Today’s my last day at work for the year, with an iced Americano in hand I’m trying to kill a few hours before throwing on my out-of-office and going non-verbal until Christmas. Last year I did a little bad apple round-up of ten pieces that stood out to me, you know the deal, every media outlet is getting you to click through to read their picks from the last 365. These introductions could be an extended game of mad-libs touching on cultural and political moments from the year, a reference here, an out-of-date joke there. I don’t have the energy to do that so you can just imagine me being witty and dry.
For those of us in queer media (sorry, I guess I do have energy for a couple) aka as the arts it’s been a rough one. I have this running joke about how my artistic practice is almost exclusively introductory essays at this point, which is to say there’s not much space to be or feel generatively creative. Instead, I’ve spent 2024 hustling. I was freelancing for most of the year and trying to balance bringing in cheques with keeping bad apple going in an increasingly hostile arts environment (The Pantograph Punch you will always be famous to me). For the first time in almost three years, we’re taking a ‘break’. Submissions are formally closed until February 2025 and I’m going to spend my summer making my way through the to-be-read pile.
As a workaholic, obviously, I’m not content with just fully disappearing and leaving the site stagnant as the year comes to a close, however. So let’s do a little reflecting on bad apple’s 2024.
The year started off hot with The Showcase at Basement Theatre—25 queer poets over five nights for Auckland Pride in February. Our Wellington Pride Festival offering ‘PRISM POETRY’, curated and managed by Kate Aschoff at Enjoy Contemporary Art Space, followed in March. We also went to the deep south and took on Dunedin Fringe, broadening the geographical scope of our offering.
bad apple’s partner press, Āporo Press, released its second publication in May—Marrow & Other Stories by Sloane Hong. As a long-time collaborator and one of the founding members of bad apple it was a real privilege to bring the collection of Sloane’s comics into the physical realm.
In June we had our first official collaboration with sybs candles, releasing the “tasty n tart” RIPE with a cute little hang-out at Open Late. They flew off the metaphorical shelves and left folks across the country begging for more! If you managed to snag one and kept it unlit then you could probably sell it for $10 more than what you bought it for. In this economy, I’d say go for it, babe.
Through the mid-year, we had lots of steady response writing, primarily for shows at our favourite venue in Auckland, Basement Theatre. Speaking of which, in July Basement hosted us for an incredibly special Matariki offering. To reflect the online collection future ANCESTORS, asking queer Māori and Pasifika “What kind of ancestor do you want to be?”, we held a three-night mini-festival of conversation, poetry and performance.
August is always the biggest month for bad apple and we kicked it off by launching a new zine publication in collaboration with Gus Fisher Gallery. A Blind Kind of Violence asked five creatives to respond to the work Derek Jarman: Delphinium Days exhibition—the first time Jarman’s work has been exhibited this way in Aotearoa.
I went to Ōtepoti for the first time as bad apple and Āporo Press in August for Small Press Fest. It was fantastic to engage with so many other independent publishers as there are very few opportunities where we get to come together. Big props to Frances for organising and inviting me down! I did a panel discussion ‘The politics of being small’ with Emma Ng and Murdoch Stevens hosted by Jennifer Cheuk. There are clips somewhere but I will not be sharing haha.
August never ends! For National Poetry Day, we continued our annual open-entry collection, this time themed as ‘the bad apple mixtape’—poems that respond to music. We published 38 poems and held a live event in Pōneke at Enjoy Contemporary Art Space. They’ve been supporters for years now and I had the rare chance to be there in person this year! Although the event came together quite hectically in a short amount of time it was a wonderful evening with many fresh bad apple faces.
September and October settled into a comfortable rhythm of submissions and response writing as behind the scenes I geared up for Verb Readers and Writers Festival 2024 in November. This was my second year as a programmer and you know I made sure to sneak in a bad apple event. We brought future ANCESTORS to the capital for a panel talk, ‘LGBTQ+ Lineages’, hosted by Sinead Overbye and featuring Rangimarie Sophie Jolley and Herbee Bartley.
December was technically supposed to be the start of the bad apple hiatus but to quote harold coutts:
So, this month, we’ve published our ‘adjectives.’ collection of work responding to writing by New Zealand writers, debuted a fund-raising zine Fruit Basket collecting work published online, launched another sybs candle collaboration with ‘FRUIT ROT’ and hawked wares at the Basement Silly Season market including a stunning ‘FRUIT’ t-shirt designed by Sloane Hong.
All in all, it’s been a long year. We’ve published 169 (nice) new pieces of work on the website. That makes 422 published pieces from 204 contributors since May 2022. Next week, we’ll be adding a community pick of pieces as our final sign-off for 2024. For now, I’ve tried to select a slice of the massive amount of work to share with you in my personal end-of-year round-up.
Sazzok’s Queer Business Profile with Cam Yates from sybs
It’s been such a pleasure to collaborate with Cam this year with two separate candle releases. They really understand the hustle life and I admire their work ethic—out at every market with the statement yellow and orange of sybs guiding you directly to the stall.
This interview conducted by Sarah ‘Sazzok’ Krieg was part of the Queer Business Profiles we started this year. It’s a great insight into how sybs started and Sazzok is an open and welcoming interviewer who knows when to relax into a conversation and let it flow.
‘The Ocean Dome’ by Billie Angus
Part of the summer essay series that slipped in at the tail end of the season, ‘The Ocean Dome’ is an exciting experimentation of form from Billie Angus. It reads almost like a travel piece, almost like a personal essay, almost like the truth. In the digital form, it plays with citations as interjective phrases, bouncing readers back in forth in a frenetic reading experience. I won’t spoil the reality stretching piece for those who haven’t yet read it, but I will give you a taste.
And the thing about Ocean Dome is that since it doesn’t exist anymore I can say anything I want about it and you will believe me. And it doesn’t exist and it never existed and it will exist always, and Ocean Dome lives within me, within girls changing rooms at the pool where I tried desperately to create a wall with my towel and was fascinated by the slightly damp ridged tiles under my toes, and that green spot by the drain, and that crinkle of plastic in the bathroom isn’t mine because I’m not a person and I don’t exist anyway.
Hannah Patterson’s response to When I open the shop by romesh dissanayake
I’ve had lots of conversations with friends and contemporaries this year about ‘reviewing’ in Aotearoa and its relevance. In a small industry, a small community, it is immensely difficult to be critical of a work. Although bad apple has never had a focus on review as critique, I have made a conscious effort to reframe our ‘reviews’ as a response to work—close readings that seek to find resonance and share that feeling. There are three on this list that stood out to me as exemplifying this goal.
The first of which is Hannah Patterson’s piece on romesh dissanayake’s debut, When I open the shop. In this close reading, Hannah is sharp, introspective and interrogative of the text. She writes with generosity, wanting to acknowledge key elements of the novel without being reductive.
Grief feels like a label that can be slapped onto a story and become defining. dissanayake works to reject and subvert this understanding; he depicts grief not as reductive, but all-encompassing.
kī anthony and sibling L’s response to Amma by Saraid de Silva
In quick succession, the second response piece that stood out to me this year was from frequent bad apple collaborator kī anthony and their younger sibling L. This piece is a triumph in its conversation between siblings, who resonate with the text to an uncanny degree. It’s vulnerable and introspective and we see realisations occur as their conversation unfolds. kī’s solo reflections on the text and subsequent conversation round out the piece and show the value of trusting contributors to approach a response in their own way.
I emerged from Amma a different person. I emerged from that conversation a different person, with new questions about what Amma brought up for us. Where is home? Where can someone like Annie, or like L and I, desperately jealous of people who have more confident places to stand, locate ourselves?
‘SOMETHING OF YOU’ by Liam Jacobson
As I build out this list I’m seeing themes emerge I didn’t recognise before. On this list are many works that challenge convention or approach traditional literary forms in new ways. Liam Jacobson’s contribution to future ANCESTORS is one such piece.
Liam primarily works in the short form—poetry—but has been expanding into longer form works (recent response works can be found with RM Gallery and Physics Room). For me, this piece is layered as whakapapa, poetry, personal essay, illustration and citational practice enveloped as one to tell the story of many.
there’s a home that is patient. calling a name that must’ve been mine.
it’s my tūpuna climbing Te Waka o Aoraki. Te Wai Pounamu. Te Moana-nui-a-kiwa. it’s the walk from Maukatere to Te Rereka Wairua. it’s Hawaiki. the sky, stretching. it’s South Auckland. it must be the places i haven’t been, too – the clumps of Europe they left. it is sometimes their violence. the point of departure. it’s where we arrive.
in every other universe by bram casey
bram was a debut contributor on bad apple this year and this poem ‘in every other universe’ hums with potential. I personally appreciate poetry that puts forth a ‘what if…’ situation while staying grounded in reality—something I think bram excels in conveying in his work.
i lost the multiversal lottery
and so we talk about how you can’t talk to girlsmaybe in another universe you heel-turn
and learn to talk to boys instead
‘Joyride’ by Van Mei
I’m not sure that Van knows this, but I’ve been a fan of their poetry since 2022, before we became arts admin boss babe friends. I first saw Van perform at Verb Readers and Writers Festival as part of Show Ponies (real fans will know the Brooke Fraser poem) and knew they were that (formerly) girl.
One could argue that this list is full of the version of nepotism that’s for friends, and maybe that’s true, but ‘Joyride’ goes as hard as that one fan edit of the Kesha song it takes inspiration from. I also just love when a queer learns to drive, because that couldn’t be me.
Now I drive whenever I like. Whatever roads.
At whichever speed.
& take myself away from chaos if it beckons. I bend
past corners to trace the exhaling curve
of the tide up the hill
to see the pleasure of the shoreline.
Just for me.
‘I SIT AT THE KNEES OF PLEASURE’ by Kitty Wasasala
If there’s one thing I have learned after almost three years of editing bad apple it’s that the queers love to long. Longing is easily the number one emotion expressed in poems on this website. Refreshing, then, is it when we get a bit of horniness in the mix. (That’s just sexy longing if we are being real.)
‘I SIT AT THE KNEES OF PLEASURE’ is a rejection of heteronormative monogamous expressions of lust and desire. Kitty blends a familiar and obtainable sensuality with esoteric secrets whispered between coconspirators.
So what of infidelity?
O, find me in another body and fuck me back to life!
Whoever dreamt up monogamy had a fetish for torture,
and fetishes are fine and all, but don’t make it my problem.
‘On Learning to Edit and Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo’ by Josiah Morgan
Last year, I wrote that Josiah was “deeply intelligent and engaged with literature in a way I could only aspire to achieve” in reference to his review/response to Brandon Taylor’s The Late Americans. I’m wheeling out this compliment again because it stands true again in 2024, as Josiah comes to terms with editing his own novel while simultaneously reading Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo.
This is not exactly a response, nor critique, but more an exploration of process and authorial intention.
Right now I’m interested in concision and clarity, whereas Rooney is clearly branching out into new forms of exploration involving repetition, the looping of ideas, and the relationship between human consciousness and narrative interpretation. It may just be that I’ve met Rooney’s book at a poor time in my own literary practice and that our aesthetic sensibilities are not overly aligned right now.
‘The Cyborg Manifucksto’ by Alexandra ‘Sascha’ Stronach
Shit, this piece is just so fucking cool. I was surprised to receive an email from Sascha in my inbox with this piece attached asking if bad apple might want to publish it. Having read The Dawnhounds and being familiar with her other work I felt confident it would fit right in with our offering.
God, it’s good to be right. This piece locks in on what it means to have a body, and how to bend and break that body into one you can take control of—just like a mecha.
We enhance our bodies every day, with glasses and pacemakers and good solid boots. Where our bodies are not fit for purpose, we build solutions. Where our bodies fail, technology steps up. That’s why I think so many trans women love mechs: it’s a body we can build and fine-tune, powerful and perfect and entirely ours.
Well folks, that is basically all I have in me for now. This is a labour of love, to provide a platform and archive for our communities, so I hope you found something to treasure in the art and writing we published this year.
bad apple will be back in 2025, maybe a little different, maybe the same, but always fruity as hell.
Damien
