Speaking of Michael Forbes
A new literary event in Auckland feels like crumbs from a rich man's table, looks like crumbs from a rich man's table, and quacks like crumbs from a rich man's table, but some crumbs are a lot better than no crumbs at all when it comes to patronage of the arts. Ockham Residential, principal sponsors of the national book awards, are also behind a small, perfectly formed venture at The Nix in Grey Lynn. On the first Thursday night of each month for the next six months, two well-known actors will give onstage readings of two New Zealand short stories. The first event was held last Thursday. It was packed, exciting, and unexpectedly topical.
The Nix is a six-level redbrick apartment building on the city's edge. It has 32 apartments. Ockham comms: 'Each apartment is provided with a stainless steel fridge, dishwasher, heat-pump, washing machine-dryer combo, and a Samsung cordless vacuum cleaner.' The ground floor art space has couches and not very good artwork and a little stage. Performances happen fairly regularly and selected writers are welcome to go there on Tuesday mornings to write in each others' company. But is there food? At the inaugural Thursday night short story event there were a range of wines, but no snacks. I asked Bridget van der Zijpp, mastermind of the Writers Write: Actors Read series, 'Are there any biscuits?' Perhaps next time.
The seats filled up. A number of people said they came after reading a preview that I wrote in the ReadingRoom newsletter. I sat in the second row. The windows were slightly below street level. Van der Zijpp took the stage, and introduced the two readers for the evening: Elisabeth Easther, playwright, author, and actor (she will forever be known for playing the terrible Carla Crozier, Shortland Street's first murderer), and Jamie Irvine, who plays mandolin, lawn bowls, and the headmaster in the 2025 hit movie Tinā.
Easther read first. She chose 'Collateral', a short story from the newly published collection Surplus Women, by Michelle Duff. It was about three women who break into a house in Coromandel and tie up a guy accused of sexual violence. 'The assault, Tom. Tell us about it.' The story felt didactic and kind of artless but as Easther continued reading, very well and very dramatically, there was a sense that something else was going on behind the lines, that the story was resonant with the big news revelation made public that day – the Prime Minister's deputy press secretary, Michael Forbes, had quit after Stuff journalist Paula Penfold published details of how he took intimate photos of women without their knowledge and stored them on his phone. Creeps, secrecy, abuse….Duff's fiction had imitated #MeToo and now, with Forbes, current events was imitating Duff's fiction. Forbes has been cancelled with immediate effect. The central character in 'Collateral', too, fears cancellation. 'We know you enlisted a PR team to help downplay the allegations.' Her portrait of a creep had everyone thinking: Forbes, and what he had done and what would happen to him. But the power of the short story existed on its own terms. It captured attention, it drew listeners into its imaginative setting. 'Collateral' takes place in the near-future. The home invasion seemed to be a kind of legally sanctioned course of justice. The creep was interrogated, and asked to explain his actions. He seemed more worried about the damage to his house. 'Was that the Hindu sculpture he'd bought in Bali in pieces on the floor?' He didn't give a lot of thought to his victim. 'He could barely remember her if he was honest…'
There was a break at half-time to drink wine and look in cupboards for biscuits, and to further ponder the relationship between fiction and Forbes; and then Jamie Irvine read 'American Microphones' by Damien Wilkins, the literary man of the hour in all the hours that have passed since he won $65,000 fiction prize at the Ockham national book awards last month for his novel Delirious. The short story was further proof of how good he is, how assured and sensitive and really, really funny. 'American Microphones' was fiction as stand-up comedy, a laugh out loud masterpiece, and deeply meta: a short story about a man reading a short story out loud in front of an audience was read out loud by a man in front of an audience. A further layer of meta was that the narrator was Damien Wilkins, reading a short story set in New Zealand to a writing class he was teaching somewhere in America. Irvine put on very good American accents and his comic timing was superb. The story partly served as a portrait of Americans. 'At some profound level,' says the narrator, 'I think of Americans as dangerously carbonated people.' But the story was universal. Just like the Duff story, it opened up quiet and unsettling thoughts; the audience members in the short story were lost, poignant souls, and everyone in the audience at The Nix was surely thinking, Am I sitting in a room full of likewise lost, poignant souls? And: Am I, in fact, one of those souls?
The story first appeared in For Everyone Concerned, a short story collection published in 2007. Wilkins's publishers are about to reissue his 2021 novel Chemistry (about a drug addict who goes home to Timaru). Good. I hope they also reissue For Everyone Concerned.
Huzzah to Ockham and to Bridget van der Zijpp for Writers Write: Actors Read. The short story is in good health in New Zealand–Gigi Fenster was given $10,000 in funding from CNZ last week to create 'an anthology of New Zealand writers and educators discussing New Zealand short stories'; entries close at the end of this month for New Zealand's richest short story award, the Sargeson Prize, open to adults and secondary school students–and The Nix event was a great idea, professional executed. The audience, possibly lost and poignant but hoping they were not, drained one last glass and headed out into the winter's evening, thinking of Duff and Wilkins, of Easther and Irvine, and the name that has been dredged out of a black lagoon of New Zealand life, Forbes.
The new short story collection Surplus Women by Michelle Duff (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $35) is available in bookstores nationwide. A review of considerable length will appear in ReadingRoom tomorrow (Thursday, June 12).
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2 days ago
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Speaking of Michael Forbes
A new literary event in Auckland feels like crumbs from a rich man's table, looks like crumbs from a rich man's table, and quacks like crumbs from a rich man's table, but some crumbs are a lot better than no crumbs at all when it comes to patronage of the arts. Ockham Residential, principal sponsors of the national book awards, are also behind a small, perfectly formed venture at The Nix in Grey Lynn. On the first Thursday night of each month for the next six months, two well-known actors will give onstage readings of two New Zealand short stories. The first event was held last Thursday. It was packed, exciting, and unexpectedly topical. The Nix is a six-level redbrick apartment building on the city's edge. It has 32 apartments. Ockham comms: 'Each apartment is provided with a stainless steel fridge, dishwasher, heat-pump, washing machine-dryer combo, and a Samsung cordless vacuum cleaner.' The ground floor art space has couches and not very good artwork and a little stage. Performances happen fairly regularly and selected writers are welcome to go there on Tuesday mornings to write in each others' company. But is there food? At the inaugural Thursday night short story event there were a range of wines, but no snacks. I asked Bridget van der Zijpp, mastermind of the Writers Write: Actors Read series, 'Are there any biscuits?' Perhaps next time. The seats filled up. A number of people said they came after reading a preview that I wrote in the ReadingRoom newsletter. I sat in the second row. The windows were slightly below street level. Van der Zijpp took the stage, and introduced the two readers for the evening: Elisabeth Easther, playwright, author, and actor (she will forever be known for playing the terrible Carla Crozier, Shortland Street's first murderer), and Jamie Irvine, who plays mandolin, lawn bowls, and the headmaster in the 2025 hit movie Tinā. Easther read first. She chose 'Collateral', a short story from the newly published collection Surplus Women, by Michelle Duff. It was about three women who break into a house in Coromandel and tie up a guy accused of sexual violence. 'The assault, Tom. Tell us about it.' The story felt didactic and kind of artless but as Easther continued reading, very well and very dramatically, there was a sense that something else was going on behind the lines, that the story was resonant with the big news revelation made public that day – the Prime Minister's deputy press secretary, Michael Forbes, had quit after Stuff journalist Paula Penfold published details of how he took intimate photos of women without their knowledge and stored them on his phone. Creeps, secrecy, abuse….Duff's fiction had imitated #MeToo and now, with Forbes, current events was imitating Duff's fiction. Forbes has been cancelled with immediate effect. The central character in 'Collateral', too, fears cancellation. 'We know you enlisted a PR team to help downplay the allegations.' Her portrait of a creep had everyone thinking: Forbes, and what he had done and what would happen to him. But the power of the short story existed on its own terms. It captured attention, it drew listeners into its imaginative setting. 'Collateral' takes place in the near-future. The home invasion seemed to be a kind of legally sanctioned course of justice. The creep was interrogated, and asked to explain his actions. He seemed more worried about the damage to his house. 'Was that the Hindu sculpture he'd bought in Bali in pieces on the floor?' He didn't give a lot of thought to his victim. 'He could barely remember her if he was honest…' There was a break at half-time to drink wine and look in cupboards for biscuits, and to further ponder the relationship between fiction and Forbes; and then Jamie Irvine read 'American Microphones' by Damien Wilkins, the literary man of the hour in all the hours that have passed since he won $65,000 fiction prize at the Ockham national book awards last month for his novel Delirious. The short story was further proof of how good he is, how assured and sensitive and really, really funny. 'American Microphones' was fiction as stand-up comedy, a laugh out loud masterpiece, and deeply meta: a short story about a man reading a short story out loud in front of an audience was read out loud by a man in front of an audience. A further layer of meta was that the narrator was Damien Wilkins, reading a short story set in New Zealand to a writing class he was teaching somewhere in America. Irvine put on very good American accents and his comic timing was superb. The story partly served as a portrait of Americans. 'At some profound level,' says the narrator, 'I think of Americans as dangerously carbonated people.' But the story was universal. Just like the Duff story, it opened up quiet and unsettling thoughts; the audience members in the short story were lost, poignant souls, and everyone in the audience at The Nix was surely thinking, Am I sitting in a room full of likewise lost, poignant souls? And: Am I, in fact, one of those souls? The story first appeared in For Everyone Concerned, a short story collection published in 2007. Wilkins's publishers are about to reissue his 2021 novel Chemistry (about a drug addict who goes home to Timaru). Good. I hope they also reissue For Everyone Concerned. Huzzah to Ockham and to Bridget van der Zijpp for Writers Write: Actors Read. The short story is in good health in New Zealand–Gigi Fenster was given $10,000 in funding from CNZ last week to create 'an anthology of New Zealand writers and educators discussing New Zealand short stories'; entries close at the end of this month for New Zealand's richest short story award, the Sargeson Prize, open to adults and secondary school students–and The Nix event was a great idea, professional executed. The audience, possibly lost and poignant but hoping they were not, drained one last glass and headed out into the winter's evening, thinking of Duff and Wilkins, of Easther and Irvine, and the name that has been dredged out of a black lagoon of New Zealand life, Forbes. The new short story collection Surplus Women by Michelle Duff (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $35) is available in bookstores nationwide. A review of considerable length will appear in ReadingRoom tomorrow (Thursday, June 12).
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An unfortunately brief encounter with Damien Wilkins
I interviewed Damien Wilkins for an hour the morning after his beautiful novel Delirious won the $65,000 fiction prize at the Ockham book awards last Wednesday night in Auckland, but the tape recording went awry and only kept the opening question and answer, and another question and answer around about 40 minutes later. This was most unfortunate and has left an elliptical transcript of our interview which reads like a man wandering into a room at random intervals to make interesting remarks, and then taking his leave. We met at the Sky City Hotel, where guests of the Auckland Writers Festival are given lodgings. He is 61 years old and moves with the languid, physical grace that in his teens made him a promising footballer with the wonderfully named club Stop Out. He was dressed in jeans slung low on his slender hips and a striped buttoned shirt. He has blue eyes which shyly peep out beneath low eyelids with a kind of melancholy. But he has a boyish smile which he will likely never grow out of. He spoke at length and with considerable charm. As director of the IIML writing school at Victoria University, he is one of the most well-liked figures in New Zealand literature, a calming and generous influence in the lives of hundreds of students. He was raised in Woburn, in Lower Hutt, as one of seven children who had the run of a large house. He said that his father, a mountaineer soon to reach 100, was like the eighth child, and told a story about how his Dad would take turns with the kids to lick the pudding bowl. His mother has dementia in a nursing home. She is a model for one of his characters in Delirious, and he also drew on the death of his sister Miriam. The book has tragedy in it – the pages inhabit a particular quietness of grief when the protagonists, Pete and Mary, are taken to identify the body of their young son – but it's also very funny, and expertly crafted. He worked on it for about three years and had a hot streak when he wrote a lot of it in three months. 'Thank you so much,' he said to the woman who passed by after cleaning his room. We conducted the interview on furniture at the end of a carpeted corridor. Wilkins lounged on a sofa and I sat at his feet on a kind of pouffe. Wellington author Noelle McCarthy also passed by; she spied my copy of Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews Series 1, the model I used for my questioning of Wilkins, and enthused, 'Oh! How great! I can't wait to read your talk with Damien!' The two remaining fragments may allow some insight into the writing practice of the winner of the richest prize in New Zealand literature. I recently interviewed Catherine Chidgey on the craft of fiction, and she described this kind of obsessive mathematic of writing 400 words a day, every day for 18 months. I wondered whether the oxen of your work also strained under such an exhausting yoke. They do not. They do not. I have never been a writer with a certain productivity in mind. And if I look back on some of my books, I'm a bit horrified by the erratic pattern of my production model. I mean, there's no pattern. There's nothing. It's just an enthusiasm which lasts for about, you know, six months and might go away for a bit and then return. And I've never held to a word count every day, even though I tell my students this is what you should do. I do believe in word count as a thing to help you through, because it's compounding interest. Four hundred words is not 400 words. It's actually 800 words because by writing 400 words, you've written the beginnings of another 400 words by your choices you made in those 400 words. So the compounding interest idea of fiction, I totally believe that. But I've just never been able to have the kind of Maurice Gee or Catherine Chidgey discipline of sitting down every day to write. It's just so boring. I just can't bear to. Delirious is his 11th novel. He is also the author of two collections of short stories, and an essay published in 2002 by Four Winds Press, When Famous People Come To Town, that was at once intellectually exhilarating and a comedy routine of one hilarious zinger after another. It was on the strength of the essay that I declared in the Listener magazine, 'Damien Wilkins is unable to write a bad sentence.' I hold to this conviction. His style has been used against him by critics who are suspicious that it implies a lack of substance. Dunedin author Breton Dukes laid waste to this fallacy in his Landfall review of Delirious. 'Wilkins gets called a clever writer. He's a good educator, he's brilliant at craft, so the nonsense conclusion is that he can't also possess emotional force. He's incredibly eloquent and funny in a knowing way, so maybe also he's too neat, with the haircut, those muted tones of his slim-fitting cardigans? But—he always delivers power. See his YA book Aspiring. See Max Gate, his marvellous book about Thomas Hardy. However, I think Delirious hits hardest.' What are the responsibilities of using the stories or lives of others? Well, the first call you've got to make is can you do it. And I think I struggle with this a little bit with the writers that come through the IIML. Their worry is, 'Oh, I can't do that.' I say to them, 'Well, you haven't done it yet. Can you do it? And then we'll decide whether it's actually got to where it's even alive.' I think there's a bit of a cart before the horse thing at that point. You know, I want writers to approach material that they might feel hesitant about, write it, and then we can think about it rather than decide, 'Oh yeah, it's inappropriate for you to take on that material', or 'You shouldn't because it's going to make you feel bad, or it's going to make your mother feel bad.' We don't know whether your mother is going to feel bad if it's actually alive as a piece of writing. Your mother might be very proud, happy. So that's the first thing you've got to get over. And I think that's a live question for every writer. You know, 'Can I touch this?' My mother is still alive and she's in the dementia ward, so the question was, 'Is it right to write now?' Because surely the writer waits until someone's died. There's an end to it. But what I was curious about is not the end, but the ongoingness of it. So that's how I rationalise it for myself. The ongoingness of our mother's condition and the kind of weird ways in which she's been reinvented as a person. That was the story for me, not the idea of a terminus, that it's all finished. So drawing the emotional resonance for me was the ongoingness of it, which kind of chimed for me with Pete and Mary's story of their relationship to the life and death of their son. The idea that you might put away a trauma in a certain drawer and then someone somehow would open it or really you hadn't put it away at all. And so the responsibility is that you have to do it well, that the language has to be good, that you have to do it with precision and enough detail to make that alive for readers. You know, I could never write this as a memoir. I could never imagine trying to do it. I would feel extremely strange and uncomfortable about sort of writing it as 'I', you know, like, 'I walk into the room and I see my sister.' That for me would feel very hard. It's just not the way I'm built as a writer to then convert those sort of conversations into straight memoir. I need to displace it. I need to give it to someone else. I need to give it to characters. * He said the essential thing in any story are the characters. He said he never wrote anything in longhand. He said he did not take notes or rely on a chart. He likened his writing process to drawing things out of a container; I asked if he saw it as a shipping container, something immense and heavy, but he said he always had in mind an oval bowl, something slippery and smooth. Delirious by Damien Wilkins (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $38) was named the ReadingRoom literary awards of 2024 as Best Novel as well as Best Book of any kind, and won the 2025 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the Ockham national book awards on May 14. It is available in bookstores nationwide.
