Recently I had two short stories published. One, Some Notes on Container Gardening During the Apocalypse, is a satirical short story I wrote at the beginning of the pandemic, and was published by the excellent American literary magazine The Disappointed Housewife. I knew it would be the right magazine for me to submit this story to when I read that it was looking for stories that ‘that strike us as different, always with that idiosyncratic touch. Iconoclastic. Kind of bent.’ Thank you to The Disappointed Housewife for giving my strange little story a home!
The second, The Sin-Eater, was written and workshopped during the Genre class in my Creative Writing MA and is set in a fantasy world whose inhabitants all experience life through synaesthaesia and whose skin changes colour according to their feelings and sensations. I think it’s one of my most original short stories and am very pleased with it. It was published by the UK based Fudoki Magazine which is an online magazine of myths, legends, fables, fantasy, folklore and fairytales. Fudoki captured stories that were passed down the generations in Japan and ensured they wouldn’t be lost.
Meanwhile our final short story of 2020 will go online tomorrow at Story Radio Podcast – thanks to all the writers, actors and producers who have so generously shared their work, especially to my extremely talented Birkbeck contemporaries Tatum Anderson (The Invisibles) who was Highly Commended in two debut novel awards this year, Miki Lentin (Persepolis, Meringues) who was a Finalist in the Fish Publishing Short Story Award and of course my fellow producer, Martin Nathan (The Edge, Mock Crab, The Vulnerable) who is on the shortlist for two international playwriting awards. I am privileged to have been able to work with all of them during this very difficult year.