What makes a New Zealand Story, well, feel like a New Zealand Story

“What makes a New Zealand Story, well, feel like a New Zealand Story. Is it setting or style, character or theme? Or something else entirely?”

This is the question we put to a few of our Issue 11 authors to mull over. First up with her take on this is R.L Nash. Her story ‘The Porcelain Cat of Bordertown’ is set in Australia, but retains its Kiwi flavour through her New Zealand character, a contractor working long stints away from home. R.L is a Dunedin writer. Her short stories featured in Takahē magazine while she was studying speech and language therapy. She has a novel manuscript looking for a home and is drafting another. In between bouts of writing, she’s kept busy mothering, working in unglamorous admin, and sewing wonky seams.

Writing Aotearoa

Quite the puzzle and since people have been telling stories in Aotearoa New Zealand in a mixture of ways and forms for a very long time, to attempt an answer I must first narrow my focus. So, in an optimistic bid to keep this meaty topic simple, my context is written NZ stories that are contemporary fiction in English for adults. But I am not good at riddles and my list of ‘to-be-reads’ is always growing. Clearly, I would need advice.

I started with a quick informal survey of friends, librarians and other random people but after a few strange looks it all played out like some sort of NZ Lit Housie: Have you got: “Isolation”…“Postcolonialism”…“Location”…“Jandals!…“Space – but not as in, like, astronauts” and then: “I have not read one.” Ouch – unhelpful but not untypical.

Well, lesson learnt, I would ask a prolific reader. I’d ask my Mum. I’d be general. I’d ask about the vibe.

“Depressing”, she said

“Charming,” I replied.

“No, not that.”

Bingo, the ever present darkness in all our bright southern light chestnut. Except I read a lot of genre novels written by NZ authors which I’ve enjoyed too much to fully embrace that theory. Then again, there’s an abundance of crime writing and literary fiction from these shores – there’s bound to be stylistic similarities and uniting biting themes beyond the potential mention of custard squares. However, as there are observers and courses a-plenty attempting to sum that up and track social commentary, and since it deserves research, foot-notes and name-checking of people described as eminent, I’ll leave that one alone.

Location was mentioned (and more than three times) in my survey and it is tempting to say setting is the main marker of a NZ story. It’s a definite contender and can be as broad as our landscapes. Scenic drive scenery, small town dairies, the Auckland CBD at 3am, the way up Bealey Spur, forgotten suburbs – all of that and more. But then does it have to be set in NZ? Survey says: Yes. I’m not so sure.

I identify with the travelling New Zealander and he/she crops up a lot when I write – to the point I’m wondering if it’s high time I confiscated my characters’ passports and made them stay put for a change. Perhaps having a Kiwi abroad character is almost cheating? The nationality they take for granted is suddenly overt, you’ve isolated them and they will think of home, it’s inevitable. My characters are always looking back, one way or another.

But I wonder, does a writer sit down at their desk/kitchen table, crack their knuckles and announce to the curtains/fruit bowl: “And today, I shall write a Neuw Zearlaund story”. I hope not, because I believe whether something feels like a NZ story has far more to do with the reader than the writer, and trying to define what makes a NZ story feel like one is like trying to define a New Zealander. What feels like an authentic NZ story to me might not resonate at all for someone else. Aotearoa New Zealand is a complex, layered nation and our perspectives and stories reflect this. No one reads the same story the same. Luckily, I’m not aware of any rules – if a story feels like a New Zealand one to you then, for you, that’s exactly what it is.

For me, realistic dialogue helps a lot but it really comes down to that moment when I think: I know people like that, or of people like that. I work with them, they’re my whānau, my neighbours. This could be happening/have happened across town or along State Highway 1. When I feel a connection to a place or a piece of history – a flash of recognition of something shared. That’s about now or that’s about here. It’s taken more planning, less whim, but since my resolution to read more New Zealand writers, the novelty hasn’t worn off – whether it’s observations from a new immigrant or someone with history in this soil, from the perspective of two friends struggling to run a Northland café or a pensioner doing the groceries in Timaru, I appreciate these stories more because there’s some little stitch linking them all together, though I’m not entirely sure why.

Detail from a dress by Jill Bowie, made from broken CD cases. The dress won the recycled Category in the 2016 Hokonui Fashion Design Awards. Image used with permission of Jill Bowie.

Another question to end with, but an important one I think – if something is thought to be a New Zealand story does that then narrow its appeal? Should we even care if it does? Well this at least I have a firm answer for – No, because you can only ever be yourself, even when you’re trying to tell somebody else’s story. You can never forget where you come from.

Read ‘The Porcelain Cat of Bordertown’ and more in our current issue. Want to become a Headland alum? Submit your work for consideration in Issue 12 by February 9. Check out our guidelines for more information.

Exploring Sense of Place – Do We Write What We Know?

We are continuing our ‘Sense of Place’ series with a second piece of writing about setting and bringing one’s own experiences to one’s writing. Do we really write what we know? We started our Issue 4 series with Jane Percival’s ‘Seeds of a Story’. Next up we have an essay from David Morgan O’Connor.

David’s story ‘Berging’ appears in Issue 4, available here. David is from a small village on the Canadian coast of Lake Huron. After many nomadic years, he is based in Albuquerque, where a short story collection and an MFA progress. He contributes monthly to; The Review Review, New Pages and The MFA Years. His writing has appeared in; Collective Exiles, Cecile’s Writers, Bohemia Journal, Fiction Magazine, After the Pause, The New Quarterly and The Guardian. He is very happy to be published in New Zealand, and cannot wait to visit one day.

Names of Place and Sense

When I was eight years old I went to a production of Brian Friel’s Faith Healer at The Abbey Theatre in Dublin. My cousin Fiona was my chaperone. She was maybe sixteen, I was so excited to go out at night under her care. After the show, we crossed O’Connell Bridge, where a crowd had gathered. Some lost soul had committed suicide by jumping into The Liffey.

In the play, the three characters, who were never on stage at the same time, recited village names. Those names linked and anchored three versions of the narrative. For many years, before I re-read the text, I could only remember the recitation of those names and that I wanted to be Donal McCann, who, I later discovered, off-stage battled depression and alcoholism, while on-stage, was a charming lyrical god.

Kinlochbervie, Inverbervie,

Inverdruie, Invergordon,

Badachroo, Kinlochewe,

Ballantrae, Inverkeithing,

Cawdor, Kirkconnel,

Plaidy, Kirkinner … Welsh—Scottish, over the years they became indistinguishable.

This is my aunt’s horse farm, somewhere south of Cavan or Wicklow. I was there once, probably that same summer. I haven’t been back since.

Now that I live here,

I want to go back there. And never leave. I want to feed the horses and milk the cows and go to the local pub every Friday evening and down my pints and stare out the window and count the raindrops.

I grew up at 168 Lakeshore Drive, Grand Bend, Ontario, Canada, on the shore of Lake Huron.

That address is now something Shoreline, Drive, Lambton Shores, Ontario, Canada. The town changed names to expand the tax net and so the ambulance can find people faster. I don’t know the new number. I need to look it up every time I send a letter, which is rare and actually not a letter anymore, but an Amazon package. I learned to swim there.

But I pretend I learned to swim here:

This is the Forty Foot swimming hole in Dún Laoghaire (a name I must always Google to confirm the spelling). It is a few hundred metres from where the Holyhead ferry arrives in Dublin. Joyce’s famed Martello tower is just out of frame. They have a sign: TOGS MUST BE WORN. They used to have a sign: FORTY FEET. MEN ONLY. The MEN ONLY restriction was painted over soon after my grandmother decided to plunge into the ice cold snotgreen Irish sea. She would bring me swimming there whenever I visited. It was our little terrifying ritual. The name has not changed. Just the sign. She was the first woman to swim there. Or at least that is what I choose to remember. Men used to swim naked, now they wear togs. I believe I learned to swim there, but I didn’t. That’s the beauty of memory.

The last time I visited my mother’s house in Etobicoke (don’t you just love that name) near the Toronto airport in Ontario, Canada, I looked through her old-school leather address book. Under my name she had filled half the book:

301 Larch Street, Halifax, Nova Scotia

1208 92^nd Street, NY, NY

33 Crosby Street, NY, NY

179 Delaney Street, NY, NY

117 Swindon Lane, SW, London

267 Shakespeare Road, SW, London

23 Via Fratelli, Porta Nova, Verona

800 Al Saad, Airport Road, Doha

16 Old Brompton Road, NW, London

1 Old Fulton Street, Brooklyn, NY

406 Calle Putget, Barcelona

9 Pasaje Sant Felipe, Barcelona

501 Brickell Bay Drive, Miami

3239 MacDonald Street, Coconut Grove

1201 Capistrano do Abreu, Rio de Janeiro

354 Avenida de Nossa Senhora de Copacabana

1826 29^th Place, SE, West Adams, L.A.

1905 Gold Ave, Albuquerque, New Mexico

For a year I lived in a favela called Chapéu Mangueira in Rio de Janeiro, above the neighbourhood of Leme. We had no address because there was no mail. To arrive, a visitor had to ask for “Joao the Portuguese”. The house was impossible to find, for the first month every time I drank I got lost, like in Venice after a good lunch.

The trick is to ask a small boy who’d love to walk you there and tell you about his whole day on the way. There was no doorbell. You had to shout, normally the boy would. They loved shouting and they loved Joao. It was liberating not to have a formal address. No bills, no deliveries, no need to check the mailbox, I saved a lot of money. We were six hundred flip-flop-slaps from the sea and the morning sun made my blood flow with glorious anticipation of diving straight into a wave. We ate great meals and had profound, often heated conversations. An oasis from the chaos, a place of healing. When I left, Joao handed me a key and told me to return.

For several months, I was a caretaker of this closed-for-the season-resort just south of Jericoacoara (say that with a mouth of biscuits) in a fisherman’s village called Prea in Ceará, northeast Brazil.

I almost bought some land there and put down roots. I wrote a few good poems and read Dickens and Bolaño. I tried to make friends but there was no one around. I started talking to palm trees and lizards and the sea. I learned to open coconuts with a hammer. I burnt my mouth eating a raw cashew fruit. I hallucinated for hours, vomited for days, kept to rice and beans and flour mush for a month. I realized the danger of unknown beauty. This is not pine cone and chestnut territory. This is cactus and spider and sand land. I killed my first snake with a machete.

This is either Painted Rock or Tent Rock, I always get the name wrong. It’s between Santa Fe and Albuquerque, New Mexico, just off Interstate 20. About a thirty minute drive from my current rented studio. If I ever get “sideways”, as my mother likes to say, about terrorism or racism or injustice or greed or pollution or hate or the general state of my own existence, I just go there and sit on a peak in the wind and recite the names of places and my sense returns. In three weeks, I’ll be in Bali and I promise to learn and remember more names. A sense of place is the memory of a name.

Tag: Sense of Place

Writing Aotearoa

What makes a New Zealand Story, well, feel like a New Zealand Story

Writing Aotearoa

Names of Place and Sense

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