Introduction

I love short stories, have done since childhood and I’ve spent loads of time over the last five decades bingeing on the likes of Daphne Du Maurier, John Wyndham, Katherine Mansfield, Raymond Carver, Maeve Binchy and Lydia Davies, to name a tiny few of my favs. But none of these writers are included in the twelve stories I’ve chosen for this most personal of anthologies and here’s why. Ten years ago, at the age of 50, I took up storytelling doing the MA in Creative Writing at the Open University where I learned to read with an eye to the craft of how short stories are created. Since then, these ‘writer’s’ eyes have guided me through many, many new and contemporary short stories that I’ve either studied to learn from as I honed my skills, or that I’ve provided feedback for when they were in that magical and transient state of being created. Each story in this collection is a positive co-ordinate on my writer’s learning curve and is scribed by either one of my writing heroes or one of my writing feedback buddies, or both.