Back to the Hills

I may or may not be blogging very much for the next 10 days or so. The usual reason. (There's still a cloud down on this hill.)

Get Thee to an Old Folks' Home

Nice article by Mark Lawson on possible signs that ageism in the arts may be on the wane...

I do wonder, though. I'll never forget the time I was teaching in a Glasgow comprehensive, not long out of college. I was twenty-three. We had cosy little individual staff rooms and the people in mine were a riot: swearers, drunkards, anti-establishment cynics who held parties in the school after hours - you know, you've seen them on Teachers. Well, I was telling them a story about some really stuffy people, and I described those people: straight-laced, tradition-bound, no sense of humour - well, what did I expect, they were all over thirty!

There was a gulping silence, and then everyone in the room said, 'Well, thanks!'

Well, of course I knew if I thought about it that they were all over thirty, but I didn't think of them as over thirty, for this reason: the image in my head of thirty-year-olds was pretty dire, and they simply didn't fit it. But such images are pretty hard to shift, and I do wonder sometimes what images are in the heads of the young people who seem increasingly nowadays to be running our arts organisations (and of course, in the theatre especially, funded to look for work by even younger people)...

No Point in Whispering when You Want a Shout

OK, so I looked up Blurbings.com, the service providing book blurbs (by which they seem to mean puff quotes), which has apparently caused some outrage. And thanks to Tania Hershman I found the hilarious article by Rebecca Johnson on Salon.com exposing the fact that nothing could be more potentially corrupt than the traditional way that such cover quotes are obtained.

Blurbings.com tells us:

Normally, a blurb will cost an author and/or publisher $14 - $23, which includes printing of the galleys, packaging and mailing fees. The standard 30 – 50 blurbs expected per book can range from $420 to $1,150. It is also very time consuming researching and contacting prospective authors as well as conducting follow-ups during the duration of the process.

Notice any figure missing? A fee to the poor 'blurbing' author! As Rebecca Johnson says, it's also a time-consuming business for the endorsing author, who is expected to do it for free. Once, I remember, the winning novel of a competition for which I'd been on the judging panel, which was now to be published by a small publisher, was sent off for a quote to a famous novelist well known for her left-wing feminist views. How amazed and shocked the publisher was when she wrote back that she didn't do quotes for free. But you know, in reality, it's their shock which is shocking.

Here's my own recent cringe-worthy experience, my search for a cover quote for my recent story collection. Would I ask people I knew? Would I heck! How could I live with myself (and them afterwards) otherwise? So what did I do? I sent initial queries to the agents of short story writers I didn't know personally but whose work I respected. Guess what? Back came nice polite letters from the agents telling me that their clients were fiendishly busy but wished me all the luck.

What next? OK, I would bite the bullet and ask a well-known short story writer I had met not so long ago. But I wouldn't put her on the spot by ringing her up, or suggesting the coffee we had vaguely mooted. Instead I sent her a postcard, in which I insisted (repeatedly) that she must refuse to do it if she didn't want to etc etc, she didn't even need to answer this card if she didn't want to.

Guess what? She didn't answer the card. I didn't get a quote, and yet I still may have spoilt a beautiful potential friendship...

What next? Well, there's that mega-famous author who's really close friends with some really close old friends of mine, and I've met her at their house more than once... that wouldn't be so bad, would it. I mean, it's pulling strings, but I can hardly be said to know her, and she wouldn't feel obliged to give a good quote whatever... So I email my friends and ask them what they think. Well, they'll read the stories first and decide whether to ask her. I email the stories. One of my friends reads them over a week on his train journey to work. He really likes them, he thinks his friend the mega-famous author will like them. He'll contact her and ask.

Days go by. Weeks. A month, two... I give up. (Nine months later, when the book is published, I'm at a party at his house - the mega-famous author isn't - and he tells me she never answered his query.)

Meanwhile, I have caved in completely. I have rung up my good friend who has agreed to look at the manuscript, and there I am in his kitchen on Sunday afternoon, handing it over and cringing inwardly, not nearly as sure as he seems to be that he'll like the book when he reads it... But then we're saved the embarrassment: for my publisher decides it's better he doesn't do it anyway, since he's already just provided a quote for another of her books.

I was lucky in the end. I walked into the foyer of MMU for a reading, and Livi Michael, writer of wonderful novels for adults and children - and of brilliant short stories, one of which we published in metropolitan - came sweeping across the tiles to greet me. Livi! Perhaps I could ask Livi! But does she know my work? Would she hate my work? How could I put her through the embarrassment of saying no if she didn't like it? No, I can't ask Livi!

She sees the look on my face. 'I know what you're going to ask me,' she says, 'and the answer is Yes!' Turns out she did like my work already: turns out she loved the book.

Even so, it's not the easiest thing in the world, coming up with a quote that sums up and yet does justice to a book. Wouldn't surprise me if Livi, like so many of my writer friends, has since declared herself a blurb-free zone.

And I did only manage to get one shout.

It's All too Much for an Author

Got my head stuck in that bearpit the Guardian books blog this week, where, after writing a post on the problems of having to sell one's book via one's identity in this commercially-oriented literary world, Josie Henley Einion was torn apart by the resident purists for using both her identity and the books blog to sell her novel.

Sigh. I must get out more...

And in so doing, I missed an apparent web discussion about book blurbs... well, it happened according to the Guardian, but I still can't find it, or should I say I'm not prepared to spend a moment longer at this ruddy computer on this first hot day of August, and I'm off in to the garden.

Which is just as well, because if you ever got me started on the excruciating process of having to creep to your well-known friends and acquaintances for shouts... Can't think about it any more, I'm shuddering too much. I'm off to do some weeding...

Internet Widower

John Keenan responds on the Guardian books blog to John Updike's contempt for the internet, and links it to a fading relevance in his recent novels, in particular The Widows of Eastwick.

Thanks, Enid

In response to Enid Blyton's win in the recent Costa poll for the best-loved children's writer, Lucy Mangan writes in today's Guardian of her own childhood obsession with Blyton and the fact that while Blyton's books were once banned from public libraries as politically incorrect and culturally impoverished, she opened up for generations of children the 'promised land' of reading.

I've said it many times before and I'll say it again here: she opened up for me the promised land of writing. I wanted consciously to be a writer from the age of eight - in fact, I was a writer before that, and Enid Blyton played no small part in that. Like Lucy Mangan, while I was reading everything, including Dickens, I gobbled up Blyton - The Famous Five, The Secret Seven, and in particular the Adventure Series (The Castle of Adventure, The Valley of Adventure etc) - like a drug. You can say this for Blyton, which you can't say for Dickens: nearly every time I finished one of her books, I went off and wrote a story of my own.

Why was this? I don't have any Blyton books here to study for the reason: while I still have many of the books I read then I never kept a single Blyton; that wasn't the point of them, the point of them was what they triggered in me. I do of course remember though that they were, as Mangan says, formulaic and baldly told. It's interesting to me that Mangan reports that Blyton decribed her working method thus: '...simply a matter of opening the sluice gates and out it all pours with no effort or labour of my own.' Clearly, what is going to result from this is unthinking, cliched, repetitive. Yet there was something exciting for me, I think, generated by that, an energy - and a permission just to do it, which the classics, bound by their mature and rarified insights and more sophisticated use of language, couldn't give. The classics (after a certain age I never read any other books specifically intended for children; I stayed away from them like the plague) were exclusive in their consciousness (while of course being in the long term far more nourishing fodder), whereas Blyton did not even merely include me in hers, she allowed me to take over: so bald was her prose (as I remember) that it left infinite room for my own projections, my own imaginings of the settings and the inner thoughts of the characters. No wonder I would go off and write when I'd finished reading one: I was already writing as I was reading.

I must have another look at The Faraway Tree. So many people have told me that they hated it when I've said I loved it. I had chicken pox, I remember, and I suppose I was a bit delirious. But that notion of a tree you can climb to another world, the world of imagination (Yes, OK, I know it's derivative in the first place, but it's probably something about the very bald way she wrote it!) has been the basis of of my concept of writing ever since.

Creativity works in more complicated ways than we sometimes think, and all I can say is, Thanks, Enid.

It's Marvellous, Darling!

A nice post from Ms Baroque on the fraught question of reviewing for writers.

Business versus Literature?

Mark Liam Piggott writes interestingly (and bravely) for the Guardian blog asking whether literary agents are any longer helpful to literary writers, or whether the pressures of the market have turned them into gatekeepers barring work which, however excellent as literature, is unlikely to be profitable. The many comments are interesting. Susan Hill (with her publishing hat on) points to the Nielsen book scan which reveals the sales of any previous book by an author, and thus determines whether or not they are likely to be invested in again, pointing out as she has on previous occasions that publishing is above all a business and that 'fine words butter no parsnips'. Though whether this is a defence or a condemnation depends where you're coming from with regard to the matter of literary fiction, I guess...

Like Piggott's, Nasim Marie Jafry's novel the State of Me, which I review on my other blog, is another interesting case of a novel held back by the commercial requirements of agents and then making it to publication without an agent.

The View from the Mountain

So sorry – I hadn’t resolved my internet problems after all. I’ve been pretty cut off altogether: the radio hasn’t tuned in either, there’s no telly, and each day it’s been late before I’ve driven the 6 miles for a newspaper, and sometimes there haven’t been any left.

Anyway, through my tiny window of internet connection from the side of a cloud-covered mountain I’ve had one or two glimpses of our weird commercially-oriented literary world: John Sutherland on the sexual fantasies the BBC Drama dept finds necessary to invent to make our literary history palatable, and Molly Flatt striking despair into the heart of every novelist by taking a whoops-silly-me-but-what-a-lark attitude to the fact that she reads as a kind of addiction without attending much to what she reads.

And if you think that going back up the Welsh mountain has made me regress to the Wesleyan parts of my origins, I don’t care. (And when the flood comes, I’ll be OK, Jack, even if I will have to live in a silent, clouded world.)

Back and Eating My Words

Back in blogging business sooner than I expected.

And proved wrong by the Raymond Carver short story comp either that short story comps are universally conservative or about my own level of innovation...

Short Break

Just to say I won't be blogging much or responding to comments for a while. Back in 10 days or so.

Dressed to Kill the Market?

A year ago we were commenting on the tendency of publishers to 'brand' 'chicklit' novels with outrageously similar covers. Now Diane Shipley writes of an even more troubling move: having established that 'chicklit' books are the hot sellers, publishers are now dressing up very different novels to look like them. Shipley comments:

I hope publishers will soon realise that their tactic isn't working and could, in fact, backfire badly. If all book covers look the same, then none stand out. And if we know that how a book looks is no indication of its content, we might just become so dispirited that we bypass the bookstore and rent a DVD instead.

Indeed, Suzanabrams, commenting on Shipley's post, says that she has been avoiding this apparent influx of the genre into the bookshops, unaware of this new practice.

Review: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

Every so often - though not all that often once childhood is over, I think - you read a book which you know is going to affect your mental landscape forever. This, for me, is such a book. It's the story of Oscar de Leon, a New Jersey ghetto nerd struggling with the curse imposed by his family's history of entanglement with the cruel Dominican regime. It's a heartbreaking yet uplifting story, and the thing which will imprint it for me is the voice.

The overall narrative voice is that of Oscar's university friend Yunior (though two sections are narrated by Lola, Oscar's sister and ex-girlfriend to Yunior). It's a wonderful voice, colloquial, feisty and combative yet generous and humane. And direct, addressing the reader on familiar terms. Here's Yunior describing an episode from Oscar's teenage years (a passage which holds a subtle prefiguring of Oscar's destiny):

Those were some fucking lonely weeks when all he had were his games, his books, and his words. So now I have a hermit for a son, his mother complained bitterly. At night, unable to sleep, he watched a lot of bad TV, became obsessed with two movies in particular: Zardoz (which he'd seen with his uncle before they put him away for the second time) and Virus (the Japanese end-of-the-world movie with the hot chick from Romeo and Juliet). Virus especially he could not watch to the end without crying, the Japanese hero arriving at the South Pole base, having walked from Washington, D.C., down the whole spine of the Andes, for the woman of his dreams. I've been working on my fifth novel, he told the boys when they asked about his absences. It's amazing.

See? What did I tell you? Mr Collegeboy.

There's a special kind of authenticity about this voice. While it conveys a very particular character - Yunior, with his own shortcomings and blindspots as well as his warm heart - one suspects, as with the voices in Diaz's story collection Drown, that it is not too far removed from the author's own voice: there's an overriding tone and an energy which inform the sections related by both Yunior and Lola. The impression of authenticity is further reinforced by the piecemeal and non-linear way the story unfolds, as Yunior weaves together the information he has gathered from the de Leon family members, provides a retrospective introduction and footnotes (in his own inimitable style) on the historical background and lays bare the workings of his written tale:

Footnote 15: A favourite hangout of Trujillo's, my mother tells me when the manuscript is almost complete.

Indeed, the book itself is dedicated to Elizabeth de Leon. But it would be far too reductive to say that what Diaz has achieved here is a magical and explosive mix of historical fact and imagination: this book is something more magnificant than that. It goes beyond fact, it goes beyond fiction: it's a true voice, it's the searing dream and deep new knowledge that stays with you for good.

Oh, and I cried buckets.

Of Books and Beetles

Sorry about the gap on this blog which was due to internet problems. (How weird is that, not to be blogging?)

A couple of myths being shattered in the pages of The Guardian - firstly, the idea that the fact that we buy so many books means that we're all committed and omnivorous readers. Of the nine authors interviewed, though, only two, Lionel Shriver and Alain de Botton, confess as I do that it is writing their own work which sometimes makes it hard for them to read the work of others.

And I feel totally vindicated today by a 'Week in Books' piece by Kafka scholar James Hawes exposing the author as not 'the middle-European Nostradamus, almost unknown in his lifetime, trapped in a dead-end job, whose mysterious, endlessly interpretable works somehow foresaw the Holocaust (and so on)' but 'a millionaire's son ... a writer backed by an influential clique ... who had no more inkling of the Holocaust than anyone else' and thus whose writing was not 'the gloomy stuff we Anglo-Saxons received via post Auschwitz French existentialists, but wonderful black comedies written by a man soaked in the writings of his predecessors and of his own day'. Vindicated because the last time I read Metamorphosis I laughed out loud: Gregor the dung beetle stuck up in his room was the spitting image of a teenager not too many miles from under my own nose.

(Sorry, but the search on the Guardian site gives up on me when I look for the link.)

Whose Feast Is the Lit Fest?

Susan Hill gives us the lowdown on lit fests. Will you ever feel quite so privileged to be at one again?

What's Happening to Short Stories?

Anyone who ever read Metropolitan, the short-story mag I co-edited with Ailsa Cox, will know that I am no hater of conventional short stories. When it comes to form I am open to all comers - conventional or experimental, stories written within a recognizable tradition or wildly innovative: as long as a story work on its own terms, as long as it makes exciting use of language and I like what it's saying it'll please me. I've written both ways myself - and both kinds of story find their way into my recent collection - though I suppose I have to confess to leaning in ambition towards the more off-the-wall, to needing ultimately to stretch the form for what I really want to say, and that when I have written more conventionally it has sometimes (though not always) been because of the pressures of the market.

Which is why my pleasure at the recent rash of high-profile short-story competitions - and the seeming resurgence of the short story which it seems to indicate - is somewhat tempered by a fear that it is the conventional short story alone which is being endorsed and that innovation is being given the thumbs down, inadvertently or not. If so, it's especially disheartening when one would expect competitions to provide a counter to market forces, but perhaps expecting competitions to be immune from market forces is naive. Others have commented on the classical nature of Jhumpa Lahiri's short stories (winner of the Frank O'Connor Award), and the same could be said for the stories in Claire Keegan's Walk the Blue Fields, winner of the Edge Hill Prize. Keegan's are wonderful stories in an Irish tradition I love and indeed feel a great affinity with, and I would urge everyone to read them. They are, though, very firmly within that tradition - elegaic yet wry, lyrical yet controlled - and Keegan's writing has been compared to that of William Trevor, John McGahern and indeed Chekhov.

I am especially thrilled that Clare Wigfall has won the BBC National Short Story Award. I have been recommending her book since I discovered it and what judge Martha Kearney calls her amazing 'ventriloquism': she seems able to inhabit any voice, any psyche and any world or historical period, and the stories are nothing if not moving. Her winning story, 'The Numbers', is marked by this chameleon-like ability and by a striking, original and deeply resonant motif. I defy you to read it without ending in tears. However. Personally, I wouldn't call this story conventional, yet superficially it displays conventional elements, and one wonders if without them it would have got so far in this competition. Although there are subtle foreshadowings the story is basically linear, and the narrator tells her tale in the time-honoured mode of intimate and homely recollection. Above all there's a (wholly admirable) classical authorial restraint. And here's Martha Kearney, writing about judging the competition:

The perfect short story arrests the reader’s attention immediately and then goes on to illuminate an entire life through one scene or a few actions.

Me, I would say that that's one type of short story. And that idea of the 'perfect short story' worries me dreadfully, both within this sentence, where it implies that there's only one kind of excellence, and generally, implying possibly a certain kind of stasis, a stylistic impasse. Yet surely the short story is precisely the place where we can tear down our traditional expectations of prose. Really, the last thing I want to write is a 'perfect' short story, and whenever people describe any of my stories as 'perfect', while I'm always pathetically flattered, I have a sneaky feeling I've failed.

Rushdie Avoids Literary Oblivion

It may seem a bit mean to pick on one hapless original publisher's reader for Midnight's Children (announced yesterday as the winner of the Best of the Bookers), but I can't resist it, and anyway it's a serious matter:

'The author should concentrate on short stories until he has mastered the novel form,' The Guardian tells us he/she reported.

OK, it's a long time ago, and I'm not even sure if publishers have readers any more - by most accounts, nowadays they generally rely on agents to do the reading for them - but in spite of Midnight's Children's phenomenal success (fortunately another reader, Susannah Clapp thought differently, though what if it hadn't fallen into her hands?) - I wonder how many potential works of fiction still founder on the knot of literary prejudice, conservatism, ignorant misconception and illogicality wrapped up in that sentence?

First, the illogicality: what, you master one form by concentrating on another? How does that work, exactly? Ah, I see, because (here's the misconception) short stories are just mini-novels, limbering-up things. I don't know about you, but I think that any reader ignorant enough to believe this about short stories should not be trusted on his/her view of anything much literary, including novels. And so it proves, and here's the lethal conservative prejudice: Rushdie has not 'mastered' the novel form, apparently, because mastering the form here means by definition fulfilling the conventional parameters he specifically set out to flout.

But this tendency - for those judging fiction to look for the recognizable and tried in fiction, and to shun the different and strange - is no longer even a hapless error but is institutionalized by the cult of the market and a cynical ploy.

Just Not Good Enough

Hm. Not really sure what to say about the furore - well, furore by short-story standards - over the decision by the Frank O'Connor Award judges to skip a shortlist and announce the winner early: Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth. My first decision was to say nothing: my own book was on the long list and so I felt it would be hard to be or at any rate appear objective, and the matter would be better left for others to discuss. Nicholas Lezard quickly posted his disgust on the Guardian books blog and the commenters agreed pretty unanimously, and today Susan Hill expresses hers and quotes from her experience as a Booker judge when her fellow judge Roy Fuller also wanted to omit a shortlist.

A main objection has been that, however much a judging panel knew who their eventual winner was going to be, it was mean to deprive those who would have been on the shortlist their hour in the sun and the increased sales (and, I would add, reputation) which would have followed. People have noted that it seems especially perverse when the Frank O'Connor Award was specifically set up to draw attention to the short story collections published yearly (and which usually get scant attention), and in the service of this aim its long list is generous (39 books this year). Some, including a previous Frank O'Connor judge, have commented that to decide on a winner so soon is arrogant and that the purpose of a short list is to allow judges time for reflection and reconsideration via closer reading and rereading, and a Guardian blogs commenter points out that innovative or subtle short stories are more likely to rise to the surface at such a stage (the general consensus seeming to be that Lahiri's stories, while excellent, conform to conventional expectations). (I haven't read them myself.) Some have seen the choice as pandering to extraneous authority, since Jhumpa Lahiri's book, her second collection, is already an American bestseller and she won a Pultizer for her first, especially in view of the fact that member of this year's judging panel Eileen Battersby complained after last year's off-the-wall choice of Miranda July that the prize was not doing enough to acknowledge internationally acclaimed writers of short stories.

Actually, I think the meanest bit is this section of their statement:

"Not only were the jury unanimous in their choice of Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth as the winner, they were unanimous in their belief that so outstanding was Lahiri's achievement in this book that no other title was a serious contender."

So the rest were crap, eh?

Regular readers of this blog will know of my reservations about literary competitions per se (or any ruddy competitions for that matter). And you know what, these judges have only gone and put into words what I keep saying is the unspoken implication of all competitions. It's great for the winners, but for those who don't win there's that other judgement: Less good.

But you know what, too? OK, so four or so people were deprived of being on the short list. But guess what, 34 others of us were saved having been labelled not good enough for the short list and, more to the point, being dropped immediately from the collective literary consciousness. Quite the contrary: look how it's all still being discussed.

Martin Amis, Literature and Religion

Literature and Terrorism in December, and now in July our celebrity professor tackles Literature and Religion. On Tuesday of last week Martin Amis talked about this subject with critic James Wood in Manchester University's Whitworth Hall.

I was late - a bus and a little car had collided on Princess Parkway and the traffic was at a standstill. When I finally arrived outside the hall with my two companions, running, there was no one about, everyone else had gone in. Two stewards standing there said - with something of an excited air of occasion - 'Martin Amis?' and pointed to the door. Inside the building a huge guy like a bouncer said rather sternly, 'Martin Amis?' and pointed the way down the corridor. An Evening News photographer followed on our heels. Up the blue-carpeted stairs and then into the back of the huge hall which was unbelievably, out of term time, crowded, and where the speakers were being introduced.

Who were all these people who had given up a warm early evening to hear a debate on such a serious subject? From where we found seats near the back all I could see were strangers. Straight ahead of me was a woman in a straw Sunday hat.

Urbane as ever, even bored-seeming, Martin Amis spoke first. He was a confirmed secularist, he told us, but not an atheist. He told us that to be an atheist was an arrogant and illogical position since there is so much that we can't know, and yet I could swear that he used the word 'humiliating' rather than 'humbling' to describe this last fact. I thought he then said that religion may have solved the problem of death and evil (with the concept of heaven) but fails to solve the problem of panic - though Phillip Olterman, writing for The Guardian today (Saturday) has a different account of what Amis said on this precise point. Literature, Amis went on, has been a 'rearguard action' against this. He quoted smoothly from Milton' s great poem as the work of literature par excellence in this regard, and from some other classic English texts, I can't remember what.

James Wood sat semi-slumped over the table, leaning on his elbow and with his hand on his chin and almost over his mouth and said that his parents had become evangelical Christians, a background he had strongly rebelled against, which history had always informed his attitude to literature. He said that the rise of the novel in the nineteenth century had paralleled a decline in belief and the nineteenth-century novel was in this sense a slayer of belief - or well, maybe, he would need to think about it a lot more. There is something inherently secular about narrative, he said : a novel paradoxically requests belief (in itself, I think he meant - or maybe he meant in story) while being aware of its status as fiction. To make a narrative is to destabilize doctrine and the Bible begins with a totally unconvincing story, that of Adam and Eve and the serpent - well, I got a bit lost about his logic here. As far as Wood was concerned, it is not panic but evil which religion has failed to solve (well, this is what I heard anyway), and this has been the central theme of narrative.

And then Amis said that religion doesn't actually solve death with heaven anyway, and that heaven itself may be the real problem: the idea of it was 'repellent'. Where would the dramas and tensions be in such a bland world?

Both agreed that the debate surrounding Richard Dawkins' view of the universe was 'officially over', and theologian chair Graham Ward suggested with somewhat unctuous hopefulness that there was going to be a return to the 'sacred' in literature, whatever he meant by that.

Then there were questions from the floor. A woman stood up and spoke for a long time about her faith and how it had led her to write a novel which she hadn't yet had published and she wondered if Wood and Amis could imagine a heaven which we think of as heaven but which for the people inside it wasn't heaven at all - which seemed to be the subject of her novel; but it was hard to follow what she was saying and she realized it and finally said 'If you follow me,' and the people behind me started giggling, but Amis suavely said he followed her perfectly and gave an answer which in turn I couldn't follow since I couldn't fully work out how it related to her question before he had finished it and the next questioner was invited.

A man stood up and said he was a Pentecostal Christian and he wanted to write a religious novel, and would it be a good idea? Amis rudely told him to ask his 'heavenly father' for help, and Wood came in and in a conciliatory but tentative way suggested he write an allegory, like Tolkien or CS Lewis, who did actually write religious allegories, or well, sort of. And then a woman stood up and said Amis and Wood had been representing religious people wrongly, not all religious people just followed an institution and went to church on Sundays, but I had a funny feeling she was with the woman with the Sunday hat.

And then it was over, and we were told to sit in our seats till the panel had left because 'they had books to sell' and needed to be sitting with them at the bottom of the stairs before we filed down.

I'm sorry, but really I can't give you a good account of what was said. I was far too busy being gob-smacked and sitting there thinking how no one felt the need to couch their references to religion with the word Christian or to literature with the word Western, or mostly to the point, English and American. That in the age when religious fundamentalism should be of urgent interest to literature there was no acknowledgement of this or any sense of the need to address how literature might tackle this now. Indeed, there was only one reference to Islam: in his final condemnation of heaven Amis said he thought that the Muslim heaven was perhaps a good one, and some of the audience laughed. All I could think was that we were sitting there trapped in a Christiancentric universe, with a Christian theologian for a chairman, surrounded by Christian Neo-Gothic carving and soaring wooden arches, and overlooked by the massive organ which, on the occasion of the Literature and Terrorism debate, Tom Chatfield compared to the underside of a fighter plane, but which seemed to me on Tuesday like the towering bars of a gigantic prison.

I tell you, we couldn't get out of that place quick enough - once they let us - and we rushed down the stairs, my companion from UCL telling me in disgust that the open lectures at UCL never had such a low level of engagement or debate - and they didn't make you pay or try and make you buy their books, either.

Short Stories in a Vacuum

I'm invited this Thursday to the award ceremony for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize, and I've been thinking again about the comment made by last year's judge A L Kennedy:

The magazines that used to print stories have largely disappeared and they're left to be harried by endless small-scale competitions that merrily dictate size, content, themes and title options.

I rather think that that word 'merrily' sums up the shift in culture which this situation reflects. I've won one or two short-story competitions, and some writers of my acquaintance have won several apiece, and I won't deny that it's great publicity for the writer and great acknowledgment for individual stories when this happens, but this doesn't stop me thinking that a short-story culture primarily generated by competitions is never going to be as serious as that mainly supported by serious literary magazines.

One can't easily write into a vacuum and I would suggest that that's what this recent culture has created, a vacuum, in spite of those defining strictures - titles, themes, etc. These are simply not serious parameters. As I've said before, a serious piece of writing is not primarily characterized by its subject matter (although current marketing trends could have you thinking so). Take any subject - as these single-story competitions do - and you can approach it via any number of literary modes, traditional or experimental, any number of voices or narrative approaches. Writers entering competitions are basically taking pot luck: who knows if the one or two judges (so often writers) brought in, or indeed the anonymous early sifters, will share your literary agenda - or, more to the point, if they don't (since the odds are that they won't) how likely would it be that they'd be prepared to give it a prize however brilliant your story may be on its own literary terms? Personally, I'd never send a story into a competition which I hadn't already written anyway, but I hear all the time of writers writing stories specifically for competitions, and, as I've said before and as I think A L Kennedy is indicating, one wonders what this - a writing life of adapting to expectations which are after all usually only second-guessed- is doing to deflect them from their own potential literary agendas (and to very little avail when they don't win).

A serious literary magazine, on the other hand, will be based on a recognizable literary agenda and provide a nurturing community. (It's true that magazines sometimes run these competitions, but when they do I'd say they are a departure from truly literary concerns and are simply money-making schemes: we don't want your story really - though we'll stick the one the judge chooses in - what we want is your cash. When we were running the short-story mag Metropolitan our funders frequently suggested to us we ran competitions to raise money; for the reasons I'm outlining here we never did). In a climate where a lot of different literary magazines exist the talented short-story writer will usually find a home for his or her stories. I'm thinking of Ambit and the London Magazine, I'm looking back further to mags like Bananas and The Transatlantic Review. But I'm also looking forward and hoping that the forthcoming Horizon Review heralds a new flowering of serious lit mags supported by the web. This new online journal espouses the tradition (it's named after Cyril Connelly's 1940s Horizon) yet its editor Jane Holland looks forward to even greater possibilities afforded by the web:

I’m not interested in becoming too prescriptive about the sort of poetry, fiction, critical prose or literary oddities I’d like to receive from contributors. I’m not positioning myself either left, right or dead centre of the mainstream. What I will be seeking, however, in the work received, is an openness: to the physical, to the wider world, to ideas and language, and to the possibility of failure.

It may seem strange to be discussing failure here. But a willingness to take risks, even quite dangerous ones, is something I admire and encourage in writers. Literature without risk is like a meal without salt: predictable and unappealing. It’s important to bear in mind though that any risks should be based on the percentages, not taken at random or to extremes. Don't try this at home, etc.

I don’t want Horizon to be a cosy refuge for writers looking for allies and a comfortable place to sleep. I want it to prickle with energy, both negative and positive; to challenge preconceptions about the writing of poetry and fiction; to question methods of criticism and modes of thinking in a frank and open manner.

I tell you, I read that and I knew this was the place to send my most recent story (and indeed she accepted it) and I didn't have to send it off to some competition with that sinking feeling of chucking a bottle with a message off a cliff into the sea...

* Postscript: Jane Holland's statement about risk is an important one in relation to the competition culture. As she is implying, the risk of failure is built into experimentation - not only the failure of acceptance created by the conventional expectations of others but true aesthetic failure. But who wants to risk failure in a competition? Thus competitions can contribute towards a conventionalization of our short-story culture...