Sport and Creative New Zealand

Sport, the sportingly named literary magazine that began in 1988 as a biannual but for the last decade has been an annual, has lost its funding from Creative New Zealand. Its editor, VUP’s Fergus Barrowman, will be on National Radio at 2.35pm tomorrow (Sunday) to talk about what this means – as far as one can tell, it’s the end.

I hope not. Sport introduced me to Ashleigh Young, Tina Makereti and many other terrific writers, alongside new work from more established names such as Andrew Johnston, Bill Manhire, Kate Camp, Bernadette Hall, Elizabeth Smither and Vincent O’Sullivan. It has always been a good mix with great quality control. (Apart from the time it published me.)

But now it is endangered. There has been coverage about it on Stuff here and here, and a Twitterstorm – Fergus is good with old and new media, and also the magazine is held in great affection and regard.

Creative NZ has been subsidising Sport for 25 years so it came as a surprise that this latest application for funding was declined. The money involved isn’t much in the scheme of things – $5000, tiny compared to what dance and theatre companies get, let alone literary festivals. Nothing at the magazine seems to have changed: the quality is as high as ever, Fergus still takes no money from it, the writers still get paid. Not much, $15 a page I believe, but it’s something.

Actually, it’s more than something – it’s a lot. For a poet or short-story writer, being published anywhere is a big deal, and being paid even a token amount is hugely validating, for want of a better word. It’s a confidence-booster, and the fact of publication also helps when talking to mainstream publishers – or, I suppose, when trying to promote your self-published e-book. Publication in a magazine run by a serious editor carries a lot more weight than publication in an e-zine.

So, what went wrong? I have no inside information but I have been involved in similar decisions in the past because I was on the funding panel for 15 years off and on. Which I’m not allowed to talk about, Chatham House rules, etc. But the hell with that. Here goes.

I have no idea about Sport’s sales and costs, but I saw the budgets for other literary magazines. It amazed me what they spent and how little they earned. One journal spent $20,000 an issue but sold only 275 copies (80 copies retail – yes, 80 copies in bookshops throughout New Zealand). That made a unit cost of $73 (I am rounding these figures heavily to obscure the title in question) – and I could see from other grant applications that a novel might have production costs of $12,000 and a print run of at least 3000, expecting to sell 2000 copies. To put it another way, annual production costs of that magazine were about the same as for seven medium-size novels. And from memory $3500 is a standard subsidy for a literary novel, so $5000 isn’t out of line for an issue of Sport, which at 288 pages or so has been bulkier than most novels. And better-written.

On the other hand. . . I know people who make a strong argument for no funding of the arts. They say, if you want to consume it, pay for it yourself: why should taxpayers in Taumarunui subsidise seats at the ballet or opera for rich people in Wadestown? There are holes in that argument (one is called Lotto) but it is possible to make a coherent case against subsidising literature and the arts that the literary luvvies™ need to answer.

Almost no one in the arts/literary world thinks about opportunity costs – that is, if we fund Project X, we can’t fund Projects Y and Z, or possibly even A, B or C. This may be a factor in Creative NZ’s decision – that there could be bigger bangs for the 5000 bucks that might have gone to Sport. Without knowing the numbers, it’s impossible to judge and the people at Creative NZ are infuriatingly discreet. If Sport was selling only 50 copies, fine – but I think we should be told. Is there a journalist out there who can dig this out?

On the third hand. . . I can’t remember the numbers exactly but Quote Unquote usually got a grant from Creative NZ and every year we paid out to contributors, almost all of whom were authors, more than 10 times what we received in the grant. So there can be a multiplier effect with these grants. And, as above, there is a confidence boost to any writer, not just the beginners, when they are published in a magazine that is actually read.

I can’t see a commercial sponsor taking Sport on – but I have every confidence that it will survive. It’s too good not to.

So here are Godley & Creme with “This Sporting Life” from their 1978 album L:

UPDATE
Kyle Mewburn, president of the NZ Society of Authors, comments on Facebook:

Literature is, sadly (and rather short-sightedly, if you consider the wider social impacts), at the bottom of the CNZ priority list. It receives less funding than interpretive dance. The rapid growth in the number of “literary practitioners” over the last decade (which, I’d suggest, has been far greater than in any other cultural sector) has not been matched by any substantial increase in funding, rather the reverse. There is also no broader, long-term strategic planning – it’s simply a narrow box-ticking exercise exacerbated by the fact the boxes have more to do with cultural pretentions than literatrure, and nothing whatsoever to do with underpinning a vibrant literary scene. So ad hoc decisions/choices are made and the icing spread ever thinner.