ELEANOR FITZSIMONS profiles the writing life of Maeve Brennan: ‘…it should have come as no great surprise to readers of The New Yorker when the Long-Winded Lady, columnist and faithful, if eccentric, documenter of life in the eponymous city, was unmasked as Irishwoman Maeve Brennan, an immigrant who had arrived in her mid-twenties…’
KENNETH STEVEN recommends ‘Clay’ by Scottish writer Lewis Grassic Gibbon: ‘When you read Grassic Gibbon’s stories, you feel that cold sore in the ends of fingers and feet, because he succeeds in putting the very smell of that soil on the page…’
WRITING EXERCISE: SHAUN LEVIN, creator of the Writing Maps guides for writers, looks at movement in short stories and how to check you’re getting enough: ‘Kafka manages, in a 181-word story, to include an account of: 1) what is happening, 2) questions regarding what might actually be happening, and 3) a mention of what had been happening before all that is happening started…’
JENNIE RYAN roughs it in the Australian Outback with Henry Lawson’s short story, The Drover’s Wife: ‘…he told of a lived experience. His stories are populated with those who truly adopted and loved this new land…’
JENNIFER HARVEY peers beneath the surface of The Lagoon by Janet Frame: ‘…this is an essay about the way a writer sees the world, and the sensitivities a writer brings to experiences which may, at times, come close to madness…’
C.D. ROSE ponders on what makes a short story collection, whilst looking at the disparate stories in China Miéville’s Looking For Jake and Other Stories: ‘Miéville is a writer who has had little truck with genre and its resulting hierarchy of snobbery, moving from horror to science fiction to crime to comics to weird and back again, often mixing them all up…’
GEOFFREY HEPTONSTALL profiles the writing life of Jorge Luis Borges: ‘A Borges world is one of paradox and irony. In a few paragraphs, he is able to suggest possibilities that open doors into the infinite…’
LUCY DURRANT profiles the life and writing of Jean Rhys: ‘When Jean Rhys was finally given the recognition she deserved, after nearly twenty years in obscurity, she reacted as blasé and bitterly as anyone who has read her stories might expect…’
As Dan Coxon’s latest project – an anthology titled Being Dad: Short Stories about Fatherhood – gains crowdfunding, we talk to contributing author DAN POWELL about writing his memories into a story, his life as a hands-on dad, and his writing processes…
MIKE SMITH learns much from Elizabeth Bowen’s collected works on the art of beginning a short story: ‘The beginnings of stories, and not only short stories, was the first facet of fiction that I began to consciously study, rather than merely notice…’
