Tag Archives: My Life in Short Fiction

My Life in Short Fiction – Carys Bray

Carys Bray’s debut short fiction collection is published by Salt Publishing this month and is already receiving rave reviews. Sweet Home, which won this year’s Scott Prize, has been described as full to the brim with ‘razor-sharp prose, a killer eye for the stop-you-in-your-tracks detail and a real understanding of the hidden cruelties and unexpectedly sharp comforts of family life‘ (Jenn Ashworth) and ‘alive, beautiful and painfully true‘ (Sarah Schofield). Carys also teaches at Edge Hill University and co-edits the excellent online lit journal Paraxis. So, you can see, her short fiction credentials are impressive to say the least and it is with great pleasure that I welcome her to this blog. Sit back, relax and enjoy Carys Bray’s Life in Short Fiction:

1. The first short story you remember enjoying.

The first short story I remember enjoying was ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. I was a teenager and I hadn’t really read short stories before, but I knew there was something very special about ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’. I read it again and again to try and get a feel for how and why it worked.

2. The short story that turned you on to writing short fiction.

I needed to write short fiction during my Creative Writing MA. At first, I did it because it was a necessary part of the course. Then I started to read stories by Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood and Carol Shields (bit of a Canadian thing going on there) and the form became magical and appealing.

One of my tutors introduced me to Helen Simpson’s short stories. Reading Hey yeah Right Get a Life was like coming home. The title story traces Dorrie’s day, from an ‘early morning kitchen’ to a ‘midnight garden.’ The language is poetic and fresh and I love the way Simpson describes motherhood. Dorrie is ‘broken… into little pieces like a biscuit’ and ‘scattered all over the place.’ I have four children and I feel exactly like that sometimes.

3. A story by the author whose body of work you feel has most influenced yours.

These questions are hard!

I think I need to choose a story by Carol Shields. She once said that her stories include ‘wallpaper… cereal bowls, cupboards, cousins, buses, local elections, head colds, cramps, newspapers.’ Reading her stories helped me realise that domestic details don’t trivialise fiction, they humanise it.

I’m going to pick Shields’ story ‘Keys’, a playful piece of fiction in which the narrative moves from character to character, an approach I adopted in the last story of my collection, ‘On the Way Home’.

4. The story from Sweet Home that most reveals something of who Carys Bray is.

I suspect they all reveal something, even though I wouldn’t describe any of them as autobiographical, but I think the first story, ‘Everything a Parent Needs to Know’ may be the most revealing.

I read dozens of parenting books when my children were small. Eventually, I realised that I knew my children better than the people who were making a fortune out of writing daft advice. I stopped reading the books and my disdain for them is probably quite transparent. The story also reveals my love of T.S Eliot’s poem ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. A few years ago I made some daring decisions that really disturbed my universe (in a good way) and I particularly love the following lines (which I couldn’t quote in the story because it would have cost a lot of money!):

‘Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of toast and tea.’

5. Your all time favourite short story.

Oh, now this is just impossible. Hmm. Oh dear. Just the one?

Okay, ‘The Not-Dead and the Saved’ by Kate Clanchy. It’s one of the most perfect stories I have ever read.

Thanks Carys, for taking the time to share the stories which have helped shape you as both a reader and a writer. I loved the Radio 4 reading of the Kate Clanchy story and will be checking out the Carol Shields and Helen Simpson stories you mention but not before I get my hands on a copy of Sweet Home. Can’t wait to read it. You can buy sweet Home direct from Salt Publishing and it should very soon also be available on Amazon. 

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Bio: Carys Bray’s prize-winning short stories have been published in a variety of magazines and literary journals including Mslexia, Dialogue, PoemMemoirStory, Black Market Review, The Front View and New Fairy Tales. Her collection, Sweet Home won the 2012 Scott Prize and is published by Salt. Carys teaches at Edge Hill University. She is working on a PhD and she is a co-editor at Paraxis.

Links:

My Life In Short Fiction – Tania Hershman

I first came across the short stories of Tania Hershman back in 2009. I had just started this blog and was in the process of completing my diploma in Creative Writing. Her debut collection The White Road was one of my favourite reads of that year and is a book I still dip into from time to time. Tania is a tireless promotor of the short story both on her blog and in the virtual pages of The Short Review and has recently published her second collection, My Mother Was An Upright Piano. She is an Arvon tutor and can often be found at literary festivals and other events running workshops on writing short fiction and/or flash fiction. In fact, this coming September she can be found running a short story event at the Plymouth International Book festival as well as reading and flash fiction workshops at the Cork International Short Story Festival. It is with great pleasure that I welcome Tania onto the blog today today. Ladies and gents, this is Tania Hershman’s Life in Short Fiction:

1. The first short story you remember enjoying.

Roald Dahl’s story, Lamb to the Slaughter, where [spoiler alert!} the wife kills the husband with a frozen leg of lamb and then cooks it for the policemen who come to investigate! I loved it, I remembered being delighted at such a short story with so much happening and such a dark twist at the end!

2. The short story that turned you on to writing short fiction.

It’s got to be Ali Smith, her collection Other Stories and Other Stories, which I read about 13 years ago, I think. The first story, God’s Gift, opened my eyes to – after Roald Dahl – everything else a short story could be. It was so intimate, and there were no big fireworks, no explosions, but it was just as powerful, in it’s very small and intense way. It is a story that takes you into the space between two people, the “I” who is talking to “you”, and it doesn’t follow a linear path, it surprises, gently but insistently, powerfully. That made me want to write, to get inside someone else’s head in that same intimate way.

3. A story by the author whose body of work you feel has most influenced yours.

Well, that’s got to be Ali Smith again. I was recently at a conference and I heard an academic give a paper about Ali Smith’s short stories and that really brought home to me just what an influence she has been on me. And not just her writing – she taught me on an Arvon Foundation course in 2006 and she said everything you would want the writer you worship to say to you about your writing, it was quite amzing, stunning. I love her story ” The Child“ because it seems fairly ordinary and humorous but then turns very dark and disturbing – and that’s what I love in a short story!

4. The story from your own body of work that most reveals something of who Tania Hershman is.

Oh wow, this is hard. Firstly, I don’t consciously write about my own life, ever. But I know it’s in there, somewhere. I don’t like to think that you can learn anything about me, the person, from my fiction. I was quite disturbed after my first book came out when several people I didn’t know very well seemed to think they now knew me intimately through those stories. But, okay, I am avoiding the question. “Express”, from the White Road and Other Stories, is fairly close to autobiography in terms of being an ex-pat and how it feels to return to your home country, not to have to struggle to understand another language.

But if I may pick a second, the fiction “Retreating I Retreated” in my new book I think says something of my ambiguous relationship with others, wanting to approach people, wanting to be sociable, to be “normal”, perhaps, while at the same time not being fully equipped to do so, having to back away. Which is perhaps a condition many writers experience. We are the observers not the participants.

5. Your all time favourite short story.

I’ve been thinking about this question for several weeks and I am just utterly unable to answer it. For me, that’s the beauty of short stories, there are so many great ones, I have too many favourites to name, I’m afraid. Some recent favourites are Grandma by Carol Emshwiller, Memory Wall by Anthony Doerr, 1/3 1/3 1/3 by Richard Brautigan and Mollusk, Membrane, Human Heart by Anne Valente. Will that do? Will you forgive me?!

It will most certainly do. And consider yourself absolved. I have yet to read any of the stories you mention in your closing answer, Tania. I will be tracking them down as soon as. Thanks for taking the time to share the stories that have helped shape you as a reader and a writer.

Tania Hershman is the author of two story collections: The White Road and Other Stories (Salt, 2008; commended, 2009 Orange Award for New Writers) and My Mother Was An Upright Piano: Fictions (Tangent Books, 2012), a collection of 56 very short fictions, available now in paperback and as an ebook, which contains an extra “secret story”. Tania’s award-winning short stories, flash fiction and poetry are published or forthcoming in, among others, kill author, Necessary Fiction, Metazen, PANK magazine, SPECS, Smokelong Quarterly, Elimae, Electric Velocipede and on BBC Radio. She is writer-in-residence in Bristol University’s Science Faculty and editor of The Short Review, the online journal spotlighting short story collections and their authors. Tania teaches regularly for the Arvon Foundation and also runs workshops on flash fiction, science-inspired fiction and the short story. Her website is www.taniahershman.com

My Life In Short Fiction – Valerie O’Riordan

On the first National Flash Fiction Day it is a pleasure to welcome Valerie O’Riordan to this blog. Valerie is a prize winning writer of flash fiction and has just released her debut short fiction collection Enough. She is co-editor of the #NFFD Jawbreakers collection. Ladies and gents, put your hands together for Valerie O’Riordan’s Life in Short Fiction:

1. The first short story you remember enjoying.

As a kid I was familiar with Frank O’Connor’s My First Confession – I think it must have been anthologised in some primary school reader – and I loved it, though I’m not sure if I actually read it or had it read to me. The first short story I remember reading myself was something from Joyce’s Dubliners when I was in secondary school, probably The Dead – it wasn’t on the syllabus, I just got a bit ahead of myself, and I couldn’t get to grips with it at all. Several years later, in my final year at University, I chose a module called ‘American Short Fiction’ – mainly because it was one of the few courses that concentrated on relatively contemporary writing. And there I came across Cheever, Carver, Barthelme, Hemingway, Junot Diaz, Jhumpa Lahiri, Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter – it was a whole new world of fiction. I can’t remember which particular story I enjoyed first, or most, but I know I got a particular kick out of Welty.

2. The short story that turned you on to writing short fiction.

I don’t think it was any one story that did it, in a kind of Eureka moment – but one author whose fiction (novels and short stories) really made me get my arse in gear was (and is) Denis Johnson. I read Already Dead one summer a few years ago and thought, I have to do this. And his story, Emergency Room, in the collection Jesus’ Son, knocked me sideways. Also, if I’d read it earlier, I think anything out of Helen Simpson’s Hey Yeah Right Get A Life would have kick-started me. Maybe it’ll kick-start somebody else instead, now.

3. A story by the author whose body of work you feel has most influenced yours.

At the moment I’d have to say Kevin Barry. He’s got two collections (and a novel), but I’d pick a story from the first book – maybe See The Tree, How Big It’s Grown in There Are Little Kingdoms. Barry has the most amazing ear for dialogue and the rhythms of language – he makes me want to try harder every time I read him. His characters are both grotesque and achingly human and the stories follow their own pattern – there’s never a tidy, manicured arc, and yet they’re complete. He makes the form his own.

4. The story from your own body of work that most reveals something of who Valerie O’Riordan is.

I wish I had a large enough body of work that I could delve into for this! The story I won the Spilling Ink Flash Fiction Prize with, You Might Call It A Start, won’t be published for a few months yet, but I was pleased with the blend of peculiarity and realism in that one. (I’d been reading a lot of Kevin Barry at the time.) I like to think it’s got a good dollop of humour to balance out the main character’s rather bleak circumstances. That’s not to say my own circumstances are bleak, though! But in my work I increasingly try to go for a type of black comedy and I think it comes across in that story.

5. Your all time favourite short story. 

This is an odd one: the story that made the most impact on me, ever, is one I’ve only read once: Lawrence Sargent Hall’s The Ledge. It was so good, so absolutely perfect, but so harrowing that I bawled like a child during it, and though that was years ago, I haven’t yet been able to bring myself to do it again. But it’s the one story I’d urge everyone to read. If anybody thinks that short fiction can’t have the same impact as a long novel, then they haven’t read The Ledge.

Valerie O’Riordan is a graduate of the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Manchester. She was the winner of the 2010 Bristol Short Story Prize and the 2012 Spilling Ink Flash Fiction Prize. She co-edited Jawbreakers, an anthology of flash-fiction to celebrate the inaugural National Flash-Fiction Day in 2012. Her first chapbook, Enough, is out now with Gumbo Press.

My Life In Short Fiction – Christopher Allen

In addition to his role as one of the editors of  Metazen,  Christopher Allen’s fiction has appeared all over the web. Having been edited by Christopher a few times now over on Metazen, his recently being named Best Ezine Editor over on the Preditors and Editors Readers Poll came as no surprise to me. I’m a big fan of his fiction writing and his travel(b)logue and it is with great pleasure that I present to you, Christopher Allen’s Life in Short Fiction:

1. The first short story you remember enjoying.

I don’t remember much of my early reading life, and conjuring up the little I can remember of it makes me feel exposed and vulnerable. My family was, and still is, very spiritual. By the time I was twelve I’d read most of the Bible. I suppose the parables, the story of Jonah and the Great Fish, of David and Jonathan and all the other stories of the Bible were my first “short stories”. I’m not sure whether I enjoyed these stories; they were simply part of my life.

By the age of ten, I’d discovered a passion for writing, but I think this need to write was influenced more by TV and songs on the radio. In the fifth grade I wrote a “novel” called Cobra Man, the story of a half-man-half-snake creature who takes over a distant world. It was a masterpiece of course.

It is not a short story, but Robinson Crusoe was the first story that fascinated me. I remember reading it in the back of my parents’ car. I have no idea how old I was.

In high school I read everything I could get my hands on, but I don’t remember much of it except Edgar Allan Poe, Emerson and Thoreau. By the time I was at university, I’d read enough to know that I wanted to write—so I majored in Music Business of course.

It wasn’t until much later when I was in graduate school getting a Master’s Degree in English that my reading memory is clearer. The first short story that deeply challenged me to consider the art of writing, as well as the relationship between female and male consciousness, was Henry James’s “In the Cage”. I ended up including it in my Master’s thesis.

2. The short story that turned you on to writing short fiction.

To answer these questions, I am constantly turning around to search through the history of my bookshelves. Seventeen years ago when I moved to Germany I sold 300 books, so much of that history has been spread over the southeast United States. I remember reading a collection of stories by Eudora Welty in 1987 or so and thinking I would love to write like that. Of course I read lots of Faulkner, but mostly novels. At that time I thought there’d be a distinctive Southern sound to my prose.

3. A story by the author whose body of work you feel has most influenced yours.

If I could answer this question precisely, the story I’d mention would be a collaboration among Virginia Woolf, Jincy Willett and Bill Bryson. Philip Roth would have been part of the collaboration at first, but he would have stomped out early on in the process. The likelihood of this collaboration is dire—I know. Below in question 5 I’ve included “A Haunted House” by Virginia Woolf, which could just as easily suffice here; but since the question is focused on short fiction, I’m going to say Jincy Willett. Virginia only speaks to me in my dreams, and Bill doesn’t even write fiction. Jincy Willett’s story “Melinda Falling” (in her cult classic collection Jenny & the Jaws of Life) is always a favorite. I love the voice and the character of Melinda. I’ve worked with Jincy on my own writing, so of course she has influenced me.

4. The story from your own body of work that most reveals something of who Christopher Allen is.

Yikes. I’m still trying to figure out who Christopher Allen is. I think I’ve come to the conclusion that I am a fluid thing, becoming a different fluid thing all the time. My short fiction is usually about a character who is not me, but there is one story in which the narrator feels like me (although he speaks in a British accent). It’s about a man paid to sweep a sidewalk that will never be clean. “The Pain Taster” appeared at Kaffe in Katmandu in 2011. I often feel like this character: he’s the writer unable to comfort, console or counsel his character.

The Pain Taster on Flash Fiction Friday 

The Pain Taster in the Flash Fiction Friday anthology

5. Your all time favourite short story.

I’ve chosen A Haunted House  by Virginia Woolf, because she is the writer whose work has influenced me the most, because it’s flash fiction and because it demonstrates many qualities of Woolf’s fiction, such as triplet repetition (“safe, safe, safe”), elliptical dialogue interspersed with stream of consciousness narrative. When I reread this story, I hear Virginia’s influence on the way I hear and write dialogue—but not in a creepy way.

A Haunted House – Virginia Woolf

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Christopher Allen published his first short story in 1993. His fiction, creative non-fiction and travel articles have appeared in numerous places both in print and online. In 2010 Allen’s story “Red Toy Soldier” won The Smoking Poet’s short story contest. In 2011 Allen was a finalist at Glimmer Train, a Pushcart Prize nominee and winner of the “Best Ezine Editor” title in the Preditors & Editors Readers Poll. He blogs about his obsession with exploring the Earth at www.imustbeoff.com.

My Life In Short Fiction – Nuala Ní Chonchúir

Nuala Ní Chonchúir is a widely published and award winning poet, novelist and short story writer. Her debut novel You was published in 2010. Longtime readers of this blog will remember her third collection of short fiction, Nude, was reviewed as part of my Short Story Challenge, her story Letters winning a spot on my Top Fifteen Short Stories of 2010. Arlen House have just published an expanded edition of her second collection, To The World Of Men, Welcome which I will be reviewing on this blog next week. Nuala is currently offering a copy as a prize over on her blog, Women Rule Writer, but before you click over there to enter please join me in welcoming Nuala as she shares her life in short fiction:

The first short story you remember enjoying.

I’ve always loved stories but Seán Ó Faoláin’s story ‘The Trout’ lodged in my brain in a peculiar way. We must have read it in primary school. It’s about a little girl who finds a ‘panting’ trout in a secluded well. The landscape of the story is an old laurel walk ‘a lofty midnight tunnel of smooth, sinewy branches’ and it’s like a similar spot in my homeplace in County Dublin. At some point I started to believe that the story had actually happened to me; I adapted it into my own mythology. So much so that when I re-read ‘The Trout’ as an adult it felt like I was reading my own history. Bizarre. It’s a gorgeous piece of fiction and I often think about it.

The short story that made you want to write short fiction.

I couldn’t say that there was just one. We read a lot of short stories in school and I was always reading at home. I started to write short stories because poetry wasn’t enough for me and the novels I was attempting never went anywhere. I’ve always loved the way short stories pan out – the motifs, the tension. It’s like watching someone dive into a dark pool. They go under, you see the ripples fan out and fade, but you know the diver has to come up for air at some point, so you wait for that. I fell head over heels with Anne Enright’s collection The Portable Virgin around the time I was starting to write stories myself so, as a collection, I would say it egged me on; it showed me the possibilities of what a young Irish woman writer could do.

A story by the author whose body of work you feel has most influenced yours.

Again, it’s impossible to pick one writer or one story. Annie Proulx makes me brave with naming characters; Claire Keegan teaches me to slow my pace; I love Emma Donoghue’s language and energy; Michéle Roberts has a delicate touch that I would like to master. But I do remember being directly influenced by Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s story ‘Midwife to the Fairies’ – it gave me the idea to use a folk tale in my story ‘One Hare’s Foot’ . I’ve come around to the idea that influence is a good thing, having resisted (or misunderstood it?) for a while. I love seeing what other writers are doing and what I can learn from them. My favourite story writers include Edna O’Brien, Flannery O’Connor, Michéle Roberts, Claire Keegan, Seán O’Reilly, Anne Enright, Colum McCann, Annie Proulx, Emma Donoghue, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Tess Gallagher, Rose Tremain, Yiyun Li, Manuel Munoz and Ernest Hemingway. At the moment I am basking in the stories of Valerie Trueblood – they have an absolute humanity; her stories are layered, learned, insightful, moving and witty. I wish I could write like her.

The story from your own body of work that most reveals something of who Nuala Ní Chonchúir is.

Oh, this is a hard one. Well, I write a lot about the things that obsess and possess me: art, the breakdown of love, sex and the body. So if I have to pick one, it might be ‘Madonna Irlanda’ from my collection Nude. The story is about a shy, self-conscious artist, newly separated from her husband, who goes to Paris and meets a fabulous man (another artist). They become friends and from him she learns about strength and forging ahead with her life and her art; he makes her braver.

Your all time favourite short story.

I love different stories for different reasons at varying times. But if I had to choose only one story for my desert island, I think it would be Flannery O’Connor’s ‘Good Country People’. I just love Hulga/Joy as a character and it is so brilliant and comforting to me, as a writer, that Flannery O’Connor wrote the story not knowing how it would end. With that perfect ending! You are pulled into the story and its mix of the funny and the deadly serious. She was a genius, she had such an ear.

Born in Dublin in 1970, Nuala Ní Chonchúir lives in Galway county. Her début novel You (New Island, 2010) was called ‘a heart-warmer’ by The Irish Times and ‘a gem’ by The Irish Examiner. Her third short story collection Nude (Salt, 2009) was shortlisted for the UK’s Edge Hill Prize; her third poetry collection The Juno Charm is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. Her second short story collection To The World of Men, Welcome (2005) has just been re-issued by Arlen House in an expanded paperback edition.

LINKS:

http://www.nualanichonchuir.com/home.php

http://womenrulewriter.blogspot.com/

http://arlenhouse.blogspot.com/

Author photo by Emilia Krysztofiak