Category: short stories (Page 3 of 3)

Daily Short: Bernard MacLaverty – A Foreign Dignitary

October 3, 2014 / / 0 Comments 
friendship
In 'Friendship: 12 masterpieces of short fiction' for John McCarthy, Ryan Publishing Co. Ltd; First Edition edition (1990)
Also collected in:
"A Foreign Dignitary,in Best Short Stories 1989, edited by GilesGordon and David Hughes. 1989; as The Best English Short Stories 1989, 1989.

maclaverty
Walking the Dog and Other Stories. 1994.

A tricky one this. I have read quite a few of MacLaverty’s stories but not this one and was unprepared for this particular tale. A lot of his shorts revolve around Northern Irish themes so the sudden departure to ‘Non-Place’ as one reviewer terms it a jolt. The tale was spun in 1988 and first published in The New Statesman which is significant. It was later anthologised in a best of and the collection ‘Walking the Dog’ from 1994. In 2002 MacLaverty submitted a radio script of the story to BBC Radio Scotland. I do not know if it was aired.

1988 was two years into John McCarthy’s captivity. It was also the year Bush elder started to run for presidency, the Soviets started to withdraw from Afghanistan and Iraq and Iran stopped fighting. If any of these turbulent events affected the author is unknown but the fact that it selected for the ‘Friendship’ anthology and first published in New Statesman suggests it an advowedly ‘political’ fable.

I say fable because it a strange story. A ‘foreign dignitary’ of the title, whose manners suggest British rather than European background or from any ‘Western’ power, arrives in a ‘foreign’ city. He is welcomed and entertained by his male counterparts and two events take place. He is offered a ‘virgin’ as a gift for his personal pleasure and he is shown a barbaric means of imprisoning political dissenters (including children) whilst all other crimes are dealt with by reason and discussion.

A Voltaire like political fable? The offering of the child is sickeningly simplistic and believable but the incarceration of political prisoners in steel coffins that repeatedly smashed with a hammer when they disobey is a little blunt to say the least. It like a written version of a Polish animation of a boot stamping on a head ad infinitum. The message clear. Maybe it was written with the hostage situation in Lebanon in mind but MacLaverty has enough political demons closer to his actual home to fuel the tale too. The title story of ‘Walking the Dog’ concerns a man abducted in Northern Ireland.

The story is unforgettable and striking and probably a one-off in his overall career. It skilfully sets up the reader through the mild-mannered Manadarin’s charming habit of writing a letter to his wife. This gentle introduction sets up the blunt horrors to come. As for the ‘other’. The sense of a slightly all-encompassing’heathen’ nature of the barbarians is just this side of racist suggesting a kind of people ‘not like us’ …i.e. Eastern,or Islamic. Nowhere is this stated but the contrast is clear. I think if the tale had not crashed to the rapid and circling conclusion as he quietly writes a letter home as the child is tortured it would have become to complex to succeed.

A short parable that leaves the reader puzzled, sickened and possibly relieved it not longer. I felt bemused after reading.

Daily Short: Ron Hansen- Playland – 1989

October 3, 2014 / / 0 Comments

hansen

I had the idea of reading at least one short story a day. It sort of working and I have managed three so far this week. The first on Tuesday was Ron Hansen’s ‘Funland’ from ‘Nebraska’ a collection of short stories published in 1989. I purchased it at the time because of the cover which I later found out was a photograph by Wim Wenders. No apparent connection between the two artists just a lucky graphic design intervention I guess although film does connect to this story.

The collection contains a series of historical re-inventions or ‘factions’ that whilst starting from historical certainties and research lift off into unknown territories.  The collection was published after several more ‘historically’ accurate novels including the ‘Assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford’ now a movie with Brad Pitt. Hansen went on to write several novels on historical themes. He is now the  Gerard Manley Hopkins S.J. Professor at Santa Clara University – San Francisco. Teaching fiction and screen-writing.

http://www.scu.edu/cas/english/faculty/hansen.cfm

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Source: http://www.playlandspeedway.com/history.html 

‘Playland’ is a classic case in point. When first read in 1990 with no internet there was no chance of quickly and easily searching out images (see above) from the ‘real’ Playland or reading anything about its existence. Now I can,and whilst not spoiling the story (which I read first), it does provide an intriguing backdrop and filter on the writer’s intentions. The theme park started life as a dog track run by gangsters after the second world war and this adds a sheen to the tale which revolves around an  ‘innocent’ post-war couple. The story is seemingly set post or during WW2 as the cast mention various ‘Talkie’ stars like Peter Lorre and Betty Grable .

The introductory pages however create a ‘paradisical’ indeed a veritable Eden from the Depression created some time after  1918. This rather strange as the story suggests it long established as  the story unfolds in a vaguely 1920s to 1950s neverworld, perhaps deliberately. The real Playland was a more humdrum affair built in the 1940s and probably a place Hansen visited as a child.

The exotic and unreal nature of the tale is heightened by the landing of a  seaplane (just after a pelican!) carrying the ‘evil’ and rich protagonist. It is like something straight out of The Great Gatsby. He is the female ‘lead’s’ cousin (I say lead because the whole story so ‘filmic’) who is a sexual predator and  the essential ingredient in the plot’s progression and the final denouement. The atmosphere suggests Hansen playing with the dreams rather than the reality of Nebraskan lives.The imagery and lighting throughout is so dreamlike the whole story could be read as existing on a film set.

The structure is straightforward. The ending slightly open-ended and bristling with perverse sexuality. A very good short story not quite as draw-dropping as the tour-de-force ‘Wickedness’ that opens the collection and was featured in Tobias Wolf’s Picador anthology of Contemporary American Stories in 1993 but still very good.

This short is a  good read and suggests that ‘reality’ can be manipulated and used as suits even if twenty years later your reader can pick apart the reality from the imagined which affects all ‘faction’. Indeed where do we draw the line on historical authenticity and fiction these days when even historians questioning such notions? Is the image above any more real because sourced from the internet. it looks real but even that could  have been created by an ingenious graphic designer..maybe that is the entrance to another theme park..or hell.

A review at the time is interesting noting the precision of the writing at its best and its sloppiness at worst…but marks Playland as one of the ‘bests’

What makes the violence in these stories so powerful and disturbing is Mr. Hansen's meticulous control of his prose. The action of his tales is always carefully grounded in a welter of precise description (hens sitting on their nests ''like a dress shop's hats''; ''goldfish with tails like orange scarves''; a man who ''chews gum instead of brushing his teeth''), and the language constantly engages us by moving back and forth between the colloquial and the poetic, between the understated and the brutal.
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: February 7, 1989
http://www.nytimes.com/1989/02/07/books/books-of-the-times-stories-that-call-an-evil-by-its-name.html

Short Story and CW useful links

October 1, 2014 / / 0 Comments

‘I only write when I am inspired. Fortunately I am inspired at 9 o’clock every morning.’ William Faulkner

Short Stops website

http://shortstops.info/

Long Story, Short website

http://longstoryshort.squarespace.com/

Blot the skrip blog ( Dr. Stephen Carver)

http://blottheskrip.wordpress.com/

Lorrie Moore Interview Paris Review

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/510/the-art-of-fiction-no-167-lorrie-moore

Joseph O’Connor and Kurt Vonnegut on writing

October 1, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Kurt Vonnegut

Eight rules for writing fiction:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters,make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world,so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. selves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

dogdays
Introduction to the 1997 Fish Anthology, Dog Days & Other Stories,
by Joseph O’Connor

What kind of strange creature is a short story writer? I must confess that I don’t know. A high priest or priest of art? A wounded soul who can’t understand the real world and thus feels a need to re-invent it? A moralist? A spinner of yarns? An entertainer? A prophet? Probably all of these things. Possibly none.

The single fact I can be sure about is this: writers are watchers. The one and only thing they have in common is an ability to look at the everyday world and be knocked out by it. Stopped in their tracks. Startled. Gobsmacked.

My favourite short story writer, Raymond Carver, has this to say:

Writers don’t need tricks or gimmicks, or even necessarily need to be the smartest fellows on the block. At the risk of appearing foolish, a writer sometimes needs to be able to just stand and gape at this or that thing – a sunset, or an old shoe – in absolute and simple amazement.

Another writer I love, Flannery O’Connor, put it even more strongly:

There is a certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once.

There is only one trait that writers have in common and that’s it. They watch for the extraordinary magic that lies in the everyday. A writer is always quietly looking and thinking. Not willing inspiration but just being open to the world. This quiet looking and thinking is the imagination. It’s letting in ideas. It’s trying, I suppose, to make some sense of things.

In that sense, it is important for a writer to be always writing. Even when you’re not actually sitting with a pen in your hand. You don’t take days off. You don’t go on holiday from writing. Sometimes you don’t even go to sleep. If you’re serious about writing then you’re a writer twenty-four hours a day, in the office, in school, doing the dishes and in your dreams.

Writers have their eyes open. They keep them open all the time.

Ezra Pound said ‘fundamental accuracy of statement is the one morality of writing’. Naming things, calling things what they really are. This is all writers can do in an age where language has become debased and sterile.

James Thurber was a full-time writer. His use of his spare time is interesting:

I never quite know when I’m not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, ‘Dammit, Thurber, stop writing’. She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph. Or my daughter will look up from the dinner table and ask, ‘Is he sick?’ ‘No’, my wife says, ‘he’s writing something’.

The short story is one of the greatest, most challenging, most infuriating forms of literature. They look so easy! That’s the thing about really good short stories. They don’t read like they were written. They read like they simply grew on the page. When we read the work of a short story maestro like Joyce or Frank O’Connor or Richard Ford or Alice Munro or Mary Lavin, we think, yes, there is just a rightness about that sentence, that image, that line of speech. But anyone who has ever tried to write a short story will know just how tough it is to hit that reverberating note, to say something – anything at all – worthwhile about the human condition, in five thousand words or less. It’s hard.

A short story is a glance at the miraculous. Joyce used a religious word. He called his stories ‘epiphanies’. A good short story is almost always about a moment of profound realization. Or a hint of that. A quiet bomb. There is a record by the American singer Tori Amos called Little Earthquakes. That’s a good metaphor for a short story. Often, a good short story will be a little earthquake.

It is a form that has all the power of the novel – some would say more – but none of the self-importance. A deftly imagined and carefully written short story like Karl Iagnemma’s Dog Days, or Frank O’Donovan’s Johnny Mok’s Universe, or Anne O’Carroll’s Flame, by concentrating on the particular, can say a whole lot about the universal.

So let us get idealistic for a second or two. V.S. pritchett’s description of a short story is ‘something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing’. And our task as short story writers is to grab that moment with both hands and invest it with all of the power and humanity and sympathy we can. To develop our skill at language and characterisation and structure and dialogue – our fundamental accuracy – for one reason. To tell the truth. That’s what all the hard work comes down to in the end.

If we forget that, we forget everything.

Joseph O’Connor
Dublin
1997

How Novelists Work..how mine don’t

October 1, 2014 / / 0 Comments

harts

The first fiction session last night and a shock to the Belcher system…(unecessary elipsis there) asI am not a practicing fiction writer. The samples (vignettes, prose poems) I offered for appraisal were three very old items that I happened to have. ( ellipsis attempted but stopped mid-dot….!)

I quickly understood that writing fiction feels very different to poetry…( second uneccessary elipsis).Maura Dooley’s ‘different bus’ comment from the Seren ‘How Novelists Work’ book rang true.I took heart from a John Harvey chapter in the book where he said that he used to ‘fly off the handle and over-react’ to start with when edited but learnt to live and appreciate it and shows examples. I did not have any sulky moments and the round-table criticism was careful and appreciated. I hope I gave equally good comments back.

dooley

Maura Dooley Ed. How Novelists Work – Recommended
AMAZON

Because of the time lag between the examples it is hard to say why certain things are at fault. The David Belbin cardinal sin of using ‘as’ I simply never been told about before so that should be easy to correct as is ‘just'(note second deliberate use of as there hopefully correctly.(Smillie removed) These are basic errors that I need to learn and stamp out. Also The most basic of all is a lack of full stops but this may be a hangover from free verse poetry where frankly I hardly ever use punctuation. The same applies to commas so I getting my ‘Oxford Guide to Style’ out and keeping by the desk at all times. (Smillie removed)

Finally there is and perhaps a bigger worry and one that my friend Mik Godley would be more than happy to see eradicated. I have spent a long time online and have picked up a lot of bad habits and lazy text-speak mannerisms. Short-hand thinking not good enough any more. A lot of this from pure lack of time and I do not have that excuse any more so self-editing and replacing missing words starts now. Even writing a ‘blog’ entry of five hundred words better than filling a text box on a social media site with garbage so I will concentrate more on entries here which acting as a reflective journal and creative diary.

I have deliberately marked up mistakes in the above text in green or by strikethroughs to remind myself to think before writing NOT afterwards which would save me a great deal of time in the future. I have spent time improving my ‘academic’ style and can cope with academic papers now but this a different type of fish…I actually hope people will read this. (Smillie removed). 


I AM GOING BACK TO PEN AND PAPER

MISTAKES

OLS= over long sentences

NO full stops

ellipsis overkill

REDUND =redundant words/ repetitions.

AS = too many- delete

JUST- just-isms.

Also – not at start of sentence = redundant.

Adverbs – like ‘frankly’ redundant

ORIGINAL TEXTS

Here links to the original unedited fragments. I will over the rest of the week re-edit them into newer versions and post links next to original links. I doubt if any will make it off the first page in future but never say never. As David said concentrate on some new stuff and I have an idea and a title ….it is a start.

One was an intro introduction to a failed ‘Great British Rural Novel’ which got to staggered to ten pages in 1990 before going in the draw.
Crow in Barley

Crow in Barley Edited

The second was a strange historical snippet inspired by a true account of a landowner in Oxfordshire and his pet monkey and also inspired by Nick Cave songs. 2003.
Chalkfish and Monkey

Chalkfish and Monkey edited

The third was an aborted first draft of a non-existant Trailer Star movie or graphic novel. 2003.
Moon over the Downs

Moon over the Downs edited

Starting with short stories…

September 23, 2014 / / 0 Comments

shorties

Decided to concentrate on short stories to start with…my favourite poets Burnside and Carver both write short stories too….some of these I collected 20 years ago…about time I read them! Thanks to Jez Noond for some more recent additions to the que including Grace Paley and Amy Hempel.

Some obvious missing collections here..D.H.Lawrence..Richard Ford, Russell Banks, Steinbeck. This just the paperbacks.

1985 Carver Short Stories……my most important purchase?

September 23, 2014 / / 0 Comments

carver

Some time in 1985 or 1986 possibly during a very cold winter, as I recall sheets of ice around a phone box on Plymouth Hoe, I purchased a new book in a Plymouth bookshop. This is significant because I very rarely purchase anything at full price having been trained in second-hand shops from art school on. However on this occasion I relented and I wanted the book badly enough to pay full price ( £3.95) which in those days was equivalent to £10 or more now. I cherished the book so much I immediately bought a penguin plastic jacket for it maybe I knew I’d be keeping this book for a long time.

I would have been visiting my sister in Navy barracks in Plymouth and was probably almost broke or scraping along in my library part time post whilst I dreamt of artistic success.

I would probably have been better off listening to the author of these short stories and started writing then but it was not to be. I did write some poetry which kicked around in folders until finally found an outlet in John Harvey’s magazine Slowdancer which..yes you guessed it..I picked up in 1991 in the Poetry Library London because he had a picture of Carver on the cover. The next year I was lucky enough to meet Carver’s widow Tess in the flesh at a Poetry Library reading. She, William Trevor and C.K. Williams were the only people I truly felt were ‘real’ writers that I met then.

Life happens and it happened to me..paintings ended up in storage..a gamble on a new life in Scotland  fell apart and I ended up back in Oxford with the remnants of a poetry career nothing more. Words would have to wait…..and art disappeared completely. I found solace in Americana music and writing about others…as music reviews for magazines and even BBC Radio 2 at one point. It was writing but at one remove. I also continued at a rapidly slowing pace to write Americana songs…at the peak a 100 a year until 1999 it had slowed to a dozen. Some poems seeped out but my heart was not in it. I constantly found references to carver in the songwriters I admired. The fuse was very slowly burning.

So I relocate to Nottingham the drip drip of poems finally stops….and so does the songwriting ..well almost. I find an outlet for the huge backlog of songs in a charity disc in aid of cancer Research as both my parents succumb to the disease. The songs on the record could be described as ‘dirty realist’ or ‘Carveresque’.

Finally and I’d say it was around about 2010 as my mother was diagnosed and finally died….the words stopped. Ironically at the very moment Chris Emery at Salt ‘discovered’ my poems ( well not discovered I sent them to him and he liked them and published them) I ran out of words altogether. My attention was on finishing a M.A. I’d begun and work was demanding ‘art research outcomes at an international level’ which I duly did.

My mother died in 2012 and the Salt book was buried with her. Right then I thought that was it. However things have a way of leaking out…or seeping back into view. My job became more and more ludicrous..or at least my managers did and an opportunity to take a different tack appeared like a patch of blue in grey skies.

I am now embarking on that ‘blue sky thinking’ and now concentrating solely on the word..something I never been afforded the opportunity to do in my entire adult life unless at times of unemployment which generally means depression undermines the apparent opportunity. I am hopeful that something will come of it. The Carver book is symbolic if I cared then I care now. …and writing is a kind of caring…and a craft. I need to practice.

 

Footnote: The cover illustration is by Clifford Harper who I now find out is a ‘Militant Anarchist’ …wonderful how well things fit together!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Harper

The 10 books that left a lasting impression challenge….

September 20, 2014 / / 0 Comments

1. The Victor Comic 1966

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My step-grandfather was illiterate and had the Victor comic in his farm labourer’s cottage to help him to learn to read..I remember reading it to him when he in his sixties as he puffed clouds of tobacco around my head from his pipe….I was 7.

2.  Ian Allen Combined Locoshed Book 1974

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Any real trainspotter will know this volume and also the point in travelling to places like Birmingham New Street to collect train numbers…it was how I discovered the world….and honed my research skills:-) In fact most trainspotters would make better researchers than most academics.. they far more ‘rigorous’:-)

3. Roger Price – Droodles 1974

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Shrigley before Shrigley…from a jumble sale I think…wonderful visual puns..

4. Percy Bysse Shelley – Poems 1976

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Masque of Anarchy…..says it all..

5. John Clare – Poems 1976

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Mrs Millington maddest most conservative spinster English Teacher who taught me value of writing…forever….bless her.

6. Joseph Conrad – Nostromo 1975

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Mr Peyton my other English teacher who taught me the value of sarcasm…and Conrad who I loved…I went on to read every book I could I think I made 8 or 9……obsessive….

7. John Berger – Ways of Seeing 1977

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Art Foundation a whole new way of seeing things and Punk Rock….went well together 🙂

8. Seamus Heaney – Death of a Naturalist 1978

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A voice I could trust….still do.

9. Raymond Carver – Fires 1985

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The book that made me a writer…literally salvaged from a St Anne’s Tottenham Haringey Library fire….I told that story years later to his widow Tess Gallagher..

10. W.G.Sebald – Rings of Saturn 2008

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Fine art course Lincoln 2008 …read it every day on train to Lincoln as it coincided with a pretty pretentious art show there on themes associated with Sebald ( as pretty much every artist seems to have done since).

Still a good book….and way better than any art ever ‘influenced’ by it.

(Finally if this list went up to 11 and yes the first woman on the list)

11. Alice Munro – Too Much Happiness 2014

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Back to creative writing and first volume of short stories I chose to read…great choice….now time to put pen to paper again and again and again and again…..

Creative Writing M.A. starts Monday…

September 20, 2014 / / 0 Comments

bookshelf
Well all change or rather back to where I was already…..after a 10 year pause.

When I first moved to Nottingham in 2002 I came from a relationship and career (one Spanish the other Oxford University Boldeian Library) that had both broken….and after a disastrous sojourn in London I asked my best friend from school days to come and pick me up lock stock and pc from my dingy one bed (literally a room 8′ by 10′) in Willesden North London and rescue me from the insanity going on around me….. a short story in itself.

So I ended up renting a one bed flat in Lady Bay opposite my friend and began temping….and going slowly broke after a year my savings that I intended to spend on a Creative Writing M.A. at NTU were depleted and I had to go for Teacher Training at Nottingham University instead..as it was funded then.The rest is history….a succession of weird and wonderful teaching appointments in everything from basic skills to drawing and finally a permanent post in 2007 (after a brief and not very successful web design freelance period) at NTU School of Art and Design.I have been there ever since…and technically I am still there this as is a ‘career break’ of nine months and I am due to return in July 2015.

Clearing my hard drives the other day I found the original M.A. application form from 2002. The one I never sent 🙂 So this is a kind of return to basics and a chance to reinvigorate a writing career that been stalled for 7 years as I had to focus on my job in hand and the accompanying development of a ‘art research’profile as part of that job. I also completed a professional development M.A. in Fine Art which whilst it started out as job related twisted onto a weird and wonderful new illustration path….kind of a trojan horse (or dog to be exact) really.

So the door is open..the books (far too many) are stacked up in the studio (writing room now 🙂 and here we go…..two three four….

chalkfish and monkey

August 14, 2007 / / 0 Comments

Chalkfish and Monkey

She picked the fish out of the box leaving a pool of mucus and blood slowly congealing on the shelf and dripped it toward the kitchen table. Outside the wind lashed the tops of the poplar trees together and rain sprayed from the barn roof opposite. She guessed the river would be rising now and looked across at the hills in the distance and wondered what time he’d be back and if the cartwheels were getting bogged down in the chalky mud again. They’d been gone three hours to market and she should be seeing their wagon slowly come around the curve on the down opposite soon.

She was used to watching it crawl along the white chalk road like a fly along cook’s apron string. She heard the master scraping his chair back on the wooden floorboards above and the gentle tap of his cane on the floor as he rose to leave the table. Every day he followed the same routine of moving slowly over to the bedroom where he’d sleep off the meal and wine. She heard the chattering of the monkey as it skipped after him and a curse as it got under his feet. Its tiny claws scratching on the boards as it scampered back to the windowsill where it would sit sucking at grapes it had been thrown from the table.

She started to grow nervous as the single horse started descending the chalk hill toward the farm. A single horse at this time of day always meant trouble…the men were in the fields and only vagabonds or bearers of bad tidings would be out in such filthy weather. She suddenly realised that she’d sliced through the gills and bone and without thinking through her finger. She screamed and ran to the jug of water and the china bowl …she just stood there dripping blood into the bowl that slowly swirled and disappeared in the fresh water. She bit her lip. He was late..

The cook came into the room and seeing her away from her task scolded her then came and held her hand up and bound the cut and told her to hold the cut above her head. Her rough hands gripped her hand tightly as she stemmed the blood. She could smell the smoke of that morning’s breakfast fire in her hair. They were both stood motionless as the latch was raised and the rider stumbled in,face red with exertion,and cried…the bridge has slid away with Tom and the cart on it…down by the weir…

He’d come to tell master..who hearing the commotion was clomping down the wooden stairs. She already knew…as the rain puddled on the stone floor, the red stain grew and eased into droplets of blood dripping into the wet floor and the fish leaked slowly into the bare wood of the table…she knew he was gone..

They stood motionless, all looking at each other, speechless and fearing the worst. The monkey screetching and jumping from the master’s shoulder and freed by the commotion span and danced around the kitchen..chattering like a death rattle…screetching and chattering madly and spitting a grape seed into the fire..

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