A Covid glitch and 'Tides' at WORDTheatre

I've been away from this blog for some time, at first because I was very involved in trying to get a new novel started - it's often for me the biggest part of writing a novel, finding the right structure and voice so the whole thing can take off: it takes up all my consciousness so that I can think of very little else, including getting the usual practical things of life done. Then I went down with Covid, and was pretty rough and have since been suffering exhaustion. During this time the novel pretty much slipped from my mental grasp, and I may be back to square one with it when I tackle it again.

Still, I'm getting some energy back now, which is just as well, as a couple of weeks ago I travelled to London to an exciting WORDTheatre event at the Crazy Coqs cabaret venue in London's Piccadilly, where my story 'Tides, Or How Stories Do or Don't Get Told' was read by the brilliant actor Nina Sosanya. 

WORDTheatre was founded by the amazingly energetic producer Cedering Fox. The mission is to promote short stories by having them read by renowned actors at live events which are filmed for later screenings, with readings recorded for free podcasts. The event I attended was devoted to Salt's yearly Best British Short Stories, edited by Nicholas Royle, who was there to talk about the series. Five stories had been chosen by Cedering from out of the ten anthologies published so far. Alongside my story, which appeared in BBSS 2014, there were stories by Hilary Mantel, David Constantine, Hanif Kureishi and Courttia Newland, read by Nina, David Morrisey, Gina Bellman, Indira Varma, Derek Riddel and Rhashan Stone.

It was a really lovely evening in the very stylish Art Deco setting of Crazy Coqs, with musical interludes on the piano and violin. Nina read my story brilliantly, bringing out all the multiple meanings I had intended, with all of the emphases I'd had in my head as I wrote it, and I felt very moved. 

Find out about WORDTheatre and membership here.

'Tides, Or How Stories Do or Don't Get Told' is included in Best British Short Stories 2014 and my own collection, Used to Be, both published by Salt.

News: Edge Hill Prize result and new publications

Lots going on for me on the short story front right now. On Friday we held the Edge Hill Prize Award event in Waterstone's Piccadilly, and announced our winner, chosen by yours truly, last year's winner Tessa Hadley, and writer, journalist and publisher Sam Jordison: David Szalay for his stunning collection of linked short stories, Turbulence. As Sam Jordison said afterwards, these seemingly brief and extremely stylish stories, hinged on the fleeting connections between people on plane journeys, magically pack in whole lives and poignantly inhabit the experiences of an amazing span of characters. David also won the Reader's Prize, which is judged by students and alumni of Edge Hill University, for a single story from the same collection.

And as Tessa Hadley said, when she announced the prize, we had a very long discussion and a very hard decision to make when we met back in September in the foyer of London's Tavistock Hotel: all of our shortlist were wonderful - Wendy Erskine's Sweet Home, which gives us a whole world of present-day Belfast via a fantastic ear for speech and an enviable linguistic dexterity; Vicky Grut's collection of great humanity and empathy, Live show, Drinks Included, which at the same time offers a sometimes Kafkaesque vision of contemporary society; Chris Power's Mothers, which takes us on geographical and existential journeys and displays his great gift of showing through language how memory and the past affect our present-day experience and often the trajectory of whole lives; Simon Van Booy's The Sadness of Beautiful Things, which brings the joyous surprise of being about good heartedness; and Lucy Wood's The Sing of the Shore, a haunting collection set in out-of-season Cornwall, the atmosphere of which lingers long after you've finished reading.


Meanwhile, my story 'Kiss', first published in MIR Online, has been selected from Best British Short Stories 2019 to appear in The Barcelona Review, and I'm finally able to announce that my story 'Saying Nothing', which was longlisted in the V S Pritchett Prize last year, is also a finalist and judge's honourable mention in this year's Tillie Olsen Award, announced today and published in The Tishman Review. And I've been writing a commissioned story for an anthology due sometime in the future from an exciting new press, Inkandescent.

Edge Hill Prize and other matters.

The Edge Hill Prize shortlist has been announced, and novelist Tessa Hadley (last year's winner), journalist and Galley Beggar publisher Sam Jordison and I now have six weeks to read the six books, and to choose a winner. It's a wonderful list, and I can't wait to get reading:

Three of these books, Mothers by Chris Power, Live show, Drink Included by Vicky Grut, and Sweet Home by Wendy Erskine are debuts. Lucy Wood appears on the list for a second time, and men make a stronger showing than in most previous years, with the list divided evenly between male and female writers. Very exciting!

I'm going to have to buckle down and make myself a strict daily timetable, as I've also been asked for a new short story and have promised to deliver it for the same deadline, and there's a lot of activity connected with my own current and forthcoming publications. I've done no writing in the past few weeks due to this last. Twice this summer I went away to Wales intending to write, and both times editing and publicity work took over. First there was editing for my story 'Kiss' in Best British Short Stories 2019 (now published) (not much, but once you start thinking about a particular story it pushes everything else from your mind, I find). This was followed by the pretty intense editing process that the Mechanics' Institute Review always make a point of providing (my story is 'Dreaming Possibilty' and the anthology, on the theme of climate change, will be published in late September). Meanwhile there's been a good bit of pre-publicity work for my forthcoming novel from Salt. The novel, Astral Travel, will be published in February, and we are at the stage of deciding on images for the cover - exciting, but a terrible responsibilty!

Best British Short Stories 2019 arrives.

My author copy of Best British Stories has arrived! Well, it arrived a few days ago, but I've been so run off my feet that I haven't had a chance to post about it until now. It looks wonderful, and I discover that the list of contributors I posted before (and which I copied from elsewhere) wasn't comprehensive, and one of the names missing is that of Ruby Cowling, to whom I owe a debt of gratitude for recently publishing another story of mine, 'Consequences and Alternatives' in the Short Fiction Journal.

One of the things that's been keeping me busy is the questionnaire for sales and publicity that Salt have sent me about the novel they are due to publish in February. It's one of the hardest things - summing up your own work!

'Kiss' in Best British Stories 2019

Today Best British Stories 2019, which includes my story 'Kiss' (first published on MIR online in December), has arrived from the printers and is available to buy from Salt. Needless to say, I'm pretty thrilled at being in this prestigious anthology edited by Nicholas Royle, and can't wait to read the stories by the other contributors, Vicky Grut (whom Ailsa Cox and I published twice in our [discontinued] story magazine Metropolitan), Julia Armfield, Naomi Booth, Kieran Devaney, Nigel Humphreys, Sally Jubb, Lucie McKnight Hardy, Robert Mason, Ann Quin, Sam Thompson, Melissa Wan and Ren Watson.

Dramatic and quiet stories. 'Kiss' chosen for Best British Short Stories 2019

Happy New Year!

I have started the new year on a bit of a high, as my story 'Kiss' which early last year was longlisted in the Short Fiction Journal prize and was recently published on MIR online, has been chosen by editor Nicholas Royle for inclusion in Best British Short Stories 2019, to be published by Salt later this year. This is the second time I've had a story in this great series - in 2014 my story 'Tides, Or How Stories Do or Don't Get Told', made it (interestingly, that had also been previously published online) - and it's a huge thrill to have a published story receive this further - and prestigious - acknowledgement. ('Kiss' is the story I wrote about in my post on research for fiction.)

I've had three strikes with this story, basically, and pretty quickly (it did get two blanks, with two other competitions), but as far as I can remember 'Tides' suffered a few rejections before being accepted for publication and finally receiving critical praise in reviews of Best British Short Stories. It's made me ponder the mystery of why some stories make it easily and quickly, and others take some time to get acceptance even though they may do well in the end. Perhaps to some extent it's subject matter: as a story concerning terrorism, 'Kiss' involves an urgent current topic and a dramatic situation. There's also the question of the form of a story: the urgency of the situation in 'Kiss' is reflected in a deliberately rushed, breathless prose. 'Tides', on the other hand, is consciously contemplative both in subject matter and style - I guess you could say it was a 'quiet' story. And 'Kiss' involves sexuality, including a new and youthful relationship, whereas 'Tides' concentrates on the quieter poignancy of a long-term relationship. Yet to me these two stories are equally dynamic in terms of their themes and the issues they raise. (I'm afraid 'Tides' is no longer online, but it can be read in my latest story collection, Used to Be [Salt].)

It makes me wonder: are 'quieter' stories less likely to catch the eye of competition judges and magazine editors overwhelmed with material and inevitably to some extent scanning on first sight? Is there such a thing as a 'competition story', as I have long suspected? It would be a great pity if quieter, more contemplative, but no less accomplished and thematically important stories were to be squeezed from our culture...

A time-lapse year

Happy New Year to all!

It's been a funny time-lapse sort of year for me, writing-wise. All last winter I holed in and worked intensively on something long and then got stalled on it for various reasons not to do with writing, so there's nothing to show for it yet and may not be for a while. In the meantime, however, although as far as the actual writing went my focus was away from short stories, stories I'd written previously were published in several anthologies. In January I was in York at a signing for Red Room: New Short Stories Inspired by the Brontes, ed. A J Ashworth (Unthank Books), for which my story 'That Turbulent Stillness' was commissioned - an amusing day I wrote about here. Spring and summer brought three more anthologies. Best British Short Stories 2014, ed. Nicholas Royle (Salt) was launched in June at the first-ever London Short Story Festival and included my story 'Tides, Or How Stories Do or Don't Get Told', first published online by Fiction Editor Kate Brown at The View From Here. This was followed the very next week by Unthology 5, ed. Ashley Stokes & Robin Jones (Unthank), where my story 'Clarrie and You' appeared, which involved me in a truly enjoyable first-time trip to Norwich for the launch. In July I attended the 13th Conference on the Short Story in English in Vienna, and my story 'Where the Starlings Fly' was one in an anthology of stories by writers invited to read at the conference, Unbraiding the Short Story, ed. Maurice A Lee. Finally, in the autumn, my inverted ghost story 'A Matter of Light' saw publication in an anthology of creepy stories from Honno, The Wish Dog, ed. Penny Thomas and Stephanie Tillotson. In fact, I ended up with a clash: I was really sorry to have to miss the Cardiff launch of this book as I was already committed to read at an event at Edge Hill University for Best British Short Stories 2014, organised by fellow contributor and lecturer Ailsa Cox. Meanwhile, during the summer, my story 'Looking for the Castle' was runner-up in the Short Fiction competition, and in the week before Christmas I heard that it is to be published in Unthology 7 by Unthank Books in the coming summer.

After my winter of seclusion, I became suddenly a writer once more in touch with the wider literary world. A long time ago now I gave up teaching writing to concentrate more on my own work. I was lucky to be able financially to do that, I know, but the fact is that I was becoming decidedly itchy for the creative and intellectual stimulation I always found in teaching. So when in March I was invited to read at the Vienna conference, I jumped at the chance, and have to say that I revelled in the conference, in the to-and-fro with academics and other writers. An upshot was that I was invited to join a narrative research group, and I have to say that although peace and isolation are essential ingredients in the life of the writer, there's little more stimulating than sharing ideas about writing with your peers and to be able to feel a sense of your own place as a writer within the wider world of literary ideas. By the same token, I accepted a generous invitation to join the writers' group to which three of my writing colleagues already belonged, and I'm once again experiencing that mutual support between writers who trust and respect each other - there's really nothing like it.

I'm entering 2015 with a lot lined up writing-wise: two longer pieces to redraft and, before Easter, a commission to write a short story and linked essay, but I'm thrilled to be able to say I'm doing it all with a sense of backup, and with a greater sense of context in which to do it.

I wish you all similar happiness in your projects for the coming year.

Best British Short Stories 2014 event at Edge Hill

Last night we had a most enjoyable event for Best British Short Stories 2014, organised at Edge Hill University by fellow contributor Ailsa Cox. Also reading were Claire Dean, Vicki Jarrett and Richard Knight (Richard arriving by the skin of his teeth after getting stuck in the rush hour on the M58!) It was very interesting to hear about the journey of the others' stories into this anthology, and great to hear them read aloud. I'm afraid the photos aren't so hot - I made John use my phone which he'd never used before and didn't get the hang of in time - but I thought I'd stick them in just to give some sense of it all.

Vicki (above) told us that her story, 'Ladies' Day',  first appeared in an anthology from enterprising Scottish independent publisher Freight before being picked up for BBSS by series editor Nicholas Royle. It's an account of a group of housebound young mums attempting with a day at the races to escape the inevitable sense of being sidelined (and stereotyped) in their role - amusing yet also very touching.

It turned out that Claire's story, 'Glass, Bricks, Dust', had its first outing in an academic publication: she had been asked to write a modern fairy story (this is her specialty) along with an essay explaining her process and rationale. The story, concerning a young boy playing on a pile of demolition rubble and a mysterious lamppost on which a host of black birds perch, is indeed a fairytale, yet, as we discussed in the brief Q and A at the end, there's also something very concrete about it, and a strong sense of the reality of place - an affecting combination that characterises her work generally.

Ailsa's haunting 'Hope Fades for the Hostages' was originally commissioned for an anthology accompanying an exhibition at the Bluecoat Gallery in Liverpool on the theme of night-time. It's an impressive orchestration of the viewpoints of three separate people awake at the same time in the night and caught with the thoughts that 3 am brings - very tense, and very moving.

Richard's story, 'The Incalculable Weight of Water' brings to vivid life a reservoir on Saddleworth Moor as the lone protagonist thinks of his wife in the cafe below waiting tensely for important news, and comes upon something unexpected in the water. It was first published online as a result of being shortlisted in the Manchester Writing Competition.

My story, 'Tides, or How Stories Do or Don't get Told', was first published online in The View From Here (now sadly discontinued). I'd been at Edge Hill last week for a reading by the brilliant Kevin Barry, winner of the 2013 Edge Hill Prize for the short story, and he said at one point during the Q & A that he isn't so keen on the well-rounded story with a satisfying ending, since life just isn't like that. As I said last night, I tend to agree, and the more I write the more strongly I hold that view. This particular story, which begins with the narrator struggling to tell a story based on a single memorised moment - a moment when she and her partner stand watching the tide come in - is actually about that idea.

There was a brief Q & A when we discussed the importance of place in stories. There was general acknowledgement that naming a setting can help readers imagine and identify, but Vicki and I both said that we tend not to if we can help it, because of the danger of, on the one hand, readers bringing ready-made connotations that are not necessarily useful to a story, and, on the other, of creating a sense of exclusion for readers who aren't familiar in life with a place. We were all agreed, however, that atmosphere was important, and a strong sense of place (named or unnamed) creates it.

Here are some of us milling in the interval:

Thanks so much to Ailsa, to our editor Nicholas Royle, and of course to our publishers Salt. And last, but not least, to the audience.

Bare Fiction Magazine Review of Best British Short Stories 2014

There's a new review of Best British Short Stories 2014 in Bare Fiction Magazine. Lucy Jeynes notes that 'when an anthology limits itself to a particular vintage, you hope it’s a good year', and, having read the book, she comes to the conclusion that 2014 must have been a strong one, and that 'this collection forms the ideal starting point for a wider range of reading.' Taking the subtitle of my included story - 'How Stories Do or Don't Get Told' - as the title for her review,  Jeynes ponders the essence of the short story as well as the varieties of ways in which it can be tackled, and the way in which this anthology illustrates both, and she quotes at fair length from several of the stories. 

Reading time

After weeks of short-story events that have taken me to London, Norwich and Vienna I'm finally having time to relax and do some proper reading. I can't believe that it was actually May when Faber sent me All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews. I have only just got around to reading it and posting my thoughts (here on Fictionbitch). I absolutely loved it, and it's an object lesson in how to write about the most painful things (in this case the suicides of a father and sister), with warmth and generosity as well as biting humour. Go to the link and find out how I thought it was done, and why it's currently one of my best novels of all time.

I've also been reading the other stories in Best British Short Stories 2014 (Salt) (which includes my story 'Tides'), and I thoroughly recommend it. Grab it here. I've even managed to read the reading-group book well in time for our next meeting, rather than up against the wire as usual. (It's Doris Lessing's first novel The Grass is Singing.) (My report of our last discussion, Ironweed by William Kennedy, which I also finally got around to writing, is here).

London Short Story Festival

A feast of short stories this weekend: on Friday evening and on Saturday I was at the London Short Story Festival, at Waterstone's Piccadilly. The festival opened with the launch of Best British Short Stories, in which my story 'Tides' is included. Three of the contributors - Louise Palfreyman, Sian Melangell Dafydd and Stuart Evers - read, and our publisher Jen Hamilton Emery was on hand. After the readings there was a discussion in which festival organiser Paul McVeigh quizzed the three contributors on the ways in which their stories were chosen for the book, and their reactions to having them chosen, and Jen on the evolution of the book and the series. There were several other contributors present, and it was great to meet up with them. I had taken my camera, but I was so engrossed in the proceedings and in talking that I mostly forgot to take photos. Here are the two I did take: first, Stuart reading, with Sian in the background

then Louise and Paul pondering a serious point:

I was a bit more systematic with my camera next morning, at the event 'The Weird and Wonderful World of Short Stories', though not entirely. Tania Hershman introduced the three readers, Adam Marek, Dan Powell and Robert Shearman, by throwing out some questions about the nature of the surreal literature - often called 'weird' - which all three write (as Tania said, in their different ways), and after the readings chaired a discussion. 

I managed to get shots of Adam and Dan reading, remembering only just in time because I was so involved in their readings:

but then forgot altogether as Robert held us spellbound.

How are we meant to take stories in which surreal things happen, such as people turning into tables? Tania wondered. Are we meant to see it as metaphor or actual? For her own part, she said, she was happy to take it as actual, and Dan and Adam agreed, though I got the impression that Robert saw his own work as metaphorical. Dan said he didn't mind, though, if people took his work as metaphorical: once a story was out there, it belonged to readers to interpret as they saw fit. Asked why he writes surreal short stories, Robert talked about the liberty compared to the restrictions of writing for stage and TV: no one to say, 'Oh can you take that out because it wouldn't really happen'. Adam talked of coming across Kafka's 'Metamorphosis' before he started writing, and how it blew him away with its mode of taking a very ordinary situation and inserting into it something strange. It made him want to write, and it made him want to write like that. All three writers talked about the playful nature of it all. An audience member asked how you retain that playfulness, and Adam talked about the ability to keep that childlike lack of a sense of boundaries (children haven't yet learned to 'box up the world' as he put it). Robert, concurring, spoke of the need to accept and allow your own 'silliness'. Adam also spoke of openness, of the need to be open to your subconscious. He never rejects an idea out of hand, and so always keeps a notebook: some ideas fail, but you've got to try them out. What about the business of knowing where a story is going to go before you start? Dan said that he very rarely did: he usually starts with an image and waits to see where it will take him. Only at the end of a first draft will he know what a story's about, and then subsequent drafts will be honing the story in the light of this.

Now an audience member stated that she thought quite a lot of surreal writing was written out of anger and alienation, and did they recognise that? Adam and Dan strongly said no. Adam said that although he felt that a certain sense of alienation was germane to all writers, anger wasn't part of his emotional spectrum. He wouldn't write as catharsis or simply for himself, and he reiterated that writing for him was play and fun and that his project was to entertain. Dan said that he too didn't write from a position of anger, and in fact he thought writing stemming from anger wouldn't be good to read; writing weird stories was, rather, a way of explaining the world. Robert said that, far from anger, what he felt on approaching a story was a sense of excitement. In fact, he said he didn't believe in nihilistic writing: the act of writing itself is a form of optimism, and all writing involves the experience of joy - which I think is right. Earlier, however, when asked whether he was ever surprised where the weirdness of his stories sometimes takes him, he said yes, he was often surprised by where a story takes things emotionally. My feeling is that the very joy of writing is the joy of overcoming, processing and distilling emotions such as anger, so that the questioner and the panel weren't as far at odds as may have seemed.

Someone now asked about the balance between form and content. As the content of stories gets weirder, is it harder to create meaning? All three conceded that this was so, and Adam referred back to Kafka's grounding technique of having just one weird thing happen in a mundane context. Dan strongly stated the undesirability of weirdness for weirdness' sake, and Robert agreed: the story has to be saying something true and genuine about the world, and there has to be a recognisable reason behind it.

And here are all three signing books:

A quick lunch, and then it was the panel discussion on short-story 'gatekeepers', which I'll blog about another time - if I get a space in the coming days.

Short-story summer

 I have a busy time coming up, and it's all to do with the buzz around short stories this summer. Tomorrow I'm off to the London Short Story Festival. The first event, tomorrow evening, is the launch of Best British Short Stories (Salt), edited by Nick Royle (in which I'm delighted to say my story, 'Tides, or How Stories Do or Don't Get Told' is included), followed by a reading by Jackie Kay.  Saturday lunchtime there's a very interesting-looking panel discussion on short-story 'gatekeepers' with editors and an agent, chaired by my writing friend Vanessa Gebbie, to which I'm going, and I can't miss the morning session, The Weird and Wonderful World of Short Stories, not least because the chair, Tania Hershman, and two of the readers, Adam Marek and Robert Shearman, are my very good writing friends, and I have been looking forward for ages to meeting the third reader, my online writing colleague, Dan Powell. The three readers are billed as 'surreal writers', and although I'd agree that they write surreal stories, I have to say they're anything but surreal in person, but very real and warm! All LSSF events take place at Waterstone's Piccadilly. You can book here.

I'm really sorry that as a result, I'll miss the Southport launch of the debut novel of another superb short-story writer, Carys Bray - I just won't make it back in time for the 5 pm start on Saturday. Carys's Sweet Home (Salt), with which she won the Scott Prize, is one of my favourite story collections - she has the most superb linguistic control along with a tough yet humane sensibility - and A Song For Issy Bradley, her novel about the effect on a Mormon family of the death of one of the children, is already receiving huge attention and praise, which I'm sure it deserves, with newspaper profiles, posters on the underground and an appearance by Carys on tonight's Radio 4 Front Row. I believe that all are welcome at Cary's launch, so if you're in the Southport vicinity on Saturday at 5pm, you could drop in to Broadhurst's Bookshop and help her celebrate and get yourself a truly rewarding read.

Next week I'm off to Norwich for Project U, to read at Unthank Books' Wednesday launch of Welcome to Sharonville, a novel by Sharon Zink, and of Unthology 5, the latest in their series of short-story anthologies, in which my story 'Clarrie and You' appears. All welcome to that, too. Then the following week it's the Edge Hill awards to which I'm lucky enough to be invited again, and later in July the 13th International Short Story Festival in Vienna (which I'll hope to blog about on my Fictionbitch blog).

No rest for the lucky!

Best British Short Stories 2014

I'm thrilled to have a story in this year's volume of the wonderful series Best British Short Stories, published by Salt and edited by Nicholas Royle. The stories in these anthologies have always been published for the first time in the previous year, and my story in this one is 'Tides, Or How Stories Do or Don't Get Told,' which was published last autumn in the online magazine The View From Here. I love the covers of these books, too!

Best British short Stories 2014 will be launched at the London Short Story Festival on Friday 20th June 6.30 - 7.30 pm, at Waterstone's Piccadilly.