CATHERINE MCNAMARA - GUEST POST

Writer Catherine McNamara

It's been a week for guests at WWR and today I am very happy to host Catherine McNamara whose début short story collection Pelt and Other Stories was a semi-finalist in the Hudson Prize and is just published. Catherine grew up in Sydney and has lived in France, Somalia, Belgium, Ghana and Italy. Her stories have been published in Wasafiri, Short Fiction, Wild Cards, a Virago Anthology, A Tale of Three Cities, Tears in the Fence, The View from Here, Pretext and Ether Books.
Catherine’s launch for Pelt and Other Stories will take place at 7pm, Friday 13^th September, at the Big Green Bookshop, Unit 1 Brampton Park Road, Wood Green, London N22. She says, 'Do come and celebrate with red wine and raw tales!'

Take it away, Catherine:

When I opened the envelope containing the review with my first published short story, I was a young mother with a baby in a basket on the floor of our house in Mogadishu. A long time ago; many lives past. Like most of us, my first published stories were set in my childhood home, Australia. Over the years I’ve published stories set in Somalia, Belgium, Italy, Ghana ... even Mauritius! Are our short stories allowed to follow our lives? And do they risk being lesser because we are visitors wherever we reside?

The short story written about a borrowed land is doubly difficult. Context must be present but it can’t be shouted on the page. The work must be steeped in Otherness, with no showing off of the writer’s intricate knowledge. Action must occur according to the clefts and indentations of the land in question; the light, the pace, the colour of a town. People, it is said, are all the same, but there are differences in the way we walk, we utilise time, we look at the sky, the things that are pressing for us. An authentic work must convey these differences with no tangible effort, and the reader must be swept along towards a shift in knowledge, hardly given a second to consider.. Hang on, isn’t she from Australia? What’s she doing pretending she’s a pregnant Ghanaian woman?

And yet, even pitch-perfect success with this type of ‘ventriloquism’ brings its own risks. Read this harsh criticism of Nam Le’s breathtaking debut collection ‘The Boat’, which gives voice to Colombian gangsters, a New York painter, a Japanese girl, an Anglo-Australian with a sick Mum on the NSW coast: “But while his ventriloquism is impressive, Le’s stories often feel like a set of genre exercises that precisely imitate their sources without transcending them. I once heard an offhand critique of The Boat that more or less sums up its flaws in one line: ‘that book is the work of an A student.’”  (link: Emmett Stinson, The Sydney Review of Books)

An over-polished and soulless exercise. Quite crushing to read this about a book that I found mesmerising. If Le has failed in this reviewer’s eyes, could that mean it is better to produce a work that plunges towards an interior truth, but remains a little ragged around the edges?

Or worse, should writers stay at home and write only about what they know?

For those of us who are rootless, living in another language or culture, these options will always be tricky. You will be challenged as to your rights over the subject matter. You may be accused of appropriation, inaccuracy, exoticism. And yet the critic above uses a key word in his analysis. It is what every story must do, it must transcend place, race and form. It must transport and transform that all-important person, the reader.

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Readers can buy Pelt and Other Stories here and the book's blogspot is here. It is also available on Amazon and at the Book Depository.

AILEEN ARMSTRONG - GUEST POST

Writer Aileen Armstrong

Here's something to brighten up your Monday: début writer Aileen Armstrong at the blog today, with a guest post entitled 'The Roots of Preoccupations'. Aileen's first book, a linked short story collection called End of Days, has just been published by the fabulous Doire Press who are based in Connemara, County Galway.

The book will be launched on Saturday the 14th September by Declan Meade of The Stinging Fly at Galway Arts Centre at 1pm. Aileen, who grew up in Sligo, now lives in Galway. Her writing has appeared in Galway Stories, the Stinging Fly, and Long Story, Short. She holds a MA in Writing from NUI Galway.

If you can't wait 'til Saturday to read it, buy the book here now.

The Roots of Preoccupations

Aileen Armstrong

When I was twenty, I spent an Erasmus year at university in the south of France. Back in those days, I didn’t know any writers, and I had already (and prematurely, as it turned out) abandoned any attempt at writing creatively myself.  Even so, it seemed to me that Erasmus years were the stuff of fiction-makers’ dreams. All of that youth and uncertainty, the language mash-up, the cultural pleasures and the cultural absurdities. Somebody should write a novel about Erasmus students, I thought. Somebody, somewhere, should mine this fount.

I took a class, in my French university, that would focus on the American short story. The class was taught in English, and only two authors were examined: Raymond Carver and Hermann Melville.  My feelings about Carver are for another day. But via Melville’s short story collection The Piazza Tales I was introduced to Bartleby the Scrivener, and anyone who has encountered Bartleby won’t forget him. Bartleby, a pallid notary taken on by a Wall Street lawyer, performs his documentation tasks admirably at first. It’s not long, however, before he is trying the patience of his colleagues and his employer. To repeated injunctions to perform office duties, or do anything at all, he has but one mysterious, minimalistic response:  ‘I would prefer not to.’ Eventually, the lawyer discovers that Bartleby has been sleeping in the office – that he does not, in fact, ever leave the office, but continues to occupy its space with his ‘passive resistance.’

In later years, after graduation, I worked for a long time in an office not unlike Bartleby’s, doing work that was not unlike Bartelby’s. And often, when I was working alone well into the evening, chasing a deadline, I would be struck by the same kind of melancholy a first reading of Bartleby invites. It seems to me that the stories we read earliest – or perhaps the ones we read best – do this to us. We hardly notice it, but their patterns or images become settled in us. They become part of our sensory make-up.

I didn’t write that novel. And maybe I didn’t exactly write short stories either, since the pieces in my collection – End of Days, Doire Press – are lightly linked, meant for reading in sequence. Still, in one of them, the title story, an Erasmus student spends Christmas alone in her flat aware of, but removed from – possibly even passively resisting – the festivities that are taking place in the busy bar on the ground floor of her building. And it’s only now that I’m writing this that I can see where the roots of my preoccupation – with solitary souls in communal buildings? – potentially lies, and I’m amazed, as I often am, at how much time I seem to need to process things.

That class on American short fiction was a bit of a disaster, truth be told. But if I got nothing else from it, I still got Bartleby. He was more than enough.

CALUM KERR - GUEST POST

I am thrilled today to welcome Calum Kerr to celebrate the publication of his new collection of flash-fictions, Lost Property. Calum is a writer, editor, lecturer and director of National Flash-Fiction Day in the UK. He lives in Southampton with his wife -  the writer, Kath Kerr -  their son and a menagerie of animals. Calum is guest-posting today on flash openings and endings, a subject dear to my own heart.

Calum Kerr

Take it away, Mr Kerr:

Alpha and Omega

Calum Kerr

In the beginning was the word, and the word was ‘flash’.

So, I’ve been asked to finish off my blog tour, by writing about beginnings and endings. Do you have any idea how hard it is to start a piece like that? With everyone analysing it? Anyway, I think what I came up with might have got your attention.

But is it as good as ‘It was the day my grandmother exploded’? Or, ‘Call me Ishmael’? Or, ‘You beg like a Bible verse: taut, memorable, ghost-written’? 

Don’t recognise the last one? Feel like you should? Well, don’t be ashamed. It’s not from a famous novel. It’s from a flash-fiction written by Amy Mackelden and published in the recent edition of FlashFlood for National Flash-Fiction Day here. When I was reading through the submissions, it was an opening line which stopped me in my tracks. It made me think, made me appreciate the concision of the writing, and most importantly it made me want to read on.

After all, that’s what a good beginning does. It forces us to read the next sentence because we want answers to the questions posed in the first. If it’s a good second sentence, it simply asks more questions, as does the third, and before you know it: you’re hooked.

The literary theorist, Roland Barthes, was a ‘structuralist’ who spent some time categorising the different types of sentences and phrases we find in fiction (in S/Z, Roland Barthes, Blackwell, 2002). He discovered five separate types, which he called ‘codes’. One was presenting information, one was using cultural references, and one was posing questions. This he called the ‘hermeneutic code’. And the purpose of this code was not simply to construct phrases which pose questions to the reader, but to pose questions that can only be answered from within the text. Thus, when we read a sentence like Amy’s, we immediately want to know who the narrator is, who they are speaking about, why they’re begging, and why they beg in such a way. Four questions with one sentence: no wonder I wanted to read on.

The hermeneutic code is absolutely crucial to flash-fiction. When I have tried to define what flash-fiction actually is, I’ve talked about the way it uses language and the way it tells a story by implication and connotation. This can occur because of the use of the hermeneutic code. By writing sentences which pose questions and ask the reader to do some work, often for the entirety of a story (bar the ending, usually, but more on that later) you are asking them to find answers which only exist within the story, but answers which are often not provided, only hinted at, or described by an absence.

This, I believe, is what makes the best flash-fictions work. They hook the reader, they pull them along on a line of questions, and the reader needs to decode the language, the setting, their knowledge of stories, and the few ‘clues’ in the story, in order to discover what has happened and what it all means. And for those reasons, it leads to a very engaging, immersive and memorable type of story.

Of course, in a story like that, the ending is going to be crucial. In many cases, it’s the one place where the questions stop, and some answers are provided. This, I believe, is what has led to the definition of flash-fiction which compares it to a joke: a feed and then a punch-line; and to comments about ‘twists in the tale’.

A good flash is not simply a joke, and a twist in the tale which is nothing more than a random event, a deus ex machina, satisfies no-one. No, the ending of a flash-fiction should be the moment of clarification, the point at which the tangled snarl of questions is pulled taut and the straight line from opening to ending is finally seen.

Now, this is not the only way to write a flash, but some structural analysis of flash-fictions shows that many are written in this way, making good use of the possibilities of the hermeneutic code, then resolving the questions at the end. There is something eminently satisfying about it. It’s not a model for writing flash, but it’s fascinating to see it in action.

Let me finish off by giving you an example from my own work which I like to think works in this way.

The Blackbird
Calum Kerr

Her bag was packed when I arrived home. She was still dressed in her work clothes, her shoes on her feet. The kitchen had been cleaned.

It’s not you, it’s me, I thought. It’s always me. It always was me and it always will be.

But it wasn’t, it was her.

She couldn’t stay, she told me. It wasn’t working, she told me. It had run its natural course, she told me.

Stay, I requested. Please stay, I pleaded. Please, please stay, I begged.

It’s not you it’s me, she said. I’m not the same person I was, she said. I need something more, she said.

Why? I asked. Tell me why, I asked. Please, forget the words you are meant to say at times like this and tell me why; tell me the truth, I asked.

I’ll call you, she said, as she pulled on her coat. Just give it a few days, she said as she picked up her bag. Just ... don’t ring me, she said as she closed the door.

I sat in the clean, empty kitchen, and heard a blackbird outside, singing into the silence, saying all the things that hadn’t been said, couldn’t have been said, have never been said, but in a language I couldn’t understand.

[Originally published in Lost Property.]

Readers you can buy Lost Property here or direct from the publisher CinderHouse. The individual e-pamphlets which make up the book are also available via Dead Ink here.