Finally got five minutes to sit down and catch up with myself and all the threads I have started off… I have not had a chance this week to read and critique a short story as I have been doing because of so much else going on. Busy is good but not when it gets this…
creative writing M.A.
First fiction for work-shopping: ‘Flying Fish’
The first chapter involves all of the above 🙂 I have finally after 30 years of thinking about it produced 2000 words of prose fiction which a relief as I had built up a mental block of ever actually doing it because I have been so immersed in art and poetry. The document has…
Daily Short: Margaret Atwood – ‘Wilderness Tips’ (S/T)
My first Atwood short story. Fairly long approximately 6000 words long. This length allows a fair amount of third person P.O.V. switching as the ‘hidden’ narrator which feels a lot like Ms Atwood such is the strength of her voice to ‘inhabit’ each of the different actors on the stage. The stage in this instance…
Daily Short: Raymond Carver – ‘Nobody said anything’ from Will You Please Be Quiet, Please.
First published in 1973 as ‘The Summer Steelhead’ (Seneca review, Vol. 4, no. 1 (May, 1973) and later as ‘Nobody said anything’. Smudging was widespread practice amongst Yakima fruit-farmers. Pollution stopped crops being frost-damaged. (Source: Carol Sklenicka: Raymond Carver – A writer’s Life 2009.) In the original story the final lines are different referring to…
Edwin Smith – ‘Catching Light’ completed
Final draft of the commissioned poem has gone to Apples and Snakes and R.I.B.A. 6 stanzas of eight lines each stanza titled according to Edwin Smith’s cameras. 1. Kodak Box Brownie 1927 2. ICA Ideal 205 1935 3. Contax II 1936 4. Thornton Pickard Ruby 1904 5. Graflex Speed Graphic 1960 6. Ensign Autorange 1955…
Daily Short: John McGahern – ‘Swallows’
I have been collecting John McGahern books for twenty odd years. Like William Trevor and Frank O’Connor he was part of the Irish Parthenon of writers that just sort of there…like kindly uncles. Because of my focus on poetry to the exclusion of all else I had neglected them. I hadn’t read any of them …
Daily Short: John Burnside – ‘Graceland’ from Burning Elvis
‘His greatest fictional achievement so far; never before has he shown the horror and grace of consciousness better than in these gems’ (The Times – no author traceable). When John Burnside started publishing fiction he was in the curious position of already being a well-respected ‘award-winning’ poet. So his dalliance with ‘fiction’ and memoir could…
Daily Short: Rick Bass – ‘Redfish’ from ‘The Watch’
I purchased this volume when it came out back in 1989 or 1990. Probably as flagged up by Raymond Carver or the Granta anthologies of Dirty Realism. I remember being impressed at the time. Going back to the collection I started with ‘Mississippi’. Like a Townes Van Zandt (both from Fort Worth Texas) folk tale…
Daily Short: Arthur Machen – The Red Hand and Poundland
The wonders of Poundland…..one of my favourite current book trawling locations where the cheap Wordsworth anthology above was available for yes a pound. Today’s gem is a tale from 1895 by Arthur Machen who thanks to Wikipedia I now know has been an influence on a diverse range of writers including John Betjeman, Javier Marias,…
Station to Station – Edwin Smith commission.
The Edwin Smith commission is turning out to be a detective story….nothing is what it seems…this photo is not Kentish Town station as represented in his catalogue..it is Walthamstow Central and it still standing. Wonder how RIBA will take the news. Shame I spent two days researching Kentish Town station and linking it to George Orwell….