Tag Archives: National Short Story Week

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:

NSSW2012: One Story

It’s National Short Story Week and I have decided to post every day this week on the subject of short fiction. Yesterday I posted the ingredients for my current work in progress, a short story made up from some seemingly disparate elements.

Today I want to talk about my favourite short fiction periodical, a magazine that manages by the unique nature of its form to be, in my opinion anyway, the perfect vehicle for the presentation of short fiction: One Story. Each issue of One Story features exactly that, one short story, because they believe ‘that short stories are best read alone. They should not be sandwiched in between a review and an exposé on liposuction, or placed after another work of fiction that is so sad or funny or long that the reader is worn out by the time they turn to it.’ To provide further focus on the individual story, each issue includes an interview with the author about the inspiration and crafting behind their tale.

Since I started subscribing to One Story back in 2010 I have been blown away with the quality of the stories they present, reading work from both established authors (Etgar Keret, Aimee Bender, Emma Donoghue) and new, emerging voices. Many of the stories presented here have lead me to seek out their authors collections; most recently Miroslav Penkov’s East of the West because of One Story’s presentation of his excellent A Picture with Yuki in issue 148, and Elissa Schapell’s Building Better Girls because of the brilliance of her story Joy of Cooking in issue 152. You can see an impressive list of their back issues here.

One of the neatest features of One Story is the fact that once an author has published within their pages they are inelligible to submit any further fiction to them. In this way One Story can be sure to continue to present new authors and their stories to its readership. I recently had my first stab at submitting to their esteemed pages and am currently waiting to hear back about my one story. I’ll let you know how that goes.

Meanwhile, the latest issue features Jason Ockert’s excellent Still Life, a story of an art teacher and his student and the conflict caused when they fail to see each other clearly. In the story Ockert manages to bring his characters into stark contrasting focus then simultaneously drag them toward a confrontation and a final clarity that, like all the best short fiction, leaves the reader thinking of them for days and weeks after. I don’t really want to say more about the plot of the story lest I ruin the reading of it for any of you. Suffice to say, this issue is the perfect jumping on point for new readers. You can subscribe to print issues here and to a digital edition on Kindle for only 99p a month here.

Anyone else have a short fiction periodical they’d care to recommend?

Ingredients of a Work in Progress

The idea for this post comes from Jessica Patient by way of Suzanne Joinson who have both posted the ingredients for their own current works-in-progress, a short story and a novel respectively. Inspired by their own excellent insights into the writing process, here is my own. With my MA novel currently on sabbatical while I plow through this term’s Contemporary Novels II course reading list, my current WIP is a short story composed/cobbled together from the following inspirations and elements:

  • Highcliffe in Dorset:

  • Coastal erosion and the defences put in place to combat it

  • The best setting descriptions from an old story of my own set there that never quite worked well enough for me, pulled out and repurposed:

  • Dramatic coastal cliff-slides:

  • Fossilised gastropods:

  • A cliff-top car park:

  • An amateur fossil hunter:

  • Frontotemporal degeneration

  • & finally, this latest, epic track from Villagers, The Waves:

Anyone else care to share the bits and bobs that make up their current WIP?

Week of Stories – Day 7

Last day of National Short Story Week and my final recommendation is a Dave Eggers story that highlights how a short stories last line should provide some sort of payoff to the reader. Not necessarily a twist. In fact I prefer an image that sticks with you, or an emotional moment that resonates back through the story, or in the case of ‘A Fork Brought Along’ a laugh out loud moment of revelation.

Read the brilliantly observed and painfully funny ‘A Fork Brought Along’ here.

Week of Stories – Day 6

I am a huge fan of David Mitchell’s writing. That’s David Mitchell the author not the guy out of Peep Show, though I am a big fan of that too. My recommendation for today is his short story, ‘The Massive Rat,’ which I read earlier this year and shows that David Mitchell is capable of brilliance in the short form as well as the novel. Here’s hoping he publishes a collection at some point.

Read ‘The Massive Rat’ here.