Learn the Craft of the Short Story at Faber Academy

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Learn the craft of short story writing, then create and polish new stories with an award-winning writer. Includes two masterclasses, led by Lucy Caldwell. The course if part of the Faber Academy

The online course will run from 27th January – 14th April 2021 and is limited to 12 Places.

Sessions will take place 7pm–9pm every Wednesday night for twelve weeks. Below is a session breakdown, which is subject to change, but should give you a good idea of what to expect.

For more details about fees and course timeslines, or to apply, visit the Faber Academy website.

 

Overview

In this course, we’ll look at what a short story is, has been historically, and what it might be – using that reading to develop your own practice as a writer. From Angela Carter and Borges to Lydia Davis and David Hayden, we’ll look at fairytales and urban legends, at flash fiction, at the concept of the ‘well-made’ short story and how contemporary writers have dismantled it. We’ll read David Foster Wallace and Dorthe Nors and talk about coming-of-age stories. We’ll read Lucia Berlin and Akhil Sharma and talk about how to write your own life, and we’ll read Lesley Nneka Arimah and Hassan Blasim and discuss the modern fable. We’ll read Kevin Barry, who blew the contemporary Irish short story wide open, and we’ll read work by some of the most exciting emerging voices, such as Yan Ge and Melatu Uche Okorie, and discuss how to write contemporary life. We’ll read Daphne du Maurier and Shirley Jackson and Elizabeth Bowen, looking at how to create and maintain a story’s mood. We’ll read Raymond Carver and Gordon Lish and learn how to edit our own work: where to begin, and where to end, and how to cut right down to the bone. We’ll end by looking at how and where to get your own work published, and at opportunities for unpublished and emerging writers.

Small Wonder Festival

Interviews, News

An online panel discussion with Lucy Caldwell. Caleb Azumah Nelson and Eley Williams, shortlisted writers from this year’s BBC National Short Story Award with chaired by BBC’s Editor of Readings Di Speirs.

Now in its fifteenth year, the BBC National Short Story Award with Cambridge University is one of the most prestigious for a single short story. From the short and pithy to the layered and literary, via robust poetics, family hierarchies and maligned youth, this year’s shortlist is the perfect reflection of all that can be achieved in few words.

Small Wonder Festival at Home is a weekend of free digital events to mark Small Wonder: Charleston’s annual festival dedicated to short stories and short form writing which runs from 10am (BST), Friday 25 September – 10pm (BST), Sunday 27 September.

Lucy Caldwell goes on a wartime footing for new novel

News

The author has turned to the Blitz in her native Belfast while the pandemic delayed her short story anthology

Rescue workers searching through rubble after an air raid on Belfast

‘Are you reading much during the quarantine?” asks Lucy Caldwell, sounding breathless, as if she has just run up a flight of stairs — though, in reality, it’s how she talks. The playwright novelist and short-story writer has been in lockdown with her husband and two young children in their seventh-floor apartment in London’s Whitechapel for several weeks. “I’m finding that I don’t have the mental capacity to read for pleasure,” she admits. “I’ve always read prolifically, but not while entertaining two kids during a pandemic.”

While peers including Marian Keyes and Anne Enright have admitted to feeling unproductive as a result of lockdown malaise, Caldwell reveals that spring 2020 is one of the most creative periods of her career. Were it not for the pandemic, she would have been celebrating the publication of her latest collection, Intimacies, now postponed for a year. Instead, she finds herself “churning through” an as yet untitled fourth novel about the Belfast Blitz.

“It’s bizarrely resonant. I’m finding the parallels between then and now quite remarkable,” says Caldwell. “As we were approaching the outbreak of the coronavirus in Europe, I observed people across the Continent attempting to carry on as normal as possible for as long as possible, thinking it’s not going to happen or, if it does, it’s not going to be as bad as they’re saying. And that’s similar to what happened in Belfast after war broke out in 1939.

“Everyone felt that aerial raids on London were imminent, but they didn’t happen until 1940, so surely Belfast would go unscathed. It was too far out of range. It hadn’t happened so it wouldn’t happen. The government imposed rationing in London and elsewhere not because of supply chains, but because of panic buying. But in Belfast, they didn’t really panic. Very few children were sent to the countryside. So when the Luftwaffe attacked in Easter 1941, the city wasn’t prepared and there were more casualties than in any other single raid on the UK.”

(read the full article at the Time (Paywalled))

Rachel Dean’s Big Ask

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Lucy Caldwell on her childhood in east Belfast and loss of much-wanted pregnancy

In this week’s interview Rachel Dean talks to author Lucy Caldwell (38), who grew up in Belfast and now lives in Whitechapel, east London, with her husband Tom Routh (38) and their two children, William (5) and Orla Rose (2)

Q: Tell us about your childhood

Big influence: Lucy with parents Peter and Maureen and her children

A: It was so happy. I was born and grew up in the Belmont area of east Belfast. My dad Peter was an architect and my mum Maureen a full-time mum.

I have two sisters, Kim (36), a palliative care consultant, and Faye (34), an English teacher. Both are near me in age and we were very, very close.

We used to spend weeks, months on end in our secret imaginary worlds. In later years, when I read about the Bronte siblings and their worlds of Angria and Gondal, and saw the tiny books they used to make, I felt such a headrush of recognition. One of our most elaborate worlds was called Braxton, and we drew and illustrated its chronicles, going back generations.

Everything we did and saw and read was folded into our made-up worlds, which sometimes felt more urgent and alive than the “real” world around us.

I didn’t want to grow up and found growing up very painful because there was so much I didn’t want to lose or have to leave behind.

Q: What are you most proud of?

A: Family legend has it that I wanted to be a writer before I could actually write – I used to fold up pages to look like books, draw pictures and tell my mum what words I wanted and where I wanted them.

When I was 13, we were asked to write an extra chapter for the Jennifer Johnson novel How Many Miles to Babylon?

I wrote an alternative ending – I worked so hard on it, and handed it so proudly to my teacher, convinced it was even better than Johnson’s, but more importantly knowing that I was utterly sure about what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

So to see my shelves of my own books sometimes feels remarkable.

I’m not sure I’d say I felt proud, exactly, because I’ve been so lucky to have the support of my family, encouragement of my teachers and mentors – anything I’ve managed is due to them too and I’m always mindful of that.

But what I think I am proud of are the small, private ways in which my writing has made a difference for people.

There are a precious handful of responses I’ve had from certain readers that I will never, ever forget.

Q: The one regret you wish you could amend?

A: Where do I begin? Sometimes I’m just a bundle of regrets.

Mainly it’s the small things – the things I should have done or said but didn’t, the things I did but shouldn’t, the times I should have been kinder or more patient, or just let something go, but instead enjoyed the blaze of feeling self-righteous …

Q: What about phobias? Do you have any?

A: Pigeons. I don’t mind dozy bumbling woodpigeons, but I can’t stand their scraggy feral inner-city cousins, especially when they flap right in your face. The only pigeon I can tolerate is the one in Mo Willems’s children’s books.

(read the full article at the Belfast Telegraph)

On Editing “Being Various”

News

(Irish Times Apr 27, 2019)

Irish writing is exploding with energy. So I set out to capture its power

One rainy afternoon just before St Patrick’s Day, my husband and I walked from our home in Whitechapel to see an exhibition at London City Hall.

As we took turns pushing the baby’s buggy and trailing our three-year-old on his scooter, we slipped into the grooves of a conversation we often have these days, about where we might live, if and when our accumulated drift of London years is no longer sustainable.

We talked about the sunshine in Sydney, where one of my sisters is; of my cousins in Canada. My parents considered emigrating before I was born; the ghost of my imagined Canadian self flickered in and out of vision.

Our children sing Bengali nursery rhymes and celebrate Eid, and, even without setting foot in Ireland, their own children will be eligible for Irish citizenship by dint of mine

We talked about Europe – Andalusia or Tuscany or Berlin – and I pointed out that although the children and I would be okay, with our Irish passports, my English husband would need to rely on spousal rights after Brexit.

And we talked about Belfast, of course, a conversation we’ve been having with varying degrees of intensity for years.

My phone in my pocket was abuzz with a stream of banter from my family WhatsApp group about the imminent Ireland rugby match and the Grand Slam and the Triple Crown; a separate, far more sombre conversation with my mum was about the ongoing trial of the Ulster rugby players accused of rape. I wondered aloud about the Ireland we’d be moving to, if we ever did move back (or, from my husband and children’s point of view, move).

Meanwhile, our children sing Bengali nursery rhymes and celebrate Eid, and even without ever setting foot in Ireland, their own children will be automatically eligible for Irish citizenship by dint of mine, one quarter of their grandparental make-up. One eighth, if you take into account the fact that my mum was born in England; though set against this is the fact that Belfast is the place she chose to come to, and that, besides, her own family once hailed from Cork.

I often wonder how Irish my Cockney-born children will feel, or feel entitled to be. My son at two, solemnly watching the progress of the construction site opposite our flat and admonishing his visiting Grampy: “It’s not tar, it’s taow-ah.” My daughter with her anglicised Irish name. The tug of my complicated relationship with the place I’m from, its eddies and swirls and undertows, cross-currents.

The exhibition, called I Am Irish and curated by Lorraine Maher, is a series of portraits by the Jamaican-born photographer Tracey Anderson, celebrating mixed-race Irish people aged from one to 75. It intends to address, the accompanying literature says, the lack of representation of the Black Irish experience, and to question the concept of Irishness.

For Maher, growing up in Carrick-on-Suir in Tipperary in the 1960s and 1970s, there wasn’t anyone else around who looked like her. For the best part of her life, she explains, she didn’t know that there were any other mixed-race Irish people. She grew up with folk constantly questioning her Irishness and casting doubt on whether she belonged.

Who is more Irish: a writer born in Ireland who moves and stays away, or a writer born elsewhere who chooses to come ‘here’ again?

As I moved from portrait to portrait, the patronymics – Power, Fitzpatrick, Behan, Griffin, Ní Eochaidh, Costello, Kelly, Walsh, McGowan, Keogh – were a roll-call of Irishness. A middle-aged woman was standing in front of one of them, crying. I thought about how far Ireland has come in my lifetime and how far it has to go.

What makes a writer Irish? This is a question that has enervated and energised me for the whole of my writing life. I was born and grew up on the island of Ireland, yet never called myself Irish until I’d left.

I sit at my desk in London, yet still find myself calling Belfast “here”.

I hold both UK and Irish passports and neither of them tells the full story; I feel apologetic and fraudulent to varying degrees, depending on who I’m with, or where I’m going, whichever one I use.

Who is more Irish: a writer born in Ireland who moves and stays away, or a writer born elsewhere who chooses to come “here” again. A writer born in what is technically Ireland, in the “island of” sense, but who chooses to identify with “the mainland”? A writer born outside of Ireland to parents who keep it alive through songs, St Patrick’s Day and waking up in the wee hours to watch the rugby? A writer born in Ireland to parents from elsewhere, who constantly has to answer the deathly question, “No, but where are you really from?”

All of this was to the forefront of my mind as I put together this anthology, the latest in the series begun by David Marcus. Ireland is going through a golden age of writing: that has never been more apparent.

I wanted to capture something of the energy of this explosion, in all its variousness. The crime writing that’s come from the North, the closest we’ve had to a way of questioning and dealing with the past. The new strain of magical realism coming through. Young adult fiction, where some of the thorniest questions about feminism and bodily autonomy are being addressed. The new modernism, with its linguistic pyrotechnics and emotional urgency.

Writers at the height of their powers turning the full beam of their attention to subjects that have long been unspoken or dismissed or taboo, with a ferocity and unsentimentality that’s breathtaking. Writers who are truly the inheritors of Bowen and Trevor and O’Faolain, telling 21st-century stories with effortless elegance and grace.

It will be of no surprise to anyone who knows me that the balance of the anthology is two-thirds female, one-third Northern

I wanted to look, too, at where the new ways of Irish writing might take us. The fresh narratives, perspectives and multiplicities that are coming from immigration to a place so long and persistently defined by emigration. The brilliance of the voices we have can blind us to those we’re missing. I would love to read, in future iterations of this anthology, stories by Polish-Irish, Syrian-Irish, Traveller voices.

Stories about the Venezuelan friends my parents met through Duolingo who came to Belfast after having to leave Caracas at short notice and in peril. Of my son’s friend’s grandmother, who came to Belfast in the 1950s from what was then called British Guiana.

We are all the lesser for not having these stories in our common cultural experience, and I hope we’re at the verge of such new voices beginning to come through, or at last to be heard.

After much deliberation, I took as my starting point the Belfast Agreement, deciding to focus on writers who’ve begun to publish since then. Recently celebrated and newly imperilled, the Good Friday agreement changed everything for my generation.

Suddenly, psychologically, we were free to experiment with and to embrace pluralities; contradictory ways of being. The milestones in contemporary Irish literature come thick and fast from then. The founding of the Stinging Fly magazine and its publication of Kevin Barry’s There Are Little Kingdoms, the influence of which cannot be overstated.

The #WakingTheFeminists movement, which asked, loudly, where our women’s voices were, on the national stages and in the national tapestry. The work by historians such as Catherine Corless and activists such as Colm O’Gorman, bringing buried and hidden stories into the public domain, and keeping them there.

The more recent publications of Sinéad Gleeson’s beautiful and important The Long Gaze Back and The Glass Shore, both published by another formidable small press, New Island. This pair of sister anthologies redefined the Irish writing landscape, restored neglected women writers to the canon, and led to more conversations about whose stories are missing not just from the pantheon, but from our lives.

All of the stories in this anthology are new, commissioned specially. It will be of no surprise to anyone who knows me that the balance is two-thirds female, one-third Northern. Two-thirds born in Ireland, two-thirds currently resident. The youngest writers are in their 20s, but it’s not just youth which is new: some of the best writers represented here are in their 40s, 50s and 60s and only just beginning to publish.

This anthology, and many of its individual stories, ask, again and again, questions about contemporary Irishness which, like those I ask on a personal level, cannot be answered, only further complicated. But I hope that most of all it is a celebration – in the words of Louis MacNeice, words which are the closest I have to an article of faith – of “the drunkenness of things being various”.

Following her own brilliant short story collection Multitudes, Lucy Caldwell guest edits the sixth volume of Faber’s long running series of new Irish short stories, continuing the great work started by the late David Marcus and subsequent guest editors Kevin Barry, Deirdre Madden and Joseph O’Connor.

Eimear McBride, Kit de Waal and Sally Rooney are among the writers to feature in  Being Various: New Irish Short Stories, which brings together new stories from Ireland’s current golden age of writing and features newly commissioned works from writers including Louise O’Neill, Paul McVeigh, Kevin Barry, Lisa McInerney and Arja Kajermo.

Caldwell said: “Being Various has a brilliant array of writers making waves in the twenty-first century, from lauded names to newcomers ranging from their twenties to their sixties; Irish by birth, by parentage, or residence.”

Being Various: New Irish Short Stories is published on May 2, 2019

Being Various: New Irish Short Stories

News, Short Stories