Opening a door on bizarre New Zealand

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Writer Stephanie Johnson is clearing the mail from the rickety letterbox outside the sprawling Grey Lynn villa.

She's wearing her habitual puckish grin and saying that it's quite possible she will soon be getting a few hate letters.

It's certainly on the cards. Because Johnson, who won the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Scholarship for 2000, has turned her keen eye for human frailty and silliness to an era in New Zealand history which has provided a goldmine for a writer who likes playing with irony.

When her eighth book, The Shag Incident, lands on booksellers' stands on July 19, it could upset a few people. Particularly, we cackle away in unison, anyone who takes offence at a very funny scene in which there is a very solemn womb burial.

"They might come around here and put a womb in my letterbox," says Johnson.

Truthfully, she really is a bit nervous. But "I think it's time we laughed at ourselves. We're funny".

We, as a nation, are so funny - as in peculiar - that thus far Johnson's American and English agents have been unable to find a taker for The Shag Incident.

"Although it's horrible for me," Johnson says, "because it means I earn far less money, it's also reassuring because it means our cultures are different ... "

Which is a bit difficult to get your head around when you consider the genesis of the story.

What Johnson calls "the inspiring" for the book she wrote during her tenure in the Katherine Mansfield room in Menton, France, is a bizarre fictional story which began with a bizarre New Zealand true story.

We're both laughing at me looking at her incredulously. What I finally manage to stutter is: "Our cultural difference comes down to the fact that a man once got tied to a tree?"

That is an oversimplification, of course. And you could just as easily pick out the scene where guilt-ridden Pakeha, sharing a crayfish with their Maori mates, pick at the slim pickings of the antennae while the tangata whenua get the juicy bits.

But Johnson's story begins with a man who is abducted by a group of radical feminists, taken to Western Springs, and is bound and branded a rapist with the end of a cigarette.

In her fiction, this incident takes place in 1985.

In 1984, a group of radical feminists abducted Mervyn Thompson, a playwright and a senior lecturer in drama at the University of Auckland, and tied him to a tree at Western Springs. His car was spray-painted with the word "rapist". His abductors were never prosecuted.

The unidentified women contacted media and distributed flyers around the city accusing Thompson of having forced women students to sleep with him.

He never really recovered from the attack. The ripple effect of that first cast stone included his work being boycotted. He died of cancer in 1992.

"I can't stress enough," Johnson says, "that the story of what happened to Mervyn, and why, couldn't be more different to what happens to Howard [Shag of the title]."

She is well aware, though - despite Shag's story being only the starting place of a fiction whose central theme is guilt - that there will be a great deal of interest in these parallel stories.

As Johnson says: "Where the idea came from is probably fairly obvious to cognisant, sentient beings living in New Zealand at the time."

T HIS is about to get a bit tricky. Because the year before the Thompson incident, Johnson was one of his students.

She was writing feminist drama and was "involved in the women's community". And Thompson was a friend.

"I was fond of him. He was like an uncle and I knew he wasn't a rapist."

She went to see Thompson the day after he was attacked "and I was horrified, I could not believe what these women had done."

There must be a few people around the country who know exactly who the women were.

Does Johnson? "I've got a fair idea. But don't put that in. They might come and get me ... tie me to a tree."

She says this in a perfect parody of the helpless heroine in need of rescuing, so it's safe to assume she doesn't mean it. Well, she was once an actor.

Johnson certainly knows something of the story which led to the accusation. "I have to be careful because of course it never got to court."

She has been careful enough to move the action off campus: Howard Shag is a former All Black and writer of best-selling trash.

Johnson writes her own books in longhand in the little study her builder Dad put up for her. The winter sun leans in across her writer's desk through the french windows.

It is a small haven in the big house full of the clutter you get when you have three kids, an ankle-high dog called Scrubber who has just pooped on the verandah, and a faintly pongy cage of mice in the youngest daughter's room.

What the 41-year-old needs in order to write is "coffee, and peace of mind". If you'd asked her seven weeks ago, she would have said cigarettes.

Actually, she'd probably still say it - although she's determined not to. The kids made her give up by bursting into tears every time they saw her smoke.

In a recollection of her joy-filled, peaceful days at Menton, she remembers that she was "still smoking delicious cigarettes in those days".

The woman who writes with such wit about the burying of the womb ceremony puts herself off smoking by going to the website of the American Cancer Association.

She likes (although that is probably not the right word) to look at pictures of cancer and diseased lungs. She certainly enjoys telling me about them in disgusting detail.

She is good at telling - and writing - bad jokes. She has one of her characters describe the story of The Shag Incident as "the most labyrinthine Kiwi joke ever told".

It's possible she's developed a sort of black humour through an exposure to pain. Johnson was born with a condition that has "lots of names" including club feet "but it's much more severe".

She hates going on about them, but does let slip that the pain caused by this condition caused her to give up acting.

Of course it's entirely possible that she just is very funny. She is certainly capable of the most outrageous ham. When I ask her about the author photo in the front of the book - blonde, wearing a cowboy hat - she says: "I don't look anything like that any more. My hair," she says pointing to her bottle-brunette locks, "it was a miracle, you know. Instead of going grey, it went dark. Isn't that amazing?"

The Shag Incident is pretty amazing too - she is a talented thrower of fictional stones which create ripple after readable ripple.

And while she might prefer to focus on the fiction, there is more than one story in this book with its basis in truth. That crayfish yarn, for example.

"It's true," says the former actress in her best stage whisper. "It's very silly but we did it.

"But the time has come where we should be able to look where thetwo cultures have rubbed upagainst each other and have a laugh about it."