An update on the New Zealand short story
A new old book of short stories has appeared quietly but with perfect timing. Six By Six, an anthology of six short stories by six New Zealand writers, was first published in 1989; Victoria University have released a new edition, and the stories by six masters of the form - Katherine Mansfield, Frank Sargeson, Maurice Duggan, Janet Frame, Patricia Grace, and Owen Marshall - arrive with fresh packaging just as the short story is enjoying a kind of renaissance in New Zealand letters.
The hottest book of 2021 is Bug Week by Airini Beautrais. Her collection of stories was published last year but its win at this year's Ockham New Zealand book awards as best book of fiction sent it soaring to the top of the Nielsen best-seller list for five weeks. New collections are due soon from two major writers – Elizabeth Smither of New Plymouth, and Emma Neale of Dunedin – and Huia are scheduled to publish Girl, the debut collection of stories by Auckland writer Colleen Maria Lenihan, and Southland's 2021 Dan Davin Literary Foundation Writer in Residence, in early 2022.
Coming Home After Dark, based on a short story by Owen Marshall, is about to open in cinemas nationwide. The story features in a newly published greatest-hits collection by the great Timaru author.
Every Saturday, good old ReadingRoom publishes a new short story. The next few weeks will be devoted to stories by writers of colour, who feature in new anthologies: Carol Anu from Sista, Stanap Strong!, a collection of writing by Vanuatu women, and Emma Sidnam, Mikee Sto Doimgo, and Wai Ho, all from A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from New Zealand.
Four short story writers made it onto the shortlist of the 2021 Surrey Hotel-Newsroom writers residency award. Kōtuku Titihuia Nuttall finished in second place. Not right to burden young writers with expectations but the fact remains that the manuscript for her new collection, Tauhou, shows clear evidence of genius. She's a special writer.
As well, about 1000 entries – a record – were received at this year's Sargeson Prize staged by the enterprising Catherine Chidgey for the University of Waikato. It's New Zealand's richest short story prize, with first place coughing up $6000. The judge is Patricia Grace. Her six stories in Six by Six serve as a kind of bridge to a new literature: the number of times a Māori character appears in the stories by Mansfield, Sargeson and Frame appear to be around about zero. Grace's stories include "A Way of Talking", which revolves around a stray remark made by a dressmaker, who says of her husband, "He's been down the road getting the Maoris for scrub cutting." Hera, a Māori woman who has returned to her family from her studies at university, replies: "Don't they have names?"
Māori, the nameless people in so much of New Zealand writing. Roderick Finlayson tried doing something about it in his short stories from the 1930s. Maurice Duggan's most famous character is Fanny Hohepa, in his 1960 masterpiece "Along Rideout Road That Summer", which features in Six by Six. Strange to read it in 2021. It's still intoxicating. It's still really funny. But it's on thin ice: what to make of the way Duggan goes about his portrait of race relations? There are other, probably more constructive questions to be asked about that story – its style, its form, its brilliance - and the other 35 stories in Six by Six, a book which represents a pinnacle in New Zealand writing.
Bill Manhire edited the book. He writes in the Introduction, "The unusual vitality of the short story in New Zealand…must...stem from the fact that this is the form in which our very best writers have done much of their best work." True, when he wrote it in 1989; true, still, of writers such as Emily Perkins, Paula Morris, Fiona Kidman, Witi Ihimaera, and Airini Beautrais, in 2021.
Six by Six edited by Bill Manhire (Victoria University Press, $40) is available in bookstores nationwide.
