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Jenny Purchase has written a debut collection of short stories featuring a wide range of characters and themes, and some of the settings will be well-known to our readers.
Warkworth, Wellsford, Maungaturoto and locations further north make appearances in Transit Lounge: Stories, fittingly, since Jenny spent 15 years living in the area. A former English teacher at Mahurangi College, she also managed the Sandspit Yacht Club for a decade.
She acknowledges that the stories are “very different”.
Her characters are certainly different, too. Among the cast are an Elvis impersonator, a terminally ill former drug dealer, a rugby-besotted detective and a striking refinery worker with a Nazi past.
In one story, a pair of troubled teenage twins carry out a bombing in Wellsford – “a cry for help” – and as police work to track them, a backstory of family brokenness and drug abuse emerges.
Another reaches back in history to the musket wars in the 1820s, when a Pākehā baby found abandoned in a forest is brought up by Māori.
Each story is distinct, although some characters do reappear, with short vignettes right up to 7000 word tales.
“I believe a story shapes itself around the material,” Jenny says. “I also believe that everything you write is, in a way, autobiographical. Even as you create characters, you can only write about what you’ve experienced, witnessed, understood.”
The cover artwork was gifted to her by Christchurch abstract artist Keith Morant, who died in 2022.
Born in Zambia and schooled in South Africa, Jenny moved to New Zealand with a young son and two daughters in the late 1990s after her marriage ended, determined to “get my children away to a safe place, and start over”.
“Living in Warkworth was wonderful because we very quickly became part of the community. It was a great way to start off in this country.”
After stints teaching at the Mahurangi Technical Institute and Mahurangi College, she was recruited as manager, secretary, treasurer and “general dogsbody” at the Sandspit Yacht Club.
Prone to seasickness, she’s not particularly into sailing. Colleagues would tease her that she was hired because they knew she’d be in the office, rather than out on the water.
The part-time job freed her up to write more, leading to a Masters degree in creative writing at AUT and, eventually, her first book.
Now living in Marsden Point with her partner, dog, three pianos, seven guitars and two cats that loathe each other, Jenny is working on further projects, including an anthology on solo parenting featuring 55 pieces of original writing she sourced, solicited and edited, which she hopes to see in print later this year.
Transit Lounge: Stories (Lasavia Publishing) is available at Paper Plus Warkworth and Matakana Village Books, and through online stores including Mighty Ape and goodbookshop.nz
Book Giveaway
Mahurangi Matters has two signed copies of Transit Lounge: Stories to give away.
To go into the draw, email editor@localmatters.co.nz with Transit Lounge Stories in the subject line. Entries close midday on Wednesday March 13.
