This post is about going back, after many years, to writing short stories. I’ll include some insights into my process that may be of use to writers wrestling with the form (looking at you, my students at U of L), but mostly it’s about going back to a form I adore.
Short fiction is probably my first love. The first grown-up literature I came to by choice was via Roald Dahl, graduating from Mathilda and James and the Giant Peach to his story collections. In high school, our English teachers enticed us with older cannons, early feminist works (‘The Yellow Wallpaper’); adventure yarns (Carl Stephensen’s ‘Leinegen Versus the Ants’); and gotcha classics from Saki and O. Henry. This was the early 90s, when Mavis Gallant, Margaret Atwood and Joyce Carrol Oates were reguarly working their magic. I would not truly appreciate them until a little later, early in the new millennium.
My first publication came in 2005, a story called ‘Mourning Sickness’, a pun of a title I shudder at now. It was a minor love triangle, set in a world where grief manifests physically, in the form of an elephant (yep), a huge beast that dogs you until the moment you get over the loss. It was – no doubt – a bit on the nose, but I recall my mentor, the novelist Keith Maillard, telling me I ‘chose just the right animal’.
In subsequent years, I published a few more stories here and there, but then my first children’s novel was (to my astonishment) picked up by Penguin and my short fiction was back-seated into oblivion.
This, I suppose, was understandable. Stories are too often seen as meagre, even shallow, stepping stones on an upriver trek to a debut novel. That might be true, but I’m writing this just a few weeks after the passing of Alice Munro, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature—for her utter ande exclusive devotion to the short story (though some, including Margaret Atwood, present a convincing argument The Lives of Girls and Women is a Bildungsroman).
Flash forward to 2023. I’m now teaching Creative Writing at the University of Lincoln in the UK, which demands something like a stable and regular publishing record, meaning the short story is the perfect medium for keeping my job. This led to a story in the summer 2024 issue of The Stinging Fly, a journal I love, and the first place to publish work by Sally Rooney, who now sits on their editorial board. They are one of a vanishingly small handful of lit mags that receive significant international press, and their podcast is a classic – required listening for any writer of short fiction.
I had the opportunity to attend the launch of the magazine at the International Literary Festival Dublin (ILFD), and hang out a bit with the magazine’s editor, Lisa McInerney, a novelist I deeply admire (if you haven’t yet read The Glorious Heresies and The Blood Miracles, what are you waiting for?).
I hope to find time to write more generally on short stories in future, but for now that’s it. Thanks for reading.
