Being born and having spent the first half of my life in Ireland, the term 'Seanchai' (shan-a-key) was something I grew up hearing in both history and Irish language lessons during my school years. In the days of old, the ‘Seanchai’ (teller of old lore) would have been either a wise and trusted village elder, or sometimes a travelling itinerant using their oral skills as a means of bagging a meal and a bed for the night. Invited into people’s homes, they shared their versions of folklore and adventure, always in the form of oral shorter narratives. Stories were told, retold, embellished, passed through generations during an era where the resident story teller was a person who commanded respect.

And what are we writers, if not storytellers? As human beings we all have stories to tell, but though the need to tell a story may be instinctive, the art of committing it to paper is not easy. The novelists among us choose to write 100,000 words. Others use less words, telling shorter stories but those of us who seek recognition in either genre have to adhere to many rules. There are always rules.

I’m quite sure the ‘Seanchai’ sitting by the parlour fire was less confined by rules. I’m sure their use of adverbs was frequent. They would have loved ‘telling’ as much as ‘showing’. A switch of point of view would have been a must. Plotting and planning would have been exempt from their lexicon. All very well with each tale being told, retold and lasting mere minutes, not alas for the modern equivalent of oral storytelling – the audio book, i.e. the audio novel.


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And in a packed issue this month: reviewed Matt Bell, Barry Graham, Ali Smith, Josephine Rowe, Nam Le, Mathias B. Freese, Anne Donovan, Pat Jourdan and the InkerMen's Green and Unpleasant Lands - and interviews with many of the same. Happy reading!

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And in a packed issue this month: reviewed Matt Bell, Barry Graham, Ali Smith, Josephine Rowe, Nam Le, Mathias B. Freese, Anne Donovan, Pat Jourdan and the InkerMen's Green and Unpleasant Lands - and interviews with many of the same. Happy reading!

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Salt publishing are a small, independent press publishing short stories and poetry, among other things. They are truly tiny, but have made a big impact in terms of creating a home for the short story and for poetry in the last few years. Unfortunately last year the Arts Council decided to completely revamp the causes to which they supplied funding, as you may have seen in the press, and Salt were one of the losers.

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I've had my fair share of experiences lately which have shaken my faith in human kind, most recently the shock discovery that someone I trusted and liked has been ripping off other people's work and entering it in contests under his own name. Almost worse than this is the failure by the contest organisers to disqualify him when evidence is produced by the victims of his plagiarism.

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I have never written for fun. That doesn’t mean to say I don’t derive pleasure from my work. I simply don’t write for pure enjoyment, to practice my sentence structure or to fill an empty half-an-hour. I write because I want to get published. I write with that as the sole goal. Always have done. Always will.

Yet in some literary quarters, ‘The Market’ and ‘Target Reader’ are dirty words. They are considered somehow less noble than ‘writing for me’ or ‘following my heart’. As Moliere once said:

“Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money.”

Goodness me – financial reward has always been my goal! But why, I hear you cry? Because I seek fame and fortune? A big house? A celebrity lifestyle? No. Because, quite simply, I need - I crave - an audience. The story is in my mind, so I don’t need to reproduce it on paper for myself. For me, things are better if shared. When my husband is out I find I cannot watch a film. I cannot cook a meal. It’s channel-surfing and snacks on the sofa – alone. And that’s how satisfying I would find it to write a story and never show it to the world.



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"It's Whit Sunday, you know" my mother said, pausing to look at me meaningfully over the top of her glasses before dropping her eyes to examine the black leatherette menu once more. Quite why she bothers to read the menu is unclear; it never changes and she always orders the same thing anyway. Quite why she also bothered to remind me it was Whit Sunday I'm not sure either. It's a long time since I went to Sunday School.

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One of the nice things about doing festivals, as opposed to other readings and events, is that you actually bump into not just other authors (I have lots of authorly friends, but mostly writing for the same kind of readers as I do myself) but other kinds of authors. This time, it was the Hay Festival, and I found myself sharing a car back to Hereford Station with Paul Stewart and Chris Ridell. They write The Edge Chronicles and other children's fantasy together, and we started talking about what it's like writing as a team. Scriptwriters often do it, in writing sitcoms it's almost obligatory, and of course anything which is illustrated may well have two parties to its creation. In adult fiction it's less common, though the well-established crimewriter Nicci French is of course actually a husband and wife team.

It's not just that it would be nice to have the company when doing festivals and events, though it would. (At the Swindon festival I watched Ruthie Culver with envy, not just because she has a jazz singing voice I'd die for, and a fascinating way with poetry, but because she gets to travel with her band. Sure, they have a lot of clobber, what with the double bass and all, but it would be worth it not to be alone.) Writing as a team is also a more integral kind of not-being-alone.

Paul and Chris and I were talking about editors, and they said that they've rarely had to change anything at the editorial stage: by the time it gets to Random House it's pretty much ready to fly.

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It must be the weak pound that's drawing them in. Maybe the fact that Greenwich is now a World Heritage Site is having an impact. The lower grassy area resembled Blackpool beach, with so many half-clad sunbathers.


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Across George Square bare

skin sizzling: not drowning

in high factors.


Here, summer lands

like a sledgehammer.

SURPRISE!

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