I was thrilled to find out, yesterday, that my story, Loss Angina, was one of the winners of The Fiction Desk’s flash fiction competition. I’ve long maintained that my stories aren’t the sort that tend to do well in comps (I’ve only ever entered one or two) so that was a pleasant surprise. Big congrats to the overall winner, Jo Gatford.

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And, following on from yesterday’s post, here’s a snippet from Dan Powell’s Looking Out of Broken Windows.

It’s a huge pleasure to welcome the brilliant Dan Powell to the blog today. You may remember me mentioning him and his debut collection, Looking Out of Broken Windows, a little while ago when I talked about my words being on his cover. This, incidentally, is what I said:

‘Looking Out of Broken Windows is a sparkling debut by a writer with a hugely interesting mind. Its stories are wide-ranging and varied – from the heart breaking to the hilarious, the sombre and the magical, they all touch you in precisely the right places.’

Well, Looking Out of Broken Windows is published very soon (March 15th – you can pre-order here) and Dan’s here to talk about his life in short fiction (as I did with him a little while ago.) So, let’s do it…

1. The first short story you remember enjoying.

The first short stories I remember reading would be the ones included in the Spike Milligan books of the sixties. My Dad was a big fan and as I grew up in the seventies he would read the poems and stories from A Dustbin of Milligan, The Little Pot Boiler, and Bedside Milligan to me and my brother and sister. I remember borrowing them and disappearing off to a corner of the house to dig in to the weird and wacky stuff behind those great cartoon covers. I remember the mad creativity of the stories and how funny they were, but even then, as a child, I was aware of the sense of sadness in some of the tales. Reading about Spike Milligan’s life as I grew up, and talking to my dad about him, I soon understood where the sadder, darker side of his writing came from. That said, the overriding quality in his work is the real and tangible joy of playing with language. There’s a reason why there has never been a funnier radio show than The Goons. I’d recommend ‘The Great Man’ from A Dustbin of Milligan, ‘Once Upon’ from The Little Pot Boiler, and ‘The Singing Foot’ from The Bedside Milligan. Looking back at these books, I realise I was reading flash fiction way back when I was still at primary school.

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

It was actually a collection published back in 1998, rather than a single story, that switched me on to short fiction: Michel Faber’s Some Rain Must Fall. It was the first collection that I read from cover to cover, devouring every story. The blurb on the back talks about Faber’s ‘astonishing variety of themes, characters and styles’ and it’s not wrong. There’s gritty realist stories in there, rubbing shoulders with imaginative, powerful sci-fi and fables. The stories move between playful humour, tense drama and into out and out fantasy. If I had to narrow it down, I’d say that the title story, ‘Some Rain Must Fall’, with it’s delicate handling of tragedy, and ‘Toy Story,’ with its sheer exuberance and confidence of narrative as it follows a child God at play in the universe, were the stories that rally grabbed me and showed me some of the infinite variety possible in the short form. I’d recommend this collection to anyone looking to start writing short fiction. It’s a great primer.

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

My collection seems to be split very clearly between gritty realism and more overtly playful and magical realist stories, so I’m going to cheat here and plump for two stories.

The first is Raymond Carver’s ‘Why Don’t You Dance?’, his classic story of a middle-aged man who has pulled the contents out onto the lawn of his house. It’s one of the best examples of Carver’s use of minimalism. The reader is never told why the man has done this but the reasons are there to be discovered in the subtle description of the scene and the man’s actions. The narrative pivots at the point at which the man begins to dance with the young woman, who along with her boyfriend has stopped by thinking the stuff on the lawn is actually a yard sale. In a moment of gritty epiphany we realise that the story is as much about the girl (if not more) as it is about the man. By the finale we realise that something significant has shifted, even if, like the characters, we might struggle to articulate what. This, and other Carver stories, showed me the power that lies in what you don’t show the reader but what you as a writer must clearly know. It’s Hemingway’s iceberg in action and it’s something I work at with my stories.

The second story is Jackie Kay’s ‘My Daughter the Fox’ which marries gritty realism in its emotional aspect with a truly fantastical plot. This story of a woman who gives birth to a fox is part fairytale, part realist examination of the deep changes that parenthood forces upon a mother. It is a beautifully tender piece of writing, a deeply sympathetic tale, and the fantastical element of the story is handled with a lightness and a surety which I have tried to capture in my own writing of this type. The ‘Ultrasounds’ trilogy of flash fictions in my collection were my first attempt at trying to craft something similar in tone, while ‘Storm in a Teacup’ is perhaps my most successful attempt at marrying the real and the impossible in a believable way. Vanessa Gebbie’s wonderful story ‘How Claude Romarin Lost the Buttocks of Celestine Bigorneaux’ was another story with a similar sense of sympathy and playfulness with subject matter that has influenced my more imaginative writing.

Sorry, you asked for one and I gave you three. To be honest I could go on all day. I haven’t even mentioned Amy Hempel, Alasdair Gray, or, more recently, George Saunders, or some of the great contemporary UK and Irish short story writers like Carys Bray, Adam Marek, Tom Vowler, and Nuala Ni Chonchuir, whose collections and stories have challenged me to work harder with my own fiction.

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

My story Storm in a Teacup is probably the story from my collection that most reflects me as person. Weirdly it is also one of the few stories in their that I can hand on heart say it is all made up. The plot hinges on a literal manifestation of the classic idiom in a greasy spoon in Bridgenorth in 1973. The characters all sprang, pretty much fully formed, from the sense of the setting, they all just started coming into this fictional cafe I created. It is one of only a handful of stories that feel like they were handed to me, like a gift. That said, the story is really all about the many types of love and how they make us and break us and so the emotional current of the story probably reflects the many brushes with love that I’ve had in my life. There’s unrequited love in there, long term relationships, broken hearts and everything in between. While nothing in the story that happens to the characters ever happened to me in quite that way, the feelings in there are autobiographical at some level. Probably. It’s also my most overtly optimistic story, which I hope reflects how I feel about love and life in general.

5. Your all time favourite short story.

Without a doubt it is Anton Chekhov’s Misery. You can read it online and there is a great reading by Kenneth Brannagh on Youtube. I urge your readers to listen to or read the story before reading on to avoid *spoilers.* Misery tells the story of sledge-driver, Iona Patopov, who is so desperate for emotional connection as he grieves for his son that, in the absence of a sympathetic listener, he tries to tell his grief to those he meets as he goes about his night’s work. Tragically for Iona, no one is listening, and so, at the stories end, in a final desperate lunge at connection, Iona unburdens himself to his horse. The image of this man, destroyed by grief and seeking sympathy from his horse, is at once ridiculous and painfully tragic. The whole story moves between these two emotional modes with the delicacy and deftness of touch that mark out so many of Chekhov’s stories as classics of the form. If I could only read one short story writer’s work, without question it would be the stories of Anton Chekhov that I read to console myself of the loss of so many other great writers.

Thanks for having me on the blog and giving me space to bang on about the stories that have helped shape my own writing. As the person who usually hosts other writers’ lives in short fiction thinking and writing about these stories has been a great pleasure.

You can read all the other My Life in Short Fiction posts over on Dan’s blog.

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Over the past few years I have been collecting words. More of a hobby than anything else. If there was a word that interested me – for whatever reason, the way it looks or sounds or feels to say it, its significance, what it means or represents, I’d pop it in a small yellow notebook. And after a while I thought it might be a cool idea to put them in a book. But not just a book of words that Nik Perring (who the hell is he anyway?) thinks are interesting. No this was going to be a little more interesting than that.

So I wrote Beautiful Words. Mostly it’s the story (or one third of it anyway) of Lucy, Lily, and Alexander. And that story is told through their words. But it’s not just a story. No, no, that’d be far too straight forward. It’s a mix of fact and fiction and, as the title suggests, it contains not only beautiful words but some meanings as well as the fictions. And it’s a little like a picture book for grown-ups – the sort of thing I’d love to be given as a gift.

Here’s what my publisher, the wonderful Roastbooks, have to say about it on their Beautiful Words page (check it out for a couple of sneak peeks at the illustrations):

Ink, Sweat and Tears have published a brand new story of mine. It’s called Push and you can read it here.

I’m not sure how I came across these sculptures by Anthony Howe. I was researching something completely unrelated. But I’m happy I did – they are stunning. The first one reminds me of something you’d find deep, deep in an ocean somewhere, and they’d probably glow. The other could be out of a Tim Burton movie or Oz. Enjoy.

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I like Dan Powell. As well as being a top chap and a great supporter of my stuff – and of books and writing in general – he’s also a very, very good writer, so I was thrilled to hear that he had a book coming out (in March – you can pre-order it here). I was also thrilled when, at the back end of last year, I had the opportunity to read it. And read it I did. And I loved it. It has now gone to print and my words are on its cover, as you can see. Check it out. I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

Long time friend, and friend of the blog, Sue Guiney has a brand new book out. It’s published tomorrow and it’s called Out Of The Ruins, and I’m delighted to have her back here to tell us a little about it, how it relates to her previous novel (which she also talked about here) and her passion for Cambodia.

Take it away, Sue…

There’s a line in the recent film, The Big Wedding, where a beleaguered Diane Keaton turns to her family and proclaims, “Remember, I did volunteer in Cambodia!” Well, no one likes to be reduced to a cultural stereotype, but it is true that I, too, have been drawn to the beauty and sadness that is today’s Cambodia. But my interest has gone beyond curiosity, though, and has become a passion, one which has led to a commitment to teach there every year, and to write a series of novels about what I see all around me while I’m there.

Cambodia is a place in the midst of real, and potentially dangerous change. In the eight years since I first went on a seemingly innocuous holiday with my family, the country has seen unprecedented development, and growing corruption. I leave in another few weeks for this year’s trip, and I fear for what I’ll find. Cambodia is in the news a lot lately. People are starting to take to the streets in attempts at peaceful demonstrations, only to be arrested, beaten and even killed by governmental armed forces. But the modern world has come to Cambodia, and there is no turning back. Indeed, in Siem Reap where I am based in the educational shelter, Anjali House www.anjali-house.com , free wifi is everywhere. You can’t walk down the street without stumbling over cracked pavement, but you can surf the web anywhere at any time.

Without my meaning to, my series of novels reflects this change. The first one, published in 2010, was A Clash of Innocents. This was set in an orphanage in Phnom Penh and against the backdrop of the beginning of the UN Tribunal and its attempt to bring the perpetrators of Pol Pot’s murderous Khmer Rouge regime to justice. That novel portrayed the harsh realities of life at that time, but it was very much infused with a sense of hope and optimism. But now, four years later, that Tribunal has stalled, the ineffectual though beloved King has died, the Prime Minister has consolidated his power. There is more anger and disillusionment than before, and that has crept into the pages of my new novel, Out of the Ruins.

Out of the Ruins imagines a clinic founded by Khmer and Westerners working together to battle the very real issues of women’s health care among the poor living within Siem Reap, a city steeped in a glorious past and hurtling towards an unsure future. It also takes a hard look at the sex trade and asks the question, how can good and evil reside together within the same heart. It is a book still culminating in hope, but it is a more mature hope, a hope that comes despite opened eyes, a hope that lives stubbornly because of an innate need and faith.

I could go on forever, but don’t worry…I won’t. But I will say thanks, Nik, for urging me to talk about this on your blog. There is very little fiction written in English about modern day Cambodia. I’m proud that my own work is opening the doors a bit so that English-speakers in the West can get a glimpse of the beauty, the spirit and the troubles of the Khmer people today. If anyone is interested, I’ve written quite a bit about it all on my blog over the years, and I’ll be writing more once I get back there www.sueguiney.com  And both novels are available in paperback and ebook, published by the lovely gang at Ward Wood, and for sale at the usual on-line sites and better bookshops.

Thanks!

And so 2014 rumbles on. It’s been good, so far. It started busy (with good things) and it’s continuing to be busy (with good things). Writing is happening, editing is happening – both my own stuff and for other people – reading is happening, and deadlines are all around me and, apart from the occasional very wet/very cold/very cold and wet day it’s not been as wintry as it could have been. So, at the moment, I’m okay. But I do realise that there may be times when I’m a little slower at getting back to people than I’d like – so, to them: sorry and bare with me.

And that’s about it for now, I think. More soon, though. More soon.

I’ll have to brief (there are places I need to shortly, and things I need to be doing for people) but I’ve just read this, from Kurt Vonnegut, and was compelled to say something about it.

First off, being Vonnegut, it’s spot on right the way through. But the bit at the end, the bit where he says ‘Use words you know‘ is the real kicker for me. Now I’m not comparing myself to the great man, but it’s something I’ve been saying, when teaching writing, for years: don’t try to sound like a writer. When you do, you end up sounding like someone pretending to be a writer. Use your words. Write as yourself. From your heart about things that stir passion in you (in whichever form(s) that may take) and do it honestly. And with words you know.

You won’t go far wrong.

That is all. I am going to eat something now.

I was going to blog in a little more detail today, but after a heavy week of writing and editing I feel a little bit writinged out. And I’ve not got all that much to say. Sorry about that.

This, however makes for good reading on eBook pricing, and is well worth a look.