Whanganui writer Airini Beautrais has won the coveted fiction prize at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards with a "provocative" collection of short stories. Photo / Marcel Tromp
Airini Beautrais, this year's Jann Medlicott Acorn for Fiction winner at the 2021 Ockham awards, talks with Joanna Mathers about stepping into the limelight.
They are waiting. The women are waiting. Down the lushly carpeted hall, through the doors, they are perching on chairs in a darkened auditorium, waiting. They are all dead.
Down below, in a cold hospital room, a doctor has injected the cancer patient with a lethal dose. He is now performing unspeakable acts of violation on her body.
"A quiet death", the final story in Airini Beautrais' Bug Week (this year's Jann Medlicott Acorn for Fiction winner at the 2021 Ockham Awards), is a horror story, an allegory and a brutal conclusion to a remarkable book.
The first short story series to win the prize since Charlotte Grimshaw's Opportunity in 2008, Bug Week is in turns hilarious and harrowing, a glorious sum of 13 parts with a viscerally chilling climax.
Known for her poetic works (she has four books published through Victoria University Press) Beautrais' short story collection was the culmination of 10 years' writing, with the aid of a Creative New Zealand fund in late 2017.
There are no wasted words in this thrilling read. The stories are short and sharp. Bug Week is inhabited by a rogue's gallery of (by turns) likeable, vile, ridiculous and tragic characters. A giant albatross takes the stage at an open-mic night, a science teacher dreams of the clean Scandinavian lines, but whose urge for order explodes into existential pieces. A bank manager is whipped, a woman flees from abuse, a strange smell permeates a German apartment block. It's tight, taut, and humming with dread.
Beautrais has written that Bug Week came from a place of rage. Abuse, at the hands of men, permeates these pages. Underpinning this is a sense of futility around the capricious whims of fate: lives fall apart, they don't come back together. Teenagers long for love, lovers walk in a new town and discover something nasty in the river.
But these are also stories of women's resilience.
"The Teashop" features Esme, the 48-year-old proprietor of the "Petunia Teashop", dishing out rough delights to the men of the city. She's seeking escape through marriage to a man only notable for his lack of colour or character. We discover how she got here: raped by a professor on a science field research project at 19. In "Trashing the flowers" Laura has fled home with her children, escaping a husband who hits the kids, and rapes her at night.
Beautrais' knowledge of the natural world (she studied ecological and biological diversity, alongside creative writing, at Victoria University) is another motif that runs through the book. It's educating, in the best possible way. In the titular Bug Week, "Don the bug man" lifts his long eyelashes as he holds a stack of brown paper parcels, which may contain tiny glass tubes. The protagonist's heart clatters and thrums: "A voice inside me said, 'That was the most erotic moment you have had in years.'"
Bugs, birds, sex, death, smells, decay ... and the power of women.
When Beautrais' name is announced, she freezes, almost unperceptively, before jumping to her feet. Walking up the stairs to receive her prize, she is shadowed by Victoria University Press publisher Fergus Barrowman. She's not wearing the suit she'd wanted, she laughs, apologetically. She hasn't written a speech. She didn't think she'd win.
After the awards, there's the usual round of media engagements. She's jettisoned into the enthusiastic clutches of national television before sneaking over for a quiet chat. It's all very surreal, one imagines, to be segued from the sleepy arts town of Whanganui on to the country's biggest literary limelight.
"Yep, it's going to take a while to sink in," she says.
Beautrais, who grew up in Auckland and Whanganui, and whose parents are both teachers, admits to insecurity about her writing – an almost impossible admission from someone so accomplished - and says that this public acknowledgement will be a panacea.
"Writing … it's a very competitive field. There are times of community and camaraderie; then there are the bad reviews and the back-stabbing," she confides.
"I struggle with self-esteem about my writing . . . so being acknowledged in a big way like this is pretty massive. Sometimes as much as you try to feel good about everything you do, external validation is [important]."
As brilliant as the entire collection is, "A quiet death" is a story that lingers. It's such brutal abuse piled on abuse. Does its positioning at the end of the book have significance? Does she believe women's disempowerment will only end when there are no men in the world (the womblike space, filled with women)?
Her answer is interesting.
"You are never meant to write about your dreams. But the spark of this story came from a dream.
"I woke up in terror having dreamt that I was a cancer patient who'd asked to be euthanised. In the dream, I had survived the lethal injection and was trying to tell the doctor I wanted to live. But I was injected against my wishes and died."
But what began as an exposition on euthanasia, morphed into an allegorical tale of women in our society and culture.
In the story flashback, the protagonist and her future wife walk hand-in-hand through European galleries and museums. It becomes a history lesson on sexual violence.
"We looked at centuries of the art of rape. The rape of Lucretia. The rape of Proserpina. The rape of Leda. The rape of Helen."
"Beautrais says that through the story wanted to ask these questions. "How do we [women] feel when we go through the old master's art galleries [and view these images]? How do [women] feel at different points of our life? The extreme stuff in the story is just a stepping off point. It's an allegory."
Motherhood also simmers under the surface (Beautrais is a single mum with two young boys). In The turtle (a story she had written by hand years ago), a teenage girl is wrestling with her emergent sexuality.
Three generations inhabit The turtle. Althea and Phoebe cohabit with their single mother Rosemary and grandmother Vera. In one paragraph, Rosemary remembers her marriage, the bad sex, her changing body, the scent of another woman that her husband wears home.
She contemplates her teenager's capricious moods: "they get to teen age and behave like a pair of ungrateful minxes, tell you they hate you, blame you for everything. Rosemary knows that she has to protect them, but sometimes wishes they were far, far away."
Does she feel that this is a summation of motherhood? Loyalty, commitment, a desire for escape?
"I sense that every parent, regardless of gender, has moments when they wish their children were far, far away."
"In The turtle I wanted to explore the dichotomies between women who inhabit the stereotypes of overly sexual or frigid. In the work, the mother experiences the latent sexuality of teenage girls as a threat.
"I don't have daughters," she says. "But I have friends who have teenager daughters and it's a blessing, but it's very hard work. In a deeper sense I wanted to explore how human generations interact with each other, when you're an older generation knowing the one day the younger generation will replace you. Looking at how people pass through all the stages, and knowing that your youth will pass."
Given the returning theme of abuse in Bug Week and as a mother of boys, I wonder how Beautrais feels that we can change the status quo. Interestingly, for all the bleakness found in Bug Week, she is optimistic about the possibility for change.
"I actually have a lot of hope for the current generation of children and young people," she says.
"They are way more aware of mental health issues, less transphobic, less misogynistic. We need to continue to work together as whole community; boys need strong women and strong men who role model respect to women."
Outside of writing, Beautrais is also a science teacher. But her current passion (something she calls the great love of her life) is pole dancing.
Originating in strip clubs as entertainment for leery males, pole dancing has evolved into a legitimate art form. Beautrais was introduced to pole dancing when she met "an amazing strong, beautiful Amazonian woman" at a Whanganui women's group who had just won a pole dancing competition.
"I had injured my knee and my doctor told me that I needed to get stronger," she says. "So my friend recommended that I try pole dancing to increase my strength."
Two-and-a-half years later she is now a teacher of pole dancing. She loves that it marries strength, flexibility and endurance with performance, a sense of burlesque, and vaudevillian elements.
"One of the behavioural schemas of early development is transformation," she says. "I was that kid who went to the dress-up box at Playcentre, to put on capes to be a superhero."
Pole dancing recaptures this for her. A means to transcend, be strong, be powerful and exercise agency.
As our chat draws to a close, I ask her what the $57,000 from the Jann Medlicott Acorn for Fiction will mean for her life on a daily basis. She thinks carefully before she answers.
"I come from a family of environmentalists who are very frugal and not fixated on material things. I will talk to them and ask them to help me be prudent."
Then she is whisked off, the media following her: the year's brightest star.
Bug Week, by Airini Beautrais (Victoria University Press, $30)
The average age of patients in the study was just 38, highlighting risks for younger adults.