‘If She Bends She Breaks’ by John Gordon

Though I was born in Bolton, I now live in the Cambridgeshire Fens, an eerie flat landscape with hanging mists that sit below sea level and has a distinct atmosphere all of its own. John Gordon lived here too, even went to the same school as my son and was deeply inspired by the landscape. I love everything he’s ever written but this story is my favourite. Set on a freezing winter’s day in a Wisbech classroom, it tells the tale of Ben who cannot focus on his lessons. The strangeness of the day is evoked straight away, in the opening lines, “Ben had felt strange ever since the snow started falling. He looked out of the classroom window and saw that it had come again, sweeping across like a curtain. That was exactly what it seemed to be, a curtain. The snow had come down like a blank sheet in his mind.” The narrative voice and boy’s Fenland idiolect are perfectly rendered, but Gordon’s genius in this piece, for me, lies in disclosure. The reader travels, or is steered, through this dreamtime day, slowly, surely coming to realise, at exactly the right moment, the truth of Ben’s backstory. This is the sort of tale you have to read again the minute you finish it to resee the moments with new eyes. I never tire of this tale. It gets better with the reading of it, even when you see the skill of the storytelling.

First published in Catch Your Death and other ghost stories, Patrick Hardy Books, 1984

‘Abode of Eagles’ by Maureen Bowden

Maureen is a seriously prolific writer and feedback buddy who’s sold over 200 tales since we started swapping stories a decade ago, but this is my favourite because I love a ghost story that takes me somewhere unexpected. It’s the tale of a journey on the narrow-gauge railway that takes travellers up Yr Wyddfa (the mountain sometimes called Snowdon or Eyri). It’s set off season so there are no other travellers to accompany protagonist Trish, except one who she was sort of expecting. The travellers chat as they chug their way up, engaged in conversation that doesn’t make proper sense, until you come to know what they are moving toward and away from. This story, which has haunted me ever since I first read it, taught me the valuable lesson that if a reader is misdirected skilfully enough to be suspecting other twists, then writers can take liberties with plot and spin perfect endings that, though they are seeded all the way through, readers will still not see coming.

First published in The Weird and Whatnot, 2020

‘City Of Specters’ by Bandi

One of the reasons I started writing when I did, in this post-truth age of misinformation and fake news, was because I wanted to be able to tell stories that reveal uncomfortable truths, a determination that led me to Bandi. Bandi, (Korean for Firefly), is a North Korean samizdat writer still living under the Kim regime who in the 1990s wrote smuggled-out, anonymous short stories that reveal the horrors of living there. In honestly presenting everyday life and values, these stories show the culture’s madness and levels of control that western minds like mine might otherwise find hard to understand.

City of Specters is set in Pyongyang in the run up to the National Day of Celebrations – a day when everything must go perfectly, down to smiling the right smile and walking the right walk. When we meet Han Gyeong-hee, she is the well-fed and well-respected daughter of a martyr from the glorious revolution, with an inherited prestigious job and a flat in the capital’s main square. But she also has a two-year old son who is afraid of the huge pictures of Karl Marks and Kim Yong Il that hang opposite where they live. When the square is being prepared for the big celebration, she draws an unsanctioned curtain each night to stop the baby from crying. This sets off a chain of events that lead to her and her husband being accused of passing down negative thoughts to their son, a crime punishable by immediate exile to the starving countryside. The almost casual calm with which these events are told, punctuated by flashes of humour, normalises the unconscionable so seamlessly it’s terrifying.

First published in The Accusation – Forbidden Stories from inside North Korea, Serpents Tail, 2014. Available to read online on Lit Hub

‘A Sex Manual for the Over Sixties’ by Thomas Malloch

Taboo-busting short stories can be hard to execute, running as they do the risk of putting readers off with near-the-knuckle subject matter and uncomfortable narrative re-creations, but Thomas Malloch’s techniques to keep you reading this story are skilful indeed. He adopts a first-person older female narrative voice that brings insight and humour to the opening of this prize-winning story. When his narrator starts to talk about oft-unmentioned issues like vaginal dryness and the practicalities of elder sex I winced. But the pragmatic humour and use of medical terminology offset this discomfiture enough for me to continue and once you’ve navigated past the geriatric sex, and cringed and laughed in equal amounts, you realise this story is about love and grief and loss and closeness and your original discomfiture morphs into empathy and understanding. Would I have stuck with this story if Thomas hadn’t been a feedback buddy? Not sure, but that would have been my genuine loss, so, you know, another valuable lesson learned.

First published by Ringwood Publishing 2023, and available to read here

‘The Witch Who Walked the Shore’ by Gaynor Jones

This gorgeous, lyrical, visceral flash fiction won first prize at Janus Literary in 2021, and no wonder. This story of loss and abuse focusses on a young teenage daughter whose mother has disappeared – murdered maybe by her abusive father. It reads like a twisted fairytale – set in an unspecified past but full of modern, feminist undercurrents. Gaynor often writes about young women and teenage girls caught in the process of negotiating dangerous worlds where default-setting opinions are apt to cast them as bad, but you want this protag to be bad, to fight back, to have had enough, and, come the end of the story, you are not disappointed. Dark, beautiful, twisted, genuine, this story blew me away.

First published by Janus Litzine, 2021, and available to read here

‘Prototype’ by Judith Field

Another reason I took up creative writing was to improve my mental health. I find putting emotion on the page and not in me a cathartic and healing exercise, and I love reading stories that show authentic characterisation of people with, or recovering from, mental illness. This tale is told in the first-person narrative voice of Clare as she recounts events following her discharge from what readers intuit was a time when she was sectioned. It includes mental health struggles, neural a-typicality and everyday, casual antisemitism. Clare is a funny, clever, though not always knowing, narrative presence through which to experience the story, and readers often have more insight into her condition than she has herself. This dramatic irony is skilfully handled and when the reader ends the story not quite sure if the supernatural ally Clare meets inside the house she rents, was a real visitation or a delusion, the not knowing feels just right.

First published in The Book of Judith, Rampant Loon Press, 2014

‘Angels Only Dance with Astronauts’ by Donna L. Greenwood

I love the Molotov Cocktail – it’s my fav e-zine, full as it is of dark speculative fiction with 50s B movie illustrations and wise-cracking razor-smart asides from its editors. On its submissions page they say, “The Molotov Cocktail is interested in volatile flash fiction, the kind of prose you cook up in a bathtub and handle with rubber gloves.” Well, this incandescent ugly-beautiful story that won their Flash Apocalypse comp in 2020 is exactly that. Exquisite, horrifying, lyrical, transcendental. How I wish, wish, wish I’d written it.

First published at Molotov Cocktail, 2020, and available to read here

‘Tracey Miller Becomes A Cowgirl (Again)’ by Sharon Boyle

Sharon Boyle has an individual, Boylesque style of writing. Her use of verbs and regional idiolects give her very often working-class protags a vivacity and energy that is consistent throughout her work. This deeply arresting, killer opening is Boylesque brevity at its best, “She whips out a pistol and shoots him. Bang, bang, you’re dead.” Totally engaging and not, the reader immediately suspects, entirely what it seems. You lean in to get your bearings and gradually come to see via laugh-out-loud moments the eye-prickingly sad truth. A roller-coaster of a read despite its concision. Anyone wanting to learn how to give their writing energy, pace and pizzaz, and their characters real depth in as few words as poss, should read this story.

First published at Flash 500, 2024, and available to read here

‘Just Because a Thin Spectre’ by Ruth Guthrie

An unpunctuated single sentence outpouring of grief and angst, a stream-of-consciousness wail of despair. This story is told in a rhythmical almost sobbing style that takes your breath away. When this story arrived for feedback in my in-box, I read it again and again, wondering if I should suggest any changes, so affecting did I find it in terms of flow and characterisation and pure emotion poured out and evoked. Sometimes you’re best leaving the creative energy of a story alone I reckon. Sometimes when it comes to storytelling, imperfections can be perfect. If you want to lose yourself on a wave of brilliant storytelling that presents a personal tragedy in a totally original and culturally important way – read this. End of Story.

First published by TSS Publishing in 2020, and available to read here

Introduction to a Childhood Personal Anthology

My anthology brings together stories that explore the endless shades of childhood: its joys and mischiefs, its innocence and fears, its small triumphs and quiet tragedies. Each story is a window into a past life that many of us can still remember – when the world felt vast and unknowable, yet strangely immediate and at hand. The authors I’ve selected look at childhood from different perspectives and ask different questions. What’s it like to be a child? How does the presence of a child shape the world around them? How do adults interact with children? Why do memories of childhood linger in the late and long days of adulthood? And of course, when do you stop being a child? These are questions for each of us to reflect on, guided by stories that may provide insights, or open up paths toward our own answers.

‘Bago’ by Alberto Savinio, translated by Michael F. Moore

The magical realism of the story is nicely tucked in the space between being a child and society saying when you stop being a child. Ismene is in the habit of saying ‘Good morning’ and “Goodnight’ to creatures around her. “To Daddy and Mummy. And then only to Mummy after Daddy died. Then only to Bug after Mummy died too. Then only to Bago, after the death of Bug”. But Ismene says neither ‘Good morning’ nor ‘Goodnight’ to Uncle Rutiliano, who took Ismene for wife after her Mummy and Daddy died. Who, or what, Bago is we learn only at the end of the story, but knowing the answer doesn’t really resolve the ambiguity in the story. Bago, a silent and rather unremarkable companion retains the warmth of Ismene’s childhood, even as she transitions into adulthood and into a marriage that was imposed on her. Bago is a placeholder for Ismene’s emotional attachment to an inexistent past, but also a question mark as to where the boundary between the real and the fantastic lies.

First published in English in The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories, ed. Jhumpa Lahiri, Penguin, 2020

Loving Sabotage by Amélie Nothomb, translated by Andrew Wilson

Starting in 1992 and up to 2024, Nothomb has published a book every autumn, and I’m using here the term “book” deliberately loose. Depending on your definition, her books could be a novel, a novella or a longer short story. In Loving Sabotage, the seven-year-old unnamed narrator tells her story with innocence, flair, and a complete lack of modesty. “I had everything. I was an epic unto myself. I felt kinship only with the Great Wall, the single human construction visible from the moon. At least it respected my scale” When the story begins, the girl had moved with her parents to the San Li Tun ghetto in Beijing at age five and had been there for three years. The ghetto was reserved exclusively for foreigners, and friendship was far from what the children of the expats wanted from each other. The “terrible, epic war of the ghetto of San Li Tun” begins around the time the girl arrives in China and rages on for years. The story does not offer an idealized or sanitized depiction of childhood. The foreign children in the ghetto, including our narrator, are cruel, intelligent, and unforgiving. Imprisonment, judgment, sabotage, and torture are as much a part of the narrator’s supreme childhood as they are of the global war that, in the San Li Tun ghetto, never truly ends.

First published in English by New Directions, 2000

‘Kishmish’ by Nadezhda Teffi, translated by Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler

Teffi’s short stories are often backgrounded by elements of religion and/or superstition. Sometimes she takes religion and superstition seriously, but sometimes she adds that little touch of satire which turns the whole thing around and reminds us that life is best lived when sprinkled with a bit of humour. ‘Kishmish’ is the nickname of an eight-year old girl who is at the stage in life when she’s wondering what she could be when she grows up. A strongman. A brigand. An executioner. All seem to her to be marvellous ideas, but Kishmish makes her final decision after a visit to the church. She wants to become a saint. “But how could she become a saint? She would have to work miracles – and Kishmish had not the slightest idea how to go about this. Still, miracles were not where you started. First, you had to lead a saintly life”. Kishmish’s idea of leading a saintly life made me laugh out loud, and this almost never happens to me. It’s best if you discover by yourself if she does become a saint or not, but let me just say this: her efforts, sincere and funnily misguided poke fun at the absurdities of adult expectations and shine a light on the grit of everyday reality.

First published in English in Slav Sisters, ed. Natasha Perova, Dedalus Books, 2019

‘Grisha’ by Anton Chekhov, translated by Constance Garnett

‘Grisha’ is a story told from the point of view of a little boy who is less than three years old. The nurse takes Grisha, the boy of the title, out into the world for the first time. So far, his world had been limited to the safe four corners of the nursery, and the sudden encounter with the outdoors is for Grisha an explosion of light and new emotions. The boy is afraid at first, but also curious. His understanding of what happens around him is limited, but he quickly learns to observe and imitate. Grisha’s observations are vivid but fragmented, focused on immediate impressions rather than cohesive narratives. The nurse’s conversations with other people, the bustling streets, and the overwhelming sensations are all described as Grisha perceives them, without adult interpretation or analysis. When arriving home, Grisha tries to express what he had seen and felt. “He talks not so much with his tongue, as with his face and his hands. He shows how the sun shines, how the horses run, how the terrible stove looks, and how the cook drinks”. But the words which could reach the deadened ears of grown-ups elude him, and the wonders of what he now knows fall flat in his inability to speak them, and in the inability of grown-ups to hear them.

First published in Russian in 1886. Available in English in Ward no. 6 and Other Stories, ed. David Plante, Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003