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.