Two very different books celebrate the importance of scent and sensory experience in coming to terms with loss. The authors Laurence Fearnley and Long Litt Woon talk with Jessie Bray-Sharpin.

Listen to Laurence Fearnley and Long Litt Woon talk with Jessie Bray-Sharpin in this highlight from the 2020 New Zealand Arts Festival writers' programme

Sensory awareness links the work of two authors speaking at the New Zealand Arts Festival in March 2020. In the memoir of Malaysian writer Long Litt Woon The Way Through the Woods, foraging in the wild for mushrooms provides her first experience of joy after the death of her husband. And it allows her to find her path out of mourning into eventually being able to celebrate the pleasures of life.

Woon talks not only of her scientific interest in mycology, but of the way in which the publication of her memoir has introduced her to a world of mushroom celebrations such as the Telluride Festival in the USA.

For Dunedin writer Laurence Fearnley, the world of scent - so powerful in her own life - frames the discovery the principal character of her novel Scented makes about herself. Having lost an academic position due to the downsizing of the university's humanities division, she becomes absorbed not only in the process of creating perfume, but in discovering the scents of the natural world which surround her.

Fearnley talks vividly about the power of smell, and its role in evoking the past. Having fallen out of her love affair with the outdoors seen from the great New Zealand hiking trails, she turned instead to thinking of landscape in terms of how it smells. And so although Signal Hill overlooking Otago Harbour has a lot of rather unattractive slash - scrubby regrowth occurring after logging - it has a rich variety of flowering plants which create scent at different times of year.

For someone as interested in the world of smell, her experience in this location has transformed her idea of what is beautiful.

About the speakers

Long Litt Woon

Born in 1958 in Malaysia, Long Litt Woon is an anthropologist and Norwegian Mycological Association-certified mushroom professional. She first visited Norway as a young exchange student. There she met and married Norwegian Eiolf Olsen. She currently lives in Oslo, Norway. According to Chinese naming tradition, 'Long' is her surname and 'Litt Woon' her first name.

Long Litt Woon's memoir The Way Through the Woods is discussed in the session.

Laurence Fearnley…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details