A set of micros and creative nonfiction works written for a special Katherine Mansfield Phantom Billstickers series with new work inspired by lines of KM’s writing. The AT THE BAY | I TE KOKORU series featured posters shared nationally, plus a Dunedin series with local writers timed with the Dunedin Writers and Readers Festival – and KM’s birthday – in October.
Below you can read the 20 original works, shared alphabetically by title. Also at the top of the stories are photos of Susan Wardell (l) and Sophia Wilson (r) with their posters in Dunedin. We hope you enjoy this special set of writings from these KM-inspired storytellers!
Susan Wardell (l) and Sophia Wilson (r) with their posters in Dunedin
[enough] – Tracey Slaughter
You, under glass, in your square-necked blood-red dress – at thirty, I hung your portrait. Parlour around you lacquered with flowers, as if you take tea with the housewives of exorcism, blue horizon of death on your face, a one-sided shimmer that makes you look Delphic. The painter used the colours of ghost and meat to demi-cross your hands, a thick-boned smudge at rest on the dust of a book. In your eyes all titles are gone. You gaze at what’s null with a lockjaw delicacy. Neck diagonaled in tendons of granite, flickering sternal notch of ash. Oh, to be half-alive and be a writer.
Tracey Slaughter’s most recent works are the short story collection Devil’s Trumpet (Te Herenga Waka, 2021) and the volume of poetry Conventional Weapons (Te Herenga Waka, 2019). She teaches Creative Writing at the University of Waikato, where she edits the literary journals Mayhem and Poetry Aotearoa. Her work has won numerous awards, including two Katherine Mansfield Awards for short fiction. Photo credit Joel Hinton
Apple Trees – Sarah Laing
Katherine Mansfield cared about the placement of every single word and could not abide the rearranging and culling by others. Each word was passed like a kidney stone, or worried at like a piece of gravel stuck in the wet silkiness of an oyster, or roasted like a chestnut and peeled, sharp casings bruising fingertips, inner membrane rubbed away, burning nut extracted.
Whereas I, I throw words out, apple cores from moving car windows. I toss these words into the long grass along the highways, my life streaming by, and some of them have rotted or been eaten by possums, and others have grown into apple trees.
Sarah Laing is a short story writer, novelist, cartoonist and illustrator currently living in Paekākāriki. In 2016, her graphic novel Mansfield and Me was published by Te Herenga Waka Press. She is quite likely to eat her apple cores in the hope that one day a tree might grow inside her.
At the Beach – Wendy Parkins
It’s not like a Mansfield story – sea-bathing and seething discontent under floppy, broad-brimmed hats. We’re freer than the women at the Bay, aren’t we? Free to wear what we like and speak our mind. Free to sink or swim in the warming oceans.
It is mid-summer and the tide is going out. Small waves fold neatly over on themselves with a sharp slap. Sandbars slowly emerge, creating rushing channels or trapping shallow pools, blood-warm, where toddlers splash and squeal.
At my feet, halfway along the shoreline, a gentle backwash passes over a scattering of mauve-striped shells, slick and glinting. A small boy and a woman with a backpack walk past me, hurrying to the crowded end of the beach, towards the surf club flags and other people’s music.
That’s enough shells, buddy, the woman says to the boy. I’m carrying the entire beach on my back.
Wendy Parkins is a writer who lives in Ōtepoti/Dunedin. She is the author of a memoir, Every Morning, So Far, I’m Alive, published by Otago University Press in 2019. Her first novel, An Idle Woman, will be published in the UK in 2024.
Bedroom > France – Dominic Hoey
At least once a year I think I should apply for the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship, sit in a house on a hill in France, drink wine and write about home, because all stories are of home no matter where they’re set.
But my bones are sawdust, the dog’s gone blind, the deadline’s come and gone, and besides, all great writers romanticise life from their sickbed.
Dominic Hoey is a poet, author and small dog owner in Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa. He’s released two bestselling novels and written a million love poems. Through his Learn To Write Good writing course, Dominic has taught thousands of students how to think dyslexic. He also works with rangatahi through the Atawhai program, helping them with their mental health and self-esteem.
From my window – Louise Wallace
raised umbrella birds in feeder
white flowers green leaves lifting in the breeze burnt lawn
dark fence deck obscured
by a sun blind shading
our sweating bodies on the bed watching arthur christmas
trying to explain a particular poem
to my husband who says okay
then silence
the table outside ready
for feasting without
my dad we are a house of women save
for my two men past the table the tops
of trees collaged on bright blue sky
beyond that cell phone towers grandstand lighting
maybe bats
or a carousel ride
Louise Wallace is the author of four poetry collections, the most recent being This Is A Story About Your Mother (Te Herenga Waka University Press). She was the Robert Burns Fellow for 2015 at the University of Otago, edited Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems 2022, and is the founder of Starling, an online journal for young New Zealand writers. Photo credit Ebony Lamb.
funny little ugly baby – Tina Makereti
she wants the world to be beautiful. she wants that angle of sunlight falling through trees just so on the dog. she wants all future dogs to be warmed by it. she wants mediocre men to discontinue their mediocre policies, lie down under trees and dream their infant selves back into the world. she wants to ask, how will you keep them sheltered? how will you feed them? oh but she wants to lie down too. she wants to never again be told how to be | how not to be | how to think | how not to think. she wants to never again be told how to Māori by pākehā women who think they know. they don’t know. she wants to go away and sit in temples that remind her that time is tall and her portion of it is short. she wants to catch trains catch trains catch trains and never smell petrol fumes again. she wants the toxic aunties to soften because there is nothing to be hard about anymore. she wants the aunties and her daughters and her sisters to be able to whangai themselves back into existence as newborn babies, soft and gurgling, mouths wide open, spitting up the universe.
Tina Makereti (Te Ātiawa, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Rangatahi-Matakore) is author of The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke and Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings and co-editor of Black Marks on the White Page, an anthology that celebrates Māori and Pasifika writing. In 2016 her short story ‘Black Milk’ won the Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize, Pacific region. Her essay ‘Lumpectomy’ won the Landfall Essay Competition 2022. She teaches creative writing at the IIML, Te Herenga Waka Victoria University.
He had this thing – James Norcliffe
He had this thing about flies. It started with the compound eyes so perfectly compartmentalised. He saw them as textured goggles with thousands of three dimensional pixels. Hell’s angels. Goggles and eyes upon eyes. He obsessed how they could capture him in reverse micro images which they would reassemble to form fly-pictures, flies-eye views of him. Even as they were flying. She tried to ignore it. Even as they were whining and zigzagging erratically across the room. When he swung at them they accelerated and the whine became angry. Their anger angered him. She told him to ignore them. They were wearing goggle-like fly masks hiding their fly identities. She told him to stop it. And when they were still, nothing improved. Their standing on vertical surfaces was improbably perverse, but real. Their ability to walk upside down on the ceiling even more so. She told him to shut the screen door. And he hated their thoraxes almost as much as he hated the word thorax. When he said the word, it sounded like dried coffee grounds in his mouth. Thorax. Thorax. And their brown, brittle exoskeletons. Unsoft. Unfleshly. Unwarm. Go for a walk, she said. They’re getting to you. They vomit he said. Digest, then vomit and digest again. Think of something else, she said. He tried. Eggs. More eggs. Maggots.
James Norcliffe has published eleven collections of poetry, a short story collection and several novels for young people. His most recent poetry collection is Letter to ‘Oumuamua (OUP, 2023). In 2022 he received the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry and in 2023 he was awarded the Storylines Children’s Literature Charitable Trust Margaret Mahy Medal. An earlier version of this piece was first published in Pulp Fiction and appeared in Deadpan; it is after Katherine Mansfield’s story ‘The Fly’.
i am a cloud and you are a bird – Michelle Elvy
i am cloud and you are a bird. in my dream, that is, except in my dream i am a cloud floating in heaven, emptying torrents of rain, and you are a bird with electricity in your wings and we meet mid-air and tempt each other, me with my ocean of wet and you with your sharp spark, wishing for collision but also wishing for the opposite, me going this way with the wind, you going that way to the mountains, for rain and electricity is a crash of blue, flecked with silver, is a no-go. at least that’s what we learned in science.
Michelle Elvy is an editor, writer and creative writing teacher. Her books include the everrumble and the other side of better, and her anthology work includes, most recently, A Kind of Shelter: Whakaruru-taha (MUP 2023), Breach of All Size: Small stories on Ulysses, love and Venice (The Cuba Press 2022) and Ko Aotearoa Tātou | We Are New Zealand (OUP 2020). She lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin.
I am reminded – Sophia Wilson
I do not know why I have such a fancy for this little café
pulled as though by
or you, why I have such a fancy for
I vow not again, never
and yet here we are
perhaps because the staff don’t bat an eyelid
at breakfast: croissant short black
wine — café-bar to be precise a fancy for this
11 a.m. together I can’t help
but notice the malodour of decay
fungating in the warmth of our close, familiar habitat
a blue, bloated thing frenzied capillary chaos —
we could ask a naturopath for
burdock, chamomile, aloe vera cooling antidotes
to the atomic self-destruction of our ritual but
too far gone you bend slowly
lift your trouser leg you old hopeless
they’ve told you phase four — another round, no frills —
fleshy aberrations protuberances that crust and ooze:
awful, sad spectres metastasising from the graveyard
of your shins — time bombs —
they remind me somehow, disgustingly, of mushrooms.
Sophia Wilson is an Ōtepoti Dunedin-based poet. ‘I am reminded’ appears in her poetry collection Sea Skins (Flying Island Books, 2023) and was first published in Landfall 244. The first and last lines are borrowed from Katherine Mansfield’s short story, ‘je ne parle pas français’.
Mask – Emma Neale
If every fiction tells a secret
without revealing it
if it both dispels and creates
a little more mystery
than existed
before it unravels
like red flame that frets
through white wax paper
that concealed an aniseed sweet,
let me here confess
the worst deception
I ever committed
I entered unwillingly
in that, from the moment
an infant first discovers
the power in a mock cry,
it is as if we each decide
on a false identity
as witness protection
from which the only release
will be as on a stage set
when a cloak swirls
to reveal
a dropped mask
rocking gently
to and fro
on the floorboards
like an empty rowboat
ghosting with a diver’s spring,
now moored and
lit by silence.
Emma Neale is the author of six novels, six poetry collections and a collection of short fiction. She received the Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for a Distinguished Contribution to New Zealand Poetry 2020. Her novel Billy Bird (2016) was shortlisted for the Acorn Prize at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards and longlisted for the Dublin International Literary Award. Her first collection of short stories, The Pink Jumpsuit (Quentin Wilson, 2021), was longlisted for the Acorn Prize. She lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin, where she works as a freelance editor.
My Katherine Mansfield Fantasy Novel – Anne Kennedy
First, KM is inhabited by a demon. ‘I am a cough – a living walking or lying-down cough.’* The Cough can take any shape. On buses it snakes around and explodes next to elderly passengers. It can make masks dissolve. This will be great!
Scrub that. First, KM is inhabited by train tickets. She is a train ticket – a living fluttering or wet train ticket. The Ticket can pop up all over western Europe and expose people’s weirdness.
No no, first, KM has the ability to wear gorgeous flapper clothes and a blunt-cut fringe which makes her attractive to Bloomsbury peeps, plus she’s brainy and funny which gets her into loads of trouble. This will be great!
First, KM is born into wealth. She is wealth – a free-wheeling trust-finding or educated wealth, plus she’s brainy and funny which gets her into loads of trouble. This will be great!
Somewhere along the line KM meets Colin McCahon and there’s a sequel, Son of I AM.
Somewhere along the line KM comes through the air-conditioning at a KM conference infecting everyone and there’s a series, The Bliss Virus.
First, KM is inhabited by the Wellington wind.
KM is inhabited by the light.
By trembling.
Living.
KM inhabits us. We are – a living walking or lying-down KM. This will be great.
*Mansfield, Letter to Dorothy Brett, 9 October 1922, Collected Letters, vol. 5, p. 290.
Anne Kennedy’s recent books are The Sea Walks into a Wall, The Ice Shelf and, as editor, Remember Me: Poems to Learn by Heart from Aotearoa New Zealand. Awards include the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement and the Montana NZ Book Award for Poetry. Photo credit Robert Cross
Nocturne – David Eggleton
Welcome evening in; hex the colour blue to rose; take down the clouds; fold them like sheets from the line; put away the sun; hang a lantern for the backyard party. Not a moment too soon, the soaring moon. Cold and clear-cut face of the moon, a tossed dollar coin suspended.
The moon beckons with a gold finger. Harbour moon unveils ripples of the night. The skylight room shows a pendant half-moon. Beneath the moon, a flowerchild is rubbing her long hair with a squeaky balloon.
A breeze snuffles brushed scent of mānuka; something falls across night’s axle; earth cracks its creaking clay under the fish-hook moon; once in a while, a shooting star. The man in the moon gathers the stars, and places them in glass jars; of things on the wing, they are the avatars.
David Eggleton was Aotearoa New Zealand Poet Laureate between August 2019 and August 2022. He is a former Editor of Landfall as well as the Phantom Billstickers Cafe Reader. His The Wilder Years: Selected Poems was published by Otago University Press in 2021 and Respirator: A Laureate Collection 2019 -2022 was published by Otago University Press in 2023.
Seeing – Jenny Powell
She had the garden to herself and wandered to the cluster of trees in front of sun-glazed marigolds and nasturtiums. The trees had been growing there for years and as the youngest child she had always hidden behind them, never understanding the unfairness of being found so quickly.
Now they were a garden platoon, guarding against curiosity or plain nosiness. But today, they were different. She saw, for the first time, that every tree was solitary. Individual. On the closest tree, each leaf had its own sharp outline, and foliage colours varied from gentle greens on lower branches to showy copper at twig tips.
On the next tree, each leaf had begun as a green canvas. Brushes dabbed in lemon yellow had painted delicate centres, then, in moments of freedom, flicked the lemon to leafy edges.
Trees were glaringly obvious. Tight crinkles of bark on one, smooth velveteen trunk on another. Serrated satin leaves there, while here they were peaked denim.
She did not discuss this new seeing, quite sure that by tomorrow life, like a wind, would have swept it all away.
Jenny Powell is the Dunedin City of Literature South D Poet Lorikeet. As a writer she enjoys collaborating and exploring new ideas. Her latest poetry collection, Meeting Rita, (2021) has been published by Cold Hub Press.
Shell Seeker – Susan Wardell
A woman stands and looks at the sea. It is a story you have read many times.
But this time the woman is you, and the cold water sucks and chews at your toes.
The sand around you is stinking with tidal dreck: knuckles of driftwood, and shells with a white maggoty sheen. Amongst all of this you spot a piece of porcelain.
It is smoothed at the edges, in the way of sea-glass. It is the size and shape of a tooth; not human, but something larger. Blue and white patterns writhe their way along one side.
He is waiting for you in the car.
Your mother refused to give you the wedding china, so you take this instead. Something to cradle in your pocket. Proof you can be trusted with delicate things.
You will place it on the (rented) windowsill, behind the (rented) sink. It will be the start of something.
You get into the car, one hand a fist. The exhaust pop-pops loudly, as he carries you away, your feet still bare.
Susan Wardell is a Pākehā poet, academic and children’s book author from Ōtepoti Dunedin. She teaches Social Anthropology at the University of Otago, and publishes in both academic and literary contexts. She been nationally and internationally awarded for poetry, essay and flash fiction, including first place in the 2023 NZPS competition. She is the poetry editor for Anthropology and Humanism. Her recent children’s book, The Lighthouse Princess, was awarded ‘best first book’ at the 2023 NZCYA Book Awards.
Spring – Paula Morris
He felt the tree was watching him.
Velvet, dark in the glow of evening. Heavy boughs stretched over and, on that part of the pavement, a fine sifting of minute twigs.
There is nobody here.
On a spring afternoon, sunny and still, the top of the piano is open. The ring has been rattling. The new grass shakes in the light.
There is nobody here.
Over the low painted fences, dripping clay banks, the violet patch. Now a cloud, like a swan, flies across the sun. The air still tingles.
There is nobody here of that name.
Paula Morris (Ngāti Wai, Ngāti Manuhiri) is an award-winning fiction writer and essayist, and the editor of the online Aotearoa NZ Review of Books. She directs the Master of Creative Writing programme at the University of Auckland. Her most recent book is the anthology Hiwa: Contemporary Māori Short Stories. This piece is written from ‘Weak Heart’, an unfinished story by Katherine Mansfield. Photo credit Colleen Maria Lenihan
The Fly – Becky Manawatu
We live here in this Brand New Start house with my mum, my worry worry mum.
She is brave, beautiful, forgiving, gullible, a sucker-for-punishment.
She deserves better.
Our house used to have a Feature fireplace. Brand New Start house has a little fan heater that whirs and only heats what it’s pointed at, which is usually whoever’s hands can slap away other hands.
You deserve better, my aunty says, nodding and tapping a long and polished nail against her front tooth, while I hold my hands strong and brave in front of the fan heater, close my eyes and pretend it’s an orange fire, in our Feature fireplace.
I saw a purple fly on the windowsill. I watched it bang against the wooden frame. I could have opened the window. Instead, I killed the fly. Tiny white creatures came out, spilling onto the windowsill. Like a flame, my brother was at my shoulder. When he saw the tiny white creatures, he said, ‘Termites!’
I cannot tell my mum, my worry worry mum, that her Brand New Start house is being eaten by termites which were hiding inside a fly.
I wonder how far they’ve got, how long we have.
Becky Manawatu (Kāi Tahu) lives in Westport with her family. Her debut novel Auē won the 2020 Jann Medlicott Prize for fiction and best first book at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
The Guest House – Victor Billot
My hands are smeared in the resin seeping from the gnarled trunk of the macrocarpa. High in its branches we clasp and sway. Beyond the lupins, the line of ocean mumbles continuously. Below, the soft floor of sand. Bald hills climb up from the green swells. The old guest house stands on the rising slopes above the bay. Its lone turret leans out from glinting leaves and tall hedges. No-one is ever seen framed within its wide empty windows.
I follow the others along the hot asphalt back to the village, to family, to the evening hours. Our thin voices are lost in the heat and salt air. The afternoon falls away as we vanish into time. The blue rush of day spills over.
Victor Billot is a Dunedin writer. His poetry collection The Sets was published by Otago University Press in 2021. He grew up in the nearby township of Warrington, next to Blueskin Bay, which is the imaginative setting for ‘The Guest House.’
The Kitset Years – Kay Cooke
He started with a shadow box. We used it for the ballerina, the special Easter egg cups and the dog with one ear over one eye. The next year through a crack in the outside wall, we spotted a rocking horse in a gap under the house. Magic, we thought. Dad told us we were not to believe our eyes. It didn’t exist. That is, until it turned up on Christmas Day. The same Christmas that my sisters and I got an empty doll’s house with white walls and a poppy-red roof. We furnished it ourselves, squashing wallpaper into the corners to make it fit. But it never did look right. Nothing about our attempts looked right. Especially the pink, hard-plastic carnival doll separated from its stick and purple nylon tutu. It was far too big and couldn’t sit on the chairs. No one can remember what eventually became of the supposedly fictional rocking horse. Perhaps it galloped off into someone else’s myth. A sister with daughters got the doll’s house, except her daughters didn’t want it. They were more into sport. Funnily enough, despite its name, the only thing from Dad’s kitset years that still exists is the shadow box.
Kay McKenzie Cooke (Kāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe) is an Ōtepoti Dunedin author of four poetry books and two novels. She was born in Murihiku Southland and often draws upon that upbringing as inspiration for her work. Other things she draws upon are nature, people and the ordinarily extraordinary aspects of daily life. She is married to Robert and is grandmother to nine mokopuna. This story is inspired by Katherine Mansfield’s story, ‘The Doll’s House’.
The Place – Richard Reeve
You picked a name to get away from the place, resenting the inhabitants, their small tolerance for difference and appetites for comfort. Bliss would be getting away from here, you considered, notwithstanding C and the lambs. Perhaps they might visit? The best of the place, unfortunately, was also rooted here. Kisses, flowers on the shore, a seagull, the glitter of the waves after the wind dropped. What would the point be of staying except to revel in the sensuous moment. Surely that would be elsewhere too? And there would be writers, artists, culture, ideas. The possibility of fame. The incontrovertible fun of being known yet unknown. That would be anywhere but here.
Richard Reeve is the author of six collections of poetry. His next collection, About Now, is forthcoming from Maungatua Press. He lives in Warrington.
Wounded bird – Iona Winter
Your parlour is stuffed with dead birds. I sit amongst them.
The Victorians’ obsession with life after death ensured these creatures would remain forever poised — a futile attempt to soften an emphatic blow. A dove is perched atop your piano, near unlit sconces. I observe the dust motes as they settle, inch by inch by inch.
Birds are known to pick over bones. People do this too, after a death.
Above me, upstairs in your childhood room, I hear the echoes of windows rattling, sense absent feet on stone water-bottles. Phantasmic sadness creeps the barren hallway.
No matter how fervently I wish for it to be otherwise, my dead remain mute, incapable of reanimation.
I too am paralysed in this room. Intricately coupled with those wounded birds. My gaze can only linger, upon a faded triptych of nymphs dancing around a pool. Their voices shrieking: catch me if you can.
Iona Winter (Waitaha) is a widely published and anthologised kaituhi. In 2022 she was the 2022 CLNZ/NZSA Writers’ Award recipient, for a creative non-fiction project addressing the complexities of suicide bereavement. Iona’s side project Elixir & Star Press is a dedicated space for the expression of grief in Aotearoa New Zealand.