Ep 131: Zero Hours - A short story by Pip Adam

For this episode I wanted to share a story that I’ve revisited recently after a question that Jane Arthur asked me at a recent event at Good Books.

Jane asked:

Even before reading Audition, I’d clocked that your inspiration for it was basically ‘prison abolition’ and you’ve talked openly about this in interviews and in the book’s acknowledgements. 

I am so freaking interested in this, personally, as it is increasingly hard for me to separate out work and values and living and politics and creative work as I go about things. 

Correct me if I’m wrong (please!!), but it seems to me that you haven’t been quite so blatant about your own values in your work before, or at least in the framing of your work. What has changed? Are you simply braver now? Why is (your) art political (mwahaha)?

This question sent me back to this story ‘Zero Hours’ which was published in Overland in 2015. I thought of this story mainly because it signals a shift in my writing toward the didactic.

For years I had been interested in ambiguity. In leaving space for politics to sit there but not overtly. I was obsessed with the idea that fiction was a mirror and if I made my fiction as accuarte as possible people would see society in a new way and it would prompt change. I remember being incredibly angry at the time I wrote this story. John Key’s government had been elected, overwhelmingly, a year before and I remember the morning after the election walking down my street and not really recognising the city I lived in. The election had been so decisive that I was in a very small majority. I owe a lot to Giovanni Tiso and Jolisa Gracewood who were editing a New Zealand issue of Overland and had asked me to submist a story. I am also incredibly grateful to Overland journal which provides a space for radical literature.

These things all came together, my anger and the opportunity to write some for a journal that celabrated the radical and I remember thinking, The time for ambiguity is over. And I remember one very clear question replacing this, How didactic can I get and still be be writing fiction?

It's starnge reading the story now. It's so pre-Trump. Pre-COVID. Roseanne Barr appears as a largely uncomplicated character. I thought about re-writing the story to take her out but I kind of like how hindsight re-writes this part of the story without me doing anything. What's not funny is how little has changed. Workers are still fucked over. There are still political parties calling for self responsibility.

It’s slightly heart-wrenching revisiting this story, written during a right-wing government, a few days after the desolution of the left wing party with one of the largest majorities of my lifetime and waking up to the fact none of the promise of transformational change thatg majority held was realised.

It’s a good reminder that politics is what we do in our communities away from law and government but also that its a privilege to say, Government doesn’t matter, when it matters most to the most vulnerable.

So yeah, I offer this story because I was thinking about it and thanks largely to Jane Arthur.