Auckland Writers & Readers Festival
May 25 | Reviewed by Amy Brown

THIS SESSION bundled three short story writers of the festival together on a panel, chaired by Tina Shaw. Tim Winton, Carl Nixon and Charlotte Grimshaw are all Antipodeans, and all short story writers, but the similarities seemed to end there. Winton, with twenty-five years of experience under his belt, and a swag of accolades for Shaw to list, was by far the veteran of the group. He read with marvellous timing a story from his latest collection, The Turning, called ‘Immunity’. His prose, with its almost invisible style, revealing no seams, loose threads or dropped stitches, appeared effortless until Winton stumbled over the phrase “crisp rolled-up sleeves”. “If you can’t say it, don’t write it”, he said in a sheepish aside to the audience, which the other writers smiled at. Winton is among the best at what he does – it was relieving to see him make a mistake, even only one. The rest of the excerpt he read was brimming with his characteristic humanism and humour. Nixon and Grimshaw, both younger and less experienced, listened attentively.

Nixon, who was first to stand at the podium, chose to read the first story he’d ever written, which he was fond of due to it having won the Sunday Star Times competition and given him “the energy to carry on writing”. Although competent and at times compelling, it was altogether more predictable and less elegant than Winton’s passage, which followed. Nixon’s background in theatre was evident in his confident, fluent reading, but this didn’t hide the slightly stilted tone of his dialogue. However, it is not fair to judge a writer by the first story they’ve ever written. I will seek out his collection Fish ‘n Chip Shop Song before I cast any more aspersions on his career, which appears to be humming along nicely; he has a novel that will shortly be released, too.

Grimshaw, who happens to be the daughter of C.K. Stead, was the last to read, and impressed me more than Nixon. Her collection, Opportunity, which has been nominated for the prestigious Miles Franklin Award, consists of stories connected by characters, as does Winton’s The Turning. The story she read was stylistically different to Winton’s and Nixon’s. Her use of narrative pace – condensing the narrator’s life to three sentences then expanding slowly on her old age was deliberately self-conscious and effective. Although Grimshaw read quickly with very little eye-contact, she successfully conveyed the callous strength of her narrator’s voice.

Shaw’s questions were relevant but fairly generic. Is the reappearance of characters in a short story collection a response to the recent requirements of publishers? Winton didn’t think so. “I’ve been writing about the same old crap for twenty five years”, he said in explanation about the recurrence of characters. Grimshaw described it as “a natural progression of a long train of thought”. She even suggested that her next collection of short stories would be an Opportunity Two, featuring the same characters again. As Nixon’s collection wasn’t connected in such a way, he was quiet during this discussion, but all three writers agreed that the method is far from new. “Hemmingway did it, Fitzgerald,” Winton said. “and Balzac”, Grimshaw added.

“How is the short story different as a form?” was Shaw’s next, less than surprising, question. “Harder,” said Winton decisively. “So concentrated you don’t have time to open something up. You get in there, get it done and sod off.” This received a laugh from the small and rather sober audience. “If it’s got some kind of internal shape,” Grimshaw continued, referring to the structure of the story, “it’s hard to do this economically.”
Winton, clearly feeling his age up on stage along side comparative whipper-snappers, said that when he was younger short story writing was a large part of his life. But now, as a self-confessed “portly, sun-damaged, middle-aged old fart”, novel writing has “colonised his mind”. Not to be outdone, Grimshaw followed Winton’s metaphor with one of her own, describing a collection of short stories as “a bowl of marbles”, suggesting that each story must be whole and compact, not “bleeding” into the next.

Nixon, who had confessed that his short stories had few connections, seemed pleased when Winton referred to this as a young writer “showing off his chops” and admitted to doing the same when younger. From this point on, Nixon appeared to take his lead from Winton in answering the audience’s questions. When the panel was asked whether the impulse to write was emotive or intellectual, Winton replied, “I don’t set out to say anything or to get anything off my chest…Usually for me the impulse of the story is often an image or a place.” Nixon picked up on this immediately and agreed. He then described with great animation the part of Christchurch between the sea and the river, in which some of his stories are set, which particularly inspires him.

Grimshaw added that being inspired by an emotion was not the same thing as writing in a fit of passion. “You have to be distanced, detached”, she said, sounding rather like Wordsworth, who described poetry as an overflow of intense emotion recollected in tranquillity. To sum up the session, which was dawdling to a somewhat uninspiring end, Winton mentioned that the impulse to write is not an occasional lightning bolt, but something more constant and less amazing. “You’re immersed the whole time,” he said of the writing process, “falling from one thing to another. It’s not like you’re setting out to write a paper like ‘George Eliot’s Potty Training’... it’s just what you do.”



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