Teaching the Short Story

Out now! With chapters by Charles E. May, Peter Wright, Michael Greaney, Paola Trimarco, Martin Scofield, Andy Sawyer, Linden Peach, Dean Baldwin and yours truly.

Alice Munro's biggest fan

From a piece by Diana Athill in the Telegraph today:

Not long ago, I was invited to open a literary festival in Toronto together with the Canadian writer Alice Munro, whose work I have loved and admired for years. Flying to Canada: what a nightmarish thought! My whole body seemed to recoil from it, because my legs have become so wobbly that walking more that about 50 yards is impossible, and even that much is frighteningly difficult when my deaf old head is being battered by the incomprehensible din of places such as airports, an experience so horrid that probably no undeaf person can imagine it.

No no, I couldn’t face it. But then I thought: “The chance to meet Alice Munro at last – how can I throw that away?”

Alice Munro will be 80 in July.

Infinity

Thanks to Claire Massey for another short story metaphor from a blog post by Jeff VanderMeer

which talks about short stories being like baby sea turtles:

'Short stories (and novellas) endure a different fate, one more akin to the process by which sea turtles reproduce. Hundreds of eggs are laid

and eventually hundreds of baby turtles hatch and frantically make for the sea, many of them getting picked off by birds or crabs. Once they

reach the sea, even more get eaten by fish and other predators. Some run afoul of fishermen’s nets after they reach maturity. Short stories, by

dint of their initial appearance in magazines or anthologies, are more like sea turtles than ships. Some never make it out of the shell. Those that do frantically seek publication, but only a few make it that far. Of the ones that do, most are destined to be ignored and never heard from again. Only a handful make it all the way to some kind of prominence of recognition.'

The photo by Tim Power has nothing to do with turtles. It's the cover image for the new journal Short Fiction in Theory and Practice.

Short story metaphors continued

Owen Sheers judge of National Short Story Prize says stories are a 'soil sample' of the culture. This goes very nicely with Anne Enright's cats in the Granta Book of Irish Short Stories.

Short story metaphors

Another metaphor for the short story - this time Anne Enright introducing The Granta Book of the Irish Short Story in the Guardian: 'They are the cats of literary form; beautiful, but a little too self-contained...' My dog looks up at me balefully; he wants to be a short story too.

Katherine Mansfield

The character with the round breasts and muscular thighs is not of course Mansfield but J.D. Fergusson's painting Rhythm, discussed by Angela Smith in the journal. Rhythm was the little magazine in which Mansfield's work appeared. That title is full of Bergsonian overtones to do with dynamism, intuition, temporal fluidity....Anyway, I'm very proud that my story 'The Not Knowing' is included in a journal that bears KM's name, alongside some excellent articles and more creative work by Kirsty Gunn, C.K. Stead and others.

As Long as You Both

Her eyes were not exactly blue or grey. They were the colour of the sea, the sea on a dull morning without sunlight. That was how they were when he looked, but he didn’t often look. They had been together too long to take much notice of such details, but now he saw the way the strands of hair fell across her eyes and he asked her to marry him, for no other reason.

‘Don’t let’s make a big production out of it,’ he said, ‘not at our age. Lets just go away together somewhere quiet.’

Read the rest of the story in New Writing Vol. 7,

Even more on short story metaphors

'A reader gets in and out of a short story, like a cold bath' - Lorrie Moore. Brr!

More on short story metaphors

A couple I missed, having only just caught up with a Helen Simpson interview earlier this week. Helen says they're like 'speed boats or soft-top sports cars' - you can get away in them quickly! I like these better than the elderly aunts. Looking forward to The Tipping Point, out this week.

Short Story Metaphors

For some time now I've been collecting short story metaphors. I've heard 'the short story' described as everything from a seagull to a garden shed. The latest was in a piece by Alison Flood in the Guardian about an app for short stories, launched this week by Ether Books. I don't know if it was in the press release or if she thought it up herself, but here we go: 'The short story is the elderly aunt of the literary world: almost impossible to marry off to a publisher'. Some one has been reading too much Jane Austen.

Handy words and phrases

Certain expressions lodge in the mind, and my mother thinks, I like this, I'll keep it. After my dad died, she wanted to be 'left to grieve in private'. Another one - 'enjoy good health'. So-and-so 'doesn't enjoy very good health '. In fact, no one 'enjoys' good health. It's a phrase to be used in the negative only. If I were on Thought for the Day I'd expound on the lessons to be learnt from this, perhaps reading it as a gentle reproach to the rest of us. Like most of us, I learnt to speak from my mother, and after learning to speak I learnt first of all to read and then to write.

From Angers

On the platform, the writer is composed, answering each question precisely, without hesitation. What is the meaning of the symbolism in your stories? The towers, the mirrors and labyrinths? French critics have not yet found a language for talking to a living writer. They are suspicious of Creative Writing, and, strangely, in a country which gave us the Death of the Author, frame their discussion in terms of intention rather than process. The writer’s head is lit by the computer projector, left over from previous panels, creating a peculiar band of light, like a bandage, on his bald head. He has a fringe of white hair, a moustache and round glasses. The only biographical information he’s willing to disclose is his date of birth, 1943. Because I’ve only discovered his work recently, I’ve been thinking of him as a new writer, some one much younger, a dark, saturnine figure, conflating him with Edward Norton in The Illusionist.

Throughout the conference, he’s referred to, not by his full name, but as Millhauser, the proper noun turned into an abstraction. He first materializes at our private tour of the Apocalypse Tapestry, whose panels serendipitously call to mind the structure of his story ‘Klassik Komix #1’. He reads this story now, in the light of the screen, interposed with the sections of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock which it has rendered into comic book images. It’s a shame he doesn’t give you ‘Klassik Komix’ without explanation, leaving the reader to figure out what is it, but perhaps he isn’t sure how familiar Eliot’s poem is to French short story specialists.

I didn’t know that, as with the best Turkish carpets, the weave on the back of the tapestry matches the front, except that the side that’s hidden, protected from the light, is still dazzlingly bright, vivid because it’s unseen. If I were Steven Millhauser I’d see my way into a story through that underside. Story ideas have kept coming to me, while I’ve been away, partly a result of the conference itself, partly the effects of a long train journey. Revelations are scribbled all over the programme and the speakers’ handouts - changes to unpublished and half-completed stories, and the beginnings of new ones. I wish I’d brought my laptop, except it could be that my brain’s on overdrive because I left the writing equipment at home.

The Apocalypse Tapestry is like a great medieval slide show, showing scenes from the Book of Revelations - many-headed monsters with docile lion’s faces, the Great Whore combing her hair and St John eating the Book because the word of God must be physically digested. The previous guest writer, Helen Simpson, gives the reader a guided tour of this ‘double decker cartoon’ in ‘The Boy and the Savage Star’. I especially like the wild flowers and grasses running along the border; if you look carefully you can see the hindquarters of a rabbit, its head emerging further on. Maybe that rabbit followed Alice into the brighter looking glass world on the reverse. This evening the rain falling on Angers is like the rain in Millhauser’s story, ‘Rain’.

The copies of Dangerous Laughter that were for sale have vanished by the time the talk is over. I feel sheepish talking to a writer empty-handed. Close to, the writer seems more fragile, almost transparent. He sits at the bare table, like the magic table in ‘Eisenheim the Illusionist’, poised to sign books that aren’t there. The next day, in Paris, my feet take me back automatically to the patisserie in Rue Mabillon, where I used to go for breakfast, twenty years ago or more.

Where was I?

Where've I been for all of 2010 so far? Not on my blog. I've been in Beaumaris, Torquay, Liverpool, Ormskirk, Manchester, Newport, Paris, London, Angers and Skelmersdale, amongst other places, but my fingers never led me to this blog. Too busy writing trains and catching stories. In the meantime, the excellent Short Review has a review by Annie Clarkson of my collection The Real Louise, and an interview.

The Voodoo of Fiction

A recent Canadian article http://www2.macleans.ca/2009/11/05/an-eerie-short-story-gets-even-eerier/ sees parallels between Alice Munro's 2006 story 'Dimensions' (in her new book Too Much Happiness) and a murder, two years later, in British Columbia, where she lives part of the time. Men do kill their children sometimes, and their wives discover the bodies, and yes, those men hear voices and so on - but anyone can understand why Munro finds it difficult to read that story out loud. Sometimes it's hard to write certain things just in case you make them happen. There could be a story about that if I dare put the words down.

Short Story Reading with Robert Graham

1.00, Wednesday 18th November, Room B005, Business Building, Edge Hill University. I'll be reading from The Real Louise and Robert will be reading from his new collection from Salt, The Only Living Boy.

You can now buy The Real Louise on Amazon. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Real-Louise-Ailsa-Cox/dp/1902096576/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1258011549&sr=1-7

Sex and the Novel

The Manchester Literature Festival opened this week with a rather tame discussion on sex and the novel featuring Will Self and Martin Amis. Amis pondered the sexual aspects of novels by George Eliot and Jane Austen as if mugging up for an exam, and there was much discussion of Lolita. A shame he didn't talk about his own writing at all. Self was sharp as ever, talking about J.G. Ballard's 'death of affect'. He was scornful of so-called 'transgressive literature' in an age where, as he put it, you can get porn in every hotel room. Good for him - academics get very excited about such things, but honestly, it would be more daring to write a conference paper about an unfashionable writer like Somerset Maugham than deliver something on coprophilic websites. Is sex like writing? Hmm. Maybe. If you can keep your eyes closed.

I'm introducing Chris Beckett and James Lasdun at a festival reading on the 24th. Should be interesting. What is it about Lasdun's work that's so much like Maupassant?

No Se Puede Vivir Sin Amar

Read all about the launch of Malcolm Lowry: From the Mersey to the World on Robert Sheppard's blog Pages. Edited by Bryan Biggs and Helen Tookey for Liverpool University Press, the book is a tribute to Lowry from his birthplace, and its contributors are some of the writers and artists whose work has collided with his. Robert's 'Malcolm Lowry's Land' retraces a journey to Lowry's grave. When I wrote my story, 'No Se Puede Vivir Sin Amar' I used some of his techniques and themes. Lowry had a lasting effect on the way I structure my stories. Writing a story not in imitation of Lowry - I wouldn't dare - but through my reading of him - has been such a pleasure. Not stopping and explaining. Not asking yourself why something strange just appeared on the page. Trusting the language.

The Writer's Life

I'm currently hiding away in Wales with George my dog (see pic from gonzopix; no, it's not snowing, that was last autumn). After my morning's writing we walk along the river and up the cycle path to Caernafon (jolly families breezing past on their bikes, passengers on the steam railway daring to raise their hands in just a tiny little wave...) The castle suddenly rises up in front of you like a child's fort - and then the sound of the fairground in the square, a sort of Eurovision voice: 'Ladies and gentleman please, our ride is about to begin!' You'd expect the square to be pedestrianised, but in fact cars -I mean REAL cars cutting through town - weave in between the fairground rides. The locals all hang about outside the bank waiting to see if a tourist gets hit.

On the way home George pauses at exactly the same spot, climbs onto the wall and looks down at the river. He sees something we don't see; and also dogs are creatures of habit, just like the Writer, who is hard at work on The Institute which is turning out to be - crikey - a novel. By the time I get back I'm covered with scratches, my clothes are torn, my hands numbed by nettles. What kind of hard wiring makes me do this? I can't stop myself. I'd risk my life for blackberries - and they're not that great, not as if they were raspberries. I think it's some kind of primate behaviour, like certain sorts of grooming habits; lets not get into details. Oh but they are irresistible, glowing in the hedges like jewels....

Storm over Dollarton

The Malcolm Lowry Centenary conference is almost a month ago now. There were three other Brits there (not counting RICHARD J LANE of Vancouver Island University), outnumbered by the French who seem more likely to have studied Lowry than most UK scholars. Apparently there was a French writers’ conference about him last year. On the last night, a yellow school bus drove us to Dollarton, where Lowry once lived in a ramshackle hut by the shore. That week had been hot and dry, but the rain was falling as we set off and by the time we crossed into North Vancouver the sky was sulphurous, and a great fork of lightening hit the towers of the city. We got there, sat in the bus listening to the rain for a few seconds and then we all got out. We were Lowry nuts. We were geeks. (Even the Lacanians were basically geeks.) We were the Malcolm Lowry Fan Club and nothing was going to stop us wandering through the forest in a storm straight out of Under the Volcano.

Thanks to Miguel Mota for the little ipods playing us sounds and memories from Lowry’s time at Dollarton, and for the mescal we drank as we listened to the passage from ‘The Forest Path to the Spring’:

‘…and the rain itself was water from the sea, as my wife first taught me, raised to heaven by the sun, transformed into clouds, and falling again into the sea. While within the inlet itself the tides and currents in that sea returned, became remote, and becoming remote, like that which is called the Tao, returned again as we ourselves had done.’

http://malcolmlowryatthe19thhole.blogspot.com/ has lots of Lowry material and links to more. The Book Club at the New Yorker has been reading Under the Volcano during August, and there are some great stories from old and new converts to the experience on The Book Club : The New Yorker.

More to come when I get back