Tag Archives: Short Stories

[Intermezzo] I’m Thinking About Cleaning Out My Idea Bank

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I’m thinking about cleaning out my idea bank. It is a knee-quaking concept. Ten years of scraps, plots, extracts, phrases, titles, names, research and character studies are lovingly tucked away or carelessly crammed into various crannies and boxes and drawers. They contain a lot of good ideas and solid or beautiful writing. There are threads of greatness, however frayed and dirty and dusty; there’s a lot of crap, too, or things that I have outgrown or moved past. Legal pads, notebooks, torn napkins, loose leaf paper. Written in pen, pencil, marker, lipstick. It’s all there, waiting to be addressed. Faced. Embraced or conquered. Trashed or saved. Crumpled mounds of surprise or disgust. “I’m this good?” or “What shitty shit of a writer came up with this?” It’s all conjecture, of course, as I haven’t read any of it; but I know the odds, and they are even. The summer is young, and the days are long. I can do this.

[Alternative Muse of the Month] Let’s Talk About Katherine Mansfield’s Miss Brill, or: Why Writers Deserve Silly, Media-Created Nicknames, Too

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I dream of a world where people care enough about writers to give them silly, unnecessary and catchy nicknames. Move aside JLo and LiLo, because here comes JAust (pronounced joust, because it just sounds better). Are you sick of Brangelina and, Lord help us, Kimye? Fear not, because SylT is here to make it all better. (For the record: I refuse to acknowledge the talented but dickish Ted with more than a perfunctory T.) I could do this all day (and probably will in some future post, because this is kind of fun, yes?) but I’ll stop after one more, the subject of this piece: KathMans. Continue reading →

[Alternative Muse of the Month] Katherine Mansfield Fun Facts!

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In honour of our first Alternative Muse of the Month, we are preparing to go into Official Katherine Mansfield Mode. Until then, here are some random facts about the short story writer.

  • Kathleen (Katherine) Mansfield Beauchamp was born in Wellington, New Zealand on 14 October 1888.
  • Her cousin was writer Elizabeth von Arnim (Mary Annette Beauchamp), best known for her novels The Enchanted April and Mr. Skeffington.
  • Her second husband was English writer John Middleton Murry.
  • Her best writing was done during her final, tuberculosis-plagued years.
  • She was an excellent cellist.
  • She was highly influenced by Anton Chekhov.
  • Her brother Leslie was killed in World War I.
  • She spent her last months desperately seeking a cure for the tuberculosis that eventually killed her on 9 January 1923. She died at Georges Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleau, France.
  • She remains one of the most important-and best-short story writers of the 20th century.

 

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A Year in Books/Day 118: The Garden Party and Other Stories

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  • Title: The Garden Party and Other Stories
  • Author: Katherine Mansfield
  • Year Published: 1922/This Edition: 1997 (Constable & Co./Penguin Books)
  • Year Purchased: 2003/2004
  • Source: Unknown
  • About: It’s almost enough to state that “Katherine Mansfield wrote short stories. The end.” It’s fitting that the genre she helped make a singularly modern medium was, largely, her only medium. If you require action (fast-paced or otherwise) from your fiction, then her quiet, introspective, internal and often plotless stories aren’t for you. The book is just long enough to help pass a lonely afternoon; its perhaps best read with a cup of tea to hand and feet up, on a languorously rainy Saturday. You probably won’t walk away any happier, but you’ll be richer for the experience.
  • Motivation: I’m that rarest of creatures: a fiction writer with no real ambition to write the Great American Novel-or any novel. Short stories are my talent’s natural home. Katherine Mansfield should be respected by any writer of short fiction.
  • Times Read: 2
  • Random Excerpt/Page 114: “On her way home she usually bought a slice of honey-cake at the baker’s. It was her Sunday treat. Sometimes there was an almond in her slice, sometimes not. It made a great difference. If there was an almond it was like carrying home a tiny present-a surprise-something that might very well not have been there. She hurried on the almond Sundays and struck the match for the kettle in quite a dashing way.”
  • Happiness Scale: 9
    Alumna, Katherine Mansfield

    Katherine Mansfield (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

     

A Year in Books/Day 38: Bedside Book of Famous French Stories

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  • Title: Bedside Book of Famous French Stories
  • Edited By: Belle Decker and Robert N. Linscott
  • Year Published: 1945 (Random House)
  • Year Purchased: 1991
  • Source: Columbus Public Library, library sale
  • About: A compilation of French short stories by such heavyweights as Honore de Balzac, Prosper Merimee, George Sand, Anatole France, Emile Zola and Jean-Paul Sartre.
  • Motivation: Even as a teenager, I had an affinity for short stories. I think I knew that, as a writer, it would be my most natural (fiction) medium. This book was my introduction to the work of those listed above. Prior to that, they were just enticing but empty names. I also really love old books. I picked up an 80-year-old copy of Zola’s ‘Nana’ at the same sale. It was a good day.
  • Times Read: 1
  • Random Excerpt/Page 23: “The old lady meanwhile, passive as a child and almost dazed, sat down on her chair again. But the honest pastry-cook came back directly. A countenance red enough to begin with, and further flushed by the bake-house fire, was suddenly blanched; such terror perturbed him that he reeled as he walked, and stared about him like a drunken man.”
  • Happiness Scale: 7 1/2
    English: Emile Zola, French writer, at the beg...

    Image via Wikipedia