Tessa Scott Belich (Writing for the Page, 2024)

I treasure the friends I made...in a journey that was sometimes a struggle, often a delight and always an adventure.

Tessa writes: 'With my Master's of Creative Writing I found a community who could act as guardians of a very personal and precious piece of creative non-fiction. The year felt sacred, and passed like a dream, even when my moods fluctuated, or when grief or rage or fear appeared for me, I could write, and feel held in my writing.

'I treasure the friends I made there, as gifted, exciting, tender and unerringly kind comrades in a journey that was sometimes a struggle, often a delight and always an adventure.

'I had always written, and always been acknowledged for writing well. Six years into my journey of mental distress I began documenting it. My sister and auntie had both taken the course, and encouraged me to apply. I remember finding out I was accepted on a summer's evening, and feeling the sunshine inside and outside my body.

'The challenges and anxieties that came up in the course were always discussed among my classmates, and almost always eased by the discussion. We worried about what we had the right to write, whose stories we could tell alongside our own, and whose we needed to tell. We worried about how our families and communities would react to our words. Our teacher, Chris, always steered us toward honesty and towards courage.

'After the course ended, we all felt a sense of loss. The joy and exceptionality of the course was not only the writing, but the reading, and the analysis of both.

'I had found something that I could do, consistently, through moods and mania and all the turbulence of my life. I had suspected, but never felt so certainly, that writing was my thing. It helped more than lithium, it was better than therapy. It is a way to ground myself, and be in conversation with my dreams. It is a vehicle to say the things I feel need to be said about our mental health system. The thing I am most grateful for from the course is meeting those weird and wonderful, passionate and powerful, poets, memoirists, writers, teachers and friends that I was blessed to call my cohort. It was a beautiful time and I am proud of what we created.'

Bio: Tessa Scott Belich is a local of Te Whanganui-a-Tara who did the poetry and creative nonfiction stream of Writing for the Page in 2024. She was award the Letteri Prize for Creative Non-Fiction.

Her memoir, Unsound, will be published by Te Herenga Waka Press in 2026.

She also holds a Master's in International Relations and continues to write on the politics of mental health.

Read more:

'Wet Spaghetti': short story awaiting publication in Folly 003

'The Metal Room' - extract from Unsound. (Turbine | Kapohau 2024)

'"Just Beyond Our Reach": Reggae, Decolonization, and Ambiguity in Aotearoa New Zealand.' (Popular Music and Society, October, 1–20, 2024)