"Tell you what", write the editors of this excellent collection, is a phrase that promises "a revelation, a shift, a new truth". I remember it mostly as consolatory. When I was a child, my parents would use it when they had denied me something I wanted, when telling me what they might be prepared to do or give me instead.
It's an appropriate title, then, for a collection of precisely the kind of writing we stand to lose in what one of the writers calls the "mediapocalypse" - serious, artful and even (in some cases) fully as long as both the project and the projector deserve. One of the best pieces is Mutton by Metro editor Simon Wilson, a beautiful and poignant reflection on his grandparents and a black sheep aunt. Its length and - one suspects - the style, tone and seriousness of its intent ensure that it would never have been published in Metro.
Though two other excellent pieces - Steve Braunias' typically wry and self-deprecating dispatch from the front lines of the gentrification of West Auckland, Greg Bruce's personal encounter with the brutal reality masked by the phrase "housing affordability" - were published in Metro, much of the writing here was first published online.
One of the inspirations for the collection was "a challenge" issued by Wilson in Metro, asking where New Zealand's equivalents to the great practitioners of long-form non-fiction who grace the pages of Granta, say, or The New Yorker, or such volumes as Best American Non-Fiction (Wilson suspected the local equivalents are too busy tweeting to bother).
The editors, Jolisa Gracewood and Susanna Andrews, aren't troubled by the ephemerality of the work; nor is Giovanni Tiso (an Italian-New Zealander who contributes an excellent piece, first published online, about his experiences in assimilating to New Zealand life, landscape and letters). But it's hard not to be bothered by the fact that had these essays and articles not been collected by the editors and committed to print by the publisher, all but one would have passed me by.
