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The Real Louise and Other Stories

My critical and pedagogical interest in the specificity of the short story genre simultaneously shapes and is informed by my creative practice. I am especially interested in the short story’s capacity to fuse past and present which in my critical work I relate to Bergsonian concepts of time as duration. I research the form through my reading of my peers and predecessors, notably Alice Munro, Katherine Mansfield and Helen Simpson. Their influence can be traced not through direct imitation but through an awareness of the genre’s potential, and especially this temporal fluidity, which is evident in my own stories through their elliptical structure, the compression of language and heightened imagery. The stories included in this collection represent the range of my work. Some have their origins in formal experimentation. ‘November’ interweaves fact and fiction, piecing together observations from a walk round a Liverpool park, a fictionalized account of a hit and run death, newspaper snippets, quotations from Handel’s Messiah and excerpts from other ‘found’ sources. ‘Sex Etc’ is a fragmented fictional diary which reflects on its own on-screen construction, and uses wordplay through its deliberate misspellings. Other stories, e.g. ‘Her Old Self Again’, are relatively linear in construction, and are more obviously plot-based than these examples, but all of my fiction is marked by rapid temporal shifts and the deliberate courting of ambiguity.