so poor and nothing was really happening anyway. I may as well just kind of do what I want to do, whereas maybe if I’d been successful at something else, I might have felt limited.” As chronic pain grew in his body, writing became his preferred artistic outlet. 

His 30s was also when he found out that he was dyslexic. Growing up being the “stupid” kid, Hoey says it took a long time to build back his self esteem. “I think I see it now as a really positive thing in my life because I write in a completely different way than anyone else.”  

And since then, his reasons for writing have evolved from simply a compulsion. “I think I feel a kind of responsibility to talk about the world that I’m from,” Hoey says. He didn’t realise that just writing about his life would be interpreted as other-worldly by reviewers. 

“I just write about the world I come from and the people I know and love, and most of them just happen to be poor.” Hoey has written two other novels: Iceland and more recently, Poor People With Money, both drawing from his experience of growing up in poverty.

“All artists have responsibility, especially once you get a profile,” says Hoey. “I think it would be easy to sort of be like ‘ah fuck it’ and just maybe write books that I know would probably sell more and get me awards.” But Hoey’s not interested in giving the industry what it wants. “They want you to do poverty porn, and they want it to be cartoony and moralistic, and I think in general, what they want is just middle class stories.

“I’m not saying that those books shouldn’t exist, but I do think that our obsessions with those is at the detriment to the wider community, because to a lot of people, that’s not the stories they’re going to tell.” 

Hoey believes that our human experiences are very similar and are just expressed differently. “So it's trying to think of original ways to be like, ‘I'm sad’, or ‘I'm in love’, or ‘I hate the government’, or whatever it is.”

Hoey keeps the door open behind him by running his creative writing course, Learn to Write Good, and works with rangatahi through the Atawhai program. “A lot of kids I work with, they can read but they don’t like reading and I find that if you give them the right book, they do.” He says those books are often not the ones winning awards or in the front windows of shops. 

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