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 by way of 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 Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, and Joyce Carrol Oates were actively working their magic, though I would not discover them until early in the millennium, when I took the decision to seriously pursue writing.

My first publication was in 2005, a story called ‘Mourning Sickness’, and a pun of a title I shudder at these days. The story was a love triangle, set in a world where grief manifests physically, in the form of an elephant (yep), following you around until 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 the right animal’. The story was soundly rejected until I turned to the Canadian science-fiction magazine, On Spec. They gave it a home (many thanks to editor Diane Walton) and later that year the story was chosen for inclusion in a couple of anthologies. It was eventually nominated for the Journey Prize – a welcome vote of confidence.

In subsequent years, I published a few more stories here and there, but then my first children’s novel was (astonishingly) picked up by Penguin and my short fiction was back-seated into oblivion.

This, I suppose, was understandable. Stories are often seen as the 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 death of Alice Munro, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature by devoting herself exclusively to the short story (though some, including Margaret Atwood, present a convincing argument that The Lives of Girls and Women is a Bildungsroman).

Flash forward to 2023. I’m now teaching Creative Writing full-time, with the time and stability to experiment more in my writing. Also, the halls of academe demand an equally stable publishing record, making the short story a perfect medium for keeping my job. As such, I recently began an earnest and deliberate return to short fiction.

My first effort was partly inspired by a paper on male guilt in the aftermath of break-ups. ‘Tuesdays’ is about a man whose externalized conscience, a woman called Ingrid, won’t leave him alone, especially on Tuesdays. As I’d been so long out of the game, I kept the proceedings short, holding myself to a maximum of 2000 words.

This is something I recommend to students: Keep your first stories short and, where possible, cut or condense dialogue. These measures reduce page counts without reducing words, which is crucial because journals – especially in print – have limited space. That first story appeared in the Raleigh Review.

Continuing to draw on some combination of research, personal experience, and introspection, I produced some new stories, two of which were taken by Litro and the Normal School, inspired again by research on the difference between adoration and admiration and Jocelyn Bell Burnell’s essay on linking astronomy and poetry.

Most recently, I tried a longer, more ambitious piece, a story that conspicuously violated the rules mentioned above. The story imagines a modern world with a traditional of katakiuchi (敵討ち), pre-Meiji Japan’s concept of formalized blood-revenge. Similar to the above, I drew on a piece of academic research, a 1976 paper in Modern Asian Studies by D.E. Mills. The story is 5600 words and includes longer stretches of dialogue and, true to the above about appealing to print journals, it was a hard sell. The story was rejected many times (please don’t ask) before it was finally accepted for the Summer 2024 issue of The Stinging Fly, a journal I love. It’s gorgeously produced; it was 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.

Best of all, 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.

Lisa McInerney speaks at the ILFD, launching the Summer 2024 issue of The Stinging Fly, 18th of May 2024.