‘Our current mindset is clearly focused on how much our society sucks. It was impossible not to be moved by scenarios’
Harriet Allan explains how she chose the Sunday Start-Times Short Story Award winner.
“OAll the works mentioned here are beautifully written and made me feel deeply, but the top few also made me think about the short story as a form, as a shape, as a method of communication.
nly connect!” EM Foster urged, and anyone who made the effort to connect to readers through the Sunday Star-Times Short Story Awards is a winner to me. Assuming you did write your piece, that is. The submissions were anonymous, which is important; however, after making my selections, I realised that if ChatGPT had been used, I could be connecting with a chatbot.
Might someone be judging the judge? I didn’t know for sure but concluded that the outstanding stories were powerful because of their humanity. It was interesting when the authors were revealed to me to find a mix of names I recognised and others I didn’t.
From more than 600 entries in the Open section, plus the winners of the other three categories, I was given a shortlist of more than 100 stories, sifted out by a group of stalwart assessors. There was much to admire in this mountain: some wonderful images; brilliant sparks of humour; smart ideas; and even wombats digging tunnels through the pages of several submissions.
About 80% of the stories were grounded in social realism, exploring themes of domestic abuse, mental health, child neglect, grief and premature death. Our current mindset is clearly focused on how much our society sucks. It was impossible not to be moved by the scenarios, and several were particularly outstanding: Billy’s Place by Terry Carson, Brows and A Bounty by Gillian Breckell and The Trigger by David Ciurlionis, as well as the striking winners of the emerging Pasifika and Māori categories. Considered individually, these may well have jostled each other at the very top, but read alongside the rest they suffered by their similarity in approach, subject and style.
Another group explored school experiences, often scarred by bullying. Again, several stood out, in particular Pacific Delight by Peter Parussini, which reminded me of Carl Nixon’s amazing writing, and I admired its final sting.
All these excel, but it was the pieces that offered something different that grabbed my attention. For instance, Mirages on the Desert Road by Tehnuka Ilanko counterbalanced a child’s bewilderment at the Army interrupting daily routines in India with those routines being upended in an equally bewildering New Zealand.
In third place, though, I chose The World from Shepherd’s Flat by Jessica Le Bas. Its rugged narrative voice and sly humour evoke the setting, and it offers a whole novel of events in just a few pages: murder-mystery; commentary on the fortunes of rural New Zealand; satire of New Zealanders; homage to place; tale of a building (a bit like Fiona Farrell’s stimulating novel Decline and Fall on Savage Street).
The appearance at the end of the skinny codger who “fits the furniture” is a masterfully restrained touch, as is the telling of the tale within the telling of the tale.
It’s this inspired approach to storytelling that was the ultimate decider for me. All the works mentioned here are beautifully written and made me feel deeply, but the top few also made me think about the short story as a form, as a shape, as a method of communication. The winner of the emerging student entry deserves special mention in this regard.
For me, though, New York Style Chicken Sub by Tara Dench came second: a story in a recipe about the progress of a relationship, about compromise and partnership, creating two separate times and places, conveying the way food is tied to memory, to important moments, to sharing and connection.
It is lighter than many of the others but not lightweight; its approach is clever yet deceptively simple.
Yes, it’s about a sandwich, but sandwiched within it is so much more, not least an intriguing way to tell a story. Food and fiction have been connected before (for instance, in Fiona Kidman’s Lemon Honey), but this entry takes a step further by using the recipe method in its entirety, embodying how life and food interconnect.
However, we’re back to a skinny man again for the gripping winning story. The Skinny Man by Robert Jenkins is also told in a fresh, inventive way: a child’s voice that reads like a prose poem. Its slim form echoes the thin man, the strip of frozen water and the tow path, but it’s also like a sliver of memory, mirroring limited opportunities and the narrowness of understanding, of connection.
Its vividly cinematic sequence cut deep, leaving me gnawing over its implications. It has the shocking savagery of an Owen Marshall work, or indeed of the news headlines: with territorial claims, threat, fear, theft, sudden violence and crude assertions of power and justification.
Does this make it social realism? To an extent, but there’s a touch of the Gothic that’s just enough to make me ponder the extremes of human nature without being so excessive that it’s unbelievable.
We’re jolted into acknowledging that those childhood games of cowboys and Indians, fort-building and playing dead can become all too real.
Questions dangle: was the skinny man a predator or a friendly oddball; did Minnie kill him; is such casual acceptance of violence a facet of childhood innocence, or ignorance of any alternative; is it a moral blankness, or a survival technique in a dog-eat-dog environment?
Shining amid the bleakness meanwhile is the warmth of the narrator’s love for his little sister.
Details anchor the story in time and place, while the wintery setting is pared-back enough to have symbolic resonance, suggesting the poverty of existence.
The junk-filled fishless water is “black as engine oil”, an image doing double service, conveying not just colour but also pollution; likewise the snubbing post and lock gates are physical objects that also connote spurning and exclusion. Each word has been carefully chosen and precisely delivered.
I’m on the fence about the very final note, but this story has haunted me and I love the theme of impeded communication: Ivy can lip-read and sign but not hear; the man corrects the narrator’s grammar but cannot follow the sign language; he uses an adult double entendre and covers his mouth, swearing them to silence; the narrator lies and deflects questions; Minnie’s claim on the land is invisible but indelible and punctuated; there’s the child trying to negotiate the adult world, an adult trying to communicate with the children.
This is a story about codes to learn, behaviour to make sense of, intentions to interpret.
It is about reading – or misreading – situations, about communicating or failing to, and it begs the question: how do we connect?