Memory and the mythology of place

Hello blog! I've been so weighed down by viruses - I had a hacking chest cough for five weeks - and preoccupied by difficult family matters, that the only times I've had alone with my thoughts or with enough energy for creativity have been spent immersed in my current WIP. Anyway, things are looking up, I'm feeling more energised and the brain seems to be firing up in different directions and making connections again, and after I looked at this highly appropriate photo I got to thinking about the matter of photographs versus memory.

I saw this sight, and snapped it, when I was walking to Didsbury village at Christmas. I thought of sharing it on social media then, but hosting a big family Christmas put the whole thing out of my mind, after which I immediately became ill, and for weeks then I was so low that all I wanted to do was curl up away from everything and protect, as far as I could, the developing world of the novel inside my head, and think about nothing I didn't have to. I did go out now and then, and I even took a trip to London to the event for the Edge Hill Prize which was deservedly won by Sabba Sams for her collection Send Nudes. I probably shouldn't have spent the next day wandering around London in the cold and drizzling rain, because after that my cough worsened again. But the point here is that on that walk I was arrested by a curious sight: a high stepladder open on the pavement in front of an ornate door, and, perched on the top, a man working on something, maybe an electric light, most of him hidden by a light-coloured umbrella protecting him from the rain. It looked so strange and quaint, like something from the nineteenth century, and it was so picturesque, the steps and the umbrella creating a pale mushroom shape in front of that dark ornate nineteenth-century door. It reminded me of the photo above, and the two images instantly created a pair in my mind. I took off my gloves and got out my phone to photograph it, but then saw that John, who was with me and hadn't realised I'd stopped, had walked on and disappeared out of sight, and, feeling miserably cold and agitated by the cough, I gave up and put my phone back in my pocket and rushed to catch up with him.

So I didn't take the photo, but the image has stayed so vividly  in my mind. I wonder now, though, have I remembered it correctly? Was the umbrella really light-coloured - actually mushroom-coloured? Or did my mind manufacture that as a consequence of my registering that the whole construction was mushroom-shaped? Could it be the case that if I had taken a photo it would show something less poetically resonant and fitting (a darker, less dramatic-looking umbrella)?

Last week I went to a family birthday celebration at Croma restaurant in Prestwich. I had only ever been there once before, years ago, when it first opened, and although I had perfectly remembered the interior, I was staggered to find its location so different from that in my memory. It's on a side road off the main street, but I had remembered it very particularly as being on the main street surrounded by its busyness and lights - probably, I suppose, because I knew the manager, and it was an occasion of excitement at the opening.

This is the way that memory and imagination mythologise things, including place. It's something I explore to some extent in my story 'Looking for the Castle', which is included in my collection Used to Be, in which the protagonist-narrator returns to a long-ago childhood home.  I know there's a lot of current interest in literature of place, and I know many readers like it, finding in it the comfort of familiarity, but it is precisely because of this last that I sometimes - even often - don't name places in my writing. If, before last week, I'd wanted to name and describe Prestwich Croma in a fiction, I'd have had to travel up there to make sure I did so with accuracy - but in doing so, I'd have destroyed a very thing that would have most likely moved me to include it in the first place - that distorted image I've been carrying in my head, which would have been the locus of the atmosphere, emotions and even theme I would have been wanting to convey. It is the mythic version that would be relevant and resonant for the fiction, and in order for that not to be destroyed by contemporary readers' different potential associations with the place, it would need to be unnamed or renamed.

A literary weekend: a meeting with prize shortlistees, reading with literary icons and a new review of Unthology 7.

On Saturday I zoomed off to London, first to attend a gathering for bloggers to meet the shortlistees of the Sunday Times/Peters Fraser and Dunlop Young Writer of the Year award, and then on in the evening to Waterstone's Piccadilly to read at Word Factory.

The Young Writer shortlist is fantastic, and we had a great afternoon chatting to the shortlistees and hearing them read and being interviewed by Andrew Holgate, prize judge and Literary Editor of The Sunday Times (below). You can read more about it on my critical blog, Fictionbitch, and the thoughts it prompted for me concerning innovative fiction and marketing.

After that it was off to Word Factory. I was reading with Lionel Shriver and novelist and Mslexia editor Debbie Taylor, at the end of a day-long festival for short-story writers, Small Like a Bullet. I read the title story from my collection, Used to Be (and the really great audience was gratifyingly receptive, laughing in all the right places - I guess a roomful of storytellers was just the right audience for a story about story-telling!). Debbie then read from her latest novel Herring Girl, which I have recently read: a fascinating and really quite daring tale of reincarnation set exactly where she lives, in a converted lighthouse at the mouth of the River Tyne, with a depiction of the past so vividly real and particular that I suspect Debbie of having indeed been there then! Finally Lionel entertained us with the tale of her commission from a luxury hotel chain, which she fulfilled by writing a story subverting the whole idea of luxury hotels. She then read us the story, in which, with her customary verbal irony, she put paid to the notion of luxury itself.

Afterwards poet and Word Factory organiser Cathy Galvin chaired a discussion that ranged from the the popularity or otherwise of short stories and publishers' attitudes to them, to the question of whether they are leading to brand-new forms that defy categorisation - Max Porter's Grief is the Thing with Feathers, one of the shortlisted books in the Young Writer Award, being cited as an example. Here's a photo taken by my online friend and Word Factory regular Oscar Windsor Smith:

And as I was coming back on the train next day, I discovered that there's a new review of Unthology 7 from brilliant writer Aiden O'Reilly. He loves the anthology:

I think this is probably the best anthology I’ve read, including all those ‘best new’ anthologies that come out every couple of years. There are just so many standout stories here

and I am of course thrilled by what he, such a talented writer himself, says of my story:

I loved the prose of Elizabeth Baines’ Looking for the Castle ... it’s just perfectly written.

Dan Powell interviews me about 'Looking for the Castle'.

There's an interview with me over on the Unthology Blog, in which Dan Powell, fellow contributor to Unthology 7, quizzes me about my story 'Looking for the Castle' and other writing issues. In particular he asks me about my use of the second person, which I would never at one time have used, seeing it as a bit of fashionable tic, but then got interested in, and in which this story and my previous Unthology story, 'Clarrie and You' (Unthology 5) are cast.

Unthology: first review and launch party

The first review of Unthology 7 comes from Valerie O'Riordan at Bookmunch, famously strict in their considerations. Unthology's USP is that it's a platform for a wide range of writing styles and genres, which, as I've said before, is a hugely important provision in a literary marketplace crowded with thematic publications and stylistically partisan editors which can straitjacket authors and often leaves little room for certain types of writing. As Valerie points out, however, with characteristic frankness, it's unlikely that every story in a diverse anthology will appeal to every reader, and so inevitably she was going to like some of the stories more than others. I'm lucky that my story, 'Looking for the Castle', is one of those she likes, and which she says 'manages to evoke the confused bewilderment of returning to one’s childhood town, and the weird task of grappling with the altered scale of the geography and the unexpected slippages of memory, without ever edging into melancholia; her story is also notable for its refreshing economy – nothing’s over-explained here.'

Two days now to the launch party in the Library Restaurant in Norwich - I'm very much looking forward to it!

Publication day for Unthology 7

The day has arrived! Unthology 7, which includes my Short-Fiction-Prize-winning story 'Looking for the Castle', is unveiled to coincide with an event at the London Short Story Festival this afternoon, when editors Ashley Stokes and Robin Jones will be talking all things Unthology. If you're in London, get down there - I would! - before it's sold out (the Gatekeepers event this morning was sold out, apparently). Waterstones, Piccadilly, Lower Ground floor, 3.pm. Today it's possible to buy copies of Unthology 7, and they can be bought from the Unthank website.

Next Thursday (25th) will be the official launch of the book in Norwich, and I'll be reading along with fellow contributors Gary Budden, Debz Hobbs-Wyatt, Elaine Chiew, Dan Powell and Adrian Cross. 7.30pm, upstairs at The Library restaurant, 4A Guildhall Hill, Norwich, NR2 1JH, FREE. Can't wait for that - off on a train down the east of the country to lovely Norwich and to meet all those talented writers and our editors!

Unthology 7 arrives

Today I received my contributor's copy of Unthology 7 (Unthank), soon to be officially published, which includes my story, 'Looking for the Castle'. The book looks every bit as good as in the photos we've seen beforehand (and feels lovely: all silky-matt!). Very exciting. Nicely typeset, too.

It's pretty great being in Unthology. Editors Ashley Stokes and Robin Jones have received much praise for their aplomb in creating a series of eclectic high-standard anthologies which Sabotage Magazine has called 'a beacon of promise for the short story genre'. Here's the editors' mouth-watering press release for the new issue:

WONDERFUL AND FRIGHTENING SHORT FICTION FROM NEW AND ESTABLISHED WRITERS

 Flinch at the things that twitch in the windows a mile up from the city streets. Let text messages lead you towards a man that you already know is going to mess with your head. Find the meaning of life in your own lobotomy. Now, the ghost of Gaudi whispers in your ear, urging you to get yourself another lover, insisting it’s all going to be smooth and comfortable this time. Ruin yourself and drift towards the haunted shores of your youth. Then find yourself back there, returned to the low-down slums of a city in a country that no longer exists, that UNTHOLOGY 7 documented and mapped out for you, and you alone, a long, long time ago. 

Elizabeth Baines, Roelof Bakker, Adrian Cross, George Djuric, Debz Hobbs-Wyatt, Sonal Kohli, Amanda Oosthuizen, Dan Powell, Gary Budden, Ken Edwards, Elaine Chiew, and Charlie Hill

Unthology 7 will make its first appearance at an Unthank event at the London Short Story Festival on June 20th, and the official launch will take place at Project U in Norwich on the 25th. I'll be reading at the Norwich event along with other contributors including Dan Powell. (Excited to be going to Norwich again - last year, when I went to read at the Unthology 5 launch, I made my first ever visit there.) Dan and I will be interviewing each other for the Unthology blog, and I'll provide links when the interviews appear. The book can be preordered here and here. Previous Unthologies can be ordered here, and you can read about the Unthology project on the Unthank website.

Unthology 7

Here's the great cover of the latest Unthology, the series which has been said to be 'quietly becoming a reliable guide to the modern short story' (The Workshy Fop). Edited as usual by Ashley Stokes and Unthank director Robin Jones, Unthology 7, due out this summer, includes my story 'Looking for the Castle' which was runner-up in last year's Short Fiction competition. I love the retro vibe of the cover - which incidentally it shares with the cover of my forthcoming collection, Used to Be (it's a bit of a thing at the moment, isn't it?) - as well as the communication-media theme - and it's a great design.

New story publication

Great news yesterday that my story 'Looking for the Castle' is to be included in Unthology 7, due from Unthank Books in the summer. Editor Ashley Stokes had been deciding between two of my stories and this is the one he has finally plumped for, and I'm pleased, as it's by far the more complex of the two, another of the stories in which I've tried to do something more ambitious in the short story form than previously. ('Clarrie and You', which Unthank also published [Unthology 5] was another). One of the strange paradoxes of my writing life is that sometimes the things I've found easiest (and quickest) to write have been the easiest to publish or broadcast, and have received the most acclaim. Sometimes, I know, this is just because the thing happened to work right from the start, and the ease of conception comes out in the writing, but there's often the sneaking suspicion that the ease comes from, not exactly superficiality, but familiarity: a reliance on tried and tested codes. In these instances I feel that the reason the thing was so easily accepted was because I was writing into a borrowed reality - other people's, rather than my own. Then I feel I've cheated myself and my deeper aim in writing, which is precisely to question the ready-made realities.

The short story form is famously capable of exposing ambiguity and uncertainty, but there's also a danger of using its compactness to shut things down, to present a satisfying (but ultimately stifling) take on the world. In 'Clarrie and You' I wanted to show precisely how any 'take' on the world can be mistaken, and in order to do that I had to include a convoluted plot involving a secret, a real challenge for the short story form. 'Looking for the Castle' is similar, but this time it's not a secret creating a false view but the difficulties of memory and lack of understanding. It was one of the hardest
of my stories to write, and I'm hugely grateful to both Gerard Donovan, who judged the 2014 Short Fiction Prize and chose it as runner-up, and now to Ashley Stokes, for seeing what I was trying to do.

Crossposted to Fictionbitch.

Short Fiction Prize, Edge Hill Prize, and another Unthology 5 review

My short-story-filled summer continues apace. I am staggered to hear that my story, 'Looking for the Castle' is the runner up in this year's International Short Fiction Journal Prize. I'm particularly thrilled that this story has done so well, as it was one of the most difficult and complex I've written, a story about the complexities and uncertainties of memory, and the resultant fragmentation of self - themes I've been concerned with recently in my longer work, but which proved more tricky in the short form. It took a long time to get right; I kept having to mull it and realise it wasn't quite working and go back and make tweaks that might not have seemed much but were, in the end, all-important. My huge congratulations to the winner, Graham Mort, and to the shortlistees Catherine McNamara and Geoffrey Miller, and the longlistees who included my writing colleagues Tania Hershman and Sara Mae Tuson, and my great thanks to the judge, Gerard Donovan. Thanks are also due to my good friend, writer and editor Charles Lambert, who gave me faith in the story when I was beginning to doubt it.

Graham Mort was the winner of the Edge Hill Prize two or three years back, and this year's awards night was held in London's Free word Centre on Thursday, John Burnside winning for his collection Something Like Happy and Rachel Tresize winning the Readers' Choice prize for her collection Cosmic Latte. It's a night I always look forward to, and it didn't disappoint, though one sorry note was the absence due to illness of Ailsa Cox who founded and administrates the prize. I always look forward to a catch-up with my co-editor on the former short-story mag, metropolitan, so that was disappointing. My photo isn't very good, I'm afraid, but on the right at the back are the Salt contingent, representing David Rose whose collection Posthumous Stories was shortlisted, publisher Jen Hamilton Emery far right and editor Nick Royle second from right. On the far left are, second from left, Jackie McCarrick, shortlisted for her collection The Scattering, and fourth from left her editor at Seren Books, Penny Thomas (whom I was thrilled to meet, as she is editing the forthcoming Honno ghost anthology The Wish Dog which includes my story 'A Matter of Light'). In the centre at the back (second from right of the small gap) is Rachel Tresize. Here's John accepting his prize:

As for Unthology 5, it keeps buzzing. There's yet another very positive review, this time by Cath Barton on Sabotage Reviews. 'Excellent writing, and not a little in the stories to surprise and sometimes unsettle the reader.' She praises the diversity, but notes too that several of the stories are about disturbing secrets, including my own, 'Clarrie and You', in which she says 'the secrets carry great sadness.'