Town

In a valley along a highway, four consecutive towns stand, as if someone had once skipped a stone. Each town takes its English name after a British man of the 1800s and offers free Wi-Fi. The landscape features sun-dried mountains to the east and clouds clinging to damp ones in the west. Are we safe in the middle? Are we bored?

Welcome to Town, a collection of fifty stories and fifty images by writer and photographer Madeleine Slavick. After living in Hong Kong for almost twenty-five years, Madeleine moved to a Wairarapa country road that runs from state highway to bush.

Madeleine Slavick was born and educated in the USA, lived in Hong Kong for nearly twenty-five years, and now resides in Wairarapa, Aotearoa. She is the author of Something Beautiful Might Happen, Fifty Stories Fifty Images, delicate access 微妙之途, and Round: Poems and Photographs of Asia. Town is her first book published in New Zealand.

This work includes micro-stories, poems, and photos about living in small towns and the countryside, with a focus on the Wairarapa region. It accompanies exhibitions of the photos, and the author will appear at the Featherston Booktown Karukatea Festival.

Photo by Wong Yankwai 黃仁逵.