upon arrival

Asked to write a short intro for Avi Duckor-Jones, I found a column he wrote on the Affirm Press website just over a year ago for the publication of his novel Max. Called “The battle of living in duality,” it deals with the duality of being the son of a “Brooklyn born mother, a rabbi who loves dancing and drumming” and a “New Zealand born father, a writer and rugby watcher”, appropriately, with, in respect of the former, this being the genesis of his other dualities, the duality of here and elsewhere, where here is this strange and dual-named New Zealand Aotearoa, the duality that leads him or anyone, really, to lip sync “for my life,” the unspoken duality of being, as Duckor-Jones is, a condition, I say in his intro, we might all, here, aspire to, the winner of Survivor NZ–the surviving not the winning. And this the column brings out, with sure delicacy, what surviving might mean. It might mean arriving, as the writer of Max says on his return to NZ he does, “after years of ricocheting between selves, I slowly landed. Like confetti thrown up into the air, my parts all eventually settled into the same place.” Upon arrival to coincide