Aug 25, 2026 · 35 min · 11 segments
In this podcast we are in conversation with poet Tusiata Avia MNZM, who has won numerous awards for her work, and published collections including *Wild Dogs Under My Skirt* (2004), *Fale Aitu | Spirit…
Tusiata AviaGuest
Bonnie EtheringtonHostAs part of our conversation, as I said to you before we started recording, that just to connect our two stories together, How when I was diagnosed with an oligodendroglioma, a brain tumor, in 2021, how I was trying to cope was desperately, desperately trying to find any writing, any good writing that... connected in any way at all to brain tumors and um unfortunately what i came across were some really shitty books by caregivers about how cancer was a gift and this brain tumor just taught him so much he never complained and i remember thinking i i hope when i um hit the bucket that people say that I whinged all the time because it's whinging can be really useful.
And it wasn't until I think, I believe it was 2022 when I, I was flipping through your book, The Savage Colonizer book, and came across this cluster of poems in the middle of it.
And I'm just going to read out one of the stanzas for the listeners, if that's okay.
I wake up to my life continuing and to neurosurgeons and their students talking about it.
Teddy Woo turns away from me and says to the nurse, she's riddled with them.
And then uses the words, and then you just listed all of these different brain tumor words that I'd become very familiar with during all my MRI scans.
So words like acoustic neuroma, astrocytoma, glioblastoma, craniopharyngioma, brainstem glioma.
It is frightening, but it is something, and something is something more than the shrugging of Teddy Woo's shoulders.
And I just, when I read that, I just felt like shattered in a good way, shattered in a seen way, and just someone had offered me but it felt like this wonderful someone giving me language and I know that like we have different things going on with our brains but just seeing that word of my brain tumour given space in a book of poetry just meant everything to me.
I'm really you know that's That is such a great thing that you had that experience with that.
And I'm always quite blown away and I hate the word humbled, but it's true, by what readers will experience from some of the things that I write.
I think I wrote that poem from a combination of what did happen in the hospital and the name of the actual neurologist's name, because it's just such a great name.
As part of our conversation, as I said to you before we started recording, that just to connect our two stories together, How when I was diagnosed with an oligodendroglioma, a brain tumor, in 2021, how I was trying to cope was desperately, desperately trying to find any writing, any good writing that... connected in any way at all to brain tumors and um unfortunately what i came across were some really shitty books by caregivers about how cancer was a gift and this brain tumor just taught him so much he never complained and i remember thinking i i hope when i um hit the bucket that people say that I whinged all the time because it's whinging can be really useful.
And it wasn't until I think, I believe it was 2022 when I, I was flipping through your book, The Savage Colonizer book, and came across this cluster of poems in the middle of it.
And I'm just going to read out one of the stanzas for the listeners, if that's okay.
I wake up to my life continuing and to neurosurgeons and their students talking about it.
Teddy Woo turns away from me and says to the nurse, she's riddled with them.
And then uses the words, and then you just listed all of these different brain tumor words that I'd become very familiar with during all my MRI scans.
So words like acoustic neuroma, astrocytoma, glioblastoma, craniopharyngioma, brainstem glioma.
It is frightening, but it is something, and something is something more than the shrugging of Teddy Woo's shoulders.
And I just, when I read that, I just felt like shattered in a good way, shattered in a seen way, and just someone had offered me but it felt like this wonderful someone giving me language and I know that like we have different things going on with our brains but just seeing that word of my brain tumour given space in a book of poetry just meant everything to me.
I'm really you know that's That is such a great thing that you had that experience with that.
And I'm always quite blown away and I hate the word humbled, but it's true, by what readers will experience from some of the things that I write.
I think I wrote that poem from a combination of what did happen in the hospital and the name of the actual neurologist's name, because it's just such a great name.
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