He is the author of thirteen volumes of poetry, two collections of short stories, a memoir, two stage plays and four novels and he has edited five other books.
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, Phantom Billstickers, (New Zealand); Blackmail, Trout (New Zealand online), Ocarina, Literary Half Yearly (India); New Poetry, Poetry Australia, Mattoid, Inprint (Australia); Gargoyle, Fiction International, Chelsea (United States); Percutio (France); Kunapipi (Denmark).while his stories have also appeared in Metro and on newsroom.co.nz (Queen of the night , Polack is warming (2022), Sumatran cannabis and Perhaps it was like this (2023)).
Subsequently, he wrote obituaries based on 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.
A Fulbright Cultural Travel Award in 1981 enabled him to visit several leading American universities where he studied the teaching of creative writing.
His 80 plus published short stories vary from neo-social realism to surreal and postmodern styles and also deploy the introduction of famous personalities into the New Zealand landscape such as Jack Kerouac, Charles Fort, Andy Warhol and Franz Kafka.
Morrissey's essays have appeared in Landfall (My Auckland, Work[2]); in NZ Review of Books (A rare breed and a reflection on the death of Hone Tuwhare, entitled No ordinary son[3]); in Islands (Whole man ... tremble, a tribute to Frank Sargeson[4]); in brief (The (my) house, Landing on the moon, and Between two Pacific Islands[5]).
His essays also include a study of Wystan Curnow's art writings, tributes to other writers and comments on cultural matters.
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.
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.
Critic Jack Ross[10] 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" Those earlier works, Ross notes, include "most of the contents of his two books of short stories, ... as well as the three novellas".
Reviewing Taming the Tiger in North & South magazine in November 2011, Paul Little[11] wrote: An extended interview with Michael Morrissey (by Suzanne Olsen), appeared in Landfall 146.
Between 2000 and 2013, Michael Morrissey contributed a monthly book review column to Investigate magazine (since renamed and reformatted as HIS/HERS).
He has also reviewed books for Listener, Landfall, Islands, The Sunday Star-Times, the New Zealand Herald, The Press, Printout, and Quote Unquote.
The ship's crew of conquistadores made friends with the Māori they encountered and helped them fight a rival iwi.
Auckland novelist Graeme Lay, who attended the launch, described the incident in New Zealand Books Vol 28 No.
Lay wrote: “... right on cue, there appeared the long boat, crammed with Spaniards, their helmets gleaming in the winter sunshine.
Graeme Lay reports that Morrissey recalled that he had been contacted by a kuia (whom he later learned was the veteran activist Titewhai Harawira) several days before the event to express concern about the launch.
[14] An interesting perspective of the diversity of Morrissey's writing and his career can be found in Jack Ross' blog Imaginary Museum http://mairangibay.blogspot.co.nz/2012/10/two-writers-2-michael-morrissey.html.