KEY POINTS:
Since this is New Zealand Book Month it seems an apt time to discover some home-grown literary talents.
If you only have time for one new local writer in your life then make it Sue Orr. Her debut collection of short stories, Etiquette for a Dinner Party (Random House, $29.99) deserves to be a best-seller.
The 17 diverse stories are poignant, wry and observant, there's a real freshness about them and a strong seam of Kiwi-ness running through the middle. It's hardly surprising that Orr made the longlist of this year's Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award.
Standouts in the collection include Velocity, the story of a woman, a man and a racing pigeon; the wickedly honest How Women Behave When Men Are Losing Their Wives, and Lifeline, the moving tale of a sassy rest-home resident.
Perhaps one reason Orr's work is so sensitive and smart is that she's experienced plenty of life before starting to write.
A dairy farmer's daughter from the Hauraki Plains, she'd lived in Paris and London, had three children, worked as a newspaper journalist and written speeches for Dame Silvia Cartwright before signing up to Bill Manhire's creative writing course at Wellington's Victoria University.
"I'd had a secret hankering to write," she recalls. "And my husband is so encouraging he just said I should do it."
So Orr chucked in all her paid writing work and submerged herself in learning to write fiction. "It had to be all or nothing."
Two years on, Orr lives on Auckland's North Shore where she juggles her writing with the demands of raising a family. A typical day begins at 4.10am when she wakes and drives her teenage children to swimming training at the nearby Millennium Institute.
"They're passionate about competitive swimming. It's a weird way of life, but you can't whip their dreams away from them, so I'll roll with it until they get their driving licences."
By 8.30am she's at her desk and tries to ignore the chaos. "I can deal with the mother stuff, the breakfast dishes and the unmade beds when the kids are home from school. So I sit down, crawl into the story and stay there until I've had enough."
Orr estimates it takes her a month to complete one short story. "Most of my work is triggered by a real event or moment in time that for me says something about human nature and behaviour; the way we treat each other."
She sweats every single syllable of her stories, going back to edit time and time again. "It's a really intense experience, every word counts - it's like poetry, really."
Short stories are having a golden time at present. A Montana Award win for Charlotte Grimshaw's Opportunity and the publication of anthologies such as The Six Pack series have brought them to a wider audience.
But many find they're not the easiest read.
Orr admits she too struggled with the genre at first. "I didn't understand what I was supposed to get out of it," she explains.
"Short stories don't necessarily have a nice tidy ending or the traditional narrative arc of a novel.
"For a long time I felt confused and was put off reading them. Now I sometimes say to people, imagine a photograph. You look it and have a really intense reaction but can't always define what it is about the photo that's left you with that feeling. A short story is sometimes like that. I think the beauty of them is they live on with you long after you've finished reading them."
Her favourite writers of short fiction include Italo Calvino, Tim Winton and Annie Proulx.
"I've read so many short stories in the past two or three years I find it hard now to go back to a novel," she confesses.
Now working on her second collection of stories, Orr is finding the going slower. She's more self-critical and more disciplined about not trying to rush the process.
"When I'm in the middle of writing something I'm thinking about it constantly from the moment I wake up to the moment I fall asleep. I'm a person who likes to get things done but I've learnt it's not in my interest to treat my writing that way. Once I've finished a story I need to put it away for two or three weeks until it vacates my brain and I can go back and read it as a fresh piece."
- Detours, HoS
