New Zealand poet, novelist and playwright
Rachel Phyllis McAlpine (née Taylor; born 24 February 1940) is a New Zealand poet, novelist and playwright. She is the author of 30 books including poetry, plays, novels, and books about writing and writing for the internet.[1]
Early life, family and education
McAlpine was born in Fairlie on 24 February 1940.[2] Her father was a vicar,[3] and her mother was a granddaughter of notable New Zealand suffragette Ada Wells.[4] She grew up with her five sisters in small-town vicarages in Canterbury, New Zealand.[5][4] When she was 10 the family moved to Christchurch, where she attended Christchurch Girls' High School and the University of Canterbury, graduating with a BA degree in 1960.[3]
In 1959, aged 19, she married engineer Grant McAlpine and they had two daughters and two sons.[4][6] They spent four years in Geneva before returning to Masterton, New Zealand, where she raised her children and taught high school.[7] In 1973 she gained a Diploma in Education from Massey University and in 1977 she completed a BA(Hons) at Victoria University of Wellington.[6] After McAlpine and her first husband divorced in 1981, she married artist Michael Smither in 1988, but their marriage ended in 1992.[8]
Literary career
McAlpine began writing poetry in 1974,[3] with her debut collection, Lament for Ariadne, published in 1975.[9] It was published in the same year as debut collections by Lauris Edmond and Elizabeth Smither, and according to The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English, marked "an important development in women's writing in New Zealand".[10] By 1993 she had published seven further collections.[3] Her poetry has been praised for its "exuberant, strongly feminist lyrics".[10] Her first play, The Stationary Sixth Form Poetry Trip, was first performed in 1980, and she wrote a number of further plays including some dialogue plays for radio.[3] In 1982 she participated in a writer's exchange scheme between Australia and New Zealand, holding a fellowship at Macquarie University in Sydney.[5]
Her first two novels, The Limits of Green (1985)[11] and Running Away from Home (1987),[12] were both set in the future, with environmentalist themes, and received polarising reviews from critics. Some reviews praised her creativity and energetic prose,[3] but Mark Williams criticised her "magic realism without the realism".[13] Her third novel Farewell Speech (1990)[14] was a fictional account of the lives of suffragettes Kate Sheppard, Ada Wells and Wells' daughter. It received some criticism for its portrayal of the women, with Sheppard's biographer and great-great-niece Tessa K. Malcolm calling it "slander in fiction".[15] It was adapted into an award-winning play by Cathy Downes in 1993.[16] Her fourth novel, Humming (2005),[17] was set in Golden Bay, and described by The Press as "a quirky read, with plenty of sly humour but with an underlying seriousness about matters spiritual and a person's discovery of a connection with the world around them".[18]
McAlpine began teaching short courses on writing and managing web content in 1996, writing her first book on the topic, Web Word Wizardry, in 1999.[19] An American edition was published in 2001.[20] She has continued working in web writing education, launching a company in 2007 that offered online web-writing packages to individuals and businesses.[21] She has also used websites as a companion to her writing, most notably by creating a website to accompany her novel Humming (2005).[22]
McAlpine is a member of the Capital Choir, Wellington, and was the poetry editor for Shaky Places, a 14-song cycle of New Zealand experiences based on poems from well-known New Zealand poets including herself, Sam Hunt, Riemke Ensing and Bill Manhire. The music was composed by Felicia Edgecombe and it was first performed in November 2015.[23][24][25]
In recent years, McAlpine has written blogs and performed podcasts about aging, and in 2020 she published a collection of her poems called How to Be Old in celebration of her 80th birthday.[26][27]
