‘A Girl Turns to Stone’ by Ruth Joffre

Joffre does so much in this not-quite-400-word flash fiction. There’s something that really pulls me towards stories about transformation, or stories where girls turn into something other than women. It seems an unfairness in life that boys get to stay boys pretty much forever, if they want to, whereas girls have womanhood thrust upon them. Women writing stories where some version of their teenage selves get to become something else is kind of a response to that, and maybe I’m drawn to it because some days I want to be a stone or a bird or a wolf instead of the woman I am. Thankyou for reading, Dr Freud. 

First published in The Offing, March 2018, and available to read online here

Introduction to a Queer Personal Anthology

This anthology is certainly personal. I’ve picked stories that have helped me to understand my own queerness — a process which occurred relatively slowly and late for me. They’re not my favourite stories of all time (though some might be) but they all explore queerness from a female or nonbinary perspective, though this often involves troubling form as much as it does sexuality and gender. I would possibly argue that the short story is an inherently queer form in its ability to resist formal categorisation and absorb all manner of experimentation — hence some of these entries are ‘officially’ poems or essays.

What have I left out? I’m sure I’ve left out many great queer stories by women — both Julia Armfeld’s Salt Slow and Kirsty Logan’s Things We Say in The Dark are on my TBR— so if you have any suggestions, please let me know!

‘Something That Needs Nothing’ by Miranda July

I read this story for the first time when I was about nineteen and it really did make me wonder whether I did, in fact, belong here. (Though it took me another decade to understand that I was queer). What drew me to this story, and to the collection from which it is drawn, is the (quite comical) seriousness with which she charts her characters’ fantasies, no matter how ridiculous or outlandish, and how they function almost as a third partner in intimate relationships. 

First published in The New Yorker, September 2006, and available online here. Collected in Nobody Belongs Here More Than You, Scribner/Canongate, 2007, as well as in My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead: Great Love Stories from Chekhov to Munro, ed. Jeffrey Eugenides, HarperPress/HarperCollins, 2008

‘Stephanie’ by Caroline Bird

OK, this is technically a poem. Yet it is also short and a story. It is a short story about what happens when a sex addict and a lesbian recovering from a bout of ‘goodbye world’ share a room in rehab. It is about love and hope and repair. It is delicate and raw and ends with a bracing, beautiful reversal that would be the envy of many prose writers.

In In These Days of Prohibition, 2018, Carcanet, and available online on the Poetry Society website

‘Here We Are’ by Lucy Caldwell

This is a longer short story that retrospectively charts a queer relationship between two teenage girls in a homophobic environment. The prose is taut and concise, capturing all the same adolescent intensity, confusion and heartache as Call Me by Your Name, within a short space. Without giving any spoilers, I’ll just add that it’s a powerful study in how queer love stories are silenced and suppressed. 

First published in Granta 135: New Irish Writing, April 2016, and available online to subscribers here. Collected in Multitudes, Faber, 2016

‘Toys R Us’ by Eileen Myles

As Myles points out in the book’s preface, no one is sure whether it is a novel, an essay collection or a short story collection. This, for me, is one of its strengths; it revels in its formal resistance to categorisation just as it revels in describing relationships, lifestyles and temporalities that do not quite fit. ‘Toys R Us’ dramatises much of this brilliantly and hilariously when Eileen and her girlfriend attend a child’s birthday party only to find themselves the only adults present who have arrived expecting to be fed. 

In Chelsea Girls, Black Sparrow, 1994/Serpent’s Tail, 2016

‘Drinking Coffee Elsewhere’ by ZZ Packer

This is one of the short story collections I go back to when I forget how to write. The title story is also a story I love to teach — it is at once an exemplary example of the contemporary realist short story genre and completely Packer’s own. It also charts a cringingly awkward and ambiguous queer relationship. 

First published in The New Yorker, June 2000. Collected in Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, Riverhead, 2003/Canongate, 2004

‘Pussy Hounds’ by Sarah Gerard

This is a story about four women who hate each other and want to fuck each other and do terrible farts whilst on a road trip to a writing retreat at which they do absolutely no writing. Gets straight to the heart of the double-edged nature of many female friendships and relationships. It is as sharp as one of those very posh knives I will probably never be adult enough to buy. 

First published on Electric Literature, 2019, and available online here

‘Smote’ by Eley Williams

If you haven’t read Eley Williams yet, what are you waiting for? She makes stories out of second-long slivers of time, swooping completely away from everything you think a story should be and landing you somewhere completely new and strange. This story, a telescopic exploration of one genderless narrator’s inability to kiss their lover (also a genderless ‘you’) by a Brigit Riley painting, is a great place to start.

First published on The White Review website, April 2015. Collected in Attrib., Influx Press, 2017

‘The Female Gays’ by Ali Smith

Here, Smith brings all her verbal dexterity to bear on the distinction between ‘the female gaze’ and ‘the female gays,’ writing from a perspective that simultaneously shows us the perspective of a child who is intrigued by her lesbian neighbours, the child’s disapproving mother, and the ‘female gays’ themselves.

First published in Five Dials 44: The Female Gaze, March 2017

Introduction: Scenes from a Life

Increasingly, and not for the first time, I’ve become more interested in true stories, rather than fictional ones. There are many ways to describe it: Creative Non-Fiction, with that funny use of the negative – non – in the middle; Lyric Essay; New Journalism; Autofiction… each with its own bandcamp and cheerleaders. What seems evident to me is that some of the most interesting prose work is happening in these borderlands – where poetics are brought to bear on the true story, mixing up poetry and reportage, the polemic, the witness statement, the argument – I’m thinking Carmen Maria Machado, Claudia Rankine, Annie Ernaux, Jenn Ashworth – who in turn were preceded by James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Truman Capote, Walter Benjamin, Stefan Zweig, Susan Sontag, even Virginia Woolf, whose essays are some of the finest of her writing. Short form versions of these proliferate online – with the internet’s insatiable need for more and yet more content. So quite a few of these selections are available for free. I’ve picked pieces that I’ve just recommended to my current Creative Non-Fiction class. Pieces in a range – let’s call them essays – which I think make for great examples of work written with all the care and attention over language and storytelling that we would expect from fiction. In these difficult times, the writer is called to witness, as much as to interpret. To look at the phenomenon of life as it is lived, to look to use one’s life as evidence for an argument. All these pieces try to do that in their own way. 

‘The White Album’ by Joan Didion

This essay – the title in her collection – gets me every time, with its description of the end of the 60s, covering everything from hanging out with The Doors to the Manson Murders to Black Panthers and the swirling paranoia of both the writer and the times. The strategy is to cut it all up, present us with fragments, lists – everything from her psychiatric report to her list of things she packed to take on assignment. The end refuses to make a conclusion, her ambivalence is her weapon of choice and her sharp skills of observation still to me evoke something of the times, and in a weird way, the times we live in now. My favourite of all her essays – even the famous one about the toddler taking acid in Slouching Towards Bethlehem which in the end just has shock value – this essay really speaks to the way that form can be used to mirror content. And it starts with one of the most famous sentences in all of non-fiction: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

Collected in The White Album, Simon & Schuster, 1979. Currently available from Fourth Estate, 2017