‘Empty Air’ by Richard Smyth

Let’s take a moment here to appreciate the work of all the literary magazines that tirelessly publish and promote short stories and which are more often than not a labour of love. Structo has for some years been one of the best, but it seems to have been on hiatus since 2023. Hopefully that won’t be a permanent state of affairs because it has introduced me to several excellent contemporary short story writers, including Richard Smyth. In ‘Empty Air’, a man spends his spare moments climbing various buildings around a city trying to set the clocks to the correct time. In teasing out the reasons for this, Smyth beautifully marries his narrator’s inner and outer lives. It’s a brilliant evocation of loss, isolation and loneliness.

Published in Structo #16, Autumn/Winter 2016; read online here

‘This Isn’t Heat’ by Richard Smyth

Call me a romantic. Smyth’s sweltering New York piece with a sprinkling of spices and whimsy is without doubt a meet-cute, but don’t let that put you off. It appears in the Liars’ League top ten stories, as picked by the League members, and rightly deserves its coveted place.

It helps that I spent a couple of summers in New York, helps that the story captures that city’s fusion culture, the clash, in this case, of Indian and western. Throw in an intervention by a smiling Buddha and I’m sold.

It also helps–as with all the Liars’ League pieces that I’ve chosen to close this personal anthology–that I love a story written to be performed. Part of that is in the brevity–I like a short story that doesn’t stick around too long. Part is in the apparent simplicity. A story being read out has to work on the first pass, even if you can, and often do, find deeper layers on a reread. And partly, of course, because a story being read to you can be elevated by the talents of the reader, especially when that reader is an actor, which is the Liars’ League’s unique way.

Performed at Liars’ League, 2011, and available to read and listen to here; anthologised in Lovers’ Lies, Arachne Press, 2013

‘A Peregrine’s Eye’ by Richard Smyth

An essay now. (Yegods! Children’s books, recipes, field guide entries and now an essay! Has the man no respect for the sacred form of the short story? Probably not. Soz.)

It’s a celebration of birds, and in particular birdsong – a subject close to my own heart. But more than that, it’s a reflection on how we experience the world, on the nature of paying attention. As Derek Smalls observed as he stood alongside his fellow Spinal Tap members at the grave of Elvis: “it certainly puts perspective on things”.

The perspective here is the peregrine’s – “its vision is around eight times better than mine: easily good enough to make out the Eeyores on my daughter’s pyjamas”. What can it see from its perch 70 metres up on the nearby mill chimney? “A hundred different towns, a half-dozen different cities, all that sprawling human landscape … is drawn as if by a drawstring into the scope of one bird’s raking binocular vision.”

Too much fucking perspective, you might say.

From sight to sound, so much of it mere background noise to humans, if indeed we notice it at all. Smyth makes a case for noticing: “standing with your back against a forty-metre beech, you feel that you’re inside a cell of bird noise”. And he touches on the strange untouchability of birdsong: “As the birds’ noise yard-by-yard maps out the landscape, we’re not just here, we’re everywhere.”

I forgive him the shade he throws on the dunnock’s “pointless reeling” (we will never see eye to eye on this – I love a dunnock’s scattery babble) for this delightful description of the back yard blackbird – “that familiar rustic hurdygurdy burble”.

Most of all this is a welcome placing of nature observation in the context of real lives. Not for Smyth the worn idea of Lone Man Communing With The Nature. “I don’t know who has the time for transcendence.”

Damn right.

First published in Songs of Place and Time: Birdsong And The Dawn Chorus In Natural History And The Arts, edited by Mike Collier, Gaia Project 2020. You can read it on Richard’s website here

‘The Berg’, by Richard Smyth

The One No One Else Can Read (Yet):

I know, I know, this is cheating – but sometimes you read a story that’s so good you want to simultaneously jump for joy and quietly give up writing, and this was one of those times. Smyth has known what he’s doing for a while. He’s a fantastically sharp nature writer, and a great short story writer (he was a finalist in last year’s Galley Beggar short story competition), and he gets Narrative Voice better than just about anybody – and in this story, the details of which I won’t give away unless anyone steals it, he combines all three.

It’s beautiful and funny and sad and daring AND YOU CAN’T READ IT YET. But hopefully you will soon…

Theres a Cormorant comeing by us off the larbord bow. A black and ragged looking Bird flying bearly above the waive tops. Like somone threw a hand rake. Devilish harty apetites they have. There was a pickture of a Cormorant in a boke I had as a boy. The boke was Millton I beleive and was an Alegory but weather the Cormorant was Christ or the devil I cant recal.

The Penguine makes a croke.

Hallo I say.

The pore thing chafes at its chane.

He is the propety of our Biscayan a fello named Ineko or similar who got him in New-found-land while hunting Whales he sayes. The Penguine is as big as a goos tho’ like all of us he is Thin. He has the look of a Gillimotte such as we see at Flamboro’. Black and wite and a beke like a Cleaver. He doesnt have a Name. He is onlie the Penguine.

(Unpublished)