Still want to keep Heathrow?

The London estuary airport should replace Heathrow as the capital's main airport. Heathrow should be downsized and eventually closed and replaced with housing and parks.

Don't get pisky in the park

Reverie on a Theme

It’s a hunger.

It’s a raft in a flood.

It’s a pitiful wound.

The tide in a lonely bay,

insanity of a saint,

the echo of silence,

sleepless weeping,

call of the nightjar,

triangulated moonbeam,

shared time,

when summer performs cartwheels.

It’s a song on a loop,

merry-go-round of the heart,

plaintiff squeak of a mouse.

It’s waiting for a letter,

the sound of your own name,

transfiguration of another’s,

the grumble of a pet.

It’s a mating call,

howl of the night wolf,

dove on a windowsill

waiting for bread,

help of a teacher for an idiot,

note left out on a table -

“Your dinner is in the oven.”

--
Stephen Moran

Unpublished Cigarette Packet

A la D.T.

Till and never till the waving earth
Unleaves him with the ash of barking trees,
Will and never will the conquered
Chestnut nightmare sting the bees,
Jarred on honeydew and lime.

For once in a bishop's soutane soaring,
A moon went riding on the haggard
When all of Christendom was snoring,
Coarse as a belfry-batted blaggard,
Polite as the rood of time.

Till and never till the cashiered soul,
Demobbed as a rookery rifle-shot,
Wills and bewails the testament told,
Feathered down in a satin cot,
Swung for a capital crime.

Oh harrow me sideways, if I ever
Desecrate the rushy lake of marrow
With one red cherry stone whatsoever,
Or deflower the bed of passion's farrow
With an ill-winded rhyme.

--
Stephen Moran

October update

October 2. Henrietta Rose-Innes has taken the runner-up prize of £2,500 in the BBC 2012 international short story competition for her story "Sanctuary". The results were announced at a ceremony in London, broadcast live on Radio 4 arts show Front Row. Miroslav Penkov took the first prize with "East of the West". Details

October 24. A. J. Ashworth has won the Negative Press short story competition. Judge Evie Wyld says: ‘It was the voice that attracted me and Nicholas Hogg to this one. Her story is strong and understated at the same time.’ Details

For more news about previous finalists and prizewinners, see Willesden Herald short story competition. Closing date December 21.

Mowed autumn

The wildflower meadow

has gone the way

of all meadows yearly.

A picnic bench vandalised

Worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie

Oak leaves

?

Ash trees

Donnington Road

Ash leaves

Launderette

Willesden High Road

Huge funfair Fri 26 Oct to Nov 5

Poster

George Irvin's funfair returns to Roundwood Park through Halloween and Guy Fawkes night.

Word 2010 ".docx" now accepted

The short story competition website has been upgraded to support the new Word 2010 ".docx" format files in addition to ".doc" and ".rtf". If your upload was rejected, please retry.

Unite union: March for a future that works

"The government's austerity measures are biting hard. Hard pressed families are feeling the squeeze. One in seven children go without a hot meal and the only growth is in foodbanks. With pay cuts and rising bills many are unable to make their money last a month and in desperation are driven to take out pay-day loans. We need an alternative to austerity and cuts. We need a program of growth to build the economy. You can help send that message by joining us on 20th October." (Unite)

The mass demonstration is assembling from 11 a.m. along the Embankment between Hungerford Bridge and Blackfriars Bridge. It is planned to move off at 12 pm and march to Hyde Park. (Details)

Petition to stop the demolition of The Queensbury

FAIRVIEW NEW HOMES: STOP THE DEMOLITION OF THE QUEENSBURY | Change.org:

"The Queensbury is a well loved gastropub with the community at its heart and soul. It provides one of the very few meetings places in the area offering a wide range of well kept products and homemade food. The Queensbury emulates the communities passion and spirits."

Sharmine Chowdhury-Tse shows award for Busy Rascals

The Queensbury, formerly known as The Green, is as important a venue to Willesden Green as the library centre is to Willesden. The daytime community activities have won awards (see our report about Busy Rascals at The Queensbury). It stands near the location of Willesden Green within Willesden.

[Can somebody bring back Willesden Borough council and free us from the culturecidal reign of Brent? Ed]

2012-3 short story competition update

If any writers are thinking about entering, I can assure you on present evidence you have every chance of getting somewhere. This could well be your year! (Link)

Some people have been enquiring about the number of entries allowed. It is still one per author. The rule text for that got lost somehow but it has been restored.

The rules are the same as in previous years except that I've clarified the permission for excerpts from short-listed stories to be read at an event and permission for the Kindle version of the anthology. We took those as read in previous years but I thought it would be wise to spell them out.

The number of copies of the book to short-listed authors will be five again this year. It used to be only two. The prizes are the same.

I have horse-whipped the potter responsible for botched printing on the last priceless Willesden Herald mug and it should be back to our usual Byzantine standard this time.

Steve

Official sponsor!

The Sense of a Short Story

I feel a bit of a misery for having written a list of blunders found in short stories. Such lists are not unusual and often repeat what others have said before. However it is much harder to talk about the qualities that enthral and delight, that transport us to unknown places and stir the emotions. What is that literary flavour beyond sweet and sour, the umami that makes me want to keep on reading?

1. A Sense of Perfection

There is a difference between evidence of raw talent and a finished product. Without practice and the unrestrained commitment that Pavarotti put in, for example, he would still have been Luciano, the guy with a great voice but unknown to the world. It is the combination of great ability, dedication and unqualified commitment that results in that feeling like being in a jet plane when it goes for take-off, when his voice at full power takes flight, and carries us with him.

A lot of people sing in the shower, a lot of people write stories. Not everyone has the voice, for a start, but equally not everyone gives all. Sentences are not well worked; narrative is somewhat choked off, restrained.

What is wonderful is when a gift for writing is combined with technical perfection and a free flowing narrative. When it succeeds, there is nothing laboured, all is like a swan sailing across a pond, seemingly without effort. It's not because Pavarotti could hit a high note. Actually, many of us could hit that note. It's the way he hits it. Clearly we don't want half measures, we don't want errors. But the sense of a short story is not about what we don't want. It's about what we desire, what life itself seldom offers, a sense of perfection.

2. A Sense of Adventure

This is not about secret agents, bandits, pirates, cowboys, though they are also part of it, it's something to do with a journey, danger, hazard, perhaps conflict.

It happens that space travellers, cowboys, romantic maidens, elves and so on go on journeys, encounter hazards and conflict, but seldom will they succeed in taking us with them. No, the sense of adventure  is to do with a feeling that real people are in a real location, that we are with them, somewhere we might know, which is interesting, or somewhere we don't know, which can be even more interesting, and it's uncertain what is about to happen.

If there is a nagging thought that this is routine, that we know all this, then we fall into the "I have a life of my own" trap. As the woman says in The Ice Storm, when her lover starts to talk about his work, "I have a husband." What I seek is the feeling of landscape, of views across townscapes, of skies and the travel against weight, not weightless, where the progress interacts with a new environment. There must be  people to meet, to find out about, an adventurer alone is a hard case. He or she had better be thinking about others or else we enter the dead zone of solipsism.

3. A Sense of Inspiration

You could call this a sense of interest, a sense of importance, a sense of significance, a sense of relevance. It’s the feeling that we’re onto something. Whatever you call it, it relies on a theme of sufficient weight. We're busy people. We have our own lives. Unless a story is of vital interest, why spend the time to read it? It must draw us in from the first paragraph.

However, we are resistant to being told what to think. We won’t stand for it. The miracle of fiction is how it enables us to share another's vision, see things through another's eyes for a spell, to enter a partly  hallucinatory or dreamlike state. I suggest that this can occur when the writer has been inspired.

So what is it? Sometimes inspiration, like procreation, entails the fusion of two elements. You may think of these as spark and fuel. The spark is very small but active and the fuel is large and full of potential but static. The fuel is your theme, perhaps something that's been bugging you for some time. The spark is your angle, something trivial that you realise can be combined with your theme to bring it to life. That is your inspiration.

Hitchcock coined the term "the McGuffin" for something trivial that he used to build his suspenseful films around. For example, in North By Northwest and The Thirty-Nine Steps people chase around after something but we really don't care about the actual object of their pursuit. How many can even remember what it was?

Writing directly to a main theme runs the risk of becoming aphoristic, portentous, pompous, didactic, perhaps polemical. The trick is to write a story seemingly about the trivial one of your two elements, against a background of the main concern. This allows you to deal with what's bugging you, without seeming to talk about it at all. Without a theme, no matter how brilliant your writing, you will lose the reader. “All spark” is a bore.

Misdirection is as useful in fiction as in conjuring. Come to think of it, fiction is a form of conjuring.

4. A Sense of Humour

The only place this occurs is in serious writing. Anything that tries to be funny is anathema. If you take any of the well-known comic writers, or writers whose work encompasses humour, you will find that it is all presented in a seemingly serious manner. The stories of Waugh, Wodehouse, Tom Sharpe, George Saunders, J. P. Donleavy, Saki, James Thurber, Garrison Keillor, David Sedaris are presented with a straight face. Even Jerome K. Jerome and George or was it the other Grossmith brother. The story is king.

All humour is incidental. In spite of ourselves, in spite of the author himself or herself, we find we are concerned with the theme, delighted by the inspiration, enthralled by the adventure and then to leaven the mixture, there is something funny. There are varieties of humour; laugh out loud when you know something is bound to go wrong but the character in question doesn't, a comical remark in dialogue, or smile at the petty concerns of a miser. It's something to involve you further with the story and to feel that we're on the same page as the author, we get it.

It's pleasing to think that we are reading alongside the author and other readers. There is something more exquisite in a shared experience, (and it doesn't take much imagination to find a suitable metaphor for that), the joy is redoubled. We might not know what the author thought about certain things, but we're pretty sure we're on the same wavelength and that others will be too, when the sense of humour shines through.

5. A Sense of Suspense

We return to Hitchcock and recall that he said his biggest mistake was to have the bomb go off in Blackmail. As long as the bomb hasn't gone off there is suspense. Yes, we want to know what happens next but only if something is at stake. If nothing is at stake, I couldn't care less what happens next. Salesmen have a mnemonic: ABC - Always Be Closing. The worst result in sales theory is a continuation. With fiction, it's the opposite: ABC - Always Be Continuing, and the worst result is closure. The urge to settle for an ending and declare the story closed is like a siren calling the writer, the captain of the story, onto fatal reefs.

6. A Sense of Wonder

This is what we're left with after reading a great short story. It leaves us thinking, literally wondering. There is a completeness to a short story but it is not the completeness of satiation, of finality, it's the completeness of entry or exit, a door that opens to wonder. The beginning is a door to a secret garden and the end is the same door. We can re-enter. Somebody (?) described the sonnet as a machine for thinking. Maybe we could describe the short story as a machine for wondering.

Conclusion

These categories are arbitrary. I might add more later, I might change their contents. I could as easily invoke the theatrical maxim, "Make them laugh, make them cry and scare the hell out of them". I only wanted to describe what it is that I like in a short story. Having typed this far, I find I'm none the wiser. I still couldn't tell you why the stories in The Magic Barrel are so sublime, or Dubliners. I don't know what it is Denis Johnson does, or Annie Proulx, or Chekhov, or William Trevor, etc. The list is long. I am in awe of them and all great short story writers. I don't give a damn about the novel. There, I've said it. (Actually, it's not true, I love reading novels.) As near as I can describe, what I desire is a sense of perfection and a sense of adventure. The rest of the headings and comments are tentative.

Steve Moran

Get on your e-bike

Notes from Small Wonder 2012

Small Wonder 2012: Perspectives on China
with Fang Fang and Hilary Spurling

Fang Fang was asked through an interpreter at Small Wonder if China had literary festivals and live literature like this. By the way, we were a few dozen people, maybe 150 or so, huddled shivering in a draughty barn, in the back of beyond***. Fang Fang pointed out that they recently had a festival of poetry, where they had invited several British poets and bedecked a vast railway station with hundreds of large posters featuring poems by their guests and Chinese poets.

When asked about the epigraph to her story - it was a quote from Baudelaire - and what her influences were, she said that most Chinese writers could list you eight or ten western writers and that people recited Shakespeare and so forth. She wondered how many westerners could name ten Chinese writers? I thought Fang Fang was a bit defensive, and her prose (perhaps too literally translated for us on a screen) seemed to me to be full of allegorical sideswipes about smug outsiders looking in on a complex family society. (However, that might have been all in my mind!)

Her narrator is revealed to be a dead child at one point, looking on at its surviving family. This might be connected to her description of the move from social realism, which had been condemned by the party many years ago, to the current fashion (or was it policy?) for neo-realism, which had to contain no trace of the author's feelings. She also described this as like glass realism or zero realism (but I am not quoting verbatim).

Despite the language barrier, Fang Fang managed to inject a few bits of humour. She is very prolific. They said 80 novels, but I think they might have meant novellas, it wasn't clear. It might have been the questionable literal translation but her story came over as somewhat chaotic.

Tess chatted with her in Mandarin afterwards and I said "ni hao" and "xie xie", which exhausted my usable Chinese vocabulary, as there was no call for me to count to five. Fang Fang's contribution was only half the event. The other half was Hilary Spurling talking about Pearl Buck, the subject of her latest biography. However by happy chance, Fang Fang came from the same place as Pearl Buck and had a great interest and knowledge about her, and so that conversation (through translator) was very good.

Fang Fang recalled that when people in China first saw the Hollywood film adaptation of The Good Earth, they began by wondering why people with long noses were playing the parts of Chinese peasant farmers; but then as they got into the film, they forgot about that and were amazed to see their own lives portrayed there realistically for the first time.

Despite the technical difficulties with the simultaneous translation, and the heroic efforts of the distinguished chair of the discussion  (? Jacobson) and the translator, it was a bold and timely attempt at promoting cultural exchange in the short story world. It's not before time we showed China and its people some empathy and respect, as I think they have cause to feel misunderstood, if not hard done by. I only mean in the cultural world, saying nothing here about politics, politicians or governance.

Steve Moran


Small Wonder short story festival

Fang Fang
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fang_Fang.
"Author of the year 2011" (womenofchina.cn) 

Hilary Spurling
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Spurling
Guardian: "A Life in Writing", with reference to "Burying the Bones" her new biography of Pearl Buck