Sonya Wilson explains why wonder is at the heart of her novels Spark Hunter and The Secret Green. 

Last winter, about halfway up a small, damp slope in the Paradise Valley, I saw some steam rising from a lump of moss. 

I might’ve walked on past, brushing it off as a nothing-much, but since becoming a writer of fiction I’ve become much more concerned with paying attention to the details of real life, so I stopped, and I sat, and I watched.

A large, bright-green mound of sphagnum was nonchalantly emitting puffs of smoky vapour into the chill southern air. The rising mist caught the sun’s low, slow light and a thick wand of purple then blue then green formed above it, arcing into a full rainbow of colour. More dusty fingers of sunlight poked down through the beech canopy: spotlights for a couple of day-flying moths that entered stage left before flitting past strands of spider silk that caught the same slow sun, blinking and glistening, too. A fantail arrived in a gentle mess of movement and squeaky chatter; a bellbird landed on a branch above and repeated a single melodious note – and still the steam kept rising. As if some hidden creature below was stirring a pot or casting a spell, as if there was something going on in the great web of natural connections we call nature too huge for me to fathom, as if the world was revealing one of its tricks. 

It was just moss and insects and birds and sunlight – flora and fauna and the winter tilt of the earth – but this small moment of wonder, it felt like a religious experience. Or as close to a religious experience as an atheist might get. There was a feeling of transcendence, a sense that something sacred was present, that the forest was more than just a collection of trees. And in the absence of a God with whom to credit it, all I could think was, thank goodness I stopped. What a shame it would’ve been to have left that sight unseen. How many other wonders must I have missed for lack of a pause?

I’ve been in awe of grander scenes of course. Sometimes, in the face of bigger views – at the top of MacKinnon Pass, or in the lee of the Darren Mountains, I’ve found myself so full of wonder that I feel it as a physical pain – so much awe coming at me that I don’t know where to put it. Too much for my eyes to take in alone, it bangs at my chest and my heart slips sideways to make space, as if my body wants to swallow the landscape whole. But that experience with the moss – it left me feeling just as euphoric, just as charged up. These moments of wonder, both the large and the small, they move me. They make me want to move. They make me want to do something.

I’ve started to think that wonder can change the world. 

I’m normally someone with a healthy aversion to hopeless idealism, but this persistent, woody, supplejack vine of an idea has wound around my ankle and won’t let go. Wonder as a force for change. Wonder as a force for good. In a world that feels on the brink of something not wonderful at all, in the face of seemingly insurmountable problems — climate change, war, the insidious creep of technology, the rise of other tyrants, too — what if fostering a simple awe in nature was the first vital step toward resistance? If we can fall back in love with the world, we might just see that what we have left is worth protecting. I’m not the first person to say this, but I’ll repeat it because I believe it to be true: we won’t work to save what we don’t love; we won’t love what we don’t know, and we can’t know what we don’t stop to notice. Wonder starts it all.

At the Auckland Writers Festival last month, I was chairing a session called “Living with the Land” with Irish writer-farmer John Connell and Norwegian Wood author Lars Mytting. We’d been talking about the value of trees and fire, of animals and weather and hard, practical work. “But I want to talk about wonder, too,” I tell them. “Because I think, you know, that wonder can save the world.” (And I hold my breath, waiting to be laughed off stage.)

“Yes,” John Connell says, perfectly straight-faced. “Wonder is a very important thing.”

He’s written a book about farming cows, another about tending sheep. “We are here to experience wonder,” he says. “That is what we have come into this life for, I think. From the birth of a lamb to a sunset over the fields. To not live a life of wonder is to not live at all.”

Lars Mytting tells the audience about the joy of reconnecting to the child he once was, with his curiosity in nature’s smaller things. “Counting the rings of a tree and trying to find the wonder in the small things. We did that a lot when we were small, we roamed around and let the land and nature talk to us.” 

A farmer and a woodchopper, up on a public stage, embracing the power of childlike awe. Team wonder is already building, and it’s a multinational force. The Booker Prize-winning Australian author Richard Flanagan is on board, too: “I realised that it remains such a beautiful world,” he wrote. “If we can just see the world for what it is and what it offers, we would not give up on it. So much blinds us: novels are one form that can help restore a necessary sense of wonder and with it, humility and gratitude.”

A necessary sense of wonder — that phrase has been stuck in my head since I first read that quote two years ago. This is what all novelists are trying to do, I suppose — to create worlds that make our readers care, to encourage that necessary sense. 

All of which is to say: my new novel, The Secret Green, has wonder at its heart.            

Like Spark Hunter before it, it is set in my childhood summer stomping ground of Fiordland – “the wonder country,” as the early pākehā explorers used to call it — a place so full of grandeur and drama and mystery and magic that it has taken me two books now to try and express it, and I’m still not sure that I’m done. 

The Secret Green is full of Fiordland’s real-life amazements, but there is (I hope) awe seeping from the sections of make-believe, too. There are ancient forest sparks with their star-lit stomachs who can converse with glow-worms and stag beetles and who remember the time before humans, when this country belonged to the birds. There is an ancient rimu tree that can shrink and expand both body and mind and a great gleaming green secret buried beneath it all. Enough wonder, I hope, that it lingers long after the reader puts the book down, like glitter stuck to skin days after the party’s over. 

There’s action, too, of course. Thirteen-year-olds Nissa and Tama, the brave and imperfect protagonists, have to negotiate home, family and schoolyard battlegrounds before fighting their way through the forest to face foes both animal and human and, you know, save the world. 

The book has taken me a while to finish. I got stuck sometimes, trying to wrangle all that sparkle and awe, bogged down by the practicalities of plot and structure and character while the words flitted about in the margins, refusing to sit still. But it was the wonder that worked for me. When I said it makes me want to do something — what I did, that time after the moss and the steam, was walk the few kilometres back to my laptop where my manuscript was languishing, sit down and start the process of wrestling all those wild green words into line. I got it done. 

Saving the world is a long-term project. Too long, for the likes of me. I’m 46. My knees hurt. But this was my lofty and earnest ambition, my contribution to the cause: to write a book that might encourage young readers to take their own first steps. To fill them with enough wonder that they want to get outside and hunt for some themselves. And to show them that they can make a difference – that two young humans, with the help of their mates, can leverage their wonder and be a force for change. 

Kids don’t have to be traversing the great wildernesses of Fiordland to experience awe. Suburbia, too, is full of magic. These days, I can find wonder in a fence post. I can quite successfully be in awe of a rock. The trick is in the noticing. The trick is to stop and really see it: that pale green crusty lichen hugging the silvering timber of the fence, the seedling attempting to grow out of the scrap of soil on the surface of the stone.

“The question is not what you look at,” Henry David Thoreau wrote, “but what you see.”

This is the genius of the wish to save the world with wonder. To start the process you just have to walk out the front door. You just have to stop and look at some moss. 

I sat in the chill of the southern winter on that damp slope in the Paradise valley last year, watching that steam rising from the moss, for a good 40 minutes. So long that the fantail grew bold and came close, hopping right up to my damp legs, cocking its head towards me as if to say, shit, this is cool, eh? 

Sometimes, when you stop long enough to wonder at something, more little wonders will approach. 

The Secret Green by Sonya Wilson ($25, Allen & Unwin) is available to purchase from Unity Books.

The Spinoff Books section is proudly brought to you by Unity Books and Creative New Zealand. Visit Unity Books online today. 

https://thespinoff.co.nz/books/12-07-2025/sparkle-and-awe-how-to-save-the-world-with-wonder

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