Middle Distance: Long Stories of Aotearoa New Zealand

Cover Page Title Page Copyright Page Contents Introduction Scales, Tails and Hagfish School Spirit The Promotion Basil and the Wild Getaway Backwaters The Dead City Ko tēnei, ko tēnā Ringawera Around the Fire Afterimages Like and Pray Sea Legend The Black Betty Tapes Contributors 
 
 
 
 Anthologies published by VUP include
 A Game of Two Halves: The Best of Sport 2005–2019
 edited by Fergus Barrowman (2021)
 Sista, Stanap Strong! A Vanuatu Women’s Anthology
 edited by Mikaela Nyman & Rebecca Tobo Olul-Hossen (2021)
 Monsters in the Garden: An Anthology of Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction and Fantasy
 edited by Elizabeth Knox & David Larsen (2020)
 Short Poems of New Zealand
 edited by Jenny Bornholdt (2018)
 Twenty Contemporary New Zealand Poets
 edited by Andrew Johnston & Robyn Marsack (2009)
 The Best of Best New Zealand Poems
 edited by Bill Manhire & Damien Wilkins (2008)
 Great Sporting Moments: The Best of Sport 1988–2004
 edited by Damien Wilkins (2005)
 Six by Six: Short Stories by New Zealand’s Best Writers
 edited by Bill Manhire (1989, 2021)
 Some Other Country: New Zealand’s Best Short Stories
 edited by Marion McLeod & Bill Manhire (1984, 2008)
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Victoria University of Wellington Press
 PO Box 600, Wellington
 New Zealand
 vup.wgtn.ac.nz
 Copyright © the authors 2021
 First published in 2021
 This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without the permission of the publishers.
 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.
 A catalogue record is available from the National Library of New Zealand.
 ISBN 9781776564323 (print)
 ISBN 9781776564637 (EPUB)
 ISBN 9781776564644 (Kindle)
 Ebook conversion 2021 by meBooks
 Contents
 Introduction
 Craig Gamble
 Scales, Tails and Hagfish
 Octavia Cade
 School Spirit
 Joy Holley
 The Promotion
 Maria Samuela
 Basil and the Wild
 Rem Wigmore
 Getaway
 Nicole Phillipson
 Backwaters
 Emma Sidnam
 The Dead City
 Jack Barrowman
 Ko tēnei, ko tēnā
 Vincent O’Sullivan
 Ringawera
 J. Wiremu Kane
 Around the Fire
 Anthony Lapwood
 Afterimages
 Sam Keenan
 Like and Pray
 Samantha Lane Murphy
 Sea Legend
 Kathryn van Beek
 The Black Betty Tapes
 David Geary
 Contributors
 CRAIG GAMBLE
 Introduction
 This collection really was born over the morning coffee table at the VUP office, despite how conveniently picturesque that might sound. It grew out of a discussion of how the literary magazine Sport might evolve – if evolution was something we wanted to happen to it.
 One of its guiding principles was that, like Sport, it should collect previously unseen work. I was keen to read unpublished stories, and I wanted as much as possible to include a diversity of voices and styles. This didn’t just come from a place of wanting something new and shiny. I also thought this anthology would be an opportunity for writers to consider the long story form anew. The guidelines we set were brief (new fiction, about 10,000 words, by New Zealand writers) and deliberately so, because I was keen for writers to consider more than length. I wanted them to be free to think about form, about what they could do with that little bit of extra space and time. I imagined that I might receive work which rejected convention, perhaps even broke down the walls between writing and reading in some way I could only vaguely imagine. I was keen to be surprised and challenged, to read the unexpected.
 We received many submissions, and immediately obvious was the huge variety of genre, character, setting and subject. Some stories were speculative fiction; others were much more realist. Some focused on a short passage of time; some encompassed a life. There were several ghost stories, two stories about mermaids, and stories that talked about otherness, sexuality, racism, religion – how to be alive in the world.
 I was delighted by this variety, and often surprised by the directions many of the stories took. But at the heart of all of the submissions, and exemplified by the fourteen stories published here, was something I perhaps should have expected. Each of them urgently wanted to tell us something. Each made a space in the reader’s head and filled it with another life, or world, or feeling, or all of these. These stories kept you reading and gave you knowledge you hadn’t previously held. In other words, each story demonstrated how very skilled the writer was – not necessarily at experimentation, though that is there too – at being a storyteller. And yes, both mermaid stories made it in.
 In his recent book on stories, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, George Saunders describes a story, wonderfully, as ‘a frank, intimate conversation between equals’ – the ‘equals’ being the writer and the reader. This is not peculiar to shorter fiction, but in a short story, obviously, the writer has less time and space to achieve that intimacy and frankness. The writer must exercise a keen focus at every line to keep the reader engaged, to ‘respect’ the reader, as Saunders has it, and to communicate what is vital in the story. The long story has more space to work with – 10,000 words or more compared with the 3,000 or 4,000 more common in a short story. To my mind, that only makes the task harder. A reader has time to engage with a character more deeply, but their greater attention needs to be satisfied more fully. Setting and world-building can be given more space, but it still needs to be done with an immediacy that keeps the story moving. The writer of a long story walks a difficult middle path between the sharp joy of a shorter work, and the more cumulative pleasures of a novella or novel. They can, if they’re successful, make the conversation between themselves and the reader truly memorable. Editing these stories – another sort of conversation, perhaps – has reminded me how much effort this takes, how much care and precision.
 These are stories