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After leaving university, I started trying to get published as a journalist. (I figured a BA in English more than qualified me). My first big break was a story in New Idea about a kid who’d had a seizure playing home video games. I never asked him if he got the high score or not.
All my work for both the now-defunct Evening Post and the Dominion was done on a freelance basis, including film and theatre reviews. The bulk of the work was feature writing. During this time I continued my part-time job from university – laying pipes with an Irishman from Galway who only spoke if someone threw a cigarette into our hole while he was working on a live gas main. I also remember interviewing for a job as a vacuum cleaner salesman in the Hutt Valley. I never got the job.
I was at the Sunday Star Times as Wellington arts correspondent and features boy for three years from ’96–’99. I went overseas for a millennium family reunion in Scotland (think Deliverance with bagpipes) and came back to work in a video store for three years.
Famous people I have interviewed include Lenny Henry, Michael Flatley, numerous Elvis impersonators and Julio Iglesias, who invited me to his island but seemed more than a little tipsy at the time.
I won a spelling bee in Standard Two, aged eight years. The word was musseum (museum).
Link to Matt's Blog on the New Zealand Book Month Website www.nzbookmonth.co.nz