Helena writes: 'A year on from my final MA class and I'm not sure if I'm hungover or homesick. Writing something new without a do-or-die deadline and a team of stroppy sidekicks seems unthinkable. I'm told this is a normal post-MA condition, but at this point I'd gladly take any seat in that workshop room again – my back to the view even, I wouldn't mind – and do it all over. I'd listen more, read more, be braver. New classmates would be fine, but I'd love it if the old ones (my clever, inspiring friends from last year) were there too. In the meantime, I try to be polite with people dithering about whether or not to apply. Why wouldn't you? I want to yell. Why wouldn't you?'

Bio: Helena Wiśniewska Brow is a Wellington-based writer and former journalist, and the 2013 recipient of the Adam Prize in Creative Writing. She studied English Literature at Victoria University of Wellington in the early 1980s, followed by journalism at the University of Canterbury, and was a reporter for the New Zealand Press Association in Wellington and in London and, later, the Evening Post. In 2009, she gave up public sector communications work to tackle the Creative Non Fiction and then the Short Fiction undergraduate courses at the IIML, followed by the Master of Arts in Creative Writing in 2013. Her book, Give Us This Day: a Memoir of Family and Exile, was written during that MA year, and published by Te Herenga Waka University Press in October 2014.

Read more:

• Te Herenga Waka University Press