Tracey Slaughter, writer, teacher and editor, tells us about flash in the Waikato region and shares some flash from local writers.

Flash in the Waikato

 

 

Flash is a living, electric form, and it’s thriving here in the Waikato, in the hands of some of Aotearoa’s most exciting emerging writers. In our local arts community the practice of flash has a key place, with strong centres in the Creative Writing classes at the University of Waikato (where I get to share the joy of flash with students from undergraduate to PhD), in the vibrant scene that has grown around Mayhem Literary Journal (some of whose editors have work represented here), in the Waikato Writers group, where flash is a core form that members gather regularly to share, and on the zine circuit where writers blend their flash skills with visual arts and collage to cutting-edge effect. National Flash Fiction Day also gives us an annual reason to party, and as Waikato authors point out, flash is a space which naturally brings together prose writers and poets, a proximity which fosters community, and sparks collaboration and innovation.

Local voices speak of being drawn to the hybridity of flash, the way it opens up an alluring space to play between poetry and prose – it’s no accident that the writers profiled here span both poetry and fiction, revelling in the flash form’s permission to fuse. For Naveena Menon it’s flash’s challenge to capture ‘multifaceted shades’ of experience within ‘a single moment’ that presses her senses towards ‘lush detail’. Likewise drawn to sound-driven and sense-rich lines, Aimee-Jane Anderson-O’Connor likes the narrative kick that flash injects into the lyric: ‘I love flash because it pushes me to consider character, make something happen, and track a change.’ Flash is ‘kind of the exposition-cousin of poetry’, says Dadon Rowell. ‘It allows a more tangible thread of narrative but is still a poetic zoom-in on a moment, rich in texture and sensory detail.’ Shivani Agrawal too loves how the flash mode mixes sense-charged language with story direction, letting her ‘zone in on specific details and slowly pan out as the narrative progresses’. The capacity of flash to let a writer rest within the fragment and suspend the small isolated moments is also crucial to Melody May, who has composed an entire novel in flash, using the vital physical gifts of the form to express the reality of living with chronic pain – a task that conventional linear narrative cannot accomplish.

It’s a privilege to share with you some of the breathtaking writers we have here in the Waikato, who are making use indelible use of flash’s accessibility, intensity and impact.

Tracey Slaughter

carpark ghosts

Shivani Agrawal

 

below my thighs, black leather burns red-hot. milk skin clouds crack over a sky of powder blue.

the sun burns angrier every new summer. men veil their shops with threaded cords of marigold.

the steering still untouchable. heat grows from my fingertips. fat, satin leaves quiver in what is left of the wind. roots dangle till they clutch land. birth new life from the womb of dirt. then crawl over and under concrete. it is hard to imagine this bark was not always vermillion. time is already a memory before the next thing happens. is this where the earth first cracked open? ma bites into her triple-decker sandwich. tells me ghosts live under banyan trees. i turn the ignition on. all the ghosts watch us leave.

their laughter, made of light, echoes from behind the hanging roots. growing indefinitely.

 

Daisy

Aimee-Jane Anderson-O’Connor

 

This town is just one great big farm. The main road runs alongside these power poles tilted over green green paddocks, the lines all sagging, the poles on the piss. You hit it at forty k and slug down the main street, past the Strand, the Top Pub, the Nott. The arterial line is just panel beaters, tractors, pots of pink flowers dripping from shop windows. She says they look like icing.

And these cows. There are forty-two of them, all painted up to look cultural. Blue like an old tea cup, pearls and roses dribbling over the rim. One unzipped at the side, with muscle and guts peeking out like baked beans and salmon. She txts me while she waits for him to pick her up, take her to play pool at The Tav. She uses the golden heart emoji. She uses extra yyy’s.

There’s one flower power cow, real LSD yellow and orange, like it sorta wandered over from Woodstock and got lost for years and years. Little kids run across the road just to touch them. Name their favourites after their pet cats. Rusty, Mittens, Boots. She says her future kids will have pictures on them. I can see them, then, their little chubby hands clutching the ears.

They’re bolted to the pavement so at night they just haunt the main street, all washed out and hollow. But the worst is that giant one right at the start of town. Two stories high, with black splotches like flames of tar. I have these dreams that the paddocks are on fire and the ground is opening up and all you can hear is mooing. The Mega Cow watching over her herd like some great milky God.

The trains rattle past at dawn and the cows hardly blink.

Adapted from original, published in Ngā Kupu Waikato, ed. Vaughan Rapatahana, 2019

 

Drain

Melody May

 

Kelly rolls the word pandemic around her brain. An outbreak that cannot be contained. She’s not prone to hype. She excavates the noise for precise reality. The media offer simulations and peddle fear like insurance ads. This news cycle resembles all the other times the world nearly ended. She remembers Y2K – New Year’s Eve parties were in basements with cans of baked beans stacked in the corner. Yet, this seems different – it crawls past her sceptical defences. She feels the spiky virus clawing toward her broken body the way a lizard eases toward a cricket. The presenter with stiff-gelled hair keeps saying, underlying conditions –chronic conditions. And she knows her meds make her particularly susceptible to respiratory infections. Susceptible. Likely to be harmed. She is likely to be harmed if people don’t adhere to the government’s guidelines. They are worried that people like her will be a drain on the system. System. Interdependent group. Drain. Deprive of strength or vitality. She doesn’t want to deprive anyone, but she also doesn’t want to end up on a ventilator where they decide to harvest her organs while she fights to live in her sleeping body, and her daughter holds her hand. Although, her disease has made even her vital organs useless to anyone who needs them. Useless. Useless. Useless. She would be useless even in death. One upside is people actually know what the term immunocompromised means now. She doesn’t have to encounter the blank stare that usually follows her utterance of the word. Now though, they look her up and down and wonder, does she have cancer? Does she have AIDS? She doesn’t know. That may not be what they’re thinking at all. Maybe she’s making it all up in her head and they’re all just as scared as she is.

 

the &

Naveena Menon

 

when I peel you from my armour you slip out like the pit of an olive slick with red still warm in the way dead things aren’t & if I buried you now would you grow would you reach for me through Trojan earth wet with breaths we should have shared in a scorched tent humid with want seeping from skin from between rug burned thighs from the lucid dip between your shoulder blades where I’d lay my damp palm press you down onto the sheets & after my fingers will meld into that curve as you tell me about the young soldier whose arm hung limp bone gored from flesh torn at the elbow how he fell to the ground the moment his friend’s breastplate stopped rising as though they shared one heart & I’d search for words to allay in the coarse hairs on your chest that catch on my lashes with each blink & I’d promise us a future as the camp shudders to still life around the first bare shadows of dawn

 

Hanging out with Marie Curie

Dadon Rowell

 

We sit in dry grass, backs propped against an old punga trunk. Marie’s just wearing a strappy summer dress. I tell her that her shoulders are going to burn, but she says the sun makes her skin flutter & she likes it.

Beta particles & whispered secrets twist in the humid air, Marie talks about a handsome lab student in her department. He gave her purple wildflowers after her husband died & dries her tears with cotton wool. I end up showing her the chip in my tooth I got from falling instead of running. We agree that picnics by the Waikato River are better than sitting in church or waiting for photographic plates to melt.

I recite as much as I can remember of Tom Lehrer’s ‘Elements’ song & sunlight reflects off white filaments in her hair as she giggles. We chew on strawberries & flick the hulls high into the ferns.

Her fingertips are blue, but she tucks them into the crooks of her elbows & tells me when it’s dark our breath will hang in the air like fireflies.

Previously published @ the Dunedin Young Writers Festival: https://youngwritersfest.nz/flashfiction/

 

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Shivani Agrawal (she/her) is a poet & editor from India with a long-standing love affair with Aotearoa. She is currently pursuing a Master of Professional Writing from the University of Waikato in Kirikiriroa. Her recent works are featured/forthcoming in Poetry Aotearoa, Mayhem Literary Journal, Mister Magazine, The Alipore Post and The Uncuts. She is also the co-founder of Femme Fridays, a virtual workshop for South Asian women and queer writers.

 

Melody May, who was, for a strange while, referred to as Melody Wilkinson, is from Colorado but currently lives in New Zealand with her teenage daughter. She completed her English with Creative Practice PhD at The University of Waikato. Her topic is ‘Erased: Representations of Women’s Bodies in Chronic Invisible Pain’. Her creative and academic focus is on changing the way women are represented in literature and other media, especially women suffering from chronic pain and creating a more inclusive world for those on the margins. She has academic publications in Mortality and the Australasian Journal of Popular Culture. She has creative publications in the Spinoff, Mayhem Literary Journal, Poetry New Zealand and Sweet Mammalian, and her screenplay won the Sam Barn’s Award for excellence. She wants to tell stories for a long time.

 

Aimee-Jane Anderson-O’Connor is a writer living in Kirikiriroa. She is a keen zinester and collage maker, and believes in the power of community and collaboration.

 

Naveena Menon (she/her) is a queer writer who should really be drinking more water than she currently does. She is currently working toward a Masters in English at the University of Waikato Te Whare Wānanga o Waikato. Her words have previously appeared in Sweet Mammalian and Overcom.

 

Dadon Rowell (she/her) is a Kirikiriroa-based poet & short fiction writer with a Masters in English from the University of Waikato. She’s a teacher, librarian & long-time ampersand enthusiast. Her work has featured in multiple journals & anthologies, including Sweet Mammalian, Poetry Aotearoa, Starling & No Other Place to Stand: An Anthology of Climate Change Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand. Most recently she guest co-edited the 10th issue of Mayhem Literary Journal & is a member of the new Mayhem editorial team.