Saturday, November 06, 2010

BNZ Short Story Awards, Novice Section, 2010 - Judge's Comments

Judge's Comments - Emma Neale

First of all, I want to say that I thought my job was going to be made very cushy by my initial reader, Laura Kroetsch. Laura did an extraordinary job of winnowing down the entries from about 400, to 50, then 30, then 25, as time began to get tighter and tighter. I thought of her as a kind of night club bouncer, turning away those anti-social creeps who have no sense of timing, spill their drinks, shout over the music, misread all the cues from the opposite sex, and try unseemly groping where subtlety and restraint are called for. Laura will just invite in those who have really learned their moves, I thought. Well, she did, and in a way that actually made my job harder. If there had been obvious klutzes, screeching monsters of indiscretion, it would have been much easier to choose a winning story. But there were so many potential stylish, intelligent, thoughtful waltz partners, that after I'd reduced Laura's initial list to ten, I felt like one of the twelve sisters from the Grimm fairytale, who's compelled to dance nightly, until her shoes are in tatters. I read and re-read, swearing to myself each time that this round, I'd be truly ruthless: turn down that one for his boring digressions about his beer mat collection, or that one for her somewhat jerky switches from topic to topic. I could only see charms and merits, so the decision took much longer than I'd anticipated - but of course, that's something to celebrate, as it's a clear sign of the calibre of those shortlisted entries.

After whittling down the list to ten, and then to five, I realised that at some level all the best stories shared either a discussion of compassion, or by implication, the perils of its absence. When trying to find the pre-eminent story in this smaller subset, I based my decision on whether it had:

a robust, consistent sense of character and/or narrative perspective;

a strong internal focus, be it on an atmosphere or a chain of events;

an accurate, compelling or unusual use of descriptive imagery to help paint a psychological portrait or mood;

a clear understanding of the technicalities of style (i.e. of elements such as grammar, semantics, paragraphing, and so on).

I've given a fuller discussion of all ten finalists in a report I understand the BNZ has made available tonight. I want to congratulate all the writers on my own shortlist, and to reiterate here that it was very difficult to choose particularly between the top two stories. Their styles were quite different, yet they both concentrated on a protagonist whose actions expose the murkier moral territory that even apparently caring people enter under certain pressures.

These two stories shared an interest in how complex emotions can shape an ethical choice, but in the end I chose the entry that had what seemed to me to be an extra element of strangeness, that covered a wider range of power dynamics between the constellations of characters, and the story that went into what you might call a more peripheral social interaction – and yet one which exposes something deeply troubling at the centre of a family.

This story takes on a difficult stylistic challenge, in its attempt to slide between two points of view in a very short narrative space. Yet its subject matter maintains the smack of the real, and exposes the odd tensions, the intersection of private and public, in the often uneasy context of looking after someone else's children. In its focus on the strange psychological meet-and-recoil between a young adult and her charges in a babysitting scenario, where the sitter is new to the family, it asks wider, pressing questions about social responsibility.

There is a lovely interlude of clownish, crazy playfulness shared by the two main characters, yet when the babysitter comes to suspect there's a dark undercurrent beneath a happy family facade, the story rapidly accelerates to the end, in a reflection of her sense of panic and her rush to get away from a situation that unnerves her.

The babysitter herself is poised on a painful fulcrum of agency and vulnerability, at an age where she's really just begun to take on the adult world alone. There is an authentic distancing of herself from the family after the babysitting episode, which is both a sign of her immaturity, and yet also in keeping with her personality as a 'people pleaser', afraid to stir up trouble when she faces a moral dilemma, especially when she has no tangible proof of her suspicions. Yet despite her apparent paralysis over the right action to take, the openness of the final lines suggest she retains empathy, and that there is, therefore, hope both for her own development as a citizen-of-the-world, and perhaps even for a further connection with the child.

I chose this story because I think one of fiction's important roles is to speak the otherwise unspoken: to shine daylight into some of the hidden rooms of, and repressions in, human relationships. And yet despite its illuminations, the story also leaves gaps which get our own imaginations and ethical sense working, to fill in the silences and absences, puzzling over and independently judging the protagonist's actions. My reading might not be the same interpretation you bring to this story. It's troubling and alluring in that sense: it's unpredictable; it doesn't do all the thinking for us. For this reason, it lingers in the mind, and I think it shows a writer of enormous promise.

The winner of the novice category for 2010 is Chloe Searle, for her story 'Babysitting'.

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