acceptance

February used to be my most depressed month. The month when my hands would stick to the icy gate and fog glue up my throat with cotton wool.

But today some steamy news flew over from Australia. I have had another short story accepted, in The Australian Reader, which will be appearing around February 20th.

Everything after I read that news fell into place, or if it didn't, who cared?

Like the awful peas they decided to throw into the salads my friend and I ordered. My empty bank account. My grotty kitchen a victim of my uninspired overgrown boys. The empty fridge and my driver's license left in a pair of trousers up in the mountains so I am freewheeling, hoping some nitpicking carabinieri won't catch me out along the brittle country roads.

I am so very glad. It's a great hit and a good omen. Of the seventeen stories in my collection only five are still homeless. With these I am aiming high, and responses will be as long as the summer is from now. But now that I know that 'Janet and the Angry Trees' will soon be appearing, I'm ready for another round of the rest.

swiftness

Another request for a full manuscript! I am quietly thrilled, though beaten up with a head cold and I had wild skiing dreams all night. The woman who ventures out with wet hair into the fog has been punished! I would like a grappa or two to ease this head.

So the manuscript is now wending its way to the fiction editor of a small, reputable company, continents away. Send good wishes, cross fingers.

Plus I had another near miss with Granta dammit. The narrator was admired, oh yes she was quirky, and I've been invited to send more work. It feels like a soft bummer, not so bad. I reread one of the stories this morning and was entranced.

The thing is I must finish a hefty book revision before I return to story writing. I've promised it to myself, before this novel dissolves again as it has done before. My laptop is lying on the bed waiting for me, the winter sun is even poised at the window so kindly.

The stories in my head will just have to wait.

My title story still moves me

PELT

Rolfe triggers it. In the way that is the way of all men. In his case a type of athletic bragging ruined by the self-defeat he hangs his hat on. I feel a plock and, with his surprised, involuntary retreat my waters come splashing out, gay and heralding, whereby he bounds back to inspects the folds of his manhood.

My abroni baby will come this day. I roll onto my back and raise my knees in sweet excitement, the baby nestling back even though her head is plugged within my pelvis. Soon after Rolfe is agitating with a towel, peering cautiously at my dark opening. No action there, I laugh. He looks perplexed. Despite his thirty-nine years Rolfe is unfamiliar with the mulch of his own body. A fever sends him into studied ecstasy. The tumbleworm in his butt, whose head and long wrinkled body I inch into the light, is repellent and edifying.

At the apex of his growth curve I suspect I must place myself. This is the man who continues to daub his hands on my sheeny back and breasts. He told me that in Ethiopia, his last posting, they call girls like me ‘slaves’ because of our broad noses and skin a shadow cannot cross.

This is Rolfe’s first child. His wife Karina was barren. I have led Rolfe to believe that this is my first although I had two others before. They are at the village and I send them money. The midwife will no doubt perceive all of this.

(published in Pretext, U.K.)
---
This is the title story of my collection. I remember being possessed by it. Scribbling on the bed for days. Figuring out the last page while on a train going to Florence, needing to finish it before the train stopped burrowing in and out of the hills, transfixed by the poor man in front of me as the final scene coursed onto the page.

Want to know what happens?

Let's hope this collection finds a well-spined home.

wind in the machine

how rotten! Now that my early burst of glee has found a warm home I was kept awake half the night by a throttling thought: I checked my email just as I dropped my book (The Scandal of the Season by Sophie Gee, very transporting) and read that yesterday's accepted story had been longlisted for a big fiction competition prize! Dammit! What the?!

Yesterday morning I'd written off to two other magazines and the friendly bloke running the competition I'd entered late last year with the same story, apologising for sending a spanner into the works with my simultaneous submission - but whoever thinks a story is on the brink of being accepted in two places? And yet what is one to do? Sit back and wait nine months for a reply or a total void? Or sneak out the same piece five or six times?

So there it swims away, flashing in the light, my first longlisting for a fiction prize. Grrr!

The only good bleep is that I even met the competition judge (glazed eyes, I know he thinks I am an ozzie wimmin's writer because of the title of my upcoming commercial book) and I have secretly scuttled under his 'serious literature' door. He longlisted me!

This is quite satisfying.

We wish to inform you

A story from the collection accepted! What lovely news as we wind down the mountain valley after a dodgy day of skiing (helicopters, snow like wet sand, broken legs a-go-go).

It will appear in Tears on the Fence, a green movement/feminist established journal of poetry and fiction.

I am so pleased. Plus the story speaks of injury, acceptance of injury, and how a woman's world softly shifts in a vivid summer mountain setting. I wrote it last year in the autumn - and whoever knows where these compulsions spring from - and remember enjoying discovering the characters as they moved on the page. I knew where I wanted to take them, but it is always a mix of knowledge and acceptance what happens in between.

That is why I love short stories. Departure is so swift, so decisive, then comes the meddling of the mind, the evolving of the characters themselves, and then the crackling at the end, the cusp, the moving away. I love writing the story behind the greater story and was delighted to read this comment once, spoken by an interviewer to Robert Drewe, whose stories I loved as a young woman:

'These stories remind me of Hemingway’s adage about the iceberg – that a strong writer only need reveal one eighth of what he knows about that story, and the reader will sense the submerged whole. Many of these stories seem to contain a novel within them, a wider story that is only hinted at. Is that accurate – do you know a good deal more about these characters and their situations than you reveal?'

Why of course.

The smooth warmth

Of the wooden jetty under bare feet.

Of water swilling around the boat the morning after fireworks, moored in a harbour bay.

How lovely to change continent, change season, change light and breath. I realise how much I have missed movement, water, light. How steathily winter has crept up. And how I am hunched and my bones cold.

I miss the water.

the snows

Since I've come back from Ghana I have pieced together a new life. Not being Italian I have been able to select certain things, without having to submerge as one does in a culture as pervasive as local Ghanaian life, and comfortably stay on the rim of things. Perhaps that is why I will always be - and there are many ways of describing this state - an outsider, an exile. And isn't it a bit of a con too? hanging on to this mildly celebrated state. After all, I have kids who are bi-lingual, even the one who is half-Ghanaian. I own a house. I have my passport. But even if I thought I could travel to the core of this place - embrace literature in another tongue, write in it, feel something other than the superficial buzz of return - would I? No I wouldn't.

While every place has its woes I think that this corner of the world is particularly woeful. The roadworks over the hill - nasty. The rude driving. The hunters after little birds. The racism. The fog. The mud. There are times when I am ready to flee.

Thank goodness we have the gorgeous Dolomites nearby. This place makes winter surviveable and the people there provide gutsy, impassioned talk. Yes, even there the economic situation is devastating and there are no guarantees the season will pan out well. But to ski again, to see Civetta and Pelmo appearing through the cloud, these make me feel a special charge and gloriously happy.