Editorial
Tēnā koutou katoa,
This August, takahē farewells our Reviews Co-Editor, Ash Davida Jane, who leaves us to continue work on many other exciting projects, including the ever-impressive Tender Press. Ash has done such thoughtful and important work across our reviews over the past two years. This shift sees Angelique Kasmara, the other excellent half of the reviews team ever since takahē 111, step into the full Reviews Editor role.
We also warmly welcome Sharon Mazer as Essays Editor. Sharon is Professor Emerita of Theatre and Performance Studies at Auckland University of Technology, with an academic and publishing background spanning professional wrestling and performance in popular culture. We’re excited about the new energy and perspectives Sharon offers the team. For her debut takahē essay, she brings us ‘How to decipher a clothesline’ by Ann Palmer.
A big welcome too, to the ten new Fiction Readers joining the quiet engine of volunteers who read our short story submissions. These are the people who ensure every story that comes our way has the chance to be appreciated from more than a single perspective, and you can find their names on the contents page of each new issue. takahē also offers free feedback to writers currently living in Aotearoa, which is no small undertaking, and the Fiction Readers contribute many of these ideas. Another job for the Fiction Readers is staying alert for the influence of AI, and this is an increasing challenge.
takahē recently clarified its stance regarding AI-generated content (we reject it), and fortunately, we haven’t yet seen much apparent AI in our fiction submissions, and least of all from Aotearoa-based writers, but I do worry about what will happen if trends from overseas pick up locally.
Recent accusations of AI-generated stories winning top prizes have fundamentally shifted the literary landscape. These include this year’s Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Competition and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize (published no longer by Granta). Beyond competitions, literary journals abroad are anecdotally being flooded with AI content, with Apex Magazine republishing its 153rd issue to delete a story suspected of AI influence.
Of course, many more times than is countable (or reportable) these days, AI steals creative work of all kinds, leaving us to wonder what, beyond the idea jotted in a notebook or the tune hummed in the shower, might be safe. Writer, musician and takahē contributor Thomas Iannucci shared in June that his work had been scraped without consent into a music composition AI, including collaborative pieces, which left multiple creators uncredited and uncompensated. Others in the takahē whānau will have suffered this kind of theft, too, knowingly or not, as AI continues bulldozing our arts landscape, with its proponents insisting on the inevitability of a junk future that we all ought to clamber to be part of.
As much of a shadow as AI casts over the arts, I’ve recoiled at some of the social media responses aimed at those writers accused of using AI. It felt like some nuance in the conversation was missing, something about empathy and equity, and how accessing the time and resources to write are still far beyond the reach of many working class writers, as well as those with disabilities, among others. How AI functions inside assistive technology and in regards to cultural knowledge are other areas in which the wider conversation feels under-developed, not to mention how creative writing is taught in educational contexts. Some writers and publishers will dismiss AI as merely another tool in the writer’s toolbox, like a pencil or a typewriter, as though it can ever be put back in its box and isn’t already changing our relationship with words and language. Merely equipping ourselves to opt-out of AI features seems almost impossible.
It feels like the literary world, like many others, has been ambushed by AI, and is scrambling to come up with responses, and how a magazine like takahē might untangle AI-tainted stories from genuine submissions is an ongoing question. Not only do AIs struggle to detect their own footprint, but increasingly, so do people. After all, whatever is produced by AI is our own stolen words being regurgitated back at us. Regardless, journals like takahē, which run on a power of volunteer work and a shoestring budget, are unlikely to ever have the resources to make use of the best AI-detectors, even if we wanted to. Catherine Chidgey’s recent emphasis on ‘human judgement’ (when discussing practices that might weed out the use of AI in Sargeson Short Story Prize entries) seems as good an approach as any. Still, there must be a risk that judges and even editors will begin refusing the role, not wanting to risk being associated with an AI-assisted selection.
For me, there’s such a sadness inherent in using AI for so-called creative work, I guess because it feels like the foregoing of an artistic practice. It reduces a story to an output—a thing that exists to win a prize or be published in a journal—only another product, churned out and plonked on the shelf for mindless consumption. Everything else aside, including the respect for our art form and our readers and our environment, what’s the point of a short story without the experience of writing it? The false starts and the dead ends and the stories that take ten years to write are all a vital part of the practice, because alongside them come all the chances to find a rhythm, pursue an unknown thread, reach out to the numinous, and crucially, to improve as a writer during the process.
It’s a good idea, isn’t it, to look forward in hope when the present seems so murky for our creative arts? And anyway, I couldn’t leave you without specially mentioning the takahē Matariki Short Short Story Celebration, which we were so chuffed to reinstate for 2026. It’s a treasure to trace the way the very short form keeps shifting over time and across the motu, and this year’s collection of nine stories includes several new and early-career writers, already shining brightly. I hope you’ll find the same nourishment I did in the words selected, not to mention the rest of the issue across fiction, poetry, reviews, essay, comics and art.
Mānawatia a Matariki!
Zoë Meager
Fiction Editor