Dominic Hoey returns to Grey Lynn for his new book 1985

There’s a rainbow over Grey Lynn, arching from Surrey Crescent across to Great North Road, and Dominic Hoey is back on Crummer Road to talk about his new novel 1985.

The street is the book’s cover star and where much of its action takes place, in the cold, draughty old villa that’s home to 12-year-old Obi and his family.

Mum’s sick, Dad would rather read poetry at the Gluepot than return to the bacon factory and the Kingswood’s broken. But Obi finds a treasure map, and between that and a video game competition, he figures he’ll get enough money to help keep their home. Backdropping it all is the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior.

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Grey Lynn felt like a natural place to put them. “I may as well set it where I know,” Hoey explains, walking down Crummer Road. “All good stories come from your stories.”

The neighbourhood is written with the observational clarity that comes from first-hand experience, and the book’s empathy for its characters has that too.

His clear prose is woven with poetic turns of phrases, rejecting pretension for deep feeling and universal truths. 1985 is about memory and longing: big dreams, lost ones, and those that never materialised in the first place.

He wanted the adventure be a little larger than life, rather than “getting too hamstrung by realism”. After the third draft his partner at the time likened it to “a really depressing Goonies”.

Obi, who does much of his adventuring with film-fanatic best friend Al, is “way cooler than I was at that age” Hoey says.

“I wanted to think of someone that had some similarities to me, but managed to navigate that world a lot better than I did. And that idea of being great at something that’s a bit useless, like video games.”

He plays Elevator Action, Kung Fu Master and Ghost and Goblins at recognisable spots all over the city: the Surrey Crescent spacies parlour, Fun City. They’re Obi’s obsession, and he’s not alone in finding distraction in a hobby. The characters all have passions - art, poetry, literature, film, breakdancing - and Hoey shows people living in poverty having culturally rich lives.

“When you don’t have many options, that’s when you gravitate towards those things, and it becomes your whole life, because there’s no reason not to.”

The book documents a Grey Lynn that’s long gone. While there are flash cars and new fences now, the 1980s were a different story. Hoey grew up here, moving to the neighbourhood when he was three years old.

“We lived on the corner of Firth and Dryden. It was cool. We were quite poor, but there was lots of art happening, and community. But also lots of crime and craziness at well,” Hoey remembers. “I tried to capture that in the book best I could.”

A lot of groundwork was needed to bring the Grey Lynn of 1985 to life, and it was respite from the usually lonely work of writing a novel.

“This is definitely the most research I’ve done for a book. Interviewing people, getting people to read it to make sure things are accurate. I went through a lot of archives, spoke to a lot of people. It was actually quite cool, I got to speak to people I hadn’t seen in decades,” he says.

“Sharing the manuscript with people who were around at the time was really interesting too.” Some said he nailed it, others had a different memory.

Romanticising the past, particularly when it comes to Grey Lynn, can risk glossing over the real hardships that were part of that history. “I noticed that in the research, when I was talking to some people about it,” Hoey says, and people focused on the nice memories.

“But people were getting home invaded and stabbed and murdered and that stuff as well,” he says. “But I think that’s a trauma response too right? You don’t want to remember that stuff, and you just block it out.”

People get nostalgic about what the villas were like then, before they were all painted white and under special character protection, but in 1985 they’re grim and cold.

“I remember, and I put in the novel, that the ceilings were black. I thought they were painted black, and now looking back I realise it was mould.”

The book was originally called Homesickness (the title changed a few times before they landed on 1985).

“There can be that toxicity of a really tight community,” Hoey says of the play on words. The family of the book, while loving, and rendered lovingly, is flawed and challenged. “I know lots of families like that,” he says. “Even the most chaotic families, there’s usually love in that. People are just dealing with their own shit, and then they have a family, and they’re trying to get through it.”

It’s not easy to write about poverty without sensationalising or slipping into voyeurism. Hoey handles it without patronising or pitying. He’s written about the subject before, in 2022’s Poor People With Money and 2017’s Iceland, and it’s a regular territory for his poetry.

He’s been called “one of the best natural writers in the country”, and Hoey puts that skill to use on the page, as a playwright and, in the early 2000s, as a rapper (he has four critically acclaimed albums under his belt). It’s all knowledge and experience he shares, teaching the Learn To Write Good creative writing course, and working with young people in the tikanga-led Atawahai youth programme. Hoey also co-founded independent publishing company Dead Bird Books alongside Samuel Walsh.

Financing the writing of his latest book wasn’t easy, though he got funding “eventually”, and Hoey’s been candid about his experiences with this in the past.

“It’s challenging for me, I don’t know if it’s challenging for other people. It has been difficult,” he says. “I think I had to apply three times for [1985] to get funded.” There was a lot of back and forth, and the whole process was pretty exhausting.

“The reason that I talk about it all the time is because it’s really important that people know that that’s the reality.”

These days he’s hesitant to endorse the vocation. “I don’t really encourage people to become artists like I used to,” because it’s so hard to make a living. “But if you’ve got it in your blood, you do it anyway. I’ve been writing poetry about that recently; you wouldn’t do it if you didn’t have to.”

Dominic Hoey will be at the Auckland Writer’s Festival, appearing as a panelist at The Happiest Place On Earth (May 16) and Writing Auckland (May 18). Hoey will be promoting1985 around the country: the Auckland launch at Ponsonby Road bar Goblin on May 8, then Wellington’s Unity Books on May 13, Dunedin’s University Book Store on June 5 and Christchurch’s Scorpio Books on June 6.