Books: Embracing the hard stuff

Jolisa Gracewood, left, and Susanna Andrew. Photo / Marti Friedlander

"Tell you what", write the editors of this excellent collection, is a phrase that promises "a revelation, a shift, a new truth". I remember it mostly as consolatory. When I was a child, my parents would use it when they had denied me something I wanted, when telling me what they might be prepared to do or give me instead.

It's an appropriate title, then, for a collection of precisely the kind of writing we stand to lose in what one of the writers calls the "mediapocalypse" - serious, artful and even (in some cases) fully as long as both the project and the projector deserve. One of the best pieces is Mutton by Metro editor Simon Wilson, a beautiful and poignant reflection on his grandparents and a black sheep aunt. Its length and - one suspects - the style, tone and seriousness of its intent ensure that it would never have been published in Metro.

Though two other excellent pieces - Steve Braunias' typically wry and self-deprecating dispatch from the front lines of the gentrification of West Auckland, Greg Bruce's personal encounter with the brutal reality masked by the phrase "housing affordability" - were published in Metro, much of the writing here was first published online.

One of the inspirations for the collection was "a challenge" issued by Wilson in Metro, asking where New Zealand's equivalents to the great practitioners of long-form non-fiction who grace the pages of Granta, say, or The New Yorker, or such volumes as Best American Non-Fiction (Wilson suspected the local equivalents are too busy tweeting to bother).

The editors, Jolisa Gracewood and Susanna Andrews, aren't troubled by the ephemerality of the work; nor is Giovanni Tiso (an Italian-New Zealander who contributes an excellent piece, first published online, about his experiences in assimilating to New Zealand life, landscape and letters). But it's hard not to be bothered by the fact that had these essays and articles not been collected by the editors and committed to print by the publisher, all but one would have passed me by.

I first read the talented Leilani Tamu's brave piece on sexual abuse on Facebook - important stuff, speaking to current issues and capable of usefully informing debate, but there it was on ... Facebook. The ephemerality of ice sculpture is not at all to the detriment of its beauty, but it serves little purpose if it is created and melts away in obscurity. Just saying, as they say.

Lloyd Jones tried to create a "new" genre in New Zealand publishing with his Four Winds Press essay series a while back. Awa Press' Ginger Series has been somewhat more successful. The failure of serious non-fiction to flourish here probably says a lot about New Zealand and New Zealanders: perhaps we don't want to enter serious discussions such as those to which Tamu, or Rachel Buchanan (the lingering effects of the misappropriation of Maori land throughout the 19th and 20th centuries), or Megan Clayton (the web of social prejudices surrounding intellectual disability) invite us.

But if we dodge the hard stuff, we also deny ourselves the beauty, the uplifting and the heartwarming: Braunias (as above), Naomi Arnold (a deftly woven tale of the healing of a number of fractured lives), David Haywood (the hilarious and touching tale of his reconciliation to parenthood) and Paul Ewen (an elegy to his mate, as larger-than-life as any character in fiction) - and the spectacle of great minds thinking, which we view in the hope we might some day come to think alike.

Tell You What: Great New Zealand Non-Fiction 2015
edited by Jolisa Gracewood and Susanna Andrew
(Auckland University Press $29.99)