Ed Garland was described by our mutual-friend Laura Phillips as a beautiful writer and it is t r u e ! His short story ‘Yeah Not Bad’ (feat. medicality fuck-ups, kale attack, toxic labour, et cetera) arrived at The Stinging Fly online in 2023, then ‘Interior Bunch Concerns’ in The Stinging Fly’s summer print-issue the very next annum. I’d had the privilege of Going About with Ed Garland while ‘Interior Bunch Concerns’ was in draft mode for example on magic Bristolian barge-cafés and in wooden hôtel-lounge milieus. ‘Interior Bunch Concerns’ is the premonitory title of a fraught-living-set-ups and fraught-bodies tale, all scrunched up and bleugh. A nameless narrator and his “top-notch companion” wanna live in “Marseille!” and make a “durable baby” there, so get lodgers toward accruing the wealth required to do so, supplementing their incomes from yucky occupations (socio-economic hoops Ed Garland terms “lucrative ordeals”). Exact not-yet-Marseille location is unknown, but the “slate-grey couch” where the couple sit daily with laptop-braised legs makes me wonder if it’s at least somewhere in Mid-Wales where Ed Garland and I both live at the time of writing. The “two sunburned cherubs” who emit rosy-cheek smile emojis and own a weird silver spaniel are fucking eerie and bring unbearable domestic uncomfortability ~ the end to its temporary endurance climaxes with a spoiler I will not reveal here. Still, the fight for Marseille’s not over! Dark yet Optimistic, Zesty. Every word is BIG. Get excited because Ed Garland is writing a NOVEL at the moment (it’s not a secret) utilising his immaculate attention to auditory (and otherwise) terrestrial details. Go!!!
Published in The Stinging Fly, Issue 50 Volume Two, May 2024
A Personal Anthology 