Sunday, June 03, 2012

Languages of Colour...

How gorgeous is that? It's the front cover of a new anthology published on May 31st by the excellent Frogmore Press, "A collection of writings and artwork on the subject of colour and colour theory" which includes my very short story, Colours Shift and Fade (first published in the Vestal Review). Contributors include Graham Dean, Clare Best, Liz Rideal, Julian Bell, Rachel Playforth, Aprilia Zank, Niki Fulton, Robert Hamberger, Jeremy Page, Tamar Yoseloff, Roy Osborne, Ros Barber, Catherine SmithMario Petrucci, Kay Syrad, and many others. It's a wonderful anthology - find out more here.

And I had a wonderful time last Sunday night reading at Stroud Stories in the company of these excellent writers: Thursa Swindall, Anthony Hentschel, A.J. Grace-Smith, Adam Horovitz, Rachel Levay, Rommy Collingwood, Pauline Roberts, Aidan Rush, Jo Bousfield, and Esme Lloyd-Baldwin. You can see pictures on the Stroud Stories blog.

Tuesday night's Spread the Word event in London, Short Story: Big Picture, for which I was on a panel with Helen Garnon-Williams (editor, fiction, at Bloomsbury), Di Speirs (head of readings, BBC Radio) and Ted Hogkinson (online editor, Granta), expertly chaired by Aasiya Lodhi, BBC Radio producer, was very interesting. We talked about whether Britain lags behind America and/or Europe in terms of enthusiasm for stories, the problem of there being not enough prizes for short story collections, who is publishing short stories - longer ones as well as shorter - and took excellent questions from the audience, including what those of us who read for competitions we wished we weren't seeing in short stories! I refused to answer any questions relating to the "rules" of short story writing, since I don't believe there are any, and Ted and I, when asked for our vision of where the short story would be in 10 years, both envisaged an iTunes-like way to deliver single short stories to readers.

It was fascinating for me to be part of this discussion - and a great honour - and did make me wonder about the future. What is the purpose of a short story collection - for its author, for the reader? This is something I am personally thinking about as I enjoy promoting MMWAUP, and think about future projects. The world is changing... but music lovers still by albums, don't they? I do. Sometimes. Hmm. Food for thought! Answers in the comments please! :)

3 comments:

Vanessa Gebbie said...

Id like to be able to feed recorded flashes into a player and mix them so's you dont know which one is coming next...exciting!

Tania Hershman said...

Ooh, I like that! Surely this must be possible already? Do you mean as audio? Sorry for being thick! "Random Flash" would be a great name for a journal...

Lauri said...

I am just now working with a local company to see how to deliver short stories and chapters of books on cellphones. Here in Bots few people have Kindles and credit cards, but everyone (I mean everyone- like the old lady in the bush on her donkey cart) has cellphones. I love all of these exciting changes.