Strange--but anyway . . .

I no longer live on a smallholding! This feels strange. I no longer know who I am. (A good thing in Buddhist terms, but disconcerting.) However, since this is a blog about writing, this has been a reasonably succesful year. In February I won first prize in the Doolin Writers Competition, Ireland (1000 Euros) with a story called 'Whisky and Halva'. This just shows how long it can take a story to reach its best--I won't say 'final'--form. It started out with a contorted subplot about a hardware shop in Underbank, Stockport, and the terribly symbolic search for a stopcock access cover in cast iron. The cast iron theme is still there, just, but Sidney Biddle's shop--based on Harold Bibby's, I can reveal--had to go. Also I learned from reading stories in recent magazines that you can get away quite nicely with prose in short bursts.
Another story that's been the rounds without sucess has suddenly won second prize in the Sunderland University/Waterstones competition: 'The Hills of Ffostrasol'. Which just goes to show how the tastes of editors and judges vary enormously. (Yes, all right, we all knew that.)  Two others have been on shortlists. (Excuse me while I go to a Kadampa meditation group in Manorowen, after which I feel more philosophical about being so crap at badminton.) 'My Life With Eva'--the title story of a collection Parthian are bringing out next year--was shortlisted in last year's Ilkley Literature Festival, and 'Always a Bit of a Loser' in this year's. My short play 'Touching the Tree' which had an unsatisfactory production at the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff, has just appeared in Bare Fiction Magazine. 
Now I'm working on two fairly weird stories, one based on a 1948 school photograph, the other about a guy I remember from an open week at Lauriston Hall commune back in 1975. Why am I telling you all this? You aren't even listening!  

Does anyone read this stuff?

More haiku:

Spring. But in my heart
is a patch of emptiness
the shape of a cat.

The woodpecker pecks
happily although he's got
nothing published yet.

Scintilla 16

Scintilla 16 is a very good read, and I'm not just saying that because I have a poem in it.

Orchards: honourable mention

A very welcome mention in the New York Review of Books on Jan 10, in John Banville's footnote to another Rilke review:

'He was never to feel entirely at home in the language, yet he wrote a large number of poems in French, most of which can be found in two delightful and beautifully translated dual-language volumes, Valaisian Quatrains, translated by Peter Oram (Cardiff, Wales: Starborn, 2008), and Orchards, translated by Peter Oram and Alex Barr (Cardiff, Wales: Starborn, 2011).'

Iain - a new poem

IAIN

The tall, tall, slim French boy stood
in the rain with his back to me, his head
snug in a hood. I thought
for a moment it was Iain, my friend Iain
(two i’s in his name) alive again.

In his attic
we pulled out 78s and it was then
I first heard When They Begin the Beguine

that voluptuous tune. One voluptuous night
we played strip poker with the delicious nieces
of Mrs Lichfield. (Very little flesh
got exposed.) We chased them round the garden

- Iain’s idea. Next day I said
he’d acted like a fool. ‘Did they say that?’

he countered. ‘No, they didn’t.’

In his cellar and in my washhouse

we messed with flowers of suplhur
potassium permanganate, zinc,

and hydrochloric acid, and he told me
(as we reverently studied
Griffin and Tatlock’s catalogue of flasks,
beakers, pipettes, burettes, Liebig condensers,
all in voluptuous virgin Pyrex)
that Norma, whom we met on the cricket field
one rosy summer evening
and whom I ached for, really fancied me.

It was a lie.

In Barr’s Private Army
(we were eleven then) he was lance-corporal
but later in the Queen’s Own Khaki Squaddies
only a private. Nonetheless he claimed,
‘I’m dating the Colonel’s daughter.’

Was that a lie? I see him saying it,
hair butchered by the regimental barber,
tall, horse-faced, outside the Jolly Sailor
with great aplomb. On that same spot
I learned that he had died, at forty-two.

The French boy turned, and oh, he wasn’t Iain.

Late one afternoon
returning to the Scout camp from a hike
(it seems we’d lost the rest of our patrol)
he made us do a three-mile detour
along a country lane. I counted telegraph poles

to deal with weariness. When I complained he said,
with all the authority of his extra year,

‘Scouts do things the hard way.’

 

Stories that have appeared so far

I'm listing my stories that have appeared so far so anyone interested in joining me to form a writing group can see what I’ve been doing. I’ve only listed stories, not poetry or plays, which is why there appear to be long gaps.

In 2011 ‘Homecoming’ won joint second place in the Willesden Herald short story competition and ‘Rich Bitch’ was runner-up in the Oxford Editors competition.

‘My Stopwatch’ appeared in New Scientist in 2007, and ‘Trouble’ in Stand in 1997.

In 1996 ‘The Visitor’ was broadcast on Radio 4, ‘Snaps’ appeared in Paris Transcontinental, ‘We Practice French with M. Tigny’ in Metropolitan, and ‘Whole’ in Staple.                                   

‘The Fan’ appeared in the Bridport Prize Anthology in 1995.

‘The Smell of Happiness’ was broadcast on Radio 4 in 1994.                       

In 1994 ‘Doing It’ appeared in The Affectionate Punch and ‘Romey and Jullit’ in Stand.

Way back in 1983 ‘And Gnashing of Teeth’ appeared in Iron magazine. Around then another story whose title I forget won a small Bridport Prize (the judge was John Fowles). And in 1981 ‘The Mouse’ won first prize in the Radio Piccadilly children’s short story competition in Manchester.