Storytelling gets technical

A residency in Dunedin provided the breakthrough for writer and technical storyteller Karen Wrigglesworth, so she is hoping that another visit to write will prove to be equally successful. She talks to Rebecca Fox about mixing writing with engineering and botanics.

Karen Wrigglesworth has always been fascinated with how things work.

Whether it is an engineering conundrum or the biology of plant hybridisation, Wrigglesworth is always searching for the story behind the problem or concept.

It comes from an early interest in writing but also in the practical so when it came time to decide on a career, Wrigglesworth was quick to rule out teaching or journalism. Writing was seen as a hobby not a career path. A good science programme at school led her to look at other options.

"I’ve got these two sides to myself. I wanted to be a little bit different, so I ended up doing engineering."

On what was certainly not the easiest path, Wrigglesworth was soon to find out a large component of the job was writing reports and communicating with people about what they were doing.

"When I did my degree, I came out the other end and I’ve always wanted to write and I had to kind of start again because I spent so much brain power on the engineering side. Like the two are quite different things."

But when she lost her engineering job she started to think about what she wanted to do. Needing to earn a living, she started writing about a wastewater project nearing its end in Whanganui, sending that off to an engineering magazine.

"I was lucky they took me on and gave me a go and I learnt through doing that. But the initiative, the impetus, was about getting ordinary people to understand how things work, essentially, and what is in their landscape that they walk past every day and they don’t realise, oh, that’s actually a water tower."

So, she then approached the local newspaper, offering to do a series of feature articles about engineering in Whanganui.

"We’ve got a water tower, we’ve got a memorial tower and an underground elevator and bridges, all these things."

For a year she wrote a piece a week about these different structures with the stories growing longer each time.

"People didn’t want me to stop in the end, basically. And those stories became the kind of foundation of my first book."

The idea of a book became a reality when she received the Robert Lord Cottage residency in 2019-20. Balancing a new career and being a wife and mother, she found life was a bit of a juggle, so getting an extended period of time to think and look at what she had was pivotal.

"That was the opportunity for me to say, ‘I’ve got a book here’. I think the other thing is what I’m trying to do is to combine engineering and storytelling. So to turn these things into story as opposed to, you know, another heritage book." 

She also uses her photographs as part of the storytelling and her daughter, who is at art school in Dunedin, created the covers.

"I’m trying ... to mash up the creative and tech and do something fresh with that." 

She was able to finish the Whanganui book Take Me With You! in 2020 and make a start on a similar book about Dunedin, which she ended up splitting into two, one on the city itself, Take Me with You Too!, and one on the region of Otago, which will be launched at Dunedin’s International Science Festival. Take Me With You 3! received a Charles Fleming Publishing Award from the Royal Society Te Apārangi.

"It takes a bit of time to get people to understand what I’m trying to explain because it’s something that we haven’t traditionally tended to think of, these things as compatible or similar, but storytelling is key. We are humans and that means we need storytellers to make sense of the world. And very much that needs to be the approach with how we deal with tech stories."

At a time when people are coming to appreciate a town’s built heritage is not just historic buildings but also other features in their landscape, her books are doing well. Take Me With You! won an Outstanding Contribution to Heritage Award at the Whanganui Regional Heritage Awards and was highly commended at Engineering NZ’s Heritage Awards.

"It’s also about broadening what heritage is. There’s all these different facets to the problem — engineering’s just one part of tech and science and things." 

Around the same time, she also went back to work in engineering and was working with a company which was involved with the Transmission Gully project. She was pulled in to "translate" the public consultation documents.

"That’s when I began to move sideways in the engineering world, doing the writing rather than the engineering."

Her work on that project helped people start to understand the need for technical writers in engineering.

"There was a shift around the way people were bidding for work. So, we had to be more communicative about what we could do for a design solution when we were trying to get work. So, all of those things kind of started to happen at about that time."

While she has built her business in technical writing, a passion project has emerged alongside, a book on iris hybridiser Jean Stevens and her husband Wally.

"I never wanted to just get stuck in the writing about engineering thing. Part of it’s a practical ‘I’ve-got-to-earn-a-living’. So Jean Stevens’ story is fantastic on all sorts of levels because it’s giving me some diversity. And it’s another one of these things that’s just a really important story."

Wrigglesworth, who is related to Stevens by marriage, grew up playing in the couple’s garden, which by then was owned by Stevens’ daughter and husband (Wrigglesworth’s uncle). And there was a  photograph in  Wrigglesworth’s home of Stevens meeting the Queen Mother during her tour of New Zealand in 1966.

"And that piqued my interest over many years. I did at one point ask my uncle and aunt about it and they weren’t very interested in sharing the story with me at that point."

Then her uncle died just after the Covid pandemic and the property, including the Stevenses’ garden, was put on the market.

"I sort of found my mojo. The key thing is I didn’t come to it knowing the story. I came to it knowing the story was important, but not knowing the story."

So, she began to research and talk to people about Jean Stevens. She captured as much information from photos, papers and materials in their home, but it was not until she talked to a friend of her aunt and uncle who was a botanist that she realised the significance of their garden.

"With his help, we realised that the garden had an awful lot of plants in it which were rare, special, unique and so it also became a mission to try and save the garden and to save the plants in the garden and to figure out what we had in the garden."

A group came together to work out what was in the garden while they tried to get the story publicity.

"We were trying to save things. The key problem was that people didn’t know the story. So, we couldn’t say, ‘oh, you know, Jean Stevens’ gardens’."

While Stevens’ work was known internationally, especially in the United States and South Africa in garden circles, it was relatively unknown in New Zealand, so the group struggled. While they failed to save the garden they have been able to establish an iris garden in her name at the botanic gardens in Whanganui.

She hopes the garden and the biography she is writing will keep Stevens’ story alive and promote it as the original garden has now been bulldozed. 

Wrigglesworth also wants Stevens’ work to be seen as an important science story.

"I want to put in the science and encourage a generation of people to get involved with science in that way. And she’s a woman of science that we should be celebrating and no-one’s heard of her." 

As a pioneer hybridiser of irises and leucadendrons, Stevens, who also wrote about her work, was seeking to develop the equivalent of a blue rose.

"So, it wasn’t just something that hadn’t been done before. It was something people didn’t think could be done until she did it. And she did it [hybridising] several times over in irises and also leucadendrons. That’s why she’s so important."

One of Stevens’ last irises ‘Sunset Snows’, which has a beautiful white top, copper pink fall and a tangerine beard was developed in the 1960s and was the first iris from the southern hemisphere to win a prize at an international symposium for irises in Florence, Italy. And it was the first of any iris from anywhere to win three awards in one year.

"So ‘Sunset Snows’ is really important because it’s a recessive. And so when you breed from it, you get this kind of rainbow of results that you can’t necessarily predict."

It has been a huge learning curve for Wrigglesworth and with the help of a botanist, she tried to work out what was in the garden as the Stevenses had gathered seed from around the world and swapped and collected plants with others as they sought to find plants that were viable in New Zealand. 

It required DNA testing to identify some plants. 

"There was one plant in the garden that we found out eventually had come from this small little valley in the back of New South Wales. And we found out that it’s rare and endangered in its native habitat."

The Stevenses also grew cut flowers for florists and were looking to fill a gap in the winter flower market when they started investigating and developing leucadendrons.

Grants also enabled Wrigglesworth to travel to Melbourne, Florence, the United Kingdom and Oregon in the US to continue her research into the pair’s work.

Now at the stage of beginning to pull the information together and starting to write, Wrigglesworth is coming back to Dunedin, this time for a self-funded residency at Caselberg House.

"I was up in Auckland for a couple of weeks putting everything aside, doing an initial bit of writing, and you get all these serendipities coming out of the woodwork and you go, oh, that’s really interesting."

The whole experience has made Wrigglesworth even more convinced of the importance of storytelling.

"The reason we didn’t save Jean’s garden essentially was because the story had been lost. We need to value our story. If we value our stories, then we’re halfway there for what matters."