Book launch

The launch of my new collection, Blindfold, is taking place this coming Saturday, 3 December, at 7.30, at Panteg House Social Club, Griffithstown, Pontypool. Postcode is NP4 5BE.

You can find a street map of the venue here

All readers of this blog are more than welcome!

New collection

My second collection of short fiction, Blindfold, will be published by Stonebridge Books next month.

We'll be holding the book launch on Saturday, 3rd. December, at 7.30, at Panteg House, Griffithstown, Pontypool, NP4 5BE. I'd be delighted to see any readers of this blog there! I'll post more details, with links to directions and a map, later.

Irfon Valley Writers competition

My story, 'Pure Black', won first prize in the short story section of the Irfon Valley Writers Group first annual competition. You can read the story here

Insignificant Gestures, by Jo Cannon

Jo Cannon is an online writing buddy of mine, and I recently attended the launch of her first book, Insignificant Gestures. Since then, I’ve been working my way slowly through the collection. Like all good short fiction, you need to take your time with these stories, to savour everything they have to offer. They are multi-layered, and resonate in the mind long after you’ve finished reading. Above all, the characters are so well-realised I found myself wanting to start talking to them each time I finished a story and put the book down.

In her day job, Jo works as a GP in Sheffield, and detailed medical knowledge underpins the precise descriptive writing in a many of these stories. Some of them are set in Malawi, where the struggle of medical staff to perform basic functions in the face of desperately inadequate facilities acquires a heroic dimension:

“Trembling with tension, I detach the placenta from its gritty bed and drop it into a bucket. The barely anaesthetised mother murmurs. Frustrated by blunt instruments and limited skills, I feel a quick jolt of anger.”

The main focus in these fictions, though, is always on the human drama, the uncountable tragedies and indignities suffered by people whose stories are rarely, if ever, heard. Whether they live in Malawi or Dagenham, Jo Cannon gives these ‘insignificant’ people a voice, bringing them vividly to life for us on the page. People like Nasma, Amos and Rosa, all refugees from conflict or oppression, struggling to fashion new lives for themselves in an indifferent or hostile environment in Britain. People like Mercy, wasting away from an unnameable illness when she returns to her village after her dream of a new life in the city turns to ashes. Or Jack, watching his parents’ marriage collapse and expressing his powerlessness by just lying down in the garden.

What gives these stories their power is Jo Cannon’s ability to move effortlessly from precise, matter-of-fact description to another register, where the depths of her characters’ emotional lives are revealed:

“I stack boxes in a storeroom in a cold English city, beneath harsh artificial light that throws no shadows. Lorries arrive by day and night and I record deliveries in a book… Only the blood in my head is hot and loud. I’ve built a fence of mirrors around the past. I guard it vigilantly and it works, reflecting back only the moment… I barely speak this language. Words squirm just out of reach. My voice, strange and thick as if from a mouthful of mud, echoes in this Spartan place of white walls and brown cardboard.”

Not all the stories are about suffering. One of the best pieces in the book, ‘Love on the Rocks’, includes a joyful erotic account of middle-aged lovemaking. Even here, though, the author makes us keenly aware of the impermanence of happiness, as the protagonist imagines what the future holds for her and her partner, using the sailing imagery that has underpinned the whole story:

“They will see many things and thread many more beads on this life they have strung together. Yet Eve understands that in time one of them will falter. Despite his broad shoulders and middle-aged vitality, she suspects this will be Tim. She will paddle for both of them, but one day he will slip away from her into the waves and she’ll carry on alone.”

There is much more I could write about this collection, but, really, the best thing is to buy a copy and discover it for yourself. You can order the book here

I can guarantee you won’t regret it!

left hand waving

My flash, 'Take me to the coast', has just gone up at Left Hand Waving. You can find it here

Apology for long absence

Completely inexcusable absence for - what - 6 months now? By way of mitigation, I should mention that I found out a few months ago that the cancer I received treatment for two years ago was trying to make a comeback. So, I'm currently in the middle of a concerted programme of chemotherapy to try to knock it on the head for good. The chemo leaves you feeling frazzled and strange in cyclical waves, and it's not that conducive to coherent writing. However, I have managed to scribble a few flashes which may or may not end up being half-decent.

I found out recently that I'd made the long list for the 2010 Sean O'Faolain Prize. Gave me a welcome boost after bombing completely in a few comps earlier in the year. The competition judge, Tania Hershman, posted a brilliant piece on her blog about the judging process from her perspective. Required reading, I'd say, for anyone thinking of entering a short story comp any time soon. You can read Tania's post here

Anyway, will try to post more frequently, and to return to my list of favourite short pieces before long.

Radio Baby

Here’s the second in my (very) occasional series where I have a go at explaining what I like about my favourite stories. (At this rate, I might get to the end of the list by mid 2011.)

Radio Baby appears in Deborah Kay Davies’s collection Grace, Tamar and Laszlo the beautiful, which won the Wales Book of the Year award in 2009. The book’s success caused huge rejoicing among lovers of the short story form - and not just in Wales.

At the start of Radio Baby, a mother has discharged herself early from hospital soon after giving birth to her third child. On one level, the story is ‘about’ post-natal depression, but the writing isn’t in the least didactic or preachy. Davies offers no overt explanation of the mother’s strange behaviour on her return to the family home, and does not set out to elicit either sympathy or condemnation on the part of the reader. We are distanced from the mother’s predicament by the fact that the story is narrated in the first person by the family’s oldest child, Grace, who observes and catalogues her mother’s actions with a deadpan matter-of-factness:

“Mother starts to doodle on the paper, every now and then stopping to listen. I ask her what she’s drawing. I’m portraying the child in the room upstairs, she says and holds up the page. She has drawn a naked baby lying in some grass. From the neck down it appears normal, but where its head should be there is a radio.”

Early in the story the mother insists on having a radio playing constantly to try to drown out the sound of the baby’s crying. As the story progresses she begins to identify the baby with the radio in an illogical, increasingly dangerous, way. The chilling final words of the story contain a hint that she has killed the child:

“There, she says, giving me the bedroom key and dusting her hands, I’ve turned off that radio for good.”

As punch lines go, this is pretty hard to beat: nothing is spelled out, no obvious emotion is indicated, but the telling detail in the parenthetical phrase ‘dusting her hands’ is tremendously evocative.

The world of Radio Baby has nightmarish features. Like all good nightmares, it contains mundanity mixed with a bizarre logic, all related in the convincing voice of a precocious child. If we read the rest of the collection, we know that there is an unhinged quality to Grace herself, but the story can be appreciated on its own, without this knowledge.

In its concision, this is a proper short story, with none of that obsessive need to provide ‘coherent’ psychological explanations for human behaviour that can bedevil so much fiction. Above all, for me, it inhabits the territory where writing works best, that borderland between familiarity and an irreducible strangeness. I first read an earlier version of this story about ten years ago, and it’s one of those I can’t get out of my head.