NURTURING CULTURE
With the future of another NZ literary magazine unclear, David Hill ponders the importance of such journals — to writers and readers
There’s an irony in the appearance of 4th Floor, the latest and possibly last online anthology from Whitireia’s Creative Writing Course. The tertiary institute announced a few months back that it was drastically reducing the said course — a muchadmired and much-valued one, whose tutors and students have stacked up an attention-capturing, award-winning list of publications.
It was an economic decision — they always are. A writing course doesn’t show instantly measurable income and career statistics the way engineering or nursing or IT courses do (and good wishes to all those worthy disciplines). Okay, there are still writing courses being offered at other institutions but the loss of Whitireia’s means the loss of another source of support and publication for Kiwi authors, especially new ones.
So where does an aspiring New Zealand author turn to get her/his words into the world these days? There are still the first-book sensational success stories — Annaleese Jochems, Hera Lindsay Bird, David Coventry, etc — but for most new names, online publication and/or literary magazines are the main outlets, in their own erratic ways.
I don’t mean “erratic” in any disparaging sense. So many literary magazines start with a few committed, talented, usually young spirits who fling themselves into the project with maximum zeal and minimum money.
Literary mags are run on a shoestring; shoestrings often fray and snap. A few, like Landfall, Takahe, JAAM and Sport, have hung on for years or even decades. That’s remarkable. That’s admirable. But Mate, Islands and Bravado are just some of the many more who’ve arrived, often with a touchingly bold manifesto of how they’ll reshape our nation’s writing. They last for three or 13 issues. Their editors get exhausted or get mortgages. The magazines vanish, leaving a few copies in university libraries or on contributors’ bookshelves.
Our literary magazines are so valuable, so cashstrapped. Funding comes almost exclusively from subscriptions and Creative NZ grants (and they have to compete fiercely for the latter). Universities sometimes help — Victoria with Sport; Waikato with Mayhem. A few of the more handsomely subsidised ones resemble quality paperbacks. Rather more look like stapled high school yearbooks. They pay maybe $20 for a poem; $40 for a 3000-word story that may have taken 30 hours or more to write. It really is all they can afford. In some cases, they don’t — can’t — pay anything at all; offer a couple of free copies instead. (That’s better than some overseas lit mags, which ask that contributors pay them before they’ll even read the submission.)
As I said, they’re so valuable. They give new writers the chance to get feedback from editors, to experience the incredulous pleasure of seeing their words, their name on the page or screen, to feel, “Yes, I’m an author! I’ll keep going!” Recently, they’ve been augmented by or, in some cases, turned into online outlets. The Spinoff, The Sapling, The Pantograph Punch, Turbine are among such sites publishing or reviewing New Zealand writing. There’ll be others I’ve omitted and I smite my brow in shame. Online publishing is immediate, quickly accessible, cheaper for both publisher and reader, more environmentally friendly. Its economy and near-instant format encourage a greater diversity of material. Is it the way of the future? One of the ways, certainly.
Which brings me back, after one of the century’s more protracted digressions, to Whitireia’s 4th Floor. Cassandra Barnett’s introduction has the same vigour and vision that I mentioned earlier as a
feature of so many lit mags. “Writing as Activism” is the motif and Barnett notes how for many of the 22 contributors, that activism is often an internal one, a life change of some form, initiated by internal drives or outside events.
So among the writers, who range from rising to risen, I’ll mention Jane Arthur striding into a room and shouting out her new self. Johanna Knox has a magical monologue on how wounded creatures meet and Erica Challis reaches a hand across millennia in a springy, tight image. Anne French deftly builds the bio of a splendidly bolshie old woman, while Anahera Gildea reworks (I’d almost say improves) Curnow’s concept of standing upright, and does it with two cultures. There’s also the activism of working at one’s craft, as in Mandy Hager’s excellent exposition on how words can “harangue ... seduce ... break open ... mend.”
Several ticks for the absence of any real hectoring or preaching; and for the crackling energy of many pieces: Rob Hack’s bounding poems, Hinemoana Baker’s packed images of platform, fountain, steamship; Romesh Dissanayake’s imagined marriage. Ticks also beside a number of the new names: Justine Rose Kingdon and her vivid prose evocation of night and change; Hana Pera Aoke wanting glorious things for herself and her country; Marlon Moana-knox with a nifty, nine-word identity issue. And just the most tentative of question marks beside some authors equating obscurity with impact.
If this does turn out to be 4th Floor’s final issue, it’ll have earned a creditable place among those other publications listed above. If it does a Lazarus and rises again, that will epitomise the dedication of all those, past and present, who have nurtured these ephemeral, essential elements in our literary culture.