An exquisitely-tuned second collection, following from her debut Terms & Conditions, and exploring boundaries of animal and human worlds and the intimate nature of time, existence and joy.
And look what amazing company I'm in, I can't wait to get my hands on their books! #gratituesday
366 women, one for every day of the year, doing it. #SheDidIt @OnThisDayShe onthisdayshe.com/wp/on-this-day…
"Last year we were able to help more than 90% of all writers who applied. Priority is given to first time Arvon writers. Writers can apply for any amount up to the full course fee, although most receive between £200 and £400."The range of courses gets wider every year - not just short stories, poetry, novels, but graphic novels, songwriting, memoir etc... Check out what's on offer. If you fancy having fun with me and Dave Swann, my mutli-talented co-tutor (and our special guest, Carrie Etter) then we would love to have you!
In these wonderful short, very short and very very short stories, Jonathan Pinnock takes aim at all the foibles and vanities we think we succeed in hiding. Not content to just pull back the curtain, Pinnock sets fire to it and chuckles as it blazes. Yet he also executes something of a conjuring trick, making us laugh, but also making us feel, think. Like Nana, whose granddaughter recreates Cairo in her bedroom for her before she dies, we fabricate our own reality: we see and hear what we want and ignore what we don't. Dot Dash is sending us a message, and yes, it may be through yellow plastic ducks, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't listen.
Berit Ellingsen is no ordinary wordsmith but a weaver of silken tapestories, lush and burning with both ancient ache and postmodern playfulness. Mixing myth and astronomy, desire and other appetites, and dancing on the thread that slips between poetry and prose, Ellingsen stitches every word in perfect service to her utterly beautiful and dreamlike stories.The Baghdad Fixer by Ilene Prusher
A journalist's fixer is a go-between in so many senses: linguistic, cultural. The fixer straddles borders and boundaries, helping each try to communicate with the Other. Ilene Prusher conjurs this so beautifully in her stunning, thrilling debut, as Nabil, an Iraqi English teacher with a poetic soul, is drawn into the unfamiliar, learning as much about his own country and people as about the world in which Samarra, the American journalist who has hired him, moves so easily. A unique novel, The Baghdad Fixer's compelling plot is combined with poignant and difficult insights into the life and tragedies of ordinary Iraqis during the war. This is not just a wonderful read, it is an important book for helping us, too, to begin to understand the Other.Fakakt: Melissa Morris and The Meaning of Sex by Jasmine Schwartz
I love Melissa Morris. The most unlikely heroine of a murder mystery, she's insecure, worried about her failing love life, her job prospects and her fashion sense. Yet when, on a trip to Rome in pursuit of errant boyfriend Colin, she is wrongfully arrested for murder, does she sit in a cell, weeping? She does not. She promptly escapes to track down the real murderer and clear her name. In a city she's not familiar with and a language she doesn't speak. That's more than plucky, and it makes for the unputdownable story of an amateur detective who could be any one of us, stumbling around atmospheric Italian streets trying to piece the plot together. I dare you not to fall in love with Jasmine Schwartz's Melissa Morris too. She may believe she's "fakakt" but I think she's fabulous!Enough by Valerie O'Riordan
Valerie O'Riordan puts to shame the puffed-up and the oversized with her beautiful, brief and brutal fictions. Each word is worth a hundredweight, each story a full world. O'Riordan is a true original, fierce and fearless, she will travel anywhere for a great story. I can't wait for more!Storm Warning by Vanessa Gebbie
Both haunted and haunting, Vanessa Gebbie's protagonists in these unsettling stories move through the present but remain always tethered to the past. No war stories these, but explorations of what it means to “survive” the conflicts and horrors created by humans across centuries and continents. Like Pat Barker, Gebbie gives voice to those who cannot forget, even decades later, who was taken and and what was lost in the blood and mud. Gebbie's strength lies in her poetic and poignant combination of reality and dream, the weaving together of outer experience and inner turbulence, and the small sparks of hope even in the darkest corners.Hot Kitchen Snow by Susannah Rickards
The stories in this quietly powerful collection are populated by characters you care about from the opening sentence, children and adults whose lives you slip into in the midst of action. For Rickards, action is something as ordinary as a mother wondering whether to leave her children alone for five minutes or a dog-food salesman looking for meaning in his life; as magical as the father who kidnaps the moon for his daughter; or as quirky as the overweight dance administrator persuaded to put on a sari and take an Indian dance class. Whatever the context, Rickards’ stories grip and flow onwards, tiny twists and revelations exposing the undersides of life, both glowing and dark. This book will entertain, provoke, shock and surprise you in all the ways a great short story collection should.In the Spirit of Phineas McLata by Lauri Kubuitsile
Lauri Kubuitsile's stories are sweet, salty, colourful, hot, and unforgettable. Botswana-flavoured and pregnant with atmosphere, Kubuitsile's writing slips easily between the real and the magical, between death and life, love and sex, humour and darkness, friendship and family. Just as McPhineas Lata wove his seductive spell on the village women, so too will these stories bewitch and enchant.Housewife With A Half Life by Alison Wells
AB Wells is not only a supremely talented writer but also something of an alchemist. Housewife With a Half Life is wondrously original and imaginative, combining the travails of domesticity with glorious scientific allusions and illusions in a fast-paced and sparkling tale of a wife and mother who discovers she is losing herself, and the stranger from another dimension who turns up as she's cleaning the bathroom to make sure it doesn't happen. A wild ride, this nuclear fusion of a novel is, underneath it all, the story of relationships, of family, of what it means to be a mother, a wife, a woman, and, ultimately, a human being. Move over H.G., A B Wells has written the time-travelling tale for the 21st century!Veronica Britton by Niall Boyce
I could say that Niall Boyce's fiction is X meets Y meets Z, but that would be doing it a severe injustice because it is a fabulously imaginative and unique combination of elements. Here we have historical fiction meets science fiction meets fantasy with a dash of philosophy and a sprinkling of feminism. I was captivated by chronic detective Veronica Britton and her sidekick, superheroines in every sense of the word, saving the world time and again, in and out of time. I was only sorry when I turned the last page and had to leave their exploits. Am eagerly awaiting the next one!
Tony Williams has a special talent for assembling the magical out of the mundane - whether that be pub carpets, satnavs, mattresses or bananas. These short short stories often deal in pain, in death, in loss and loneliness, in absence, in anger and in shame, but Williams always makes sure that fragments of hope emerge, like the music of an oboe, that short burst of happiness that lights up the dark.
‘My name is Laddy Merridew. I’m a cry-baby. I’m sorry.’
‘And my name is Ianto Jenkins. I am a coward. And that’s worse.’
The boy Laddy Merridew, sent to live with his grandmother, stumbles off the bus into a small Welsh mining community, where he begins an unlikely friendship with Ianto Passchendaele Jenkins, the town beggar-storyteller.
Ianto is watchman over the legacy of the collapse many years ago of Kindly Light Pit, a disaster whose echoes reverberate down the generations of the town. Through Ianto’s stories Laddy is drawn into both the town’s history and the conundrums of the present.
Why has woodwork teacher Icarus Evans striven most of his life to carve wooden feathers that will float on an updraft? Why is the undertaker Tutt Bevan trying to find a straight path through the town? Why does James Little, the old gas-meter emptier, dig his allotment by moonlight? And why does window cleaner Judah Jones take autumn leaves into a disused chapel?
These and other men of the town, and the women who mothered them, married them and mourned them, are bound together by the echoes of the Kindly Light tragedy and by the mysterious figure of Ianto Jenkins, whose stories of loyalty and betrayal, loss and love, form an unforgettable, spellbinding tapestry. The Coward’s Tale is a powerfully imagined, poetic and haunting novel, spiked with humour. It is a story of kinship and kindness, guilt and atonement, and the ways in which we carve the present out of an unforgiving past.
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is in this sense a genetically modified organism, derived from the ancestral Pride and Prejudice by the introduction of new (genetic) material taken from the unrelated "monster" genre. A small-scale comparison of the two texts supports this idea: all Grahame-Smith's modifications have parallels with genomic modifications performed (or harnessed) by laboratory scientists. Here, I examine six classes (Insertions, Duplications, Insertions with Duplication, Replacements, Over-expression, and Gain-of Function Mutations) of these modifications, and draw parallels with biological examples.Her thesis is lengthy and erudite! So we will skip to her final thoughts:
These six sections consider only a few of the classes of Grahame-Smith's modifications. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is also marked by DNA inversions (in the form of transposed words and phrases), silent mutations (in the form of synonym replacements), and missense mutations (in the form of deliberately misspelled words), and so on. The molecular techniques used by Grahame-Smith have also been applied to other works, enabling the production of a range of genetically modified texts: Android Karenina, The Meowmorphosis, Jane Slayre, and others. These modified texts possess new phenotypes. Some are merely new twists of humor, curious for their own sake, like a mammal engineered to possess fluorescent skin. Others, more utilitarian, render the text appealing to new audiences, like a plant engineered for cold-resistance, enabling it to grow at new latitudes. The success of these variants – some commercial, some aesthetic – sets the stage for a new generation of literary geneticists, whose experiments will force the field in new directions. This new dynamic, converting the writing desk to a laboratory and the classic text to a model organism, may in addition pose its own ethical questions. We exist in a new era, exciting and disturbing, in which neither text nor genome is immutable, and in which humans, armed with new technologies, can force their evolution. [My emphasis]Any reactions to this?
To cheer me up, today witnesses a first for me: two stories published in one day: In triplicate in Metazen and Tiny Unborn Fish in the science-themed issue of Litro. Very nice news, both are fantastic publications I've had the honour of being published in before, do support them. Litro is also a print publication, "100,000 copies are distributed monthly around London and the UK, including in underground stations, libraries, galleries, bars and cafes, as well as online."
Thanks so much for asking me to take part in this, Tania. So to begin, some may say my writing is all over the place:
Poetry
Novels
Short stories
Plays
Magazine articles
My blog (of course)
Endless emails
Good morning Ladies,
Oh my- this might be a bit of an embarrassment showing explicitly what a writing whore I am but here goes:
Adult short stories
Short stories for kids
Detective novellas
Romance novellas
Adult novels
Children’s books
Magazine articles
Newspaper articles-primarily science and health
Newspaper column on writing books and publishing (this is new)
Radio educational programmes (science, maths and English for primary)
TV scripts- drama series for private production company and HIV/AIDS NGO
Science textbooks for primary and junior secondary school
English textbooks junior secondary
Blog
I think that’s it.
Hi Guys. This is fun. I think I may be different from Sue as I must make a living from my writing, I must have a monthly income of a certain amount from writing. My husband is a government school headmaster (translated as low paying) and we have two kids. I need to work. I don’t want to take a day job. I want to earn my share from my writing. I know it is politically incorrect to say that I write to earn a living, but that’s it. Keeping it real- as it is.
I have two adult novels I wrote with no market in mind- I just wrote them- they sit unpublished and will likely remain there unless I break out and then conveniently die. From that experience, I know I don’t like writing that doesn’t get published. I view it as a failure (normally) or as a lesson when I’m being kind hearted.
So having said that, I always know where I’m going when I start. I don’t always know which publisher I will send to, or contest, or magazine but I know if I am writing a romance or an adult novel or a children’s book; I know if it will be genre or literary. I am an anal Capricorn – I plan most everything in my life, and after those first two ‘organic’ novels I decided I was going against my innate nature to do otherwise with my writing. Occasionally I will tweak something afterward to have it more streamlined for a particular mag or publisher that I eventually choose. I usually start with an idea that stews in my mind until it gets the right amount of ‘tension’ behind it, but when I get to work at the computer, I know already what I am writing.
Hi Guys. I’m back!
First, I want to say that I think Lauri is amazing to be able to reliably have a monthly income from her writing. That is something I have only dreamed of...I don’t think it is “politically incorrect” at all to say that you write for a living. It is what I aspire to. I am very lucky in that my family does not rely on me for income. To be honest, if that was the case I’m not sure what sort of writing I’d be doing at all.
But as far as knowing what genre a new piece will be, like Lauri, I know at the start. An idea will come to me, and the form it will take will come along with it. With poetry, I do tend to sit down with my “poet’s head” on and think, “ok, it’s time to write a poem. What will it be?” But with other genres, the piece itself will dictate the form. For example, plays will grow out of a very visual kind of imagining. Although all my writing, including poems, seems to originate with character, in a play I imagine that character in a specific space like a restaurant or a sitting room, whereas fiction places the character first and foremost in time. When I write a story, the time is compressed, as in a day or a few hours. In a novel, time expands to cover a series of months or a year. Certainly, there have been great novels that take place in just one day (ie Joyce’s Ulysses). And there have been many short stories that cover an entire lifetime. But for me, so far at least, fiction examines how a character evolves over time and the breadth of that time period helps to dictate the form. But to be honest, I have recently found that the more pieces I have written and the more pieces I am trying to find a home for, the more I need to think about how much time I myself have. Do I have the time or energy to begin to write something that I know can’t possibly take me less than a year or two to finish, like a novel, or should I wait before taking on another task of that magnitude and use my time to work on shorter pieces? For the first time in my writing life I find myself in precisely that position right now. I presently have a novel, 2 plays, a short story and a poetry collection “out there.” I know all of them will eventually need revising and reworking. So I’m holding off beginning the new novel I have in mind until most of what is already out there is really finished. So I suppose I’m saying that the more writing becomes a business for me, the more I put brakes on myself and steer myself towards one genre or another, depending on outside unrelated factors.
Yes, this is fun. Lob us another one, Tania!
"The books were all laid out on a table and I looked at the covers and the titles and thought how carefully each had been chosen ... the ambition and the beauty and the sensitivity," he said. "But an awful lot of them seemed to be published just because they existed, really. That's too big a number of books in one year in one country to put out. I think it's something to do with the democratisation of everything – that everyone's got a right to get a book out ... I've got the feeling that sometimes it's more about desire than worth."
Ann: For me, "creative" belongs to those writers who make up places that don't exist or tell stories about events that never happened. Your "North Cold" is my idea of creative. You developed a character and had him give warmth to a cold city by placing a metal ball on a windowsill. I never would have thought of anything so original. I had to close your book for a few days to let my mind settle after reading that story as well as others in your The White Road.
I have to start with real places. I discover small events that actually happened and then try to show those events through the eyes of characters. That calls for imagination, yes, but I start with an event handed to me. That applies to my characters as well. I need photographs of real people. I need to read diaries or newspaper articles. I can't spin a story without grounded facts.
There's one other thing behind my inability to describe myself as creative. When I was a kid, a teacher -- a Catholic nun -- stated with complete certainty that only God was creative. Humans were not, case closed. I've not forgotten that. Every time the creative issue is raised, I hear her thundering voice and see her narrowed eyes. I don't believe her now, but I'm not taking any chances. If the nun's purpose was to strike the fear of God in a little kid's heart, she accomplished her mission. I have a good imagination, but others are creative.
T: thank you, very interesting! Even more proof, to me, of how creative you are! For me, I don't care about "truth", it's subjective. I am more interested in the quality of the writing and the telling of the story. I do tend to read books that are labelled "fiction", but don't question beyond that how much is true. As a reader, I don't care.
A: Now for your question (I'm stalling here). This is a tough one. The idea of "thinly veiled autobiography" as fiction has me thinking. I suppose it comes down to balance. If a story's foundation is autobiographical, but an equal portion is not based on the truth, then it works as fiction. But if the great majority of the story is true, I don't see it as fiction. If it's 50/50, well, I really don't know. Maybe we need a new label such as mixed non-fiction/fiction. In any case, authors need to be honest about their work. Come right out and say that it's a mix. Why do people feel they have to cover their work?
In the case of my novel, the towns actually exist and I did use some real historical figures. However, most of these figures were seen through the eyes of my characters. The one exception was the scene where my main character met Ida B. Wells. I imagined this meeting and it was not based on an actual event. Was it possible these two could have come together? I believe so. Both lived in Chicago at the same time and Wells did speak before groups. Did it happen? No. My main character never existed. She was inspired by a photograph I found. I didn't have a name, date, or any information about her. I took that photograph and gave her a life. I consider the novel 90% fiction and 10% non-fiction.
The mix of fiction and non-fiction is confusing for readers. So often authors say their fiction is based on their grandmothers' or distant relatives' real lives. Such claims lead readers to believe the entire story is true. Memoir claims to be true and yet, who can remember all the details such as the color of a bedspread or every word of a conversation? Perhaps we are coming to a point where books require Author's Notes to explain away the confusion. It's never good when readers feel manipulated or cheated. Authors, regardless of genre, have a responsibility to readers. Honesty about one's work is one of those responsibilities.
A:I'm so enjoying our conversations... It's interesting that you don't worry about the truth behind fiction. I had guessed the opposite since you have a science background. It's great that you let go of labels and read for the joy of reading. I just finished Mantel's Wolf Hall and believed every word of it. I also marveled at the sheer size of it.T: what's the book you are working on now? Just a few hints!
Now for your last question. I did worry about assuming the voice of a black woman and for a long time I didn't tell anyone about this project. When I finally gathered the courage to take an creative writing workshop, the instructor told me I had no business writing this story. I ignored that since publication was not my goal. I simply wanted to see if I could write a beginning, a middle, and an ending. I didn't want to write about my life (boring), and I wanted to learn about someone else's point of view. It was hard work, but fun.
I worried equally about my Indian characters. Indians are often misunderstood even today, and some resent the old-fashioned portrayals of being warriors with tomahawks. Also, the word "squaw" is derogatory. I worried about using it but had to keep with the times. Based on my research, I tried to present one of the characters as a modern Indian who dreamed of going to California and did not want to be a nurse.
For the most part, black readers have accepted Rachel DuPree and tell me they appreciate a different story about black Americans. Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, graciously wrote a lovely quote for the upcoming U.S. edition. This validated the book, and I'm most grateful to her. My U.S. editor asked several Native Americans authors for quotes but we didn't hear from them. I'm trying to not read anything into that.
A:The next novel takes place in 1900 in Galveston, Texas, an island about a mile from the mainland. The story revolves around a college-educated woman who marries a dairy farmer. The story begins two months before the 1900 Storm, a historical hurricane that killed over 6,000 people.T: With the announcement of the recent Orange shortlists etc... there's this discussion again about the merits of women-only prizes. Do you have any response to this? What did your Orange short- and long-listings do for you?
T: And finally, I wanted to tie this in with you being one of the judges of the Waterstone's Perfectly Formed short story competition. What does your "perfectly formed short story" look like?
A:To better answer this question, I looked at today’s New York Times Book Review. Twelve novels or short story collections were reviewed in this May 16, 2010 edition. Eight of those books were written by men. I looked at today’s book review section of The Houston Chronicle. Two novels were reviewed and both were written by men. I understand this is not a fair sample but it does give pause. Until books written by women receive the acknowledgment they deserve, the Orange Prize is the one competition that celebrates women writers and their books.
The short- and long-listings resulted in reviews for The Personal History of Rachel DuPree, something that hadn’t happened before. I’m convinced the publication deal with Viking in the U.S. happened only because of the listings. Best of all, Will Atkins, my editor, and his remarkable team at Macmillan New Writing received well-earned international praise and recognition for daring to publish an unagented debut author.
A: I don’t write short stories, but I’m a reader and admirer of the form. I particularly like short stories that are narrow in topic but rich in character development. Short story writers must get to the heart of the matter quickly. Once into the conflict, they can take the reader deeper into the psychology of their characters. I love that moment when I think "the mood has shifted, something has changed." Since the beginning of the story is often fresh in the minds of readers, I admire writers who end their stories with a nod, subtle or overt, to the beginning.
First comes the idea for a new novel. Fabulous! (Literally, one might say). It hits me on the tongue like sherbet. If I’m in a supermarket, I will stop mid-aisle. Walking the dog, I’m likely to ignore the worst canine behaviour. At this point, I’m thinking, “Yesss! Why didn’t I think of this before?” Next, I fluctuate between excitement and a more prosaic, “Hmm, but such-and-such might be a problem later.” But over the following days, as the characters grow in my head, excitement mounts and doubts fade. I am about to start to write.A lovely way to describe it, excitement mixed with doubt. Nicola then says it's
"damned terrifying because it’s the start of a long and unknown journey. When I sat down to write the first page of Sleepwalking, my third novel, I actually said aloud, “Oh God, here we go,” taking a huge breath to summon the strength. Many blank pages stretch ahead, and they won’t fill themselves."Yes. Exactly. Not, I want to stress, that I am working on a novel. No, definitely not. But I can imagine it being book-length, and possibly rather undefinable. Almost definitely completely uncommercial! But that actually makes it easier to contemplate. The thought that no-one will ever publish it, that I am doing it for me, makes it far easier to jump off this cliff. I hope!
