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.
Art & Science Flash Story Gym
Date: Saturday 21 April 2012
Time: 10.30am - 4.30pm
Venue: The Writers' Place, Jew Street, Brighton
with Vanessa Gebbie and special guest Tania Hershman
Learn the liberating process of flash fiction writing and add an invaluable tool to your writers’ toolkit, one that will enable you to boost your own creativity when you’re feeling uninspired, bust writers block, and create fresh voices.
Using her experience as a science journalist, and as writer-in-residence at Bristol University’s Science faculty, Tania Hershman will bring a sparklingly special scientific note to the days’ proceedings, which added to the somewhat unusual visual art Vanessa Gebbie has in store for you, will make this a fun-packed workshop with a difference – a unique programme to challenge and inspire!
Attend this workshop and you could walk away with a supply of new and original work in time to polish for the Brighton Festival Flash Slam on 19 May!
Vanessa Gebbie is author of two collections of short and flash fiction: Words from a Glass Bubble and Storm Warning, and was contributing editor of Short Circuit, Guide to the Art of the Short Story (all from Salt Publishing). Her debut novel The Coward’s Tale (Bloomsbury) was a Financial Times 2011 Book of the Year. She teaches widely, writes poetry, has collaborated on a stage play and is a dreadful cook.
Tania Hershman’s second collection, My Mother Was An Upright Piano: Fictions, will be published in Spring 2012. Her first book, The White Road and Other Stories, was commended, 2009 Orange Award for New Writers, and her flash fiction and short stories have been widely published and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. She is founder and editor of The Short Review, an online journal reviewing short story collections, and writer-in-residence in the Science Faculty at Bristol University. www.taniahershman.com
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.
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| Merthyr Tydfil |
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| WWI tank |
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| Plymouth colliery |
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| Plymouth colliery |
To coincide with our recent interview with Vanessa Gebbie, author of The Coward’s Tale, we’re hosting a competition for you to showcase your literary skill.
We’re asking you to write up to 300 words (as a reference, not much longer than this page!) of flash fiction to be judged by Vanessa Gebbie. The best entries will win some very exciting prizes:
If you think you are up to the challenge, read Vanessa Gebbie’s flash fiction article for inspiration and submit your entry to writersandartists@bloomsbury.com by the 22nd February 2012. Winners will be announced on the 7th March – good luck!
- First place winner will receive a signed copy of The Coward’s Tale in hardback, a copy of the Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook 2012, and also have their work featured on our website.
- Second place winner will receive a signed copy of The Coward’s Tale in hardback and also have their work featured on our website.
- Highly Commended- two highly commended entries will also have their work featured on the website.
‘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.
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!
