Securing the future of New Zealand’s lit scene
Published by The Sunday Star Times and The Post: https://www.thepost.co.nz/culture/360823925/securing-future-nzs-literary-journal-scene
By Sapeer Mayron
The literary industry has a marketing problem.
It takes years, sometimes decades to get a book to print, says Emily Broadmore, founding editor of literary journal Folly.
And when it finally does, often it’s launched under the fluorescent lights of local bookstores, where guests are served lukewarm wine and dried-out cheese.
“This is how we celebrate art?”
When Broadmore decided to start Folly, she wasn’t interested in joining the writerly scene of the esteemed 80-year-old Landfall and 76-year-old Poetry Aotearoa, heavyweights which have propelled literary greats into their careers.
She wanted to disrupt it, taking a proudly commercial approach - charging guests to for the well-attended launch parties (from $55) and paying for the staffing and cost of the parties and for each journal issue, which cost $35 each. Then there are the annual membership options of $150 or $250 a year to support the journal and guarantee journal copies.
“That’s uncomfortable for a lot of artists and writers,” Broadmore says.
“That we're actually saying ‘yes, art needs to make money in order to survive’ is seen as a bit controversial, yet within the commercial world, it's like, well, of course it does.”
Folly Issue #3 - a different kind of literary journal, founding editor Emily Broadmore says.Allison Turner
This year Folly was a finalist in the International Indie Book Awards 2025, won a Literary Magazine Incubator Project grant, and is representing NZ literature at the Frankfurt Book Fair this month, where Broadmore will pitch Folly to stockists all over the English-speaking world.
The more financially viable the journal is, the better is it for the artists within its pages, she says. Why not sell entertainment at a premium?
“And in providing entertainment, you're sneaking in support for the arts, you’re sneaking in literature, and you're opening up that world to a whole variety of people who might otherwise never engage.”
Mayhem founding editor Dr Tracey Slaughter with two covers, from 2019 and 2024.
Platforming work on the smell of an oily rag or the precarious promise of central government funding is the other model.
“I started Mayhem because I was dazzled by the power of the voices coming out of my classes on campus,” says Dr Tracey Slaughter, an award winning writer and poet, and senior writing lecturer at the University of Waikato.
“The ferocity and life and energy, the voices that were pumping through, they were so striking, I really felt they needed to be heard... and I’ve often had to put my hand in my own pocket to keep it going.”
Same goes for another founding editor, poet and writer Louise Wallace, who in 2015 (the same year Slaughter made Mayhem) launched Starling, another journal dedicated to young writers, which has successfully become a staple for exam writers picking texts for young readers.
“I found it very difficult to relate to some of the poems we were being shown in high school, often English writers from 100 years ago,” says Wallace.
“That Starling pieces are by young New Zealanders, and young New Zealanders can connect with them and are reading them, that’s really wonderful.”
The editorial team at Starling, speaking at the New Zealand Young Writers Festival in 2024: (L-R) Louise Wallace, Tate Fountain, Maddie Ballard and Francis CookeSupplied
Aotearoa’s oldest journals though, are funded and managed by universities.
The mighty Landfall, which this month celebrates 250 issues over 80 years with a new name, Landfall Tauraka, has been published by Otago University Press since 1993. Today they charge $35 per edition and offer annual subscriptions starting at $65.
Founded in 1947 by poet Charles Brasch, published by Caxton Press and described by the New Zealand Listener at the time as “holding its own, and no more”, Landfall soon became the notable place to be published.
In an interview for the 250th edition, poet Bill Manhire said he knew he had made it when his submission was accepted for the first time, in 1968. And in her autobiography, Janet Frame wrote: “if you didn't appear in Landfall then you could scarcely call yourself a writer.”
Its publisher, Dr Sue Wootton of Otago University Press, and current editor Dr Lynley Edmeades, both had their earliest pieces published there.
“We both suffered the Landfall curse,” Edmeades laughs. “I'd been rejected so many times, and then it was like, hooray – this is me growing wings, like, I can fly now into New Zealand literature.”
“There is this sense when you get published in Landfall that you have joined this living kōrero that is still evolving through time,” Wootton adds.
“And oh my god, it’s an amazing feeling to be part of that.”
Otago University Press publisher Dr Sue Wootton and Dr Lynley Edmeades, editor of Landfall TaurakaMel Stevens / Supplied
Headland, an online journal for literary fiction and creative non-fiction, is produced alongside Massey University’s Creative Writing Programme; Victoria University’s Institute of Modern Letters online journal is Turbine Kapohau; and The Three Lamps publishes an annual collection of writing from University of Auckland students.Poetry Aotearoa is published by the University of Waikato (and edited by Slaughter), and sells annual yearbooks in commercial bookstores for $36.99, and Mayhem cost $30 per edition.
But it’s possible to run a literary journal without a university’s backing: Wallace and co-editor Francis Cooke have been running Starling with funding from Creative New Zealand, releasing 20 issues so far with the next due in February.
Six years in, Wallace and Cooke invited some of their writers to sit on an editorial committee, helping choose the work– making each issue better than the last, Wallace says.
For example, one poem was submitted entirely in capital letters. To Wallace’s admittedly conservative eye, it was an immediate no, but the others disagreed.
“It made me have another look at it and engage with the content and with what the poet was actually doing, rather than just like my instinctual response.”
Incoming editors of Starling, Maddie Ballard and Tate Fountain.Supplied
This year, Wallace and Cooke are stepping back, and writers Tate Fountain and Maddie Ballard, both Starling writers, become editors, allowing the journal to keep evolving.
Fountain says the community connected by Starling makes a world of difference for what can otherwise be a solitary career.
"Being surrounded by people who are also doing what you’re doing, and have a dedicated practice to it, it makes it feel very possible. It’s like, oh, people do write books.
“There is a great feasibility to it, when you can see people around you doing it as well.”
Keeping Starling online-only helps keep costs down - for readers too, as it’s free - but now Wallace and Cooke have given Fountain and Ballard more responsibilities, they can focus on ensuring the journal’s sustainability.
Although the university model is tempting - Edmeades and Wootton say if Otago University Press had not begun publishing Landfall from 1993, it may not have survived - it’s not always a safe bet either, Wallace says.
Melbourne University Press’ Meanjin will cease publishing after its last issue in December, 85 years after launching. Wallace is sad - Meanjin had her first published piece.
Somehow, Landfall remains “a continuous vault for Aotearoa New Zealand voices”, says Wootton.
“Other literary journals have come and gone, and there always will be others arising in parallel, and this little fighter is still going.”
The first and latest covers of Landfall, now Landfall Tauraka, Aotearoa's oldest and longest running literary journal.Landfall
Sapeer Mayron is a reporter based in Auckland, covering arts, culture and supercity news.
Among those who came and went are: JAAM, founded by a writer’s group in Victoria University in 1995; Brief the journal, which produced 56 issues before folding in 2018 ; and Sport, founded in 1988 by the publisher of Victoria University Press, Fergus Barrowman, with Nigel Cox, Elizabeth Knox and Damien Wilkins.
Sport published some of Aotearoa’s most esteemed writers first: Booker Prize winner Eleanor Catton, and award winning novelists Emily Perkins and Catherine Chidgey.
Now, too, Slaughter’s Mayhem.
“It’s quite an excruciating decision to have to make when you love what you do and you've poured in so many unpaid hours, and so much energy, time and care,” says Slaughter.
“We need the old days of patronage, someone who is liquid cash to happen along and want to bless all these young writers with their backing.”
Emily Broadmore promoting Issue #03 of the literary journal she founded, FollyAllison Turner / Supplied
That’s why Broadmore dressed up in multiple outfits to pose all over Wellington for the new issue’s launch photoshoot, and why the launch itself is ticketed at a minimum $55.
“Our readers, they’re not the ‘literary community’, they're just people going about their daily life and just want to read some entertainment,” she says.
“Art costs money, and so do good parties - so people pay to come to our parties, they leave with a copy of the journal, and our parties sell out.”
And she’s not upset if there are abandoned copies of Folly left behind, or if they do get taken home but are abandoned on a coffee table for months.
Because sooner or later, Broadmore starts getting a lot of the same calls, texts and emails, from people she knows never would have bought a literary journal in a mainstream bookshop, who have just inhaled Folly from cover to cover.
“Then they'll text me and go, ‘oh, wow, this is actually really good.
“And I'm like, ‘well, yes, obviously. Thank you.”