This story starts in a haunted hotel room with blackened twelfth century beams jutting out over the bathtub. Of course there are ghosts in these walls. I am in Tombland, which, contrary to how it sounds, has nothing to do with buried bodies. Rather, in Old English, the word combined open ground and empty space.

This story started in a confined space, the thirteen inches of my laptop screen. In February 2021 I was a virtual resident of the National Centre for Writing in Norwich, peering at the city from the heights of the cathedral’s peregrine web cam. People were pixellated and then there was snow.

IRL I arrive by car in July 2025, screaming slightly when I see a sign that says Unthank Road. I’ve regoogled the story of the Colonel and plan to walk a virtual walk I took in 2021 out to Eaton Park Cafe for apparently the best bacon buttie but

in the present heatwavey July tense Norwich is sweaty and winding and when I walk straight then left then around a corner I see a Hawk and Owl information place, with telescopes to look up at the peregrines. I look. And I see them.

This story starts when I start crying. First at the peregrines and then when I visit with Dame Julian’s story behind a heavy wooden door with blue writing on a white page stuck to the outside.

Please leave

this door open

There is no full stop. This story starts when Leon, Yeh and I say goodbye at the corner, the cathedral gates locked, and walk our separate ways. It starts when Tiffany, who went to the other Coach & Horses first, reminds me of something I said four years ago. It starts, standing at the bar with Katie, while we talk with the person pouring the craft beers about their writing. It starts across a table, marvelling over Kate’s shelves.  I am so comfortable in the company of writers, of books, of words. Our conversations across a space so full, I am so myself that I disappear. I am in Norwich, and I’ve given away my plans to explore by following research or a map, by any means other than asking. Than walking. Than starting.

This story starts when the Lit from the Insiders pick up scissors and cut into poems.

When they ask me about wildlife in Aotearoa New Zealand and I tell them about that one time a seal played with a friend’s surfboard at the shoreline on St Kilda beach in Ōtepoti Dunedin for ten minutes that seemed like a hundred glorious years.

When I read about the grey seals of Horsey Bay, see more of them on one beach than I’ve ever seen for real and think maybe I should’ve talked about hoiho or kororā instead, little yellow and blue penguins, told them about the place in Ōamaru where the little blues come in every sunset. Tourists pay to sit in the viewing platforms that can be accessed for free during the day, the smell of sea and seals beckoning you around the corner, past the gate. This story isn’t about the penguin webcam and the evenings I’ve watched it, wanting both wild and routine. The webcam doesn’t show the time we tried to climb the harbour wall to watch the tourists watching the penguins, the full moon red with intrigue.

This story starts in a jewellery shop buying a titanium necklace I will later lose, in Shako Mako cafe (come in! come in!) checking poem book proofs, at Dragon Hall, dipping my head to mind the roof.  Each time I start, I ask where next?

People point me to places. I stand on a wall above the market stalls, my phone camera held high as my hand will reach. I send the picture to a friend, tell them I am here.

Liz Breslin

Liz Breslin is a writer, editor and performer of Polish, Irish and English descent, now living in Ōtepoti Dunedin in Aotearoa New Zealand. Her new poem book, show you’re working out, was published in 2025 by Dead Bird Books. Liz’s other poem collections are In bed with the feminists (Dead Bird Books, 2021, 2023), winner of the Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems 2020, and Alzheimer’s and a spoon (OUP, 2017, 2021), one of the NZ Listener’s Top 100 books of 2017.