Post Greenbelt

Thanks again to everyone who came to the talk at Greenbelt on Monday. I so enjoyed sharing some work and some ideas about stories.

If you asked me for more chapbooks, I will get some made and will post on the blog when they are ready to send out.

For the person who asked about how to make chapbooks, I will endeavor to make a post about those soon too.

This is a quote I used in my talk from Michael Mayne's book This Sunrise of Wonder: 

‘It may seem as if poetry, the creative arts and the world of the imagination, are useless in the face of so much that is evil and destructive; as Seamus Heaney has said, ‘no lyric has ever stopped a tank’. No; but there are lyrics [or short stories], paintings, buildings, music, that have stopped a person dead in their tracks, amazed at the work of the human mind and hand and eye; seeing beauty, experiencing momentary wonder that they had never noticed, and enlarging their understanding of what it means to be a person.’

Below is the start of a list of favourite short stories that I promised you:

‘The home of the famous poet’ by Muriel Spark 

‘A whisper in the dark,’ by Louisa May Alcott 

‘A pair of silk stockings,’ by Kate Chopin 

‘The Kiss,’ ‘Rothschild’s Violin’ and 'The Student,' by Anton Chekhov

‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’ and ‘The fall of the house of Usher,’ by Edgar Allen Poe

‘The Sculptor’s Funeral,’ ‘The Garden Lodge’ and  ‘Neighbour Rosicky,’ by Willa Cather

‘That Colour,’ from Jon McGregor’s new collection 

'The Offshore Pirate,' 'Bernice Bobs her Hair,' and 'A Diamond as Big as the Ritz,' by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

'Pale Horse, Pale Rider,' by Katherine Anne Porter.