National Short Story Week: Late Views from Behind the Coffee Pot

As a writer whose first short story collection is being published next year it's hard to admit that National Short Story Week passed me by. I knew it was happening. I didn't attend any events in my neighbourhood (tiny village surrounded by roadworks and unfortunate Palladian villas on hills), mainly because there weren't any. I didn't even read up much, reply to anything, or even finish my own damn revisions (I did make the executive decision to remove two stories. Or maybe not. Or maybe.)

But I've been reading. This year I have read quite a few short story collections, more than I can write about here. The most recent have had me really thinking about what constitutes a great short story - as a reader - and trying (desperately!) to relate that to my own work. I finally concluded early one morning as the 5.50am alarm went off that the last line of a short story is like a gate being clicked shut, or a lock being snapped closed, or the final piece of a jigsaw being eased into place. It must be a moment of completion, of being locked within the story like a tight embrace.

Nothing new here, but it felt clarifying. I was just as thrilled when I read about Hemingway's iceberg theory - where 80% of the 'story' lies suggested beneath the surface. And now I have this warming nugget to add to my writerly thoughts.

I'll start with the short story collection I am reading now, Irish Emma Donoghue's 'Touchy Subjects'. A lot of people say they don't particularly like short stories because as soon as you are absorbed, the action is over, the climax is behind your back, or shivering in your hands. Emma's stories are swift, almost casual, and difficult to put down. Each time I can feel that last jigsaw piece falling into place and I look forward to that resolution, the end of that compact journey. And yet her characters are no more compelling than you or I. A personnel officer places his chic coat over a homeless man, while ridden with moral fastidious doubts. A lesbian couple split up over a vet's bill. A man can't decide what colour to paint his house. And one of my favourites, a young guy struggles to tell his girlfriend about the hair on her chin. So artful. So cheeky.

Before that I read 'Dark Roots' by Australian author Cate Kennedy. What a mistress of the story! Cate's story 'Cold Snap' was in The New Yorker and it's easy to see why. A 'simple' country boy is treated as such by a city woman who has bought a house nearby, whose arrogance has her eliminate the old gum trees obstructing her lake view. The 'simple' narrator deals with this in a chilling way. Another favourite is the first story 'What Thou and I Did, Till We Loved'. It's almost too beautiful to explain but the essence of this and many of Cate's pieces is that outer action follows inner contemplation or compulsion. She rides that motion with scant language, speaking of relationships that change gears and the tight weave of domesticity. Strongly recommended.

Laura Maylene Walter is an American writer whose collection 'Living Arrangements' won the G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction. I 'met' Laura through a loose group of American writer/bloggers who I join when I can, and I've been reading her blog for ages (I will be interviewing Laura in the near future!). I knew from the tone of Laura's blog voice that I would enjoy her book and what a rewarding, thoughtful read, with many of her stories still making eddies in my head. Laura addresses loss and place, quirky women, beauty and survival, the dance between women and men, sometimes with a hint of danger. Her characters are often numb, pulling away from their pasts or their place in society. I liked the contrast, the stillness and the lack of fear in Laura's voice. Brilliant.

I read Sarah Hall's 'The Beautiful Indifference' while on a lounger in Corsica this summer on breezy afternoons. It finished too quickly. Having received deserved recognition last year, I knew this book was a banner-waver for short story writers and it didn't disappoint for a second. I haven't read Hall's novels - already someone with such an output at her age makes me green all over - but I wouldn't want my admiration for her stories to be turned into something else. Her stories were long and fruitful, drenching, draining, beautiful. From her EFG Booktrust short-listed 'Vuotjarvi' which takes place on the shores of a Finnish lake, to a lover's tiff gone super-bad in Maputo, involving - maybe - a leopard; Sarah delves deep into the sensual folds of coupledom, and cuts into British society. Her language is break-taking:'They had already rowed out..and gone in where the shadows were expansive, the bottom a black imagining.' If you buy this one, don't give it away.

Recently I read that the best stories are those that you might forget, but you remember. You remember the tones, the lilt of the language, the current of thought. These are all collections that I will be remembering.

Up Close and Personal

I have spent the past few weeks wrestling with my short story collection, due out next year. I've yet to decide on story order, although story precedence seems to be falling into place. I've also had feedback from some very generous readers - some of whom have thrown my thinking on its head. As the stories voyage from Africa to Europe and back, vastly different environments are drawn up, sketching characters who deal with their appearance or physical foibles or fixations, in shifting contexts coloured by history and landscape.

I've also been reading up on what other writers have said about trying to stitch up a collection. It's rarely comfortable reading, because there are so many elements, so many different opinions. What to aim for - a vast and diverse collection, or a thematic voyage through interlinked characters? A parade of stand-alone stories (I can think of Nam Le's 'The Boat') or a tessellated piece like Gretchen Shirm's 'Having Cried Wolf'. And, is the story collection a prelude to the more imposing authorial task of the novel, or is it art unto itself?

So many tussles going on. And this poor writer's pieces go from gay druggies in Berlin to a story of incest in Sekondi, Ghana. How to map these out without losing/baffling the reader?

And yet, as one of my readers said and some of the discussions I read confirmed, short stories are meant to be reread, fished through, digested and thought about. They sit on the stomach. They smoulder in the mind. They are not a comfy flow from one snatch of free time to the next, the connected world of the chunky novel that gives the reader relief. Rather they are demanding, feisty, often unresolved and can leave you sorely wanting. Cliff-hangers, in their most effective form, with the crux of the story's reality just beyond reach, the story around the story, leading the reader up a garden path that buzzes with suggestion.

If you are a short story writer or interested in how these collections come about, do read this discussion, one of the most pertinent series of points I've come across lately www.twentyone.org.uk/issue1/cox.html.

Some of the most interesting points include:

..Publishers favour the linked collection, especially if they can disguise it as a novel. If that isn't possible, they may still suggest a unitary title. This is how Mothers and Sons was given its title, homogenising Tòibin's wide-ranging collection, and privileging one theme among many.

..However tenuous the links may be, story cycles and thematic collections are highly visible, and they are popular with both publishers and literary critics.

..How do you go about assembling all those bits and pieces into a book-length manuscript? Do you just put your best stories together and hope for the best? Or is there some inner logic?

And, for me, one of the most resonant point of all:

..A short story doesn't really resolve anything. It sustains tension, which is probably another reason why people don't take it to the beach. It's not a relaxed form. It can mirror a confusion which doesn't have to go away.

..The word story, the word plot, means a crisis, a conflict, an escalation and then a resolution. Resolution can be a positive, reassuring, warm resolution, but it can also be a kind of Shakespearean, apocalyptic resolution. The short story does have a lot more of the latter - confusing resolution, resolution that turns everything on its head - but it's still a type of closure, a truth slamming down on the reader.


This entire piece is worth reading and is called Oceans of Stories: Collections, Sequences and the Short Story. The discussion is chaired by Ailsa Cox, of the Edge Hill Prize, and the speakers included Anthony Delgrado (bluechrome), Ra Page (Comma Press), Duncan Minshull (BBC Radio 4). Very glad I discovered this.

And this is the bit where most short stories writers photograph their post-its on the floor or the bed, showing you how maddeningly off their rockers they are. Check this out. Can betrayed Laila rub shoulders with broken Sebastien in Brussels? Will Nathalie lead on to Veronique and her contemplation of scarred Heinrik? Will Celeste stand back and allow her brother and his lover to take their own lives?

I read a beautiful comment by Scott Prize winner Carys Bray. She said that unconsciously, she had bookended her collection with two similar pieces. I was thrilled to discover a while back that I had done the same thing too - 'Pelt' starts with a feisty pregnant woman determined to win her man back, 'Volta' ends with another, completely flawed pregnant woman about to lose hers.

Abuse

On Wednesday I took my second son to see the great Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiong'o speak at the Mantova Literary Festival. Ngugi spoke with wisdom and - we thought - restraint about the neo-colonial state of the African continent. A key sentence in his talk was that 'Africa has given, much more than she has received'.

I wondered how many times Ngugi has said this to a fusty, literary-minded audience. Africa has given. I thought it an extremely polite way of saying, African has been stolen from since the days of Adam! In fact, when he said that 'European modernity has African colonisation at its centre', I felt like cheering. Rather over-enthusiastic of me, but let this old Africa-head explain. My favourite university course, years ago, was Modern African and Asian History - Independence Movements and the Struggle Against Imperialism, and after thirteen years in East and West Africa my favourite conversations still deal with the rich cultural and economic force that is contemporary Africa.

But - not surprisingly - there was silence when Ngugi spoke these wise words. We sat there frowning and nibbling our nails, thinking of the great writer in a prison cell devising his lauded novel. So humbling for this middling writer with a computer screen and constant electricity. And no police detention likely for the material she is writing!

Ngugi - gingerly - also warned the mainly Italian audience about the widespread hostility towards African refugees arriving on shoddy boats, half of which sink in the rough seas off Lampedusa. He asked, Why are people afraid, given Europeans have migrated to every corner of the globe for centuries? Why?

It made me think of so many stories about this new wave of immigration. Stories of how people's humanity caves in because of these age-old inbuilt fears. A Ghanaian truck driver friend, whose truck broke down on an Austrian highway in the middle of winter. He sat waiting for help for eight hours. A Nigerian-Italian lass, brought up in this country, who lost her job at a bakery because people wouldn't buy the bread she touched.

And yet, it also made me think how that hostility is terribly two-faced.

Just a week back I had a dear friend - from West Africa - sitting at my kitchen table with a beer, all het up. She is tired of Italy. She is tired of the beckoning hands that pop out of cars on a city street, in the morning, often when she has just dropped her small kids at school. Vieni, vieni quà, how much bella? And today, she is furious because her landlord, called in to check a fusebox, suddenly fondled her breasts and buttocks. A man who knows her husband, who gives toffee to her kids.

'Ah! And he just laughed!' she says. He thought it was just a joke, just a little thing. A prod here, a caress there, skin on skin.

Africa may have given for centuries, but the next day my furious friend told me that she belted back on her landlord's door. At lunchtime, a sacred hour, when all the family gather. Her landlord answered.

Hello? Buongiorno! Shall I have my husband fondle your wife's breasts? Or touch your daughter's bottom??

The man was horrifed.

Corsican escape

For years I spent my summers here in my elegant farmhouse watering tomatoes, weeding my zucchinis, making apricots flans, entertaining Sunday guests and ferrying intercontinental friends to chic exhibitions in Venice and Verona.

Then I went camp.

I mean, yes I did a stint in Berlin with some gay pals who do feature in one of my short stories and yes I did do a lot of kinky clubs as an observer... But then my friend's dog I used to dogsit died and it was suggested I join the clan of friends, exes, somewhat cousins and live dogs, for their annual camping trip to Corsica.

I did last year. And I did again this year.

The island is so beautiful. I think I should set a novel there, or it seems suited to a steamy novella perhaps. I could rent a room in a village in the hills set back from the sea, with stone paths and iron ballustrades and keening churches with scrolled white facades. I could swim early in the mornings, hike home to my shadowed room, work at length without internet, without kids, until pastis at midday.

Then, after lunch and coffee at the bar or the lady's downstairs, I could go back to my room, recharged, and as the afternoon sun moved about in boxes I could continue on, undisturbed, sentence after sentence, scene after scene.

Oh, dream on!

But I do. The evenings in the bar with its semi-circular terrace over the outstretched bay, which you wouldn't have to visit, except briefly to the shops or the pretty markets, or - dread! - to check your mail. Or yes, to meet friends passing through and urging to join a hike through the arid mountainous centre or a visit to a special pebbly beach - no way but thanks! And then hurry back.

It would be so good.

This summer the sea has been tickling my fancies. First in Cornwall with its cawing seagulls and green coasts and me nearly tripping over a pirate in the street. And then in Corsica with her fiery interior and scorched shores, tinkering jade water up my torso.

Maybe next summer. A Room of My Own? Instead of a sandy tent and fifteen Italians at lunch, buckets of rosé and a tub of washing up??

I am so tempted.

A Literary Festival Virgin

For a while there I felt it. Stinging pain, embarrassment. Worry that I wouldn't be able to perform.

Beforehand, I worried that my clothes would be all wrong, that my hands would fidget, that my mouth would say awful things.

Last week I spoke at my first literary festival in Penzance.

I watched other old hands breeze onto the stage, sip their water, cross and uncross their legs. I listened to their unburdened discourses, the ease with which they shared their characters, their writing processes, the anecdotes rolling out as if on a whim.

It made me nauseous. It made me want to run away.

A few days earlier I spoke to a friend who is a pop star, can you believe? Her advice: Be Exuberant. So that day, my day, I heeled up the hill feeling gleefully, painfully, horribly Exuberant.

Strangely, it was fine. It seems my body was two steps ahead of my thoughts and saw to it that I was just a tinge nervous, and not smiling too hard. I did not trip onto the stage. Or even sweat much. The other writers for my session were marvellous and my unease dropped away. I too sipped my water and raised some light laughter.

I came out on a rocking high!

I would like to think that, for once, everything came together. I knew why I was doing this. Why I was sitting on a stage with people looking up at me, all expectant, warm, wanting to laugh or look out the window, or thinking perhaps they should have gone to the loo. It felt good, funny, enlivening. Can you believe I want to do more? In September I am up for another one - the Women's Fiction Festival in Matera. I know I will be a little nervous as it will be in Italian. But as well as nervous I will be keen, curious, alive. I've come this far.

Outside my window in Penzance I had a peaceful view. Just walls and yards and houses. Sometimes a big golden dog barked or moved about on the stones. I worked. For four days - not before having a scrumptious Cornish breakfast each morning - I felt pure concentration. No phone calls, no homework, no taxi-driving, no worrying (should I feel guilty about this?), no guilt. The short story revision has lagged. Promotion of my novel has taken up enormous slabs of time and energy. But for a few good days I had my stories mapped on the bed, a new order in place, a rush of underlinings and crosses for a new print-out, and a damned fine view through the afternoon.

I also met other writers, such as Alison Lock, poet and short story also with Indigo Dreams who, like me, is spanning genres and wondering what comes next. I imagine this is the true purpose of Literary Festivals, just like some people go to the beach. Instead of dissolving into sand, into water, into the whole coastal experience, we writers speak of words, share hopes and defeats, gossip a bit and, best of all, start itching to go back to work.

A lovely gift: today my copy of Tears in the Fence arrived, with my story 'Veronique in the Dark' which is part of the collection. I reread it in a sushi bar waiting for my son to arrive.

By late autumn Veronique called Heinrik. She had recommenced work and her injury was no longer the thing she had to manouvre around. The light had distilled, as though winter had chosen her course and would visit their city when she pleased.

Tug Boats

It's time to turn around. My women's commercial novel is out. I have a book under my belt. Reviews have been thoughtful and rewarding (mostly), and I've stopped reading them. I am peddling - the peddling required if a book is to make any headway - but I'm hoping a grassroots campaign will take hold. In the meantime I am allowed to turn back to the short story collection coming out next year. I am revising and editing. Easier than a novel in the sense that most of the stories have been published so they have been clarified and worked over. But it's never enough, I've learned. Editing is a microscopic process, requiring various lenses, clear lighting, a tense kinked neck.



But I'm up for it. The stories in their wide range of locations and subject matter provide a new home for my thoughts, both elated and bruised by the uncertainty of publication, and the greater uncertainty of sales in a cold, multinational-slapped world. It's quite a relief to come back to the silent, word-crammed page. No other voices from beyond, no pressure to reply, just the words of my stories. Bright polished stones looking for attention and company.


PS I am reading Deborah Robertson's delicate and compelling novel of stories, Careless. It tugs me back to Australia.

A Lost City and Photo of Haji Nur

I didn't really mean for this blog to become an Africa-vent for me. The short stories in the Pelt collection are varied. Some are set in Europe or Australia. Some are set in Africa and travel close to the seam of my life. One is set in Somalia, for example, where I was a young wife without a clue how to mother.

The other night I felt a jarring when I saw my old street in Mogadishu on the news. There had a been a bombing at the National Theatre of Xamar, whose whining singers used to go on and on into the night, almost until the morning muezzin. I saw the junction where twenty years ago a cunning thief put his hand into our jeep and stole my young husband's glasses. I saw the hill we used to chug up to our turn-off, a rutted dirt road where one evening we found a blabbering man, an ex-soldier, who used to live in our street. He had fought in the Ogaden border world and lost his senses, his family, and years of his life.

I don't think of Somalia often except in bursts of guilty pain. It was my first foray out of Europe, the first strange tongue I began to learn beyond the European languages I'd learnt in high school, the first African capital I explored on foot with a driver who was as skinny as myself. It was the first time I ever had help in the house, slow Faduma who pasted magazine cut-outs on our walls and cooked fermented bread like pads of white earth.

The guilty pain comes because I wonder. I don't know what happened to my co-secretaries from the office. It was pre-internet, we left in a rush when Siad Barre's young quat-chewing soldiers took the centre, claimed cars, killed and raided houses. I don't know what happened to the children my friends were trying to raise, or those who came after in their complex and - for Westerners - uneven marriages. I just don't know. Every time I see a tall Somali man and recognise their gutteral language I don't know what to think - was he a man who as a young soldier shot at women in a market? Or a man who truly wants to harvest peace for the future?

I remember my first-born receiving his first vaccination in a filthy clinic that made me grimace. I told myself, be equal, your son is living here - quite a joke given we were able to escape. I remember the tough exterior of Somali women colleagues, so fragile and damaged inside. I remember the flat rooftop of our old Italian-built house with the spiral staircase, watching an eclipse of the moon with our watchman Elmi, the way the city cascaded down towards the sea.

Elmi was gunned down by troops soon after we left.