This month’s Flash Frontier featured author is Jenna Heller, winner of the inaugural AT THE BAY | I TE KOKORU manuscript competition for a manuscript of flash fiction. Jenna’s collection – her first – will be published later this year.

Vaughan Rapatahana: Kia ora. Can we start the interview by asking you to tell us about yourself – for example, how long have you been in Aotearoa? Also, something about your writing career, please?

Jenna Heller: I spent my earliest years in Connecticut and New York; my high school and university years in Pennsylvania and Texas; and my summers in Prince Edward Island, Canada. I first set foot in Aotearoa in December of 1993 with no inkling that I would one day call New Zealand home but in 1998 I officially moved to Ōtautahi Christchurch. I’ve spent roughly half my life living in each country – the majority of my life driving on the left side of the road than on the right – and I feel very much like an American-Kiwi.

The very first story I remember writing was called ‘The Mystery of the Missing Shoelace’. I was about 9 or 10 and I spent a whole sunny weekend indoors writing a first draft, revising the draft and illustrating a final draft. It was about one girl’s search for her missing green and white striped shoelace. Spoiler: it turns up in the spaghetti at dinner. I wish I had a copy of that story but it has been lost somewhere along the way in my many moves. A year or so later, I won a state-wide poetry competition for my age group with a poem about unicorns. Looking back at that poem now, I can say with generous and kind honesty that it is not very good. But I remember loving the process of writing it and the thrill of learning that other people – adults! – found something in my poem that they connected with, and that they thought it was ‘good’.

I kept writing and, although I preferred writing short stories, it was my poetry that other people seemed to like most because it was my poetry that kept getting noticed. In high school a friend took one of my poems and shared it with her English teacher and he decided to anonymously share it with his class for a close reading that day. That was quite a thrill. My first magazine publications were with Portland, Oregon’s PLAZM and New York City’s BOMB Magazine.

But it wasn’t until I participated in the Hagley Writers’ Institute in 2011 that I really started to take my writing seriously: the daily practice of writing, the close reading of others’ writing, the exploration of the craft of writing, developing my writing voice. It was at Hagley that I finally decided to focus on my fiction writing and it was there that I started writing my first novel-length manuscript, which was eventually shortlisted for the Text Prize for Children and Young Adults in 2019.

My writing has since been published in journals based in Aotearoa New Zealand, the US, Australia, Canada and the UK. I won the National Flash Fiction Day competition in 2020, placed runner-up in the Caselberg International Poetry competition in 2021, and have had pieces selected for inclusion in the Best Small Fictions anthologies in 2020, 2021 and 2023. I’m also on the Canterbury Poets’ Collective committee, and I’m a relief teacher at WRITE ON: School for Young Writers.

VR: Congratulations on winning the AT THE BAY | I TE KOKORU flash fiction manuscript competition with ‘The End of the Beginning’, which I really admire. Can you please let us know why you chose to write, and continue to write, flash fiction?

JH: I’d never heard of flash fiction until I met local Ōtautahi writer Heather McQuillan at the School for Young Writers. It was 2016 and Heather had just won the National Flash Fiction Day competition. I was intrigued and peppered her with questions about the form. Flash instantly appealed to me because of its immediacy and the blend of storytelling and poetry. And talk about ‘show don’t tell’! If you don’t really understand what that means, writing flash fiction will help you figure it out. Every single word must ring in service to the story and flash words are often working double-time to both advance the plot and give you some clue to the character. The amount of foreshadowing and character deepening you can do with just one word is remarkable.

Recently, I’ve realised that one reason I’m particularly drawn to flash is because I enjoy making connections between ‘where we are now’ and ‘the choices we made then’. In my mind, flash fiction is an excellent form for conveying reflective connection and the sense-making that only happens with the passing of time. Often my flash stories include vast periods of time, sometimes whole lifetimes, in just a few hundred words. It’s ironic that such a short form can do that. But then, life happens in moments, doesn’t it? And we piece those moments together and call them memories; and memories are the stories we tell ourselves and each other as a way of explaining and defining who we were, who we are and who we aspire to be. This exploration of internal ‘human scriptwriting’ is what draws me back time and time again to the flash form. Interestingly, and this only just dawned on me as I’ve answered your question, my longer short stories tend to focus on a short period of time: one hour, a night, a couple of days at most.

VR: This collection has several themes, which I would label – if pressed – somewhat chthonic. There is a dark underbelly to many of these short pieces, eh. Ostensible murder, revenge, personal identity conflicts, life crises and so on. Could you perhaps discuss the origins for many of these pieces: for example, are they grounded in personal experiences, or are ‘purely’ imaginative tales? Or perhaps a mixture of both?

JH: The stories are a mixture: both purely imaginative and the fictionalisation of personal experience. All of the stories explore emotions that I am intimately familiar with – rejection, fear, disgust, desire, feeling like an outsider, anger, bravado, confidence, love, hate. Some could also be considered flash memoire or even creative nonfiction.

It’s probably worth noting that my favourite holiday is (or was when I lived in the US) Halloween, and I grew up loving scary movies and scary stories. Not the slash-and-gore kind but the subtler sort. The kind where the seemingly well-adjusted character has a deep knot of disturbance within them that stems from something and it shows itself in a horrifying and disturbing way but whose actions can be understood. Thread-pulling stories or the troubling nature of snowballing, regrettable decision-making. True horror.

VR: One key theme I note in several of the pieces relates to LGBTQ+ issues, thus alienation and a sense of belonging. Would you like to expand on this theme and the importance of writing about these issues, with special focus on Aotearoa New Zealand?

JH: You’re right about the themes of alienation and belonging – feelings that are common to the human experience. I just happen to explore them from an LGBTQ+ perspective. Regarding the importance of writing that is grounded in an LGBTQ+ experience, my short answer is that representation and expression matters.

We live in a male-centric, hetero-normative world. Growing up, the stories I read were dominated by boys and cis, straight men as main characters. When I was coming out in the pre-internet days, the only writing I could find that was lesbian-themed or had lesbian main characters was the incredibly depressing but groundbreaking novel The Well of Loneliness published in 1928 by Radclyffe Hall and a women-run erotica literary magazine, On Our Backs. In comparison, I had no trouble finding books and lit mags featuring gay men as main characters. I was thrilled – and I need to underline that: thrilled – to eventually discover Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For, a serial comic strip that ran from 1983 to 2008 in gay and lesbian newspapers and published into small books every couple of years. Her entire cast of characters was multicultural, neurodiverse, dominated by women and dominated by LGBTQ+ characters. It took a while, but eventually, her strip was syndicated into more mainstream outlets and available for purchase in mainstream bookstores. I cannot tell you how self-affirming reading this comic strip was for me and for so many queer women I’ve spoken to.

I’ve lived in a state where it was not only legal to discriminate against someone’s sexual orientation but was also against the law to engage in a ‘homosexual act’ and where it was life-threateningly dangerous to be out. I’ve personally experienced discrimination and been on the receiving end of death threats and hate speech. I remember being thrilled when ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ came into being for LGBTQ folks in the US military (which now seems abhorrent but back in 1993, it was considered a small but important step in the right direction) and more thrilled when it was repealed in 2011. Even though marriage is not really something I particularly aspire to, it was incredible to see same sex marriage become legal in New Zealand in 2013 and in the United States in 2015… and it has been incredibly frustrating to see LGBTQ+ acceptance and rights under-fire and eroding since 2016.

It’s tempting to think that Aoteaora New Zealand might be immune to the erosion of human rights but in the last couple of years, there has been a growing wave of LGBTQ+ hate. From anti-trans rallies to increased homophobic vandalism to an uptick in both verbal and online hate speech targeting people in our rainbow communities. Women’s rights are also increasingly under attack.

So, all of this is to say that I am very intentional about writing stories with girls, women and queer folks as main characters because it is my lived experience and because it’s necessary. I do this not only because I want to create more opportunities for queer people to see themselves in more stories, but also because I want readers of all sorts to be exposed to real society, society that is not only made up of cis men with a hetero-normative experience. We live in a diverse, rich world that should be reflected in writing.

VR: You also write in other genres, for example longer fiction and poetry. Can you please tell us about these forms of writing and why and when you switch genre?

JH: I write poetry when I don’t really know what I want to say but I have a feeling to explore or I just want to see what happens when I let my mind write freely. Poetry allows my mind to make unexpected connections and work in mysterious ways that I don’t even attempt to try to figure out. I just let it flow. On the other hand, fiction writing – of any length – seems to require me to have clarity of direction before I even put pen to paper (or fingertips to keyboard). For me, it’s important to play with structure in the final shaping stage so sometimes the final draft of a poem might become a piece of flash fiction or a piece of flash might become part of a longer short-story or become a poem. What I know for sure is that writing in different genre strengthens all of my writing, even my business writing which I also do a fair bit of in my day job.

VR: Finally, could you also gift us an example of your tuhituhinga poto, please? Ko te kaupapa mō te moana.

JH: Here’s a piece called ‘Animals’. I wrote the first draft of this back in 2020 during the first lockdown when I was particularly prolific. I wrote something like 49 new pieces over a six-week period. It’s still a treasure trove of ideas for me. The final version of ‘Animals’ only holds the kernel of the main plot line from the first draft; the rest it almost entirely newly written specifically for Flash Frontier.

 

Animals

 

That’s what she called us. I laughed but you didn’t. When you finally spoke, it was the c-word whispered for only me to hear. I knew then you wouldn’t hold your tongue and you’d get the stick and a hard kick to the groin. Something to send you crawling to bed.

So I took off. Ran along the side of the road, watched the late-to-leave tourists drive by, the tough tussock clipping my ankles all the way to our safe place. The place where you showed me the fossilised forest, where you said the seabed was from the time of dinosaurs. The place where we would spit and shout and collect pieces of petrified wood to stand on our bedroom windowsill.

This time, the tide was coming in and so were the last of the yellow-eyed penguins. They tumbled out of the sea and onto the ossified forest, scrambled to their feet then waddled into the scrubland to nest for the night. Safe. After that, I walked home. The sun so low in the sky it was hard to see, but there was no mistaking the flashing lights. I watched them wheel out a stretcher. Watched them push it into the ambulance. And then I saw you. Head hanging, a copper gripping your arm.

These days, I carry the ocean in my pocket. Pipi shells. Pretzel-stick driftwood. Sometimes just a fist-full of wet sand to squeeze between my fingers. And my windowsills? They’re full of fragments from the ancient forest.

Jenna Heller is an American-Kiwi writer living in Ōtautahi Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand. Her poetry and fiction appear predominantly in journals based in Aotearoa New Zealand and the United States, occasionally in Australia, Canada and the UK. She won the Aotearoa New Zealand National Flash Fiction Day contest in 2020, was runner-up for the Caselberg International Poetry Prize in 2021 and was shortlisted for the Text Prize for Young Adult and Children’s Writing in 2019. Her writing has appeared in the Best Small Fictions anthology in 2020, 2021, and is forthcoming in 2023. Her first collection of flash, The End of the Beginning, will be published by AT THE BAY | I TE KOKORU in late 2023.