Little echo chambers
With this book of short stories, Courtney Sina Meredith joins our very best writers, finds Paula Green.
Courtney Sina Meredith is New Zealand’s representative at the prestigious Iowa Creative Writing Programme this year. She follows her debut poetry collection Brown Girls in Bright Red Lipstick with Tail of the Taniwha, a stunning book of short stories.
From the moment you hold the book, with its gold-embossed hard cover, and its elegant interior design, you know you are in the company of something special.
Meredith is a poet, musician, and a script and fiction writer — and it shows. The writing dares to shake and refresh the short-story model with pitch-perfect dialogue and sweet lyricism. Most of the stories are punctuated by generous amounts of white space.
Sometimes the pages are grey or blue. The white space changes your way of reading because it’s like a rest stop, a place to take stock and get your breath back. Importantly, it slows down your reading so you can better absorb mood and character.
Visually, the book excites me. Sometimes the stories are little echo chambers with lines making multiple guest appearances in multiple colours or fonts. It is like a capella singing, with a sweet bitter harmony of voices getting under your skin.
In one story, the voices of the father, eldest son, ghost son and daughter are recognisable by colour or font.
The father is getting things off his chest as he lies on his death bed, although his death is a little in question. The story is particularly moving.
On other occasions, the writing is barely visible. In ‘Aotahi,’ the dark blue page stands in for the night sky and you have to lean in close as though you are trying to read the Milky Way. The repeating lines, mesmerising and mystical, are like a universe chant.
In ‘Taniwha House,’ some lines are barely legible. It reminds me of the way daily life repeats itself, is close at hand and then impossible to read.
Meredith’s stories always return you to people because their voices are the heart of the book: mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, lovers. There is a strong and vital bloodline along which stories shift or change or settle. There is the useless father who is observed in a new light.
There is the scaffolding that holds someone in place who is no longer familiar. There is the debate on why a lover is just not right. Some stories poke little elbows in your gut. There is the old friend who is not a friend and the request for milk on the off chance someone comes to London.
Writing becomes a way of selfrecognition for Meredith. It is song, idea, heart, family. The stories come out of a Pasifika heritage, a female heritage, and that matters.
This book, marvellous and memorable, affected me as both a writer and a person. It offers me points of self-recognition. With this book, Meredith joins our very best writers.