3 days ago
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).
