Laura Windley One and Only Girl began life as an exercise in a long-ago workshop, and then lurked for a some time inside a folder-within-a-folder somewhere on my laptop before I rediscovered the paragraph and finally expanded it into a full story. Maybe it’s just an excuse for procrastination on my part, but my stories,…
Robert Minhinnick Issue Four / Spring features ‘June 20: The Ratling’ and ‘June 24: Razors’, two possible excerpts from Utopia Street. This work references climate change and mass migration without attributing causes. The whole is fiction, fragmentary, unscientific, and features characters inhabiting the duneland of Swansea Bay. There are few crowds, many individuals. The main participants…
Carol Lipszyc To write about the process of writing poetry is to unlock a puzzle. The late poet, Richard Hugo, accomplished just that feat in his seminal collection of essays, The Triggering Town (1979). There, Hugo conceptualized that a poem has two subjects, the “initiating or triggering subject, which starts the poem or causes the…
Pia Ghosh Roy You’re at a desk putting words on paper, but you’re not really there at all. You’re somewhere else. You’re hovering. Writing is hovering. You’re mid-air, with an aerial-view of your imperfect characters living their imperfect lives. And as you spy, you try and document them with as much honesty as you can.…
Valerie Sirr ‘But it’s true, it’s how it happened!’ is a phrase often heard in writing workshops. It can be difficult to accept that the faithfully recorded facts of one’s experience, however harrowing, are not what make good fiction even when the writer has attempted to fictionalise their own reality by handing it over intact…
I work part-time in a university library, stacking shelves, and Janet Norbury was inspired – as they say – by ‘actual events’; I saw a name on the door of an empty office. So prompted, it didn’t take long for the themes of the story to present themselves.
Marie Gethins One of my internet wanderings turned up a series of History Channel clips on the Crusades. I had been reading articles on the Syrian refugee crisis around the same period. So I began to ruminate on cultural categorisations, motivations, and intransience. What people often cling to when they try to make sense of…
On the surface, the thing that most strongly links these three poems is that they have a lot of weather in them; a lot of sky. One of the things I most love about Grasmere is the sky: its ever-changing moods; the complexity of its little-lit darkness; the long summer light; the sharpness and excess of stars on a crisp night, when you can see the milky way.
Susie Wild I had the kernel idea for this short story a while ago, not long after finishing the promo for my debut story collection The Art of Contraception, and I certainly think it fits in that ilk of my writing – quirky or eccentric people in fairly mundane or lonely daily life situations. It…
Nigel Jarrett First-person narratives, except for the impossibly superhuman feat they display of recalling in detail what lots of characters said over a long period, are the closest the reader gets to authenticity. They should be acts of ventriloquism, in which the writer assumes a persona, including the all-important trait of unconsciously betraying the narrator’s…
Neil Campbell I never have a plan for a short story. I start with either an image or a one line idea. For ‘The Sparkle of the River Through the Trees’, which started out as ‘Coming Home’, then became ‘The Sparkling of the River Through the Trees’, before I finally settled on the present title,…
Bethany W. Pope Writing is a form of playful exploration. It is a way of packing up your bag, settling your machete into the sheathe on your belt, and plunging out into the wilderness to learn just a little bit more about the world you inhabit while having an adventure. When I write a short…
Alan McMonagle It’s 4am, late September, and I am at the station in Ljubljana, Slovenia, waiting for the bus that will take me to Trieste from where I will fly home. I had been staying with the Slovenian writer and my good friend, Cvetka Bevc. We’d met at the Fundación Valparaiso in Spain earlier that…
Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch My poem Six Secrets of Ivy is part of a sequence that was composed during an Arts Council Creative Wales Award which I won last year to examine how the 16 and 32 beat rhythms of tango might influence my new work. Creative Wales Awards are granted to mid-career artists to enable them…