The 2024 Ockhams Finalists

Explore the finalists for the 2024 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards in these four digital samplers, with extracts from all sixteen shortlisted books.

Over the next month we’re releasing a new digital sampler every week, each dedicated to a different awards genre: Fiction, Illustrated Non-Fiction, Poetry and General Non-Fiction.

You can view read-only versions at Issuu, the New Zealand Book Awards Trust website, or click on the covers below to download samplers and read at your leisure. Then seek out the complete books in bookshops and libraries countrywide.

 

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….Mary and Peter Biggs…..…………………………………..General Non-Fiction Award
…….Award for Poetry…..………………………………….Booksellers Aotearoa New Zealand

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‘What makes a winning essay?’

Emma Neale on Landfall’s Strong Words #3 and thinking aloud about New Zealand culture.

 

The Landfall essay competition has achieved its silver anniversary. In fact, it has bettered that: it turns twenty-six this year. Perhaps we can call 2023 the contest’s ‘art anniversary’. When marking a marriage of this duration, gift guides suggest any presents swapped should have a link to original art. (A Saskia Leek, Nick Austin, Sharon Singer or Star Gossage painting?) An art anniversary seems a suitable time to write an encomium of the award, especially given Landfall’s own constant championing of the visual arts, alongside its celebration of literary innovation and excellence.

Initiated by Chris Price, the first woman editor of Landfall, the essay contest began in 1997, when it was launched as a way to mark the journal’s fiftieth year. Since 2009, the competition has been an annual award. As the Otago University Press website says:

The purpose of the competition remains as it was at the outset: to encourage New Zealand writers to think aloud about New Zealand culture, and to revive and sustain the tradition of vivid, contentious and creative essay writing in this country – as embodied in the non-fiction of early Landfall contributors such as Bill Pearson, in the essays of past winners of this competition, and in the essays the journal continues to publish.

Each year the competition, which can bring in entries on everything from birdsong to an analysis of body dysmorphia, is judged by the Landfall editor. All entries are anonymous, and the winner (announced and published in each November issue of Landfall) receives $3000 and a year’s subscription to Landfall, Aotearoa’s oldest literary print journal. Past winners include Tze Ming Mok, Peter Wells, Tracey Slaughter and C.K. Stead.

The competition’s reputation blossomed steadily, particularly under David Eggleton’s open-minded yet also perspicacious and uncompromising watch. In 2018, when I was the new editor of Landfall, I had an almost comically difficult time winnowing the field of ninety entries. In fact, at one point in the judging process, I wrote to the then publisher, Rachel Scott, with a cry for moral support.

Rachel understood. She dutifully included a POOR EMMA in her reply, and said, ‘Maybe there needs to be a book?’ Jokingly lamenting how few botched, scrambled, deathly dry or amateur essays there were (the dross that would have made the filtering process far more straightforward), I agreed that a book might be a good idea and suggested we could call it ‘Essay, Essay, Essay: What Do We Have Here?’

Clearly I was saving intellectual energy for re-reading and selecting. The wisecracks via email tapered off as I read and re-read the submissions, woke up in the middle of the night with my thoughts fossicking into the pleats or chewing over the rough hangnails of the arguments in some entries. But eventually I wrote to Rachel again with a triumphantly final cull of 37.

She told me to get tougher. Cut-throat, hard-arsed, no more Mrs Nice Guy, I wrestled the list down to 21. Still no go. Then down to 15. Encore, nope: anything more than ten would look indecisive for a prize announcement.  So, once more unto the overreach – I returned to the pile and reconsidered.

I took some comfort from the fact that Rachel Scott was serious about the idea of an essay anthology. It wasn’t my lack of girded loins that made selection difficult: it was the high standard of the entries. Wonderfully, and in quick order, the concept was approved by the Otago University Press publishing board. We hoped that Strong Words: the best of the Landfall Essay Competition (a much better title than that first cross-eyed jest) might become a series; though I did think it was possible that 2018 was an anomalous year.

Happily, it was no freak aberration. Strong Words # 2 combined the best essays of 2019 and 2020; and now, in 2023, Otago University Press has produced the third volume in the series. Strong Words 3 showcases the intake from the past two years of the competition – years which have again been sterling. My co-editor Lynley Edmeades (the current Landfall editor) and I have each separately chosen half the contents – and definitely would have welcomed more, if various factors had permitted.

A double-headed editorial entity might sound like some daunting, slavering Cerberus-skulled gatekeeper. Yet my hope is that our different tastes and aesthetic styles mix in this selection, like fresh and salt water; so that divergent populations meet and mingle in a fertile, estuarine zone, and the collection should attract even more readers.

 

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*    *    *

 

My co-editor Lynley Edmeades is not only a poet but also a serious and searching essayist in her own right. In 2019, I wanted one of her (anonymously entered) explorations of language and gender for the first Strong Words; she had to decline because there were other designs afoot for it. With a PhD in English Literature, Lynley has an interest in the avant garde, in formal experimentations, and in the essay as a place of openness and productive irresolution.

As she says in her article ‘Supposing (Un)Certainty: Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and the Queer Essay’, she is interested in slipperiness, in porousness, in the way an essay can hover ‘in between our conclusive and tidy notions of genre’ and the way it ‘works against essentializing answers and opts instead for supposition’.[1]  The essay, she writes, ‘is a space to explore the possibilities of uncertainty [… ] It hovers in entanglements instead of seeking closure or tidy conclusions. It supposes, I begin to suppose.’[2]

In her judge’s report for the 2021 contest, won by Tina Makereti’s essay ‘Lumpectomy’, Lynley describes the contemporary essay’s permeability ‘as something of an antidote to the atomization and splintering that seems to govern our current emotional dispositions; essays can offer a salve from the dominant and dominating individualism of our age, by showcasing all its antonyms: relationality, vulnerability, hospitality. A place to come out from hiding.’[3]

I wonder, re-reading this, if in our current moment we need the carefully wrought essay even more for its contemplative thoughtfulness and its potential as a site of healing, and rather less than we need it for the ‘contentiousness’ encouraged in the competition’s website rubric. Many readers, surely, witness enough flashpoint reaction, dysregulated argument and deliberate, heated provocation on social media, with its mêlée of pile-ons and self-righteousness, often from bad-faith actors and false avatars.

During my own tenure in the judge’s role, I didn’t actively try to ferret around for the controversial. Yet my choices for the shared first prize in the year 2019 received a scolding personal letter from a correspondent disappointed in the winning essays, which he thought were solipsistic. In fact, both authors – Tobias Buck and Nina Mingya Powles – discussed issues of prejudicial judgements of character based on skin colour: a pressing socio-political issue much wider than the self, and one that is unfortunately both current and perennial.

 

*     *     *

 

 

Before I held the Landfall role, the essays I gravitated towards as a reader were usually on literary, psychoanalytic, or sometimes natural history subjects. I particularly loved essays on poetry and poetic form. Some book titles that still come back to me with the ease of formative songs are Part of Nature, Part of Us by Helen Vendler; Breaking the Line, by Helen Vendler again: Proofs and Theories by Louise Glück; Doubtful Sounds by Bill Manhire. Vincent O’Sullivan’s literary criticism, scattered throughout various works on Katherine Mansfield, had been a touchstone, since my late teens, of transporting non-fiction style: capaciously knowledgeable, critically insightful, compassionate, and alternately lyrical or sardonic as the point required.

In a more random walk, The London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the New Zealand Review of Books and the electric jungle of the internet often lured me off to sink into the work of other essayists: Adam Phillips; Jenny Diski; Jonathan Franzen; Maggie Nelson; Jenny Zhang; Patricia Lockwood: John Lanchester; Arundhati Roy; Oliver Sacks; Ashleigh Young; Zadie Smith; Neville Peat; Jillian Sullivan; Loren Eisley. My willingness to branch out into reading essays on non-literary subjects was fueled by recommendations from canny readers (such as Barbara Larson, publisher at the former Longacre Press, where I worked from 2000–2010), and by the Landfall essay competition itself.

As a younger writer, I always devoured David Eggleton’s competition choices, and also his judge’s reports, which were piquant, concise, perhaps mini-essays in their own right, laced with epigrammatic lines that could serve as barometers of taste and an aspiring writer’s yardstick. Take this, for example:

The best essays are not an escapist form of writing, nor are they slab-like factual articles; rather, they engage with the word directly and are driven by personal passions. Theodor Adorno stated that ‘the law of the innermost form of the essay is heresy’: its purpose is to challenge us with literary evidence of a free mind in play […] Good essays declare themselves by exceeding the expectations of the casual but alert reader; they serve as a means of consciousness-raising, as a form of enlightenment.[4]

Of course, a judge isn’t exactly ‘a casual but alert reader’. A judge has to be steely and exacting about some things. What I found, when trying to hone my critical cleaver and shank my own longlists, was that I had to set aside essays that had gleams of potential but which definitely still needed an editor. In this sense it was quite different from choosing work submitted directly to Landfall. When the choice is between excellent, and excellent-plus, I had to admit to myself that some entries I loved, or on topics I thought were vitally current, were let down by glitches like not having an argument or opinion backed up with persuasive and credible evidence. Or they foundered on comparisons between, say, historical events and current social phenomena that were tonally discordant.

I had to bump otherwise engaging essays because of small eruptions to the reading trance (like a closing image that jarred against the preceding argument or vision); or because the drafts were badly proof-read, so that not only spelling but also meaning was mashed into an illegible pulp. Some essays used quotations totally irrelevant to the point; others had to be passed over because they were potholed by my pet, pet, pet stylistic hate. Not redundant repetition but dangling participles, which make sentences pratfall into unintended semantic catastrophe. (‘Sitting in the bath, the dog appeared at the door.’ ‘Trying on the dress, the bird flew past my window.’ ‘Wearing high heels, the cockroach ran up my leg.’)

So, yes, in a way, a judge does have to be a pedant. But they also have to be able to adjust their vision to and fro, from the texture of the language to the weave or arch of the argument: i.e. from the view of the jeweller examining gemstones through an eyepiece, to that of the hiker looking back at a full panorama, from the crest of a hill just climbed. They need to think not only about the subject territory, but also about the direction and layout of the points the writer contends; the fire and drive of the discussion; as well as, for sure, the topic’s relevance to keen, inquisitive, contemporary readers.

It’s challenging to outline an exhaustive set of criteria for what a judge might scan the entry field for. After all, under the skilled touch of our best writers, even the story behind a toenail clipper collection might seem enthralling.

 

*     *     *

 

Landfall also runs an annual essay competition for young writers. In 2015, Rachel Scott engaged help from the Irish Kiwi writer Dr Majella Cullinane, tasking her with developing marketing ideas for Landfall. Heading towards the seventieth anniversary of the journal, Otago University Press was keen to bring in more young readers. Majella suggested, says Rachel, that OUP developed ‘a younger competition, to encourage school-age teens to get to know and read Landfall.’ Essays were a growing genre, and a distinctive Landfall strength. ‘There was also definitely an element of wanting to encourage young writers to think critically and imaginatively, in the face of the massive impetus for them to spend their whole lives online.’

 

 

The contest was originally named in honour of the journal’s founder, Charles Brasch, who Scott says had a ‘predilection for commentaries’. From 2024 on it will be renamed the Landfall Young Essay Writers’ Competition, the suggestion of Sue Wootton, the new publisher at OUP. The upper age limit for writers will also extend: entries will be welcomed from writers aged 16–25.

Promoted to secondary school teachers around the country, the contest for younger writers can turn up profoundly mature essays that easily hold their own against entrants in the adult category. The youth competition contributes considerably to the vitality of the local form. This year’s winner was Xiaole Zhan’s essay on how music can shape perception of the body. In 2022 the winner was Ruby Macomber’s essay ‘Good Catholic’.

For Lynley Edmeades, ‘the best essays are both waterproof and leaky crafted and open’; and for her half of the selection in Strong Words 3, she sees the common thread being an engagement in ‘the act of learning’ which ‘implies an acknowledgement of the flabby, leaky and largely unknowable world beyond the self’.

What I wanted in my own quest was the sense that the author could unpack their area of expertise or experience with clarity and precision. I hoped to find an informed intelligence but also erudition worn in a light spritz – I didn’t want Landfall readers to feel cornered in the library stacks by tortured souls whose clothes and breath reeked with the odour of monomania. I sought essays that were either animated by a sense of urgency, curiosity, or enthusiasm; or that emanated a calm, reflective wisdom. I also hoped to find work that understood the power of metaphor and simile: deploying what poet and essayist Lynn Jenner recently called, in a creative non-fiction writing workshop in Ōtepoti/Dunedin, ‘the lightening strikes of figurative language’.

Every year, another astoundingly broad display of subjects fans out, shifting and dancing like a pride of peacocks’ tails. Strong Words 3 includes essays on the history of anti-Semitism; on dealing with breast cancer; on the toxic allure of cigarettes; on grief; on language acquisition; on recollections of childhood; on the elusiveness of the link between identity and gender; on the long aftermath of colonisation; on the nature of traumatic memory; and on working as a comedian while solo parenting.

And my thoughts on the general state of the essay here in Aotearoa in 2023? In the introduction I note the etymology of the word ‘essay’ – French for a trial, an attempt.

It seems to me the term encodes the genre’s own openness, its dual acknowledgment of effort and imperfection, and its constant striving for excellence. In the name’s very acknowledgement of the ongoing need to explore and understand, to revisit and rethink, it also ensures its own longevity as an art form. I think the robust health of the local variety, as shown here in Strong Words #3, cheers on that point resoundingly.[5]

 

 

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The contributors to Strong Words 3 are: Maddie Ballard, Tīhema Baker, Rachel Buchanan, Jayne Costelloe, Lynn Davidson, Andrew Dean, Charlotte Doyle, Jessica Ducey, Susanna Elliffe, Bonnie Etherington, Norman Franke, Gill James, Claire Mabey, Tina Makereti, Alexis O’Connell, Sarah Ruigrok, Maggie Sturgess and Susan Wardell.

 

[1] Lynley Edmeades, ‘Supposing (Un)Certainty: Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and the Queer Essay’ Journal for Literary and Intermedial Crossings 7.2 (2022)

[2] Ibid.

[3] Lynley Edmeades, Judge’s Report, Landfall Essay Competition, Landfall 244, November 2022

[4] Emma Neale, Judge’s Report, Landfall Essay Competition, Landfall 232, Spring 2016. In fact, in her section of the Strong Words 3 introduction, Lynley Edmeades also quotes Theodor W. Adorno on the essay: perhaps a reassuring sign of continuity for future entrants.

[5] Emma Neale, ‘Open Fields’, Strong Words #3, p. 9

Takataka te kāhui o te rangi

A new anthology, Hiwa: Contemporary Māori Short Stories, will be published by Auckland University Press on 10 August 2023, featuring work by 27 writers working in te reo Māori or English. It’s edited by Paula Morris (Ngāti Wai, Ngāti Manuhiri, Ngāti Whātua) with consulting editor Darryn Joseph (Ngāti Maniapoto).

The following excerpts are from the book’s introduction:

 

All over the world, storytelling began, and continues to exist, as an oral medium. As contemporary writers with Māori whakapapa, our inheritance is a tradition of shared stories and expert oratory. We also inherit a history of imaginative engagement with the physical and spiritual dimensions of lived experience.

The written story, with its varying forms and conventions, grows from this inheritance. As the written word spreads – through books, newspapers, journals, the internet ­– our stories reach more readers. They influence, inform and spark other writers.

After all, readers and writers connect with each other across oceans, cultures, languages and time. In the 1940s, when Gabriel García Márquez was a university student in Bogotá, a friend lent him a book of short stories by Franz Kafka, translated into Spanish from the German original. García Márquez read the opening line of the story ‘The Metamorphosis’, originally published in 1915, and thought ‘I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories.’[1]

Sometimes the journey is shorter in space and time, but no less vital. In 1955, J. C. (Jacquie) Sturm published an English-language story, ‘For All the Saints’, in Te Ao Hou, the journal published by the Department of Māori Affairs between 1952 and 1975. Sturm’s was the first story in the journal’s ‘Series of Short Stories by Māori Authors’.[2] A decade later, when C. K. Stead included ‘For All the Saints’ in New Zealand Short Stories, she became the first Māori writer to appear in a New Zealand literary anthology. Witi Ihimaera remembers reading the story as a teenager; its publication meant something seemed more possible, more real: a literary career for a Māori fiction writer.

Over time, literary descendants multiply: Gogol, writing ‘The Nose’ and ‘The Overcoat’ in Russia in the 1830s and 1840s, has an influence that travels via Kafka to South America – Borges as well as García Márquez – and to Japan, and onwards to some of the writers in this anthology. Gogol’s influence shimmers via Ernest Hemingway to Acoma Pueblo writer Simon Ortiz – an ardent teenage fan – and then to Sherman Alexie (Spokane-Coeur d’Alene), who first read the work of Ortiz as a university student. There’s a fluid line, too, from Gogol to Chekhov to Katherine Mansfield and, again, to this anthology. Short stories are the wily messengers of fiction, shooting potent darts around the universe and through the centuries.

Short stories are also works of art, each one an experiment and an adventure in language. In his introduction to The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories (2004), Ben Marcus describes stories as ‘language-made hallucinations, fabrications that persuade us to believe in them for their duration’.[3] The fabrication demands a great deal of its writer. ‘The task for me,’ Patricia Grace said in a 1998 speech given in Hawai’i,

 

is to put what is known, the body of knowledge that informs fiction, through a process – bending it, twisting it, bringing language to bear, bringing imagination to bear, bringing individuality to bear, bringing imagery and creativity to bear, bringing research to bear on it. During this process we attempt to push out the edges of understanding of what we know …[4]

 

All the stories in this anthology express the peculiar vision – and talents – of each writer, including their facilty with language. Each story expresses its writer’s individuality, as well as a heritage of sources, traditions and influences. And each story is part of a larger story: of what Grace describes as pushing out the edges of understanding. ‘Stories keep mattering,’ says Marcus, ‘by reimagining their own methods, manners and techniques. A writer has to believe, and prove, that there are, if not new stories, then new ways of telling the old ones.’[5]

 

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The short story is often an entry point for fiction writers and the preferred medium of the writing contest and writing workshops. Since the 1970s, media like the New Zealand Listener and Radio New Zealand have published or broadcast stories by Māori writers. Many Māori writers have received their first recognition as writers through the Pikihuia Awards, a biennial competition that began life as the Huia Short Story Awards in 1995. Over the years the awards have expanded and contracted at various points, embracing and discarding different genres; there is currently a category for poetry as well as short fiction. A number of the writers in Hiwa: Contemporary Māori Short Stories have been Pikihuia finalists, with stories subsequently published in one of the Huia Short Stories anthologies: for many, it’s their first print publication.

In New Zealand today, there are many other opportunities to publish short fiction, from established literary journals like Landfall to the ReadingRoom section of the Newsroom site: in the past two years alone, its editor, Steve Braunias, has published work by thirteen Māori writers. Two of the writers in Hiwa, Shelley Burne-Field and Tina Makereti, have both been finalists for the Asia/Pacific region in the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, organised from the Commonwealth Foundation (an intergovernmental organisation based in London); when the competition was for books, my own story collection Forbidden Cities was a regional finalist. The annual Sunday Star Times Short Story Awards – forty years old in 2023 and a coveted prize – now also has an Emerging Māori Writer category.

Although it is received wisdom throughout the English-language publishing world that books of short stories have lower sales than novels, several of the emerging writers in this anthology – Jack Remiel Cottrell, Emma Hislop, Anthony Lapwood, Colleen Maria Lenihan and Kōtuku Titihuia Nuttall – have recently published debut collections, albeit with independent or university presses. Pūrākau: Māori Myths Retold by Māori Writers has defied the odds, in that it is an ongoing sales success: it has had twelve reprints in three years.

One obvious change from a landmark anthology like Into the World of Light, edited by Witi Ihimaera and D. S. Long, published forty years ago: New Zealand is now awash in creative writing programmes that offer opportunities to study the art and craft of writing. Twelve of the writers in Hiwa are graduates of postgraduate degrees in creative writing from the University of Auckland, AUT, Massey University, the University of Waikato and, at Te Herenga Waka University in Wellington, the International Institute of Modern Letters. Three of us have similar credentials from universities in the USA and Australia. Five of us teach or have taught at one of these institutions. In addition, five writers have gone through the Te Papa Tupu mentoring programme run by Te Waka Taki Kōrero (the Māori Literature Trust); three of us have served as mentors on that programme.

The Covid era has disrupted many community writing programmes, and caused the long-term postponement of the biennial National Māori Writers’ Hui. But more craft teaching and discussion is now being made available online: for example, through the New Zealand Society of Authors’ webinar series. Writers no longer have to make their way to urban centres, or pay high fees, to study story-writing.

Wharerangi, the online Māori literature hub I launched in 2021, was created to help Māori writers access information about opportunities, including Māori-specific residencies at the Michael King Writers’ Centre in Auckland and the International Institute of Modern Letters in Wellington. In the past three years, two Māori writers – Becky Manawatu and Whiti Hereaka – have won the prestigious Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Three Māori writers – Manawatu, Rebecca K Reilly and Anthony Lapwood – have won the Hubert Church Prize for best first book of fiction. Another two Māori writers, Michael Bennett and Monty Soutar, were fiction finalists in the 2023 awards for their novels Better the Blood and Kāwai. The age-old obstacles for Māori writers remain, chief among them the need to make a living in a small market that cannot support literary careers. But openings for Māori to develop as writers and to publish our work continue to grow, along with our confidence and our skills.

 

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This new anthology celebrates the season in which we are all writing – yet another time of growth for Māori writers and writing – in the hope that each year will be even more fruitful. The title is a reference to Hiwa-i-te-rangi, the ninth and final star in the Matariki cluster. In Matariki: The Star of the Year (2017), Rangi Matamua describes Hiwa’s name as

 

connected to the promise of a prosperous season. The word ‘hiwa’ means ‘vigorous of growth’, and it is to Hiwa that Māori would send their dreams and desires for the year in the hope that they would be realised.[6]

 

Hiwa and the star Pōhutukawa are ‘the most sacred of the group,’ Matamua writes, citing a manuscript about Māori star lore begun in the late nineteenth century by Te Kōkau, and completed by his son Timi Rāwiri in the 1930s. One star, Pōhutukawa, ‘is connected to the dead’ and the other, Hiwa, ‘deals with the deepest desires of the heart’.[7] Matamua quotes a karakia to Hiwa:

 

Takataka te kāhui o te rangi
Koia a pou tō putanga ki te whai ao
Ki te ao mārama.

Let the stars fall from the sky [my wishes]
And be realised in this world
The world of light.[8]

 

This anthology follows its predecessors by placing a stake in the ground. Here it marks the vigorous growth of story-writing by Māori writers in the twenty-first century, each of us building on centuries of precedent, both spoken and written. It also sends a wish soaring high into the night: for more writers to give the short story serious consideration, and for more readers to explore its artful pleasures and possibilities. More stories, more readers, more stars falling from the sky and taking shape in a world that is constantly re-written and re-imagined.

Writers featured in Hiwa: Contemporary Māori Short Stories:

Shelley Burne-Field / Jack Remiel Cottrell / David Geary / Patricia Grace / K.T. Harrison / Aramiha Harwood / Whiti Hereaka / Emma Hislop / Witi Ihimaera / J. Wiremu Kane / Earle Karini / Anthony Lapwood / Colleen Maria Lenihan / Nic Low / Tina Makereti / Becky Manawatu / Atakohu Middleton / Kelly Ana Morey / Paula Morris / Pamela Morrow / Airana Ngarewa / Zeb Nicklin / Kōtuku Titihuia Nuttall / Rawinia Parata / Ngawiki-Aroha Rewita / Alice Tawhai / Nick Twemlow.

 

 

Footnotes:

[1] Peter Stone, ‘Gabriel García Marquez: The Art of Fiction No. 69’, Paris Review, Issue 82, Winter 1981, https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3196/the-art-of-fiction-no-69-gabriel-garcia-marquez

[2] J. C. Sturm, ‘For All the Saints’, Te Ao Hou, December 1955, https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/TAH195512.2.16

[3] Ben Marcus (ed.), The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, New York, Anchor, 2004, p. xv.

[4] Patricia Grace, From the Centre: A Writer’s Life, Auckland, Penguin, 2021, p. 201.

[5] Marcus, p. xiii.

[6] Rangi Matamua, Matariki: The Star of the Year, Wellington, Huia, 2017, p. 33.

[7] Ibid, p. 35.

[8] Ibid, p. 62.

 

 

 

‘My work always comes from somewhere else’:

Pip Adam on not liking theatre, scrutinising comedy and questioning realism.

 

My son tells me he has started reading my book. ‘Oh,’ I say, realising quite abruptly that I hadn’t expected him to do so. ‘I like the way it’s a play,’ he says.

For the last year I’ve been talking to artists about what makes them laugh for my podcast Better off Read. I love making my podcast. I love listening over and over again to voices. The soundwaves I watch and edit have become my happiest place. It’s a profound experience to listen to words out of their context, at a distance from the bodies that created them. Recently I was listening to Jo Randerson and me talking on stage at an event last year. It’s a split-second moment: Jo says, ‘Pip loves theatre’. It’s an in-joke between us and possibly we are the only people who hear the playful counter-fact in the way we do. The sarcasm of the comment raises a laugh from the audience, but maybe they are laughing at the fact that I hate being on stage, that my body makes strange shapes when people are looking at me. Maybe they are laughing because Jo’s delivery of the comment gives them permission to release some of the tension my discomfort raises. But to me – and possibly Jo – this throwaway line recalls many conversations with me saying things like ‘I don’t get theatre,’ or ‘I don’t like theatre,’ or ‘I could never do theatre,’ and Jo saying, ‘Are you sure?’

My son is correct, of course. The first third of my book, it appears, and to my surprise, is like a play. The book is called Audition. I keep saying to people it’s meant in the sense of a synonym for ‘hearing’. But of course, the book is an appeal in the form of a performance. The role it wants is that of conversation-mate: it wants to be in dialogue with a reader’s own thoughts and experiences. It wants to perform a reality that isn’t here in the hope this experiment will open up the tiniest creak of a possibility. This performance doesn’t come out of the blue. It’s in rehearsal with Samuel Beckett, James Kelman, Andrea Lawlor, Jordy Rosenberg and the rest of the touring troupe I hold in my head and heart. The beep-beep of their work is the sonar I hear in my body as I write – ‘warmer, warmer, warmer, cold’.

 

 

The reason I start talking to people about what makes them laugh is because I’m interested in what comedy, especially live stand-up comedy, solicits from the body – the immediate and spontaneous noise it draws from a crowd. The laugh; the palpable discomfort at the absence of the laugh in the space where the laugh should be; or the presence of a laugh where it shouldn’t be. There is something incredibly profound about an art form able to make a group of people give themselves up. Crack through whatever personalities we build around our inner selves. This real-life effect of an imagined and created performance astounds me every time I experience it.

I figured these performances of ‘joke’ must have some deep relationship with the ‘real’ world to elicit this effect. Some shared agreement about the ‘real’ world seemed necessary for comedy to work, because so much of comedy relies on a surprise subversion or mistaken understanding of the ‘real’ world: ‘I was wondering why the Frisbee was getting bigger, and then it hit me’.

In the relationship between stand-up and the ‘real’ I recognised a possible explanation for the move of my own work further and further from realism. It flummoxes me how this has happened. I have theories; I’ve said things when people ask. But I’ve never been able to fully get at what I’m up to. Or perhaps what the work is up to. My work always comes from somewhere else – I feel a lot more like a ‘host’ than a creator.

And as my work took this turn, I saw quite starkly how strange that term ‘realism’ was. That my work felt more real to my experience of being here when it included women who ate with octopuses or doubled in the night or grew and grew. I realised that realism, like all writing, is a manufactured thing, not a mirror or a reflection of our world. It has its quirks and style and patterns and somehow, somewhere, someone powerful told us it was real.

I don’t want to make a claim for imagined worlds simply as a better mirror for our one. My favourite works present new worlds free from the structures of this world. But escape seems almost impossible. Of course, we are all new worlds – none of us experiences the ‘here’ exactly the same. Yet our world is the place from which we read and where we have learned how to be, all of us carbon-based and oxygen-breathing.

As I watched more and more comedy, and read more and more about the psychology at play when we laugh, and talked to more and more people about what they found funny, I couldn’t help wondering if there was an explanation to be found in the way actors and comedians use their bodies and their life experience to create imagined worlds that create a bodily response in an audience. That there might be something in the relationship between comedy and the ‘real’ world that could explain why my imagined worlds felt closer to my lived experience than when I put on the costumes of realism.

I found a video of Bridget Christie in gaffer tape antennae and swimming goggles performing A Ant as part of The Alternative Comedy Experience. While at first it may look like a thinly veiled comment on the ‘women aren’t funny’ trope, Christie’s routine somehow produces something new, apart from both the ‘real’ world and that of a human-sized ant who has taken a stand-up course – not to learn how to tell jokes but to learn how to stand up. This doesn’t depend on any clever special effects that suspend disbelief: at one point Christie struggles with her goggles and, completely in character, shouts, ‘I can’t see a thing in these.’ The success of this work doesn’t come from any desire to transport the audience to a world where an ant as we know it does stand-up. We’re always aware that Christie is under the bad ant costume, and that what she is doing has a hint of the ridiculous, an ant impersonation that fails. The shimmer caused by having to hold two things in our head at the same time builds, I think, a sense of discomfort, of the ‘not quite right’ – that might also, with different lighting and mood, lay the foundations for a jump scare. But in this case the relief from this build-up of nervous energy results in a laugh instead of a scream.

 

 

Psychologists Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren coined the phrase ‘benign violation’ which posits that ‘humour results when a person simultaneously recognises both that an ethical, social or physical norm has been violated and that this violation is not very offensive, reprehensible or upsetting’. Christie is an angry and unlikeable ant. The performance begins with her reprimanding the sound person for playing the song ‘Ant Music’ as she came on. ‘You’re ant-ist!’ she shouts, drawing an uncomfortable and deliberately tone-deaf comparison to racism and ableism. I’d argue the resulting laugh, like almost all the laughs of the performance come from a sense that an ethical, social and physical norm is being broken by a person pretending to be an ant. An ant, the tiniest thing, cannot hurt us. The woman dressed as an ant, obviously in performance, alerts us to the made-up nature of the anger.

The routine ends with one of my favourite performances of social chaos which makes visible the tenuous bond of politeness and obedience which hold society and reality together. Christie explains that as an ant she doesn’t recognise applause at the end of a performance and wants everyone to boo her instead. A lone person boos and after some back and forward with that person she says, ‘The other alternative is I can just go off to absolute silence’. And she leaves immediately and abruptly to the strangest mix of cheers and boos. Josie Long, acting as compere, comes on stage shaking her head, arms folded and says in mock disgust, ‘I feel like there’s no trust left in this room.’ This observation gets a huge laugh. Freud would call this release. ‘When the punch line comes,’ writes Giovanni Sabato in Scientific America, ‘the energy being extended to suppress inappropriate emotions, such as desire or hostility, is no longer needed and is released as laughter’.

 

 

What I recognised in Christie’s work is the breakdown of the false dichotomy of ‘real’ and ‘fantasy’. The leakage that happens between the things we agree as a society exist and the things that one person makes up and shares with society. The things we keep private and the things we share in the common.

I’m unhappy with any way of saying the ‘real world’ because there is so much power in deciding what is real and what is imagined. ‘The reasonable man’ gives me the fantods. Late in his leadership, Prime Minister John Key would often enlist the agreement of ‘any reasonable person’ when making a point – suggesting that anyone who disagreed was not. One of the things I find so refreshing and exciting about the absurd, like A Ant, is that it challenges the neutrality of reality. It calls often on dream logic, on deep instinctual reflexes that suggest reality is not so fixed. When a whole room reacts to a woman speaking as an ant it shows we must have some shared idea of what an ant would sound like despite the fact any ‘reasonable man’ would agree no one has heard an ant talk. Christie’s audience ‘reacts’ rather than laughs, because the absurd is not always aiming for a laugh. Unlike more conventional rhythms of humour, the absurd leaves space for personal reaction. When asked to boo in the face of the convention of clapping, one man boos. When the conventions of leaving the stage are broken, it’s every person for themselves.

It occurs to me that what I might be aiming for in a book like Audition is more akin to the absurd than it is to Science Fiction or Fantasy or Social Realism. While writing it I returned again and again to Samuel Beckett’s novels and perhaps leaned even more heavily on Not I and a particular interview with Billie Whitlaw.

This is why the book perhaps shares more with performance and theatre than with literature. One of my favourite definitions of the absurd is this: ‘Absurdity in art shows an inverted and contradictory version of reality that juxtaposes multiple realities in order to invite people to look at life differently’. I think this might be what I am hoping for, satiating is my desire to disrupt reality, or to make the world we take for granted strange. There is so much we have been made to think of as innate or natural: the economy, punishment, power. I am trying to create an atmosphere that makes it possible to question these systems, and this involves destabilising the reading experience.

One of my favourite books of the last few years is Kai Cheng Thom’s Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir, a book that reinvents the memoir by using fantasy elements to tell the story of a real life. Like Christie’s work, this type of formal genius questions what we know. Its destabilisation makes us open in a similar way to comedy.

Judging my work against the idea of ‘benign violation’ helps me write about violent aspects of our society that allows them to be visible and at the centre of new conversations rather than ones that follow a particular rhythm. This balance is a hard one – destabilising without doing harm – but I think it is a helpful and productive way of beginning to talk about the things that feel harmful in our world.

 

 

 

 

Kevin Ireland, Gentleman Poet

A tribute by Johanna Emeney

 

The death of Kevin Ireland OBE on 19 May 2023, just two months short of his 90^th birthday, is a deep loss. Kevin was a talented and prolific author, whose legacy of poetry collections, memoirs, short stories and novels is testament to his great skill as a creative, and to his dedication to the writing life. That he was able, in his late eighties, to write and perform his poetry so energetically, and that he was visible in his much-loved Devonport community until the last few months, will have made his death a terrible shock for many.

It seems almost impossible that we will not hear from him again. Kevin Ireland will be greatly missed, both as one of Aotearoa’s literary icons, and as a person who took a genuine interest in helping and encouraging emerging authors. What follows is a personal tribute to Kevin, based on one grateful recipient’s experience of his kindness and mentorship.

 

 

Chris Cole Catley organised a meeting between me and Kevin Ireland one afternoon in 2009. She had been promising to introduce me to one of my poetry heroes for some time, but I hadn’t expected something quite so impromptu. Ten minutes earlier, she had rung to tell him she was bringing her ‘new young poet’ over for a cup of coffee. Chris used to do a lot of telling. There was never much advance warning.

When his front door opened, Chris gave Kevin a quick kiss on the cheek, and then she started walking back to her car. ‘I’m just going to pick up a few things. You two enjoy!’ she called. I burned with embarrassment, and I could see that Kevin, too, was feeling a tad uncomfortable with the situation; he stood at the open door, staring at Chris’s back.

We muddled through the first five minutes, stumbling around shyly for things to talk about while Kevin tried to locate milk and sugar (he took his coffee black), and then, thank goodness, we were off, England and animals filling half an hour before Chris returned with her shopping.

After this initial meeting, Kevin offered to go through the whole manuscript that I had submitted to Cape Catley; he worked with me on it for months. He gave the speech at my launch. I still have no idea why he did all this other than his innate generosity and kindness. Kevin blessed other fledgling writers in this way. In fact, when talking with his wife, Janet Wilson, the week after Kevin died, I remarked that there must be many people who felt as I did — so grateful to her late husband for his faith and mentorship. Janet replied, ‘Well, that’s what he did for me, too. He gave me confidence in myself’.

 

 

If you ever saw Kevin at a double-launch, where his book was being celebrated alongside that of another poet, you may have noticed how he was never one to steal the spotlight; he frequently made more of the other book, or praised and bantered with his colleague on stage, making the event a real two-hander. I used to love going to such events — not just to hear Kevin read, which he did consummately, but also to observe a master class in how to treat others. Every card I sent him over the years was addressed to Kevin Ireland, Gentleman Poet, because that was how I perceived him, equally the brilliant poet and the perfect gentleman.

Kevin made the people he liked feel seen and special, whether it was by sending a copy of his newest collection pre-launch or simply by writing something lovely in response to an email. However, the fact that Kevin was, at heart, a self-effacing person made anyone harbouring a large ego or an overweening ambition seem strange and amusing to him. Self-aggrandisement was anathema to Kevin, and he had some wonderful jokes and asides about the literary circle’s arroganti. That’s not to say he was mean; his comments were simply apt, witty, and, often, wonderfully well timed. He could also direct his sense of humour mercilessly on himself, particularly as age made for the odd infirmity. I recall once talking with him on the phone after he had fallen down outside New World in Devonport. I asked him if anyone had helped him up. ‘No,’ he said, ‘But a couple of schoolgirls stopped to have a good laugh. Silly old fool.’ I was so upset by this. One of our taonga poets on the ground, and kids laughing? No one helping him up? There was no indignation to Kevin’s response; he was simply annoyed at his body for starting to betray him.

From his mid-70s, Kevin used the body’s failings as fodder for his poetry. Alongside love, friendship, poetry, fishing and dogs, health and aging were right up there as key Ireland themes. What I think is so admirable in Kevin’s writing is possibly what was so admirable in Kevin the man: the poems are so unassuming and yet so deeply layered. With the exception of one or two intentionally hefty works like ‘A Fine Morning at Passchendaele’ written in 2017 for the 100th Anniversary of the eponymous battle, Kevin’s poems are often talky, confiding; they have the laid-back air of riffing on a theme at a dinner party. It is only when you stop to study the metre, the turn of the lines, the nuanced phrasing, that you can appreciate the care with which they have been crafted. There is also a beautiful spirit to the poems — most usually a golden optimism, and sometimes an insouciant rebelliousness.

In his first memoir Under the Bridge & Over the Moon (Vintage, 1998), Kevin sums up his attitude to non-conformity:

 

The truly valuable side to non-conformity is that it is as irresistible as the grass that has the power to crack a concrete pathway. It splits the dull appearance of our best efforts to crush and conceal the anarchic aspects of our humanity. Yet its reward is seldom more than the private satisfaction of knowing that it can be a privilege to fill your mind with free thought, even at the risk of being in the wrong yet again — though I suppose it’s always a consolation to believe you’re wrong for the right reasons.

 

Kevin’s views on things always appeared to me to be liberal, and for the underdog. He didn’t like unfairness, and he despised a bully. Poems about Kevin’s childhood are few, but they are among the most poignant of his oeuvre because they describe it as ‘an experience/to be endured then never talked about’ — never talked about that is except with his younger brother Anthony who predeceased him in 2013 (‘Family Types’, Shape of the Heart, Quentin Wilson Publishing, 2020). In ‘Family Types’ Kevin describes the two brothers sitting in Anthony’s shearing shed, having one of these conversations:

 

just the two of us, sharing a sad joke
or recollection of unkindness we’d carry
with us to the grave. The subjects
that we could mention only when alone

seemed slight, but each held poison
we had learnt to deal with safely.
You get to handle lethal instabilities
and deadly menaces in families.

 

His memoir gives many insights into the violence and unhappiness of Kevin’s youth, but what stands out is the resilience of the little boy. Kevin’s resilience was a constant until his 89th and last year. I phoned him on the way to a poetry reading in Devonport, in December 2022. I thought I might pick him up on the way and we could go together and watch. For once, I didn’t get an ebullient reply. Instead, Kevin was rather flat. He was recovering from a recent surgery, and he didn’t feel up to much of anything. He told me he was getting fed up with getting older and the toll it was taking on his body. Then, he rallied. ‘Don’t stop asking,’ he said. ‘Absolutely lovely of you to ask.’

 

 

 

 

‘The spaceship of our ancestors’ 

Gina Cole on writing Pasifikafuturism and discovering a ‘galaxy of islands’

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I have always been a science fiction nerd, largely due to the steady diet of Hollywood science fiction programmes I grew up watching on television in the 1970s: Star Trek, Time Tunnel, Land of the Giants, I Dream of Jeannie, Get Smart, Dr Who. Some of these productions have been rebooted or updated for new audiences, which speaks to the enduring appeal of the genre. I have loved science fiction ever since.

However, what those Hollywood productions had in common was a lack of representation of any people of colour – except for one show, Star Trek. Star Trek was influential for me because of Nichelle Nichols, who played Lieutenant Uhura. Lieutenant Uhura – a Swahili name – was a communications officer on the starship Enterprise, and she was in constant dialogue with Captain Kirk. It wasn’t unusual for me to see a black woman and a white man in conversation because my mother is Fijian and my father is Pākehā. But Lieutenant Uhura was the only black woman on television or anywhere else in cultural production in 1970s Aotearoa that I was aware of as a young person.

There were also very few science fiction novels written by Pacific writers. This remains the case today. I wanted that to change. So when I enrolled to do a PhD in creative writing at Massey University, I decided to write about science fiction and specifically science fiction set in space, featuring Pacific characters and Pacific culture, for a Pasifika readership and anyone else interested in science fiction written from a Pacific Ocean point of view. This is what I call Pasifikafuturism.

The Pacific Ocean is a vast body of water covering one-third of the Earth’s surface. Sometimes it’s called the blue continent, the biggest continent on Earth.

 

 

The colonial view of the Pacific was that of ‘islands in a far-flung sea’, a perspective which suggests smallness and isolation, helplessness and solitude. From an Indigenous perspective, as Tongan academic Epeli Hau’ofa wrote in an influential 1993 essay, it is ‘a sea of islands’. This suggests a vast expansive region and a sense of connection. Indigenous Pacific peoples share an interconnected web of relationships and cultures through our common geographic location in the Pacific. The title of Hau’ofa’s selected works, published in 2008, is We Are the Ocean. The sea is our highway, a fluid biotic mass that connects us.

 

 

Although Indigenous Pacific peoples do not have a pan-Pacific identity we do share many cultural practices, including an ancestral culture of waka building and a navigational culture of ‘wayfinding’ or celestial navigation. The waka is an Indigenous Pacific technology shaped by the Pacific Ocean environment, and a container of cultural knowledge, equalling any Western model of physics. Waka builder and master navigator Hoturoa Barclay-Kerr defines wayfinding as ‘the ability to travel across thousands of miles of ocean safely and efficiently, using nothing but the ancestral knowledge of the past and the clues provided by nature to find land far below the distant horizon’.1

Wayfinding requires a navigator to sit in the ‘eternal present’2, taking stock of the natural environment around them to navigate to their destination. Wayfinding techniques are cultural knowledge that come from connection and relationship with the environment that enabled my ancestors to navigate across huge Pacific Ocean expanses hundreds of years ago.

The waka is a symbol of the common origins and common ancestry of Pacific people. Writer Herb Kane calls the waka ‘the spaceship of our ancestors, because with it, they made explorations that were, in the context of their culture, just as staggering as our effort to go to the moon and other planets today.’ 3 The ancient knowledge of waka building and wayfinding navigation was nearly lost due to the incursions of the colonial project into Pacific culture.

But these cultural practices have endured. In 1976 Hokule’a, a double-hulled ocean-going waka, sailed from Hawaii to Tahiti and back following customary ocean pathways without the aid of modern instrumentation. Barclay-Kerr notes that Hokule’a’s inaugural voyage marked ‘the first step in the reawakening of a dying Pacific practise.’4

 

 

This brings me to the Pacific concept of the ‘vā’. Samoan writer Albert Wendt defines the vā as the ‘space between, the betweenness, not empty space that separates, but space that relates, that holds separate entities and things together in the Unity-that-is All, the space that is context, giving meaning to things.’5 Accordingly, vā can denote the space between two people or two islands or two planets. In Pasifika culture it is not empty space. It is a space of connection, and it needs to be nurtured and cared for.

The re-emergence of our ancestral practice of wayfinding navigation is a present-day expression of the persistence, strength and evolution of Indigenous Pacific culture.

Pasifika cultural practices like this and waka building, together with the Pasifika perspective of the vast Pacific Ocean as a ‘sea of islands’, and the concept of the vā or the space between, underpin my formulation of Pasifikafuturism.

In writing my novel Na Viro, a work I describe as Pasifikafuturist fiction, I take these cultural practices and principles up into space – into ‘a sky of islands’ or a ‘galaxy of islands’ or even a ‘universe of islands’. Interstellar space is a future setting for our Pacific cultural practice of wayfinding navigation, a way of travelling through space, and a model for leadership. I seek to subvert colonial conceptions of Indigenous Pacific culture in both form and content, to enact Indigenous knowledge and to re-enlist an Indigenous Pacific imagining of the future through story.

 

 

The writing and publication of Pasifikafuturism was a way for me to explore anti-colonial mindscapes which embody the spirit of struggle and survival for Indigenous peoples in the Pacific. The novel’s title, Na Viro, is Fijian for ‘whirlpool’. It’s a science fiction fantasy about a young Fijian Tongan Majuran woman named Tia Grom-Eddy who leaves her home on Namu Island in the Pacific to join a spaceship captained by her mother, Dani. Tia travels into space to rescue her sister from a whirlpool. A central narrative thread running through the novel is the metaphorical idea that there is an ocean in space and a galaxy in the ocean.  The Pasifika science of wayfinding navigation can be transferred from an oceanic setting to a cosmic one as a means of navigating both realms: both are connected in the vā.

The term Pasifikafuturism was inspired by my research into Afrofuturism, which includes science fiction written by African American writers, and Indigenous Futurism which includes science fiction written by First Nations peoples in North America. I say ‘includes’ because these are cultural movements that bridge all the arts – not just literature but also design, fashion, dance, fine art and music. The Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms6 describes these as representations of possible futures arising from non-Western cultures and ethnic histories that disrupt the ‘imperial gaze’.

Similarly, Pasifikafuturism recognises – in artistic form – a Pacific Ocean point of view on technology, creative ideas about the future, and science fiction. This viewpoint provides a tool kit to recover Indigenous histories that may have been lost in the colonial project and to create counter futures. It is anchored in our relationship with the Pacific Ocean and our cultural practices. Our ancestors used the sun the moon, the stars and signs in the Pacific Ocean environment – as well as waves, currents, clouds, winds and birds – to navigate across the sea. Wayfinding provides a methodology for envisioning the future in imaginative, transformative and positive expressions of Pacific peoples in science fiction.

 

 

 

Footnotes:

1 Barclay-Kerr, Hoturoa. ‘From Myth and Legend to Reality: Voyages of Rediscovery and Knowledge’. Global South Ethnographies, edited by Elke emerald et al., Sense, 2016.

2 P.24, Spiller, Chellie et al. Wayfinding Leadership: Ground-Breaking Wisdom for Developing Leaders. Huia, 2015.

3 Kane, Herb. ‘Wayfinders a Pacific Odyssey: Ask the Expert Herb Kane.’ www.pbs.org/wayfinders/ask_kane.html.

4 Ibid

5 Refiti, Albert. ‘Making Spaces: Polynesian Architecture in Aotearoa New Zealand’. The Pacific Dimension of Contemporary New Zealand Arts, edited by Sean Mallon and Pandora Fulimano Pererira, Te Papa Press, 2002.

6 Edited By Taryne Jade Taylor, Isiah Lavender III, Grace L. Dillon, Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Routledge 2024

 

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Feature header image: Fijian drua SEMA MAKAWA, a double-hulled war canoe. Courtesy of the New Zealand Maritime Museum Hui Te Ananui a Tangaroa, 1993.367.1

Second-Best Sellers

Catherine Robertson on commercial fiction.

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The question I’m asked after, ‘What kind of books do you write?¹’ is ‘What is commercial fiction?’ If I reply that it’s pretty much everything that isn’t literary fiction, that only leaves people more confused. I can tell because the next question they ask is, ‘What is literary fiction?’ Or, more often, they start moving away towards the snacks.

Let’s imagine I’m not at a party losing the battle for attention to miniature sausage rolls. What is a useful definition of commercial fiction? How does it differ from literary fiction? Do these distinctions even matter?

The commercial fiction category is no help because it’s far too broad. It overlaps at one end with genre or mass-market fiction – crime, romance, sci-fi and fantasy – and at the other with literary fiction. In between, it contains women’s fiction, historical fiction and that imaginative catch-all for the rest, general fiction. Everything including the kitchen sink, in other words.

I could say that what all these books have in common is that they’re expected to sell well. But then I’m ignoring a truth summed up by a cartoon I once saw: it showed a publishing house team in a strategy meeting. One of the team is saying, ‘I’ve got it! From now on, let’s only publish bestsellers!’

The truth is there’s an alchemy around bestseller-dom that’s as unfathomable as the QI scoring system. Mediocre books become bestsellers. Truly terrible books become bestsellers. Books published years ago leap back into the charts thanks to Tiktok, Netflix and/or Elizabeth Gilbert. Weird experimental books win big literary prizes and become bestsellers that no one reads. And, of course, brilliantly written books, books by previously successful authors, and books that secure massive advances through fierce publisher bidding wars sink like stones. Just because we label a book commercial doesn’t mean it will be. Again, unhelpful.

I think we get warmer when we look at how the books are written. UK literary agent Ella Kahn, says, ‘Commercial fiction (whatever the genre) tends to be more driven by plot and character development, and literary fiction by stylistic or thematic concerns … A high quality of prose is important for both categories, and thematic explorations and plotting can be just as complex in either. But in commercial fiction that quality of writing might also be defined by a certain degree of “readability” or “accessibility” in the style that perhaps makes it more instantly engaging.’

I’d argue that all writers, unless they’re hobbyists or egomaniacs, want readers to be engaged. The most important distinction then, I believe, has to be about intent. What kind of experience does a writer intend their readers to have? How do they want their readers to engage?

 

   

 

John Updike’s first rule for constructive criticism is: ‘Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.’² I’ve seen people critique Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood for falling short as a thriller. Is it meant to be a thriller? Joanna Trollope was accused of pretending to be more literary than she is, when she’d probably agree with Terry Pratchett that his major service to literature was never to try to write any. The only fair way to judge a book is to first understand the author’s intent.

Back to my earlier question: do these distinctions even matter? They do to me and my fellow commercial fiction authors because New Zealand doesn’t value us. As a nation, we seem to be hung up on the binary of perceived quality: literary fiction is by and for intelligent people, while commercial fiction is by and for cabbages, or – as Lucy Ellmann said about Agatha Christie novels – people with bad head colds. Our major book awards have never, until this year, included commercial fiction. Writers of literary fiction are most likely to receive arts grants, and most likely to be invited to national and overseas literary festivals. I’ve been invited to festivals more often as a session chair than I have as an author.

Obviously, I have a bug up my arse about this. My bug is not that we’re missing out on all these opportunities, but that we’re missing out on readers. The impression given is that our commercial fiction books are Not Very Good, when the message we ought to be giving is that pleasure can be found in a variety of reading experiences.

Here’s an example: I read Danielle Hawkins’ When It All Went to Custard and lost myself for an afternoon in an entertaining story of a woman struggling with mid-life issues, and I read Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport and focused keenly for three weeks on a 1000-page non-stop internal monologue of a woman struggling with mid-life issues. The two reading experiences were diametrically opposed. But both books were smart and funny, and I enjoyed them immensely. Five stars each.³

Unless we’re very rigid in our habits, we vary our other experiences all the time. Take food: we can admire the vision and artistry of a Michelin-starred chef, and we can also appreciate the perfect simplicity of a few great ingredients combined, as in a caprese salad. Or TV: sometimes we’re up for the entire back catalogue of Ingmar Bergman and other times, we want to binge old episodes of Vera. We don’t believe we’re downgrading by choosing the latter options; we’re tailoring our experience to our mood. Why can’t we view books the same way? Why can’t we read each book on its own terms, as Updike advises, with an understanding of the experience it aims to deliver?

It doesn’t help that commercial fiction is marketed in such an imitative way. Walk into any bookshop and note the strikingly similar covers. Same font, same colours, same woman walking away, same man in silhouette beside a single streetlight. This is a strategy to attract readers: if you liked that, then we hope you’ll like this other book with the bright bold Instagram-friendly pattern on it.

 

     

 

What is does is lump together authors with entirely different styles, blurring any sense of each author’s personality, and creating disappointment when a promise of a certain experience is not fulfilled. (Yes, this also happens with literary fiction, but a lot of New Zealand literary fiction is published by smaller presses who like to create more bespoke covers for their authors. Fight me.)

What will it take to get New Zealand readers to value New Zealand-penned commercial fiction? Reese Witherspoon optioning our screen rights? A commercial fiction awards? Creative NZ issuing an official announcement that we do not suck?

 

     

The different faces of the 2020 bestseller by NZ writer Rose Carlyle.

 

It helps that Michael Bennett’s crime novel, Better the Blood, was a finalist for the big Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the 2023 Ockham NZ Book Awards. It helps that Allen & Unwin have launched an annual prize for commercial fiction manuscripts, won last year by Josie Shapiro for her debut Everything is Beautiful and Everything Hurts. It helps that Hachette has launched a whole new commercial fiction imprint, Moa. It helps that some bookshops actively promote our work. It helps that, despite persistent rumours, our major creative writing schools do accept authors of commercial and genre fiction.

On my bedside table right now, I have Anne Tiernan’s The Last Days of Joy, a battered Terry Pratchett, and The Candy House by Jennifer Egan. Each of them will provide a distinctly different reading experience. What would help most is more readers willing to mix things up. I promise that your lives will be the richer for it.⁴

 

    

 

 

1. Before that, they ask, ‘Have I heard of you?’

2. We can forgive the ‘him’ because Updike was talking about himself; his rules were written out of personal exasperation.

3. Yes, I did read the whole of Ducks, and when I next have a spare three weeks, I’ll read it again.

4. I can’t promise you’ll enjoy every book. The 1-star Amazon review of James Joyce’s Ulysses was pretty fair when it said, ‘This is a tough book to read unless you understand several languages and are on LSD.’

 

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Catherine Robertson is a commercial fiction author and co-owner of Good Books, an independent bookshop in Te Aro, Wellington. In 2020, she was the CNZ/International Institute of Modern Letters Writer in Residence. Catherine is Chair of the Hawke’s Bay Readers & Writers Trust and on the board of Verb Wellington. Catherine’s latest novel is Spellbound (Penguin Random House, 2021).

Ockham NZ Book Awards 2023: Spreading the Wealth

Like the Auckland Writers Festival, the Ockham NZ Book Awards returned to the Aotea Centre this week, after last year’s excursion to the more intimate Q Theatre. Also back: musicians on the stage, Jack Tame at the MC podium, the big harakeke flower display, and some writers reading for longer than their allotted four minutes. Still, the awards show was pacy and the audience lively, and from the mihi by Tui Hawke and Blackie Tohiariki to a number of the shortlisted books and the majority of speeches ­– including from the Hon. Willow-Jean Prime, Associate Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage – the use of te reo Māori reminded us of where these awards take place and the unique culture they celebrate. The evening’s final speaker, Ockham Residential’s Mark Todd, called for a change next year: we should be saying the Ockham Aotearoa NZ Book Awards, he said, and the enthusiastic crowd seemed to agree.

There are four genre categories in the book awards, and the biggest and broadest of them all is the General Non-Fiction category. It’s depressing that although high-quality local nonfiction books are thriving in New Zealand, this award has had no sponsor for its $12,000 prize since 2020, when the Royal Society Te Apārangi withdrew its support. There are annual calls for the category to split – there were six nonfiction categories in the Montana NZ Book Awards days – but none of these are backed by sponsors willing to put money on the table. The greatest clamour these days is not for a return to sub-categories like ‘Reference and Anthology’ but for a separate category for memoirs and collections of personal essays, even though these books form one of the smallest groupings of entries within the category.

This year’s longlist and shortlist will do nothing to appease memoir-and-essay fans, especially as books by Fiona Kidman, Gaylene Preston and Kate Camp didn’t survive the longlist cull, and writers like Mohamed Hassan and Jan Kemp didn’t even make it that far. In their place was one memoir, Noelle McCarthy’s bestselling Grand (Penguin); an investigation into a hidden history, Paul Diamond’s Downfall: The Destruction of Charles Mackay (Massey University Press); a portrait of Northland tupuna, A Fire in the Belly of Hineāmaru by Melinda Webber and Te Kapua O’Connor (Auckland University Press); and the massive doorstop of landmark scholarship that is The English Text of the Treaty of Waitangi by Ned Fletcher (Bridget Williams Books).

 

 

The judges in this category were columnist Anna Rawhiti-Connell, scholar Alison Jones, who has won this prize for her own memoir, and historian Te Maire Tau. Both Fletcher and McCarthy are debut writers, and the judges broke with tradition by awarding each a prize: Fletcher the main award, and McCarthy the E.H. McCormick Prize for best first book. When his name was called, Fletcher looked stunned, but the judges’ comments suggest why his book won: it ‘sheds new light’ on the Treaty’s implications ‘and contributes fresh thinking to what remains a very live conversation’.

 

 

The decision to spread the wealth with the popular McCarthy suggests this year’s judges were skittish after the howls of outrage last year when Charlotte Grimshaw didn’t win this category with her memoir The Mirror Book. The winner then was Vincent O’Malley’s Voices from the New Zealand Wars / He Reo nō ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa, which means this is the second year in a row that Bridget Williams Books has published the nonfiction winner.

Though controversies over the poetry list won’t excite most in the New Zealand media, this was an unusual year for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry, judged by three poets – Diane Brown, Serie Barford and Gregory Kan. Five of the eight longlisted books were debut collections. Missing from the list entirely were Elizabeth Smither and Robert Sullivan, both of whom had new books in 2022, and when the four finalists were announced, the well-reviewed and more established longlisted names – Janet Charman, Chris Tse – were gone. Still standing were, essentially, four emerging poets.

Two are debut writers: Khadro Mohamed and Joanna Cho, the latter dressed for the event in a vivid blue hanbok and a pair of white gomusin shoes. Anahera Gildea’s shortlisted collection was her first full-length poetry collection; Alice Te Punga Somerville is the author of a scholarly book and a long-form essay, but her shortlisted collection was her first book of poetry. That book, Always Italicise: How to Write While Colonised (Auckland University Press), won the award, collected by her nephew Matiu on Te Punga Somerville’s behalf: she now lives in Canada. ‘Always Italicise shines for its finely crafted, poetically fluent and witty explorations of racism, colonisation, class, language and relationships,’ said the judges.

 

 

Khadro Mohamed, winner of the Jessie McKay Best First Book of Poetry award, was also out of the country last night, missing the awards. Her collection We’re All Made of Lightning was published by Tender Press, formerly known as We Are Babies Press. This is the second year in a row they’ve published the poetry debut of the year: last year’s winner was Nicole Titihuia Hawkins and her book Whai. (In other name-related news, Tender Press is distributed by the smartly named Expensive Hobby.)

 

 

Twenty-five-year-old Mohamed is the first African New Zealander to ever win the Jessie McKay – a prize first awarded in 1945. Both Mohamed and Cho are diasporic writers; Mohamed was born in Somalia and Cho in South Korea. Gildea and Te Punga Somerville are both Māori writers and both attached to universities: Gildea is a PhD student at Te Waka Herenga (Victoria University of Wellington), and Te Punga Somerville is a professor at the University of British Columbia. Incredibly, she is the first Māori writer to win the main poetry award since Hone Tuwhare in 2002, and in the past two decades only four Māori poets have won the best first book award: Hawkins, Tayi Tibble, Marty Smith and Kay McKenzie Cooke..

The Booksellers Aotearoa New Zealand Award for Illustrated Non-Fiction is typically a hard category to call, with so many strong contenders. It was surprising that Toi Tū Toi Ora: Contemporary Māori Art edited by Nigel Borell (Penguin Random House New Zealand / Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki) didn’t make the shortlist; surprising, too, perhaps, that Robin White: Something is Happening Here, edited by Sarah Farrar, Jill Trevelyan and Nina Tonga (Te Papa Press / Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki), didn’t win the category.

 

 

The judging panel this year was historian Jared Davidson, curator Anna-Marie White, and TV producer Taualeo’o Stephen Stehlin, and both the awards they handed out leaned in a more populist direction. The appealing Jumping Sundays: The Rise and Fall of the Counterculture in Aotearoa New Zealand by Nick Bollinger (Auckland University Press) won the main prize. ‘The cover alone is one of the best of the year,’ said the judges’ citation, describing the book ‘a fantastic example of scholarship, creativity and craft’. In his speech Bollinger thanked some of photographers featured in the book, including John Miller, Max Oettli and Ans Westra. A very surprised by Christall Lowe, author of Kai: Food Stories and Recipes from my Family Table (Bateman Books) – the ‘Edmonds cookbook for our time’ – won the Judith Binney Prize for best first book.

 

 

The final award of the evening was fiction, with its massive $64,000 prize. The reason for the large sum is there in the name – the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction. Jann Medlicott MNZM was a retired radiologist, philanthropist and avid reader of New Zealand fiction, and the money she endowed was intended to support and promote fiction specifically. Last May, she was on stage at the Q Theatre to present the ‘acorn’ in person. She died three months later.

Every year there’s grumbling about lack of equity between the awards and their prize money, and suggestions that the Medlicott funds be spread across all four categories, but this is not possible: the donation had clear terms, and the money she left can’t be shared or re-directed. Our book awards need more generous donors like Medlicott, with a passion for books and writers.

This year’s judges were novelist and past winner Stephanie Johnson, editor John Huria and bookseller Gemma Morrison, and they drew up a longlist with some surprise inclusions – like the dystopian fantasy Chevalier & Gawayn: The Ballad of the Dreamer by the late Phillip Mann (Quentin Wilson Publishing) ­– and disappointing exclusions, like Colleen Maria Lenihan’s debut story collection Kōhine (Huia) and Ruth Bayley’s outstanding World War II novel Barefoot (Eden Street Press). The finalists’ list was even more controversial, with past winners Lloyd Jones and Vincent O’Sullivan out, and three ‘genre’ novels rubbing shoulders with another past winner, Catherine Chidgey.

Two of these outliers were historical novels: the bestselling Kāwai: For Such a Time as This (Bateman), a first venture into fiction by historian Monty Soutar; and Mrs Jewell and the Wreck of the General Grant (Cuba Press) by Cristina Sanders, based on the true story of a nineteenth-century maritime disaster and the young woman who managed to survive. A crime novel by screenwriter Michael Bennett, Better the Blood (Simon & Schuster), was the most surprising inclusion of all: novels about detectives on the trail of a serial killer may shine at the Ngaio Marsh Awards but usually not at the Ockhams or its various past iterations. (All four writers discussed their novels in a round table published here earlier this month.)

 

 

Catherine Chidgey’s acclaimed The Axeman’s Carnival (Te Herenga Waka University Press) was the popular winner of this year’s prize: she previously won in 2017 for The Wish Child, so now has a second lurid acorn to add to her collection. Winner of the Hubert Church Award for best first book of fiction was Anthony Lapwood for his ‘unfailingly inventive’ debut story collection Home Theatre, also published by Te Herenga Waka University Press. Like Soutar and Bennett, Lapwood is a Māori writer, the third in four years to win the Hubert Church – following Rebecca K. Reilly in 2022 and Becky Manawatu in 2020. He’s also the first male Māori writer to win any kind of fiction award since Alan Duff in 1997, for What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?

 

 

That three Māori men were longlisted in the fiction category this year is a big deal, overlooked by most media. Is this just an unusual year or a hint of a new wave forming? What’s needed, still, is fiction for adults written in te reo, not simply translated. The Mūrau o te Tuhi / Māori Language Award awaits its first fiction recipient. It’ll happen, hopefully sooner rather than later. In 2014 every single winner at the Book Awards was a Pākehā writer apart from debut poet Marty Smith. Times change, and so do our publishers, our books and our awards.

 

 

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Tom Moody is an American writer and editor living in Auckland.

 

Ockham New Zealand Book Awards: Fiction Round Table 2023

This year’s finalists for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction are novelists Michael Bennett (Better the Blood); Catherine Chidgey (The Axeman’s Carnival); Cristina Sanders (Mrs Jewell and the Wreck of the General Grant); and Monty Soutar (Kāwai: For Such a Time as This).

The writers talked via Google doc through the month of April 2023, with questions from Paula Morris.

The Ockham New Zealand Book Awards take place at the Aotea Centre in Auckland on Wednesday 17 May. 

 

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Paula: In New Zealand, readers buy more local nonfiction than fiction – and yet some of us keep writing novels. Why did you write your novel?

Cristina: I think most of the novelists I know will say they write because they don’t have any choice. It’s a compulsion, a hard-wired obsession born of the way we make sense of the world through story. I write novels because fiction is the way I explain truth. For me, understanding is not so much about empirical details but what they add up to. There are few historical facts known about Mrs Jewell, and yet we can recognise the hero she must have been by imagining a story around her.

But the fiction/non-fiction debate is an interesting one, and there is a lovely grey area between the two where most learning happens. Whether you prefer to learn about life from textbooks (written to an agenda with inevitable cultural bias and potentially dodgy source data) or a well-researched fiction (solidly based in time and place with invented dialogue) is personal preference. There is truth and invention in both. Mrs Jewell’s story could be written as nonfiction or a novel. I’ve tried to put her in that grey area between.

Catherine: Kia ora koutou – so lovely to be in your company. I wrote my novel because I had been carrying that title around since 2008 and desperately needed a book to attach it to! Also, as for Cristina, fiction is a compulsion for me…I don’t think I’m much good for anything else. When an idea hits me and I know this is the book I’ll write next, I feel driven to get that story out of me and onto the page; there’s an inner restlessness that is only resolved by writing and finishing the book. I love the thrill of slipping inside a character and living as someone else for the length of a novel…in the case of The Axeman’s Carnival, I got to live as a bird. Why would anyone NOT want that kind of experience?

Monty: Wow, I didn’t know that, Paula – that local non-fiction is more popular than New Zealand fiction in this country. One of the reasons I switched to fiction was to reach a greater audience. I hope I won’t be disappointed. As to why I wrote the novel, most people wouldn’t believe me if I was totally honest. One reason is: I just think we don’t know enough about our own New Zealand history. And that there aren’t enough varied perspectives on that history. Historians bring bias when they write on a topic, whether they are aware of it or not, by virtue of their gender, ethnicity, education, upbringing, how much access they have to written and oral sources and so on, so that no two people produce the same perspective of a past event/s. I wanted to give a Maori perspective (not ‘the’ Maori perspective) of a part of our country’s history and to reach as great an audience as I could. I felt that the novel would give me more freedom to do that.

I’m thoroughly enjoying the challenge and I suspect enjoyment is part of this idea of compulsion mentioned by Cristina and Catherine. Creating something out of what was first just an idea, and seeing it come to fruition is very rewarding.

Michael: I’m loving all your answers to why you write novels. I came to prose from my other world: filmmaking. I wrote a nonfiction book, In Dark Places, about my friend Teina Pora, alongside making a documentary and a feature film about his story. I wrote the book because in 90 minutes of screentime there was only so much I could say about the brutal obscenity of what the justice system did to Teina. Writing the book, I discovered a couple of things. With my other job, a screenplay is a dissolving suture; it holds everything together, then it completely disappears. I am passionate about how a sentence reads, but in two decades of screenwriting, no audience member had actually read a single sentence I wrote. I LOVE that with a book, people actually read the stuff I write!

I also discovered that nonfiction is a hellish tightrope. I was talking about actual human beings who hurt and cry and have been deeply damaged, and on the other hand I was exploring the questionable actions of cops and lawyers and judges who might get fiery and litigious if I represented them wrongly. The legal advice I received on one particular chapter for the nonfiction book was that while everything in the chapter was true, if I included it, I would almost certainly lose my house in the ensuing litigation. With fiction you explore the big truths by making up things that never happened; it’s way more free, and it’s way better on the blood pressure than forever fact-checking and living in fear of being sued!

 

     

 

Paula: Writing fiction offers tightropes of its own: what were the challenges for you all while conceiving and working on your novels?

Catherine: How fascinating, Michael…I think I’ll stick with fiction’s freedoms! Although I do become obsessed with my research, and the need to get my facts straight. One of the main challenges for me was writing convincingly as a magpie (and yes, I know how absurd that sounds, even as I type it). Obviously, Tama’s experience of the world – and of the human world in particular – is very limited, so at the start of the book I wanted him to use expressions drawn from that limited experience. For instance, he describes the house where farmers Marnie and Rob live as ‘yolk-yellow’; he says Rob has ‘riverstone eyes’. Later, as he learns more, his vocabulary broadens – so when he is back in the wild and is learning to fly, having encountered windows in the farmhouse as well as Marnie’s hands, he says that ‘hands of glass’ seem to hold him aloft.

I was also very conscious of needing to get the details of high-country farming life correct. To that end, I was lucky enough to be able to talk to several high-country farmers from Central Otago, and I also picked the brains of my husband, Alan, who grew up on a high-country sheep station. Some of Rob’s childhood reminiscences are lifted from Alan’s childhood (picking mint for pocket money; shooting at the superphosphate man with a toy gun; etc). I was also able to read his late mother’s diaries from that time, which were a huge help in terms of the rhythms of the farming year and the small daily details that bring it to life.

Finally, I spoke to a long-time woodchopping commentator in order to get the scene at the Axeman’s Carnival right.

Cristina: Michael, you say ‘With fiction you explore the big truths by making up things that never happened’. As a historical fiction writer I had to laugh. I’m not going to get sued or lose my house for getting things wrong, but the descendants will come knocking. (Some already have – Jewell, Sanguily and Teer descendants – so far it’s all good.) Also with any fiction writing, and you’ll all know this, there is that obsession to get details right so your readers trust you. Catherine left me believing she probably was a magpie in a previous life and I’ll be watching for the falling feathers when we meet.

So, yes, research was the biggest challenge for me. There were two parts to it. Firstly, the evidential: which of the shipwrecked men had shoes? Dysentery or scurvy giving them the runs? How would they have made soap? How slowly does one die of copper poisoning? Seals or sea lions? Cathead or catshead? Plus (and it’s a biggie) where’s the damn wreck? And secondly, the psychological: what did ‘truth’ mean in the 1860s? How did class, sex, feminism, religion, maritime culture look in 1866? Group dynamics, PTSD, survivors, guilt: what would a woman have to do to survive in that environment for eighteen months?

Monty: Sorry folks, been missing in action for a while. Mo taku he. It feels like I left the dinner table just as the appetisers were being  served. My father (90 this year) was admitted to hospital a couple of weeks back and the whānau have been taking turns in a bedside vigil. Now he has contracted Covid. I’ve been observing how much pressure our hospitals are under. I had heard all the talk in the media about our broken health system, but when you witness it firsthand it really is concerning.

But back to dinner. It feels like we’ve been served the entree with this second question. A couple of tightropes for me. Given Kawai is loosely based on a true story, I was always conscious of how my tipuna, from whom I created my characters (I’ve coded their names so only those familiar with the story will know who is actually being referred to), might react to what I have said about them.

Although the book wasn’t non-fiction, I was still writing about real people. So Micheal’s point about the tightrope being ‘hellish’ resonates with me and I imagine Cristina in building out the Jewells and her other characters found this too. I personally felt a sense of duty to represent my ancestors accurately, in so far as what I know about them from the oral tradition or what’s been recorded about them, but at the same time I did not want to demean their mana. I found I was always checking myself about whether I had gone too far when creating tension between my characters.

The other thing that concerned me was what people were going to say when they learnt that I had made very public a story which up until now had been reserved for the marae or hapu or iwi wananga. In time I realised the people that I was really worried about were my pakeke (elders), most of whom have passed on. One day I came to this realisation: what good is this story if it goes to the grave with you? They didn’t share it with you so that you could bury it. That was a turning point for me and it’s partly what’s driven me in writing Kawai.

Cristina: I wish you a peaceful vigil, Monty. Having someone pass is a strong reminder of how history forms. They are no longer directing their story, and must pass it on. When we write tipuna, or other real character’s lives, we do have that responsibility to look beyond the cautious sepia-coloured images of people displayed in history books and to catch their vibrancy.  The questions are always there: do I have a right to tell this story, can I do this person justice, how will the descendants receive my telling of this life, what have I missed, is this authentic?

From what I’ve seen Kawai has been universally well received; I hope that’s so. Coding names helps, but, as you say, people who know, know. I debated changing the names of my characters, but decided, in the end, that I wanted Mrs Jewell to be remembered in a ‘retelling’ of a true tale of survival. Women are so often lost from history. I wanted to bring her back.

Michael: Monty, aroha and light to you and your whānau from all of us. Monty and I were on a panel together in Wairarapa recently and we both said that with the development and writing and release of our books we were cats on a hot tin roof. Anxiety might be a word. Terror is another one (for me at least). Maybe that’s the biggest challenge and weird underlying job requirement of being a writer – being the cat that willingly walks out onto the hot tin roof.

Feels like all our answers echo in some way around authenticity, a sense of duty to get important stuff right. I want to mihi my strongest rock of support and advice, the pou matua of my book, Ngamaru Raerino (Ngāti Awa, Ngāti Rangiwewehi), who passed away recently. For decades Ngamaru has been a tireless advisor and supporter for Māori storytellers and Māori storytelling, someone who quietly and insistently demanded and ensured responsibility and authenticity in representing te ao Māori, te reo Māori and tikanga. E kore te puna aroha e mimiti ki a koe matua.

My lead character, Hana, is based on a number of strong amazing women in my life, but I’m not in my late 30s, nor female, nor a senior cop, nor a single parent. With prose I’ve imported a process from my other world of film – the story table. Which is pretty much what it sounds: for two or three days you gather a bunch of people round a table whose insights and world experiences are wildly different to your own, and let them loose on your manuscript; inviting them to pull apart what you’ve written, your characters, your narrative. Our story tables had a number of brilliant late-30s Māori women I deeply admire, as well as senior female cops, a just-graduated detective, an ex-Treaty lawyer, firebrand academics, activist performers (Hana’s rapper daughter is pretty much my youngest daughter, down to the same tattoos). Story tables are scary as hell, confronting, thrilling, provoking – and a really great litmus test.

 

 

 

Paula: This collaborative approach is quite different from the idea many people have of writing, that it’s a profoundly singular and isolated experience. (The writer in the garret is still a prevailing myth.) Of course, however much we get from research and discussion, we have to write the words on the page, and novels are a lot of words. As Catherine notes, you have to consider idiom, diction, dialogue. Two of you are writing historical novels: how do you avoid both pastiche and anachronisms? How does language for all of you ground you in time and place?

Catherine: Thinking of you and your family, Monty. It was a precious and overwhelming thing to sit at my 90-year-old mother’s bedside last year.

With my two historical novels – both set in Nazi Germany – I was very aware of the power of language to evoke a particular era and place. It was a formidable tool to wield; I was particularly interested in the manipulation and corruption of language at that time, and what that said about the people using/abusing it. With The Axeman’s Carnival, language is still very much centre stage for me, as it forms the bridge between the domestic and the wild – Tama the magpie’s world and the human world. There’s something uncanny about an animal who can communicate using our language – but what kind of consciousness lurks behind that ability? Is it just mimicking? Performing a cute trick on command? This is a question I wanted to explore…how aware is Tama of what he is saying? Different characters hold different beliefs about this, and that colours the way they engage with him. (I know what I think!)

Cristina: I really love a garret. Occasionally supplemented with 40 opinionated teenagers and a pinch of salty sailors, and with a fierce editor when I get smug and think I’ve finished.

For the question of language in historical fiction, the difficulty is that you’re trying to be authentic in contradictory ways – true both to the language of the past and to the essence of the (perhaps real) characters. The words we use and our language intensity has changed over the centuries, damn your eyes and f**k you. I’m not sure if there are any rules. When it works the book sings; when you get it wrong, it grates.

You can find authentic language by reading contemporaneous novels, diaries, letters, papers etc. and use this as a base for era immersion. However, Victorians were boringly verbose in their writing; even the heroes sound petty to modern ears. Where your modern reader accepts Mr Darcy’s pomposity in the classic P&P, an updated story needs a hero ‘translated’ with more vital language – so avoiding pastiche – but with no anachronisms to lob an immersed reader back to the future.  The balance is to use enough, appropriate, specific vocabulary to get the era feel while staying readable in modern storytelling style, ie. remaining authentic to historic characters while not making the heroes sound like dorks.

Michael: Hehe, damn your eyes and f**k you, that’s so funny Cristina! I’m a writer in a garret, don’t get me wrong; my garret right now is our crazy mobile home, converted from a delivery van, and I’ve got it parked up on a hill overlooking Fitzroy surf beach, at my standing desk (we got it cos it’s a two-metre stud), adapting the book. I defer to your considerable expertise, Catherine, and I know research says we’ve given magpies a bad name, but in my head they observe and choose and gather and pick and curate, then from the several million ways that big pile of stuff could go together; the magpie dreams, and constructs their idiosyncratic entirely individual creation, in the way only that particular bird with that particular beak can. Ornithologically I think I just got a D- but I like the metaphor.

Idiom, diction, dialogue – the words spoken by my characters are what I tend to sweat least blood over. They’ve got to sound lived-in and real, of course, and interesting and surprising, I hope. But what they do, their internal processing, how that turns into behaviour that is abhorrent or admirable or just alarming and unexpected; for me all that stuff reveals who they truly are, more than what comes out their mouths. When I’m directing, the biggest thrill possible is in the rehearsal room is when a bold actor gets a good scene, and they say the exact opposite of the dialogue I’d written, or they say nothing at all, and the scene suddenly goes into orbit. I feel like the dialogue I like best in my novels is when the actor on the little screen in my head is doing something really unexpected and fearless.

Monty: Thank you all for your concern about my father. He passed away last week and after the tangihanga there was his kawe mate to attend, as Māori protocol requires. That was followed by my media commitments to the ANZAC coverage. I’ve only just been able to turn my attention to this latest question. Before I answer it, can I say two things: your comments above have much resonance with me, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading all our novels. I am humbled to be in your company – three very different narratives, but each one a riveting read!

As a historian I had the advantage of drawing on years of research when I got the idea for Kawai. My greatest challenge was not the investigation or discussion required but learning how good novels are constructed.

The garret does appeal to me because in my case the solitude it offers is ideal for getting the creative juices going. Each time I drafted a few chapters, however, I had to talk to people knowledgeable about my subject (e.g. an archaeologist, tribal historians) to avoid anachronisms, especially. My editors were helpful in spotting these too.

One of the greatest challenges for me was dialogue. Kawai is set in the eighteenth century when everyone spoke Māori and iwi had their own dialects, more so than today. I was fortunate to find a tribal reo expert to assist me. Ohorere (Jossie) Kaa has had a long career editing Maori language texts and she told me that the challenge Kawai presented was just the distraction she needed in her retirement. We debated how our ancestors might have expressed something in te reo and my editors helped me find the right balance in how much te reo to use in the novel.

Kawai would not read the way it does without the various input by these experts.  ‘Ehara taku toa i te toa takitahi, he toa takitini.’ Success is not the work of an individual, but the work of many.

 

Paula: Thank you all very much for this kōrero, and to Monty in particular for taking part during his father’s tangi. One final question: is there another book – aside from your own, and those by your fellow finalists – that you would like more people to read? Just one book, one recommendation. (For me it’s usually The Dog of the South, a novel by the late Charles Portis). Fiction, nonfiction, poetry: what is the one thing you’d like someone else to read?

Cristina: I nearly always recommend a choice of New Zealand books to people who ask, but if I’m only allowed one then it has to be the best book ever, which for me is This Thing of Darkness, by Harry Thompson. It’s the story of our second governor, Robert Fitzroy, as a young commander of the Beagle with Charles Darwin aboard. It helped me judge historic people in context, more than that really, helped me see how all people derive from their culture and to understand (and almost forgive) how good people can do dreadful things.

 

 

Thanks for instigating this korero, Paula, and for Catherine, Michael, Monty for the chat. Can’t wait to meet you all, in person, soon. And we’re all together again for the HBAF! I’m so pleased to be included in the team.

Monty: I’ll plug a book by a local author: The Girl in the Mirror (2020) by Rose Carlyle, a first-time novelist living in Takapuna. For sheer suspense and whodunnit it’s a book I couldn’t put down. I read it during the second lockdown when I was learning the novel-writing craft. It traverses family dynamics and secrets, deception, resentment, jealousy and lies. There’s lots of other realism too!  You appreciate that you are in the hands of a person who knows yachts, sailing  and has spent time on the ocean. And while there were one or two times I questioned the likelihood of a dynamic playing out the way it was portrayed in the narrative, these instances were not enough to kill the suspense in this excellent read.

 

Catherine: I’m so sorry about your father, Monty. I’m glad you could be with him in his final days. Sending you my deep condolences.

Michael, I love the magpie metaphor too! That’s definitely the way I think most writers work. I have many cardboard boxes labelled IDEAS that I rarely sift through, but feel compelled to keep adding to – shiny bits and pieces of stories I stumble across.

Cristina, you can’t go wrong with a good garret…unless of course someone decides to build a new subdivision opposite it, which is happening as I type in mine. (The magpies are none too impressed either.)

 

 

As for a book recommendation: Burial Rites by Australian author Hannah Kent has stayed with me for years. Set in Iceland in 1829, it’s the based-on-fact story of Agnes, a young woman awaiting execution for the murder of her master. Kent evokes setting and character in rich detail, and the writing is achingly beautiful – but the other reason for my choice is that we still don’t read enough Australian fiction here, and our books still struggle to find an audience across the ditch. It’s time that changed.

Michael: Deepest sympathies, Monty. All our thoughts and aroha are with you.

I am in total awe of being in such luminous and brilliant company at this table. I pinch myself daily, and hope that it’s as hard to get Mrs Jewell, Axeman and Kāwai right now as it is to get avocados.

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I read In Cold Blood at the age of ten. I still have no idea why anyone let a kid read it. Capote’s incredible control of prose grabs the reader, drags them into that farmhouse basement, flinching at the sight of blood and hair on the walls, walking alongside the killers, hearing the squeaking of their cheap leather jackets, smelling the metallic fear in the sweat of the victims. The book makes the awfulness of violence real and lived-in, not observational. For me it completely changed what writing could be and what writing could do.

See you all on the 17th! Should we coordinate wardrobes, so we don’t clash? Ngā mihi, thank you all and thank you Paula, this has been such an honour to be a part of.

Catherine: Looking forward to seeing you all on The Big Night!

 

C.K. Stead on the attempted murder of D’Arcy Cresswell

The suppressed history explored in Downfall: The Destruction of Charles Mackay by Paul Diamond, shortlisted for the 2023 Ockham NZ Book Awards.

Charles Mackay was a prominent and successful lawyer and Mayor of the city of Whanganui, known as a devotee of the arts and, among other things, for the establishment of the Sarjeant Gallery there. In May 1920 he had dinner at a hotel with Walter D’Arcy Cresswell, an unusually handsome returned soldier visiting Whanganui from his home in Canterbury. In the two or three days that followed some kind of homosexual exchange occurred between the two men.

‘I purposely encouraged him to display qualities in his nature which I expected,’ Cresswell said in a police statement, which Mackay acknowledged as truthful.  ‘On making that discovery I told him that I had led him on, on purpose to make sure of his dirty intentions, and told him […] that he must resign the mayoralty at once.’

Mackay attempted to excuse his behaviour as a medical condition for which he had sought a cure. Cresswell insisted on the resignation but agreed to the suggestion that they meet again in Mackay’s office to discuss it further. There the pleading by Mackay continued, saying his wife and two daughters would be unbearably affected and his own career utterly ruined if Cresswell should expose his homosexuality. When Cresswell remained adamant, Mackay took a revolver from his desk and shot him.

The shot missed the heart and passed through the lung. Cresswell fainted, and Mackay, thinking him dead, forced the revolver into his hand to suggest suicide. But Cresswell regained consciousness, struggled up, hurled a chair through a window and called down to the street below for help.  Mackay tried at first to say it had been an accident, but soon gave that up and, when Cresswell survived, pleaded guilty to attempted murder.  For this he was sentenced to 15 years jail.

 

 

The newspapers hailed Cresswell as a clean-living young returned soldier-upholder of virtue, and deplored Mackay now exposed as a ‘pervert’ (the present day meaning of ‘gay’ was not yet in use) and a would-be killer.

Several puzzles go with this story. Why had Cresswell ‘expected’ to encounter these qualities in Mackay whom he had not previously known; and why should he so vindictively insist on the resignation when Whanganui’s civic affairs were none of his business? This suggests he might have been engaged by some of Mackay’s public enemies to help them be rid of him. It is also possible that Cresswell was trying to prove to himself (and the world) that he was heterosexual. Though he did subsequently marry and father a child, he was very soon divorced and propounding the virtues of ‘the Greek way of love’. He was indeed to make a name for himself (though a wobbly one) as a gay New Zealand poet.  It must be assumed therefore that he could read the signals from Mackay and respond to them in a way which made the entrapment relatively easy. This is a fact which makes Cresswell’s homosexual disloyalty (not to mention his brutality and lack of human sympathy) even more culpable.  Mackay was also culpable, but he was to pay a price for that.

 

 

Questions of this kind are considered in Paul Diamond’s excellent book. Another no one appears to have asked is why Mackay did not face his accuser down and, if Creswell went ahead with the exposure, simply deny it. He could even have reversed the threat, that he would say it was D’Arcy who had tried to seduce him. Some of the mud would have stuck, but there was no real evidence either way, and the extremes of the outcome for Mackay would have been avoided. I suppose it is a measure of how disreputable homosexuality was at the time considered to be that it should have produced in Mackay such panic and desperation.

I heard a lot about this story from Frank Sargeson, who knew Cresswell as D’Arcy and admired him for his prose writing (much less for his florid poetry) but mostly for his commitment to the role of ‘Poet’, which is how he always described himself publicly. I have on my shelves Cresswell’s two autobiographical prose works, The Poet’s Progress, published by Faber in 1930, and Present Without Leave, 1939. Diamond records that Faber’s acceptance of The Poet’s Progress was against the wishes of T.S. Eliot, unsurprising in that in it Cresswell declares ‘no poetry [apart from his own] was written in England now’. To offer a book carrying such an opinion to Faber, where Eliot ruled, was audacious; to have it accepted there, remarkable.

I have also his Poems (1921-27) in which he introduces himself as a ‘Colonial’ offering his work to ‘an older country’ and hoping for its approval.  On the title page of this collection he affixes the quotation

 

But I, no shame

Can ever touch.  I am Fortune’s child,

Not man’s.

 

So far as I know these three are the only of Cresswell’s works published in the UK, where he lived after his Whanganui adventure. I bought the third of them in Bristol in 1958, marked down from 7/6, to 5/-, to 1/6, to 1/-. The poems I bought for 5/- in London in 1960; and the Faber publication in 1965 – all from second-hand bookshops. There had been no reprints and clearly the ‘Colonial’ was having no great literary success; but he did gain some access to Lady Ottoline Morrell’s Bloomsbury set, and an exchange of letters with her, edited by Helen Shaw, was published in New Zealand in a beautiful little hardcover as Dear Lady Ginger in 1983, twenty-three years after his death. He also claimed to have had a friendship with Edward Marsh, famously editor of the Georgian Poetry anthologies, and to have given John Gielgud the benefit of his wisdom on how Shakespeare’s blank verse should be delivered.

His other books – a collection of letters, one of sonnets, and a book-length ballad, The Voyage of the Hurunui – were all published in New Zealand. The Foreword to the ballad, a fine Caxton Press publication (1956), declares that its author is, as always and proudly, ‘tone deaf’ to the ‘loose slangy uproar’ of ‘fashionable verse making’. In the Notes he records that the New Zealanders to whom he sent a copy of the ballad ‘would have none of it […] having their eyes fixed on the far Horizon’ [the fashionable London literary quarterly] ‘and their ears wholly inclined to Great Turnstile’ [the editorial address of The New Statesman].

Tucked into my copy, given me by Sargeson, there is also the programme for a play of Cresswell’s, The Forest, produced by ‘The New Independent Theatre’ in the Auckland Art Gallery some time in the 1960s. This was the group that also put on two of Frank’s plays, The Cradle and the Egg, and A Time for Sowing, with sets painted by Colin McCahon. The Forest, Cresswell once told a friend, contains ‘a tremendous defence of homosexuality.’  Geoffrey de Montalk (see below) describes that part of it as ‘homosexual rant’.

Sargeson aroused Janet Frame’s interest in the Creswell-Mackay story, and I have a number of copies she made of newspaper reports and police records, no doubt with the idea of writing a novel about it. I have also one of several accounts of the matter written by Frank’s friend Bill Mitchell who tried to make a book of it but seemed unable to organise the large amount of material he had collected. Diamond’s book reminds me that I too once intended to make a novel of it, but gave this up when Maurice Gee published his novel The Scornful Moon which reinvents a version of the story in a Wellington setting.

 

 

Although Mackay’s 15-year sentence was brutal and the jail experience very hard on him, he was released in 1926 after only 6 and a half years, and went at once to London, leaving New Zealand behind. In the meantime his wife had divorced him and changed her own and their daughters’ name from Mackay to Duncan, and Whanganui had gone to great lengths to erase his name from public records. Mackay’s mother and siblings, however, remained loyal to him, and his sister accompanied him to London where, Diamond assumes, he took up the life of an active homosexual, cruising the well-known parks, pubs, theatres and urinals for gay assignations. Areas close to military or naval barracks were also popular sites; but it was risky, and a great deal of London police time and energy in the 1920s was spent watching for and arresting gays for their unlawful practices. There is not a lot of real evidence for Mackay’s involvement in these activities. Diamond is probably right in his guesswork here but, only recently released from jail, Mackay would have had to be cautious.

After a year or two Mackay’s friend Hector Bolitho, another New Zealand expatriate, and also gay, wrote of him, ‘England had given his life a benison, soothing him for all he had suffered. […] His pride and laughter came back to him.’

 

 

In London Mackay, ever resourceful, found work as a journalist and in advertising. In November 1928 he moved to Berlin where he was to work as a correspondent for a London paper, and as a teacher of English. It was an exciting city, as Diamond points out, alive with new art (Klee), music (Brecht and Weil), movie-making (Marlene Dietrich, Billy Wilder), and of political conflict (Nazis versus Communists, Communists versus Social Democrats); of extraordinary police brutality, but a seeming haven for homosexual awareness and action.  It was a city especially attractive to gay British writers like Auden, Isherwood and Spender, and Harold Nicholson.

From Berlin Mackay began to send despatches to his paper in London, but also to New Zealand, and even Whanganui, using a pseudonym.  In one he summarised what he considered to be German aspirations:
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The incorporation into the [German] Republic of all the surrounding territory that can be considered Germanic, including Austria. The overlordship of the countries further east, such as Poland. The re-establishment of German influence in Russia, and the development of her riches by German capital and skill. After that a final settlement of accounts with France and the incorporation of Alsace-Lorraine – and more – of Lombardy.  In fact the Empire of Charlemagne once more.
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A decade before the start of World War II, this is superior well-informed reporting. Had he been reading Hitler’s Mein Kampf? He must at least have been listening to what the Nazis were shouting about how they wanted (in effect) to ‘Make Germany great again’.

When riots and demonstrations broke out in May 1929, Isherwood had recently been welcomed to Berlin by his friend Auden who wrote a long poem, ‘1929’ (‘It was Easter as I walked in the public gardens’), addressed to him: it was full of their sense of the violence that was occurring around them, and of its historical significance.  Towards the end come these lines:

 

You whom I gladly walk with, touch

Or wait for as one certain of good,

We know it, know that love

Needs more than the admiring excitement of union

[…]

Needs death, death of the grain, our death,

Death of the old gang.

 

On May 3 Mackay was covering the riots and demonstrations with his Australian-born British colleague Sefton Delmer who would write many years later ‘Berlin in 1928 had everything the editor of a popular paper yearns for – sex, murder, political intrigue, money, mystery and bloodshed.  Particularly bloodshed.’ Through that day the violence continued. The two journalists filed their reports and then dined together at Delmer’s flat.

Around 9 p.m. Mackay returned to the scene of the fighting which the police had cordoned off. Whether he consciously broke the cordon or strayed there by accident doesn’t seem clear, but he was standing watching the action when a police sniper shot him from a rooftop. He was hit in the stomach and bled to death.

Next day Sefton Delmer saw him on a slab in the morgue, ‘his shoes pointing stiffly skyward showing the holes in their soles.’ The German police had made a meticulous list of the contents of his pockets which included ‘1 talisman’.  This was a tiki given him by Whanganui Māori.

A surprising number of people, representatives of Government and police, foreign press association and teachers of foreign languages, journalists and embassy people, attended Mackay’s funeral at St Matthaus Church. There was one New Zealander, the oarsman Tom Sullivan, about whom Mackay had written a column.

The death was widely reported in Germany and Britain, but also in New Zealand where the ‘unsavoury’ circumstances of his departure from the Whanganui mayoralty were skidded around. A headstone was provided for the grave, inscribed only

 

CHARLES EVAN MACKAY

MAY 3^RD 1929.

 

The grave has since vanished, but Paul Diamond has found a photograph of the stone.

 

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Diamond’s carefully researched and well-told account, especially remarkable for the quality of its photo record – including high quality full-page and sometimes double page shots of street scenes in New Zealand and Germany – is primarily focussed on Mackay; but it is also Cresswell’s story. Although D’Arcy achieved some small (and now dwindling) literary recognition in New Zealand there was none, apart from the Bloomsbury association, where he wanted it most, in England. Sargeson’s admiration was limited, and probably of the kind he offered to another expatriate gay writer, James Courage, when he said one of his novels deserved ‘heavily scented brick-bats’. Allen Curnow included Cresswell in both his anthologies of New Zealand poetry, but struggled in the introduction to the first to place him critically, and in the second largely avoided the problem.

In the introduction to his UK-published collection of poems Cresswell’s tone is self-abasing, almost pleading. But in his two autobiographies it is very different and tends to be grand and admonitory. New Zealand is ‘my homeland’ and ‘my country’, but its inhabitants are ‘they’, not ‘we’. There is a sense in which the personality revealed in those two books is insufferably self-regarding, self-advertising and long-winded – but there is also sometimes a wink in the prose, a sparkle, a kind of wit, a faint suggestion of tongue-in-cheek. It’s the prose of a man who is not looking over his shoulder asking himself, ‘What will they think if I say this?’

I notice that I carefully annotated my one-shilling copy of Present Without Leave when preparing for one of Auckland University’s Winter Lecture series in 1961; and when I look at that book again now, I feel I should not write a word about it, or about its author, until I have read it again, and carefully.

Count Geoffrey Wladislav Potocki de Montalk, a poet who was born and grew up in New Zealand but despised democracy as a system of government and claimed to be heir to the Polish throne, said in his Recollections of my Fellow Poets (1983):
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I would say [Cresswell] was a good poet of a very restricted scope. Some of his pronouncements, however pontifical, are decidedly entitled to consideration. All in all he was more gifted and more interesting than the English-born big wigs of poetry, who were battening on the prestige of past generations. Few or none of them were Cresswell’s equals, either as writers or as individuals. […] There is material for a Cresswell legend. […]

There was, of course, the business about the Mayor of Wanganui! In a way, through his Sir Galahad goings-on, Cresswell was responsible for his death. […] Certain of the literati in New Zealand know all about it, and would perform a service to New Zealand literature and history, by putting it on record.
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This Paul Diamond has now done. It would be strange if an effect of Diamond’s book should be to arouse more interest in Cresswell than in Mackay.  D’Arcy is, after all, the one who has left a written record. In the meantime he is at least a marker of a point of terrible uncertainty in our intellectual and literary history; and no one who writes about him is likely to look past what he did to Mackay, a man whose plight he should have understood and sympathised with.

A Postscript on Maurice Gee’s The Scornful Moon: This novel builds on the Mackay-Cresswell story but changes characters’ names and moves it to Wellington and to national rather than local-body politics. It fills in what is unexplained in its subject – was D’Arcy engaged by Mackay’s enemies to entrap and ruin him, and if so by whom? This makes the story more complicated, and perhaps slightly less plausible. It also leaves out entirely what became of the Mackay character after his jail term was served.  It’s a good novel of the kind I used to call ‘conventional fiction’ and spent many years trying, not altogether successfully, to avoid writing. This mode is not in itself either good or bad, and like any other can be done well or badly. Gee does it very well. He is so inside his dialogue, so relaxed and cool and competent in the mode.

I had reviewed in Landfall his previous novel, Ellie and the Shadow Men*, and had concluded that Gee as novelist was essentially ‘a moralist’. I cited Stendhal’s idea that a novel should be a mirror walking down a road, and went on…

When Gee’s writing falls a notch or two below its best it is usually because moralism has got the upper hand. […] Better that the novelist should not think too much about justice and virtue, should put aside moral indignation and get on with making the picture as true to life, the language as generous and exact, as talent and the story will permit.  Say how it looks, report what they do, and get the words right.  The realist’s mirror is safer, and ultimately more charitable, than the moralist’s lamp.
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As if in answer to this, Gee gives The Scornful Moon the sub-title A Moralist’s Tale. His narrator, Sam Holloway, is indeed a moralist – a Puritan, a moraliser who can’t quite face the realities of the present.  In that sense he is distinct from Gee, who may be (and is) inclined to ‘point a moral’ in his fiction, but is more liberal, less shockable, more worldly than his character.

 

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C.K. Stead is a poet, novelist, scholar and critic. His most recent book is Say I Do This: Poems 2018–22 and and the memoir What You Made of It.

 

* See my Kin of Place: Essays on 20 New Zealand Writers, 320-329