Alie Benge

1. Please tell us a bit about yourself and your work.
I’m an essayist from Wellington, New Zealand, but I’ve been living in London for two years. My debut essay collection, Ithaca, is about love and home, and I’m one of three editors of Otherhood: Essays On Being Childfree, Childless and Child-adjacent, which is a collection of essays from Aotearoa New Zealand writers. There are so many stories behind why people don’t have children and we wanted to present the breadth and diversity of those stories.

2. Has writing always been a focus for you or was it a Plan B?
I always knew it would be one or the other and writing felt more exciting and interesting than being a parent. Many people manage to write while having kids, but I wouldn’t have been able to. I already struggle to focus, and unfortunately, I’m one of those people who needs perfect conditions to write - absolute silence, the right pen, and nice paper. As I write this, my neighbour is cutting tiles with an angle grinder and it’s threatening to upend my whole day.
 

3. How do you explore ideas or find inspiration for your work?
The ideas have to find me unfortunately, or it doesn’t work. I’ll search and search for my next essay and come up empty. I’ll feel that all is lost and my career is over, then I’ll be seized by something and I’ll know that’s my new project. I have to carry a new idea around with me, turning it over, seeing how different angles catch the light. By the time I sit down to write I’ve mostly worked the whole thing out in my head.

4. What does the process of writing involve for you?
Oh, mostly torturing myself, self-flagellating, getting to 4pm and doing a day’s work in an hour. I’m horribly undisciplined. Despite how much I love writing, the most difficult thing in the world is sitting down to do it.

I’m writing fiction now and the only way to find time around my day job is to write one sentence a day. It can be more than one sentence, but it HAS to be at least one. Using this method, I’ve written more than I did in a year of trying to find dedicated writing time. It also has to be on paper. It’s less intimidating to open a notebook than a laptop, and the full pages look nice when you flick through them.

5. And what does writing then also give you in return?
I write to understand my own questions rather than to find an answer to them. The first time I wrote about trying to decide whether to have children, it was because I had all these thoughts flying around, and the essay helped me to organise them, or at least know what they were made of. It’s the questions I’ve not been able to find the right words for that follow me around like a plague of rats.

6. Has seeing your work in print changed how you view yourself, and also how you view your NoMo status?
Hmm, no, I don’t think it has. But writing has given me the purpose and satisfaction that I think many people get from having children.

7. Tell us about the wider reception that you’ve had to sharing your story - has it changed how others have viewed you and your identity as a non-parent?
We’ve had an incredible reaction – more than what I expected. We were nervous at the launch party because we’d booked quite a big venue and weren’t sure we’d fill it. About 15 minutes in, we looked around and realised the room was packed. There are lots of international books about not having kids, but not so many in Aotearoa New Zealand and it really touched people to see their stories told. In fact, we had to crowdfund to pay the writers and we had a huge scary target. By the end of the first day we’d raised the half the money. A beautiful community has built up around the book. I get a bit emotional when I think about it actually.

To be honest, I don’t think I have an identity as a non-parent. It’s a non-issue to me. I decided not to have kids because it doesn’t seem that fun. I feel I made a simple lifestyle choice and if people weren’t so weird about it, I probably wouldn’t even think about being childfree. It’s the reaction to my decision that has made me think about it so much.
 

8. How do you feel about the current representation of childless and/or childfree people in literature?
I get tired of the "messy millennial, can’t look after myself so how could I look after a child" trope. I think it’s the new era of NoMo representation. At least we’re moving beyond witches, mad women and baby-snatchers, but in its place is a trope that’s still pernicious and restrictive, and limits how people see non-parents. When we put out the call for essay submissions, we were astonished that no two essays were the same. It showed us just how many hundreds of ways there are to be a person without children.

9. What would you like the publishing world to know about non-parents, both as writers and readers, and our stories?
Publishers are in the difficult position of working out what stories people want to hear. I often think of Louisa May Alcott, who wanted Jo March to end up a spinster but her publishers said no – she had to be married. I hope the publishing world comes to see that a happy ending doesn’t have to be marriage and babies. There are so many ways to have a happy ending and a meaningful life story.

10. What future plans do you have, especially for your writing?
I’m trying my hand at writing fiction and am having a blast. Now that I live in the UK, I’m also working on getting my books published outside New Zealand.