That was over a year ago – and that was the famous waterfall at Edessa. NowI’m flying solo, clear of the course, a respectable one-mark-short -of-distinction MA tucked under my belt and not completely sure what it was all about. Nothing like having to write for an assignment to make you take it seriously. But surely, we’re all doing that anyway?
I’ve got two stories in mind for two competitions with deadlines this month. One’s about diamonds and the other’s about an airport fracas, where the set theme is ‘nationality’.
Stories have developed a style and readership that seems very introverted and unhealthy. Philip Hensher, introducing his Penguin Short Story collection, was regretting the dearth of real publications paying sensible fees, the places that gave air and light to the D H Lawrences and Muriel Sparks of this world. He scorned story comps like the Sunday Times one which dished out a cheque in 2014 to ‘an utterly routine piece of work by an American author about a tragically dead rock star and a terminal illness’. I remember the one that won. It was curiously affectless and disturbing, in the passivity of the dying wife, trapped in the mechanical bed that could kill her, attended on by drones. Hensher, an MA don himself (Bath Spa) despaired of the cynical way the comps world of Bridport and Fish and Bath/Bristol, and all those heaving masses of American mashups and websites and folder old make us pay to enter competitions as we try to prove our worth. But how else do we make that bid for the skies?
But I do agree – these competitions reward what ‘they think ought to be good’ and ‘not what contains any real energy’
Though my friend Sean Lusk’s weird story about a pet snake was a truly worthy winner of the Manchester prize last month.
I’m aiming for the ‘real energy’. As long as I’ve got that, people will want to read it. Job done.
Izzy Brown 