Tag Archives: short stories

Revisiting Sadness and Loneliness

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Recently, I had a short reunion with the friend I met 35 years ago during a holiday to China. Our reunion last year was in Ghent, Belgium. I was very pleased to discover a branch of De Slegte, second-hand bookshop, in the same street as our hotel. I’d come by train with a rucksack: spending was modest.


I lent Eleven Kinds of Loneliness by Richard Yates to my friend, so she had reading material for her journey back to the UK. I am a keen reader of short stories, glad to have the paperback returned to me. I enjoyed these: the mundane sadness of domestic life.


As the blurb says: ‘a haunting mosaic of the 1950s, the era when the American dream was finally coming true – and just beginning to ring a little hollow.’ Yes, it’s bleak, like Raymond Carver without the humour. Yates had a difficult childhood and suffered from TB which must have coloured his view of life.


Yates is probably best known for his first novel Revolutionary Road. It was published in 1961 and an instant success. The 2008 film with Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio was true to the book.

Bookshop De Slegte, Ghent, Belgium

Mary Ruefle’s My Private Property (2016) includes 11 short pieces about Sadness which are spread throughout the book. Here is an extract from Granta’s website:
‘Red sadness never appears sad . . . it appears in flashes of passion, anger, fear, inspiration and courage, in dark unsellable visions; it is an upside-down penny concealed beneath a tea cosy.’


Writing prompt


Go with loneliness or sadness if it appeals. Or choose another emotion/feeling you would like or not like to write about. Choose a few colours which you like and a few you don’t. What comes out of the melting pot? In her prose poems, Ruefle mixes the descriptions of concrete objects with some abstraction, and off-beat imagery: Grey sadness is the sadness of paper clips and rubber bands, of rain and squirrels and chewing gum,….

Yellow sadness is the surprise sadness. It {….} is the confusing sadness of the never-ending and the evanescent…

Beneath the Earth

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I’ve just finished reading Beneath the Earth by the Irish writer John Boyne. It’s his first collection of short stories. Boyne is better known as a novelist: he has published nine novels and five novels for younger readers. One of these The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas sounded familiar: in 2008 a film was made in the UK based on the book.

I’d taken the book with me when I went to Italy recently. I can’t settle into a novel when I travel – plane, train, hanging around at airports. The blurb calls them “dark, unerring and surprising” and you can tell from the opening sentences below that they are dark. Boy, 19 opens the collection and Beneath the Earth is the last of the dozen.

* I started charging for sex a few days after my nineteenth birthday (Boy, 19)
* The brick crashed through the front window shortly after midnight and Émile woke with a start, his heart pounding, his eyes raw from interrupted sleep. (The Country You Called Home)
* I never had a chance to observe Arthur in his public role until a few days before my mother’s funeral (The Schleinermetzenmann)
* Hawke, a grey wolf in human form, emerged from the forest on his hands and knees, pulling pine needles from his palms. (Rest Day)
* It was no easy task to dig the child’s grave. (Beneath the Earth).

In my folder “Working Poems” sits a poem Reading Disgrace at the Mezza Luna. I started it on a workshop where the sample poem was Reading Rumi in the Bear Inn (I think that’s the name of the pub – I’ve mislaid the poem). The novel starts: For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well.

We know, immediately, that the protagonist (David Lurie who teaches Romantic poetry) will fail and fall. The novel is a masterpiece for which J M Coetzee was awarded the 1999 Booker Prize.

Is this opening line too strong, though, to include in a poem that weaves together quotes from a book with observations about a place and people in it? Is that why the poem doesn’t work (yet)?

Flash, I love you!

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Here are 34 extremely short stories in an anthology of flash fiction published by Paper Swans Press. My submissions didn’t cut the mustard: they were prose poems in disguise and didn’t have that important story arc.

cover flash fiction

I’ve made a handful of resolutions.  One of these is to write more short stories and get into writing flash fiction. Many years ago I had some success with short stories: published in anthologies and broadcast.  I got a cheque from the BBC for £5, that’s £1 per minute broadcast for Diving at Calypso Bay.  I’m a total novice at flash fiction and will study the form closely.  That’s after I’ve submitted some poems to issue 3 of Strix…