Michael James Terence Morrissey (born 1942) is a New Zealand poet, short story writer, novelist, essayist, editor, feature article writer, book reviewer and columnist. He is the author of 14 volumes of poetry, two collections of short stories, a memoir, two stage plays and four novels and he has edited five other books.

Michael Morrissey was educated at St Peter's College, Auckland and studied law and English literature at the University of Auckland.

Author

Literary career

Michael Morrissey has published five books of fiction and 14 books of poetry.

Morrissey's fiction and poetry have been published in literary journals in New Zealand and other countries. His work has appeared in Islands, Mate Landfall, Morepork, Climate, Poetry New Zealand, Listener, Pilgrims, Rambling Jack, Printout, brief, Bravado, Comment, Echoes, Tango, Cornucopia, IKA, Takahe, Titirangi Poets, Phantom Billstickers, Blackmail, Trout (New Zealand); Ocarina, Literary Half Yearly (India); New Poetry, Poetry Australia, Mattoid, Inprint (Australia); Gargoyle, Fiction International, Chelsea (United States); Percutio (France); Kunapipi (Denmark). His stories have also appeared in Metro and on newsroom.co.nz.

Morrissey's novel, Tropic of Skorpeo, published in 2012, is a satiric sci-fi fantasy in thriller mode.

His 80 plus published short stories range in genre from neo-social realism to surreal and postmodern styles.

His anthology The New Fiction (1985) was the first anthology of New Zealand postmodern fiction.

In 1979, he was the first Writer-in-Residence at the University of Canterbury. A Fulbright Cultural Travel Award in 1981 enabled him to visit several leading American universities where he studied the teaching of creative writing. On his return to New Zealand, he founded the Waiheke Summer Writing School which ran from 1983 to 1991.

In 1985, Morrissey was the first New Zealand participant in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa from which he earned an Honorary Fellowship in Writing. In 1986, he was the New Zealand delegate at the 48th World Congress of International PEN in New York.

In 2012, he was appointed Writer-in-Residence at the University of Waikato.

Morrissey's essays have appeared in LandfallSee Landfall archive); in NZ Review of BooksSee NZ Review of Books archive); in IslandsIslands Issue 21, p326); in Brief See archive of Brief). In 1996, the Journal of New Zealand Literature included (in Volume 14) Morrissey's essay Lyricism, language and history: New Zealand poetry in 1992 a critical examination of 14 books of poetry - including works by Alistair Te Ariki Campbell, Hone Tuwhare, Keri Hulme and others. That essay was prefaced by a found poem comprising a line from each of the 14 books under review.

Morrissey's art criticism includes A bright apple beckons (a study of Wystan Curnow's art writings) and an analysis of the work of artist Jacqueline Fahey,See Sunday Star Times May 1986

While in New York, Morrissey met and had dialogue with many famous writers. Subsequently, he wrote obituaries based on his personal encounters with Saul Bellow (7 May 2005), Kurt Vonnegut (28 April 2007) and Norman Mailer (1 December 2007) – all published in the New Zealand Listener. He has also written accounts of encounters with Samuel Beckett and Susan Sontag, published in Brief magazine.

Michael Morrissey's blogRefer to https://michaelmorrisseynz.blogspot.com also includes a number of essays.

A short film by Costa Botes of one of Morrissey's stories, Stalin's Sickle, won the Grand Jury Prize at the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival, in France, in 1988. Morrissey also created the original screenplay for The Last Surrealist, a film directed by Paul Judge and nominated for Best Short Film at the 1993 New Zealand Film and TV Awards.

In 2019, he was honoured by the NZ Society of Authors by being included in the NZSA honours list, recognising his years of service to writing in New Zealand and to the NZSA.

Influences An autobiographical essay, Self portrait: Michael Morrissey, published on newsroom.co.nz in 2021, traces Morrissey's writing career and identifies important early influences on the development of his writing. He states that his interest in story-telling dates from his childhood when his Irish father would regale him with retellings of Gaelic myths.

A 1983 interview by Massey University academic Suzann Olsson with Michael Morrissey, published in Landfall 146, contains information on his evolution as a writer, noting how his poetry reflects his reading of poets such as William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens. The interview also traces the many strands that have influenced the evolution of his fiction. Morrissey also discusses the importance in his development as a writer of his Catholic upbringing.

Morrissey's memoir, Taming the Tiger (2011) documents his experiences with bipolar disorder, graphically describing two serious bipolar episodes and his forced hospitalisation. These episodes and Morrissey's mania were the subject of a feature-length documentary, Daytime Tiger, directed by Costa Botes, which premiered at the [New Zealand international film festival in 2011. An abridgement of Taming the Tiger in five episodes was read on RNZ National Radio on 23–27 July 2012.

Morrissey's bipolar disorder is also an important source of inspiration in his later poetry - for instance, his 2018 collection Poems from Hotel Middlemore.

Critics' views

In his extended essay on Morrissey's poetry in Poetry New Zealand in 2008, poet and critic John HorrocksHorrocks, John (2008), "Truth telling: Michael Morrissey's poetry", Poetry NZ 37, Puriri Press and Brick Row, Auckland described the range of Morrissey's verse, noting also that "one of the pleasures of reading these poems is the variety of personae assumed by the poet. This reflects an underlying energy that emerges in startling ways". Horrocks writes "The venturings in these poems are like those ... of the nameless principal of Henry Miller's novel Sexus. There is the same intentness and curiosity about ideas, the writer's licence to draw anything into consideration ... These are some of the reasons why Michael Morrissey's poetry stands apart". Horrocks says that Morrissey's collection Dreams "disturbs as it taps into the familiar territory of dreams: journeys, being trapped, superheroes, erotic encounters, sudden transformations, capricious authority figures and various kinds of death. These are extraordinary poems". Horrocks notes that Morrissey's development as a poet was influenced by Wallace Stevens and Sylvia Plath, and later by Curnow, Tony Beyer and Ian Wedde. Horrocks likens Morrissey's poetry variously to Kafka, Ginsberg, Miller and, especially Walt Whitman.

Critic Jack RossRoss, Jack (2012) The Imaginary Museum notes that Morrissey's "fictions ranged from the Barthelme-like fables of The Fat Lady & The Astronomer (1981) to the gentle postmodernism of Doctorow's Ragtime in his classic story Jack Kerouac Sat Down beside the Wanganui River & Wept ... Paradise to Come (1997), his book of two novellas describing New Zealand's most distant and most recent waves of immigration, remains Morrissey's most accomplished and moving fiction to date". Ross also expresses his admiration for Morrissey's "... earlier works ... where a basic sense of Sargesonian realism underlies his taste for the extravagant and postmodern".

Discussing Morrissey's poetry in The Press in 1981, critic Peter Simpson wrote: "... women and warfare are ... inextricably tangled in Morrissey's mind; most of the poems read like dispatches from the front lines of a succession of sexual battlefields .... The few poems on topics other than the power politics of the bedroom tend to read like what the Americans call R-and-R between engagements ... there is ... a range of tone and mood, ranging through the spectrum of emotional postures from infatuation to bitter disenchantment ..."Simpson, Peter "Christchurch poetry: a revival?" The Press

Critic David Hill, reviewing Morrissey's The Fat Lady and the Astronomer in The New Zealand Listener noted that "... the whirligigs of style are always clever and often impressive, and the steady surrealism is a change from the muscular orthodoxy of much New Zealand fiction ..."Hill, David Bourgeois-baiting, The New Zealand Listener, 1981.

An extended interview with Michael Morrissey (by Suzann Olsson), appeared in Landfall 146. University of Otago literary historian, Lawrence Jones, included an essay on Morrissey's contribution to post-modern fiction in his 1987 collection of essays Barbed Wire and Mirrors: Essays on New Zealand Prose.

Australian critic Peter Goldsworthy wrote: "Morrissey is an extremely funny, extremely inventive writer … brims with a talent that is ironic, intelligent, fascinated by cliché and illuminated by an understanding of all the resources of language ..."

Reviewing Taming the Tiger in North & South magazine in November 2011, Paul LittleLittle, Paul New Zealand Books, North & South, November 2011 wrote: "Michael Morrissey has written a brave, funny account of his mental illness. It begins when he has a breakdown while teaching a writing class – the sort of outburst that could easily be passed off as someone having a bad day. In his case, however, it seems no time at all before he is convinced he has AIDS, develops a way to end crime by holding neighbourhood parties, and comes up with a scheme to make millions by encouraging people to get naked on Waiheke – like that's hard. Finally, he is convinced he is the messiah and wrestles with the tricky question of whether or not to tell people. Lithium comes into play and he slowly returns to normal. Then follows a cycle of feeling well, going off medication and becoming ill again. He learns in the course of dealing with his own illness that his mother suffered from the same complaint and that her mother had died in an asylum. It's a heart-rending and harrowing account, made compellingly readable by Morrissey's formidable literary skills, which have seldom been put to such good use. The objectivity of his self-portrait is remarkable but the real hero is his wife, Anne. He didn't have any choice about living with his condition. She did, and chose to stay, which can't have been easy when he decided she was a demon he had to destroy. ..... [This] is such a raw and thorough examination of a not uncommon condition. The author's stoicism brings to mind the last words of Samuel Beckett's The Unnameable: 'I can't go on. I'll go on.' It deserves a prominent place in the annals not just of literature about mental health but of New Zealand autobiography".

Awards

In 1989, Michael Morrissey was the inaugural winner of the Sunday-Star Times short story prize. He won the Auckland Star/Air New Zealand short story prize as well as the Auckland Teachers Short Story award. He won the poetry prize at Te Awamutu Rose Festival of the Arts 1981. In 1982, The Fat Lady and the Astronomer won the PEN Best First Book of Fiction award .

In 2019, he was honoured by the Society of Authors for his contribution to New Zealand writing. He has been appointed writer in residence by two New Zealand universities. He is an honorary fellow in writing at the University of Iowa.

Representation in anthologies

Morrissey's short stories have been widely anthologised, including in All the Dangerous Animals Are in Zoos (1981), New Zealand Writing Since 1945 (1983), I Have Seen the Future (1986), Metro Fiction (1987), Antipodes New Writing (1987), Short Story International (1987), Penguin Book of Contemporary New Zealand Short Stories (1989), The Oxford Book of New Zealand Short Stories (1992), The Faber Book of Contemporary South Pacific Stories (1994), Rutherford's Dreams (1995), Essential New Zealand Short Stories (2002 and 2009).