Gary Raymond told me about Jonathan Gibbs’s e-bulletin / website project whereby guests offer notes on a dozen short stories at their whim. In the Brixton Review of Books (brb he he) Jonathan says it’s a literary parlour game that’s now been played by over 250 ppl (over 3,000 short story offerings!)! Offerings, says Jonathan, are best when aesthetic excellence is weighed up with personal significance: yeah! Dream! But Hard! Jumping to dream-edit desk rapidly to realise my own A Personal Anthology, fear and excitement panged. Chill out, baby. I tend to identify myself to others as somebody who isn’t a literary person (hideous inferiority complex display), but this activity triggered (happily) in my brain a life-time actually of tale-appreciation I’d seemingly convinced myself to forget about. Hooray.
Jonathan says you can do A Personal Anthology many ways; mine is simply select recent favourites AT PRESENT. After some deliberation I’ve stuck quite close to an up-tight definition of what a short story is (according to Google a story with a fully developed theme but significantly shorter and less elaborate than a novel), mainly to limit free-association crazie. A crisp-packet can be a short story! But c’mon, it’s no longer era Marcel Duchamp. Initially I’d included more classics, but wouldn’t you have rather read Anton Chekhov or Fyodor Dostoyevsky when they were actually doing it prior to the Posthumous Collection? Hot word. I did check out A Personal Anthology’s archive to see what has or hasn’t been mentioned and am sad to not add new entries for Angela Carter or Leonora Carrington. Yet, this is a heart-felt curation that feels right currently (Jonathan says go with your heart).
I’m doing a PhD on so-called literary psychogeographies at the moment. While blissfully liberating myself from that parameter in making this A Personal Anthology, a theme of spatial politics and human affect is I think at least abit reflected in my choices. It coulda been a far more concentrated batch as such though, just to let you know! On that matter, if you happen to know any short stories particularly attuned to the contested notion of psychogeography, plîs will you get in touch? I’m on a Literature Wales x Disability Arts Cymru programme this November-to-March to develop short story skillz in those-ish realms, and desire bites.
Somebody should make a baker’s dozen for A Personal Anthology if you are a baker-writer?! I am not so didn’t think I could legitimately give myself an extra one, but wanted to!
A Personal Anthology 