Peri Hoskins, Author

Date: 18 Aug 2013By: Peri HoskinsComments: 0

Understanding Dharma

A reflection on how the West has come to use the word karma in everyday speech — as payback meted out by an invisible hand — and how the related concept of dharma, as explored by figures like Neal Cassady and Gary Snyder, sits alongside it in the literature Peri draws on.

Category: Blog

Browse the Blog

Posts on writing, travel and the ideas behind Peri's books, archived at the blog index.

East

A novel-length travelogue in the tradition of Jack Kerouac's On the Road. In 1995, junior lawyer Vince Osbourne leaves behind a small, mean, viciously circular life of representing petty criminals and heads out across Australia. The wide continent opens in front of him.

Millennium – A Memoir

A novella-sized slice-of-life travelogue, set in December 1999 in the tiny Pacific Kingdom of Tonga — the first place in the world to greet the new millennium. Across some 20,000 words the book captures old customs, the gentle advance of the new, and has been likened to the work of Ernest Hemingway. Available as eBook and print.

A writer's homepage often serves as a quiet threshold between the inner life of the studio and the wider world of readers. It offers a place where finished pages can rest beside work in progress, where readers can pause to consider the shape of a writer's preoccupations before stepping into the work itself. For an author whose books trace journeys across hemispheres and decades, such a threshold feels especially apt.

Peri Hoskins is a New Zealand-based writer whose work moves between memoir and novel, between the road and the page. The Vince Osbourne series, which includes a novel set in the east and a memoir orbiting the millennium, gives a name and a recurring lens to that movement. The fiction and the personal narrative sit in dialogue, each one lending weight to the other through shared terrain.

Geography is more than backdrop in this writing. The road between New Zealand and Australia, the wide continent beyond the Pacific, and the small towns encountered along the way all become part of the storytelling. Sunsets, rain, and desert light are observed with the attention of someone who has lived with these elements long enough to notice their subtle shifts. A battered bike, a jockey, a thief, a lover of beautiful women, public bars, and Aboriginal encounters all populate the vignettes.

The city, too, appears as a character in its own right. A lawyer leaves the city to travel, or perhaps returns to it, and finds it viciously circular in ways that only become clear once distance has been gained. Petty criminals and courtrooms sit alongside sunsets and rain, reminding the reader that representation and reflection often share the same address. The book holds the courtroom and the road within a single, richly layered narrative arc.

Character sketches arrive in the manner of postcards sent home: a jockey timed at the track, a girl on a battered bicycle, lovers glimpsed in passing, a thief who turns out to be unexpectedly gentle. These figures are rendered with affection but without sentimentality. They form a rich tapestry of human encounters, each one a tiny window into a life that briefly crosses paths with the narrator before continuing onward.

Style matters as much as subject here. The prose favors the rhythm of observation over the urgency of confession, and it allows silence and weather to do as much work as dialogue. Readers who appreciate travel writing that listens as carefully as it speaks will recognize the cadence. It is writing that hopes to understand place through patience rather than through possession or quick summary.

The blog extends these concerns into shorter forms. Posts take a slice of memoir or a piece of creative nonfiction and hold it up to the light, sometimes turning toward poetry and the poets who have shaped the author's ear. References to figures such as Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg appear naturally, suggesting a lineage of road-tested writing that prizes directness and a certain kind of open-eyed wonder.

Themes recur across posts and pages alike. Karma and dharma are approached less as exotic imports than as lenses for examining everyday cause and consequence. The cusp of a new millennium, the approach of a particular December, and the small ceremonies of ordinary days all invite reflection. There is pleasure taken in the interview form too, with other writers and thinkers whose paths intersect meaningfully with the author's own.

Readers arriving at the site are welcomed into a quiet, editorial space. The archive of posts invites browsing at any pace, while information about print and ebook editions remains close at hand for those ready to settle in. New visitors are encouraged to sign in for updates, follow the feed, or simply leave a comment. It is, in short, a writer's small corner of the internet, kept open and well lit.