September Newsletter
Hello Everyone,
WHAT WE’VE BEEN READING:
Going back to the novels and writing of Jean Stafford… “The Boston Adventure” and the essayist Linda Chown’s terrific work on Stafford. Why is it we’ve always heard so much about Robert Lowell and less about his wives, all gifted writers, one, two and three...Last month it was Elizabeth Hardwick, this month it’s Jean Stafford…
WHAT WE’VE BEEN WATCHING:
A beautiful short film by Palestinian film maker Farah Nabulsi - that renders, as though we are inside its walled perimeter, life lived on the Israeli Palestine border, pressed up against its brital reality.
WHAT’S GOT US THINKING:
The process of renewal, as we write about in the introduction here… So - short stories that turn into novels, parts of novels that become in turn fresh stories. Think of the work of Ernest Hemingway, of Richard Ford and of Lorrie Moore and Jayne Anne Phillips and Christine Schutt… It’s just the beginning.
WHAT WE’VE BEEN UP TO LATELY:
Writing short stories and talking about them. Why is it that the form is still sidelined in favour of novels? Ailsa Cox, the World’s First Professor of the Short Story has established an academic journal specifically to investigate and celebrate the short form. Her own short stories are published by NightJar Press, the of the many small publishing houses that are springing up to actively promote the form.
BE INSPIRED:
NightJar’s publisher Nicholas Royle publishes his own short stories with another lively Independent, Confingo Publishing. There’s a pattern emerging here, a kind of short story community, a way of thinking, working...Might we even call this a kind of an ecology of the short form?
The Scottish Review runs terrific essays on all kinds of subjects and Tom Hubbard thinks beautifully and internationally about the literary links that exist between Scotland and the rest of the world…
"Every time I touch something," writes Manas Ray in his beautiful, nuanced text, Trace the Touch: Writing in the Time of Covid-19, "it seems I am exploring..." - Well, every time Manas Ray writes something he is taking the reader along with him on that exploration. He is a joy to read. This from his “State of Democracy in India: Essays on Life and Politics in Contemporary Times” and his closing essay is a marvel...
