Wonder Woman: Bug Week and Other Stories

On September 18, one day before the 127th anniversary of Suffrage Day, I had the great honour of delivering the launch speech for award-winning writer Airini Beautrais' latest literary offering, Bug Week and Other Stories, at the Whanganui Regional Museum.

It seemed to be no accident that we were launching a book written by a feminist featuring stories with keen observations about how life is, especially for women, on the eve of this landmark day.

The road map toward gender equality features some hazards of writing while female. Considerable feminist debate has centred on whether (and how) women can appropriate literature and language that liberates.

Language is not simply a means of achieving social change but is itself part of the problem that women face.

Many women writers have attempted to navigate their way between a sense of hopelessness over language's use of women, and their hopefulness about how women use language - a predicament in which writing is caught in the tussle of simultaneous oppression and resistance, with the power to reveal the ways in which the dominant language not only limits textual resistance but also provides the possibility for rupture, critique and transformation.

Airini Beautrais' book Bug Week and Other Stories was launched recently by Carla Donson at the Whanganui Regional Museum. Photo / Liz Wylie

In an attempt to disrupt the status quo, women also face a strange dynamic. That is that women are regularly encouraged to write in a personal tone, with the risk that they will be dismissed for it in reviews of their work. In her recent article for The Spinoff, Airini alludes to this dynamic dilemma.

"I can't separate my writing from my trauma and my anger. I'm a very angry person a lot of the time. There's a big artistic risk in that, but I also think there's massive, explosive artistic potential, and that was the line I wanted to tread. I wanted to write about women characters of a range of ages ... There are stories in this collection with male protagonists, but the female experience was what I was ultimately homing in on."

And home in on it she has. You, the reader, will find stories that mirror the world around us, uncensored with the brutality of truth and the quirks of recognition.

You will identify with themes of domesticity, sexuality, love and loss, and the natural order of things. You will discover girls being daring, tough, and alive with their sex. And you will observe the relentless pursuit of unhappiness, featuring cameos by the characters of unrequited love and the tyrant that is power and control.

Ultimately though, you will be dazzled by the discipline of a writer at the height of her craft, where her words remind you that each sound, once spoken, becomes a possible thing; that life is unreliable; the heart is indeed a muscle that never stops twitching; and that in your place among women you will always be warmly welcomed in.