A Toast to Folly
A surprisingly and hilarious account of ReadingRoom’s Steve Braunias’ first meeting with Folly editor Emily Broadmore in 2023, which still has us in stitches.
A TOAST TO FOLLY
November 2023
The big news of the week in New Zealand was something that positioned itself as far away from New Zealand literature as possible: the launch of Folly, a strange new journal with short fiction, short essays and short poems, aimed at people with short attention spans and zero interest in what the so-called literary establishment considers good writing.
Its publisher and editor is someone called Emily Broadmore. She works in comms in Wellington. She came to Auckland this week and asked to meet so I suggested 5pm on Thursday at Andiamo in Herne Bay. I hate Andiamo but thought she might like it. "Here already," she texted. "Love the vibe."
She had a copy of Folly – no online presence, physical condition only – on the table when I arrived in a brown paper bag. She said: "I bet you'll rip it to pieces."
The first print run of 400 copies has already sold-out. Another run of 150 is due soon, and she's keen to get it into gift shops. "I love pretty things," she said, and one of her guiding ideas for Folly was that it would be a pretty object. The cover is a 1974 photograph by Ans Westra, and illustrations inside include paintings, drawings, sculptures.
She said: "It's for the urban-dwelling middle class who just want something titillating to read before bed." She thought the readership would mostly be women, but she heard from a male CEO who bought the first issue and messaged her to say he read it in the bath, and enjoyed it.
She said a bit more along those lines and I said, "It doesn't kind of actually seem very…. meaningful."
She said, "What do you mean?"
We had one drink each. In the (very short!) introduction, Emily writes, "We exist to question what a New Zealand story is, and what it can become." This is very high-falutin' talk for a journal which assumes a loathing of New Zealand literature; one page of Folly is given to real or imagined conversations about the purpose of Folly, and includes someone saying, "What right do you have to start a literary journal? What's your literary background?" Answer: "We don't have one. That is kind of the point."
She said, "Almost none of our writers could name a literary magazine. I only heard of Landfall two months ago."
I had a look at Folly that night. I was bored by all the poems, and bored by most of the non-fiction, but something exciting, something lively, something more than titillating was happening in a lot of the short stories. They were fresh and funny and really unusual for a New Zealand short story, possibly because they were fresh and funny. Also they were sexy. One very short non-fiction piece by a woman who called herself Snakes was about sexually penetrating a man ("I want to call him up and whisper, 'I've been inside you'"); like the best short stories (by Fritha Waters and Catherine Hart) in Folly, it marked something new in New Zealand writing, something…joyful, unaffected.
The story I liked most was "I'm obsessed with you" by George Titheridge, winner of the 2023 Folly Short Story prize. Sexy: tick (The female protagonist is brought to orgasm eight times by her partner: "He counted.") Fresh, funny, joyful, unaffected: tick. I absolutely loved it.
A toast of at least one drink to Folly, that strange new journal which has some of the best New Zealand writing I've read all year.