I've Been Thinking About You, Sister

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Brian rang yesterday to ask if I would send him a short story for an anthology he was planning to publish. The trouble was he wanted the kind of story I used to write thirty years ago.

‘It should be easy for you,’ he began. ‘People love your comic stories about hockey games or sentimental ones about old ladies playing cards, not to mention the epic tales of girls who ride whales to save their iwi.’

‘Brian,’ I answered, ‘I was just a young man when I wrote those stories and the world was a different place. I’m not that same person any more, not as innocent and my voice is not as lyrical. Nor is my work so essentialist any longer; it’s more synthesised. And I’m a professor of English, into postcolonial discourse, Freire, Derrida and The Empire Writes Back.’

‘I was afraid you’d say something like that,’ Brian sighed, but he was not about to give up. ‘Maybe you’ve got a story that you put in a bottom drawer years ago, something you wrote before you became, well, political? Something like the story you wrote about the wily Maori tohunga who puts a spell on a red-headed Irish woman? Readers just love that one! Can you take a look? And if you can’t find a story, can you try to write one for me of the kind you wrote when you were younger? And keep politics out of it? Not that there’s anything wrong with the stories you write now,’ he added hastily, ‘but they’re, well, a bit more difficult for the gentle reader. You don’t mind my saying that, do you?’

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