The Nature of NZ Writers

It's a hard gig wanting to be part of the 1%. Being an award-winning writer or novelist in NZ has always been my goal, but it's bloody hard to achieve. I've read some amazing work that didn't make the cut for The Sunday Star Times, Rat World Magazine, Starling Magazine etc. I get it, we're a nationalist place; we are similar people with similar goals who band together during hard times.

It's nice being part of something, except when you're NOT and you don't quite fit the NZ literary scene. I always think it's nice to see other writers who LOOK like you, sound like you, write like you and share the same goals. 

I started reading cryptic commentary about identity and culture, with lines spaced unevenly and enjambement at the start of sentences. I realized that it is good structure, even though the ideas are all relatively similar (bleeding on the stage and trauma-dumping about the social wiring of culture and intergenerational pain). I'm not being sour. I think many topics are overused, still, spread your truth. 

So what happens when you don't fit NZ's writing identity? I've moved away from my origin poetry roots (finally). I was so hung up on 20th-century poets (Thank you Otago Uni), as the ONLY mode of poetry. I had T.S Elliot's 'Wasteland' and William Carlo William's 'Red Wheelbarrow' pressed into my frontal lobe. Where was the variety and the accessibility? Where was the language that had one meaning, rather than a dozen? So, I ditched the Oscar Wilde wannabe poetry after publishing my own Oscar Wilde/Allen Ginsberg rendezvous. Immediately I had regrets - not of the opportunities or the people I met from the book, but of the content in it. I felt so imposturous. I was writing how I was taught, with language rarely used today. 

So I read a lot of NZ poetry. I read Michael Stevens, Tayi Tibble, Dominic Hoey, Janet Frame, Louise Wallace, Elizabeth Morton and Indy Yelich. I read and read and read. I analysed this contemporary poetry and found similarities in the NZ experience: poverty, drugs, identity, abuse, love, and landscape. Some poems dissect all topics at once. So where do I fit in? How far do I go to assimilate my style with others, only to STILL be rejected by every journal, including the 'underground' journals that praise difference? 

The point of this is to show that you can try REALLY HARD and be rejected and that's part of this industry. New Zealand's literary scene is quite rigid. New Zealand society is rigid. So, the correlation between writing style and mannerism is uncanny. 

To all the journals: please consider my next piece, otherwise, it'll end up here, lost on the internet with no one to read it xx