"Dog Collar" - A Short Story by Oonagh Montague - 10 Pages - included with Cork Stories - Edited by Madeleine D’Arcy & Laura McKenna - 2024 -

Irish Short Story Month XIII 2024

April to ?

  "Dog Collar" - A Short Story by Oonagh Montague - 10 Pages - included with Cork Stories - Edited by Madeleine D’Arcy & Laura McKenna - 2024 - Is the sixth work from Cork Stories upon which I have so far posted.

If your life has ever at least partially revolved around a dog then "Dog Collar" perfectly depicts such a highly emotional relationship. The married with children woman on whom the story centers seems at times closer and more honest with her dog, Sid, than to her husband or children.

"Sid looks like a happy dog. He’s a small terrier with tufted black fur and a jaunty, uncut tail. There’s a red scarf around his neck. The scarf and tail lend him a rakish come-at-melife countenance, but this is not who Sid is. He’s a furred barometer of grief, and wherever she goes, he is watching. When her mood dips, he begins to tremble, trailing her from room to room, studying her face as if she were the weather and he a lone skiff. On the days when tears she doesn’t feel pool at the corners of her eyes, Sid finds a shoe of hers and pees in it. If, like today, she has waited till the house empties, till her husband has left for work and the boys for school, waited till the door clicked shut, the air stilled and she with it, so that she can let her smile slide off her skin into the breakfast things, Sid begins to whimper, and the sound of it fills her with a quiet and pointless rage."

The story explores via her interaction with a priest on whether or not she considers 

Oonagh Montague is a writer from Cork, Ireland. A former journalist and editor of Arts Ireland, her short stories have been included in 'Winter Papers' (Curlew Editions), the anthology ‘Cork Stories’ (Doire Press) and the 2024 Bournemouth Writing Festival flash winners’ anthology, ‘Lines in the Sand’. She was also awarded third place in the 2024 AIS Creative Writing Awards, judged by Prof Sarah Moore Fitzgerald, Donal Ryan, Roddy Doyle and Marion Keyes.

Whether you are just getting started in Irish Short Stories or have been an 

avid reader for fifty years, Cook Stories, published by Doire Press, will delight you with 18 Stories.

The best way to purchase this marvelous collection is via the Publisher Doire Press 

https://www.doirepress.com

Mel Ulm

The Reading Life

 

"A Purple Dote" - A Short Story by Tadhg Coakley - - included with Cork Stories - Edited by Madeleine D’Arcy & Laura McKenna - 2024 - An Irish Short Story Month Work

 Irish Short Story Month XIII 

March and April - 2024

Today's Story, "A Pure Dote"' by Tadhg Coakley, a resident of Cork originally from Mallow,  is the second of the eighteen stories 

included with Cork Stories - Edited by Madeleine D’Arcy & Laura McKenna - 2024 - 

It is my intention to post upon each of the stories.

"A Purple Dote" focuses on what happens within a family when the forty year old father develops early dementia.  Coakley with depressing at times vermilitude details how it changed the marriage, how his children forced into being a parent to their father reacted.  The family had been financially secure before but now the wife must deal with government and medical authorities to survive.

 "‘Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me?’ Try telling that to someone diagnosed with early onset dementia in the prime of his life, with a wife and three young kids and a mortgage. Try telling it to his wife and children, his friends and family. Then you’ll know what hurt is. Nuala knew what hurt was. Hurt was the love of your life turning into a helpless child, so that you have to look after him every day and sleep beside him every night and feed him and wash him..entitlement, every support, waiting on phone lines, standing in queues, filling out online forms, swallowing the shame of the hand-outs she never in her life expected that she would be forced to accept."

From website of Tadhg Coakley 

"I am the author of five books, Before He Kills Again (Mercier Press, 2023), The First Sunday in September (Mercier, 2018); Whatever It Takes (Mercier, 2020), the 2020 Cork One City, One Book choice; and the autobiography of Denis Coughlan, called Everything (Hero Books, 2020) which I co-wrote. My fourth book The Game: A Journey into the Heart of Sport (2023) was shortlisted as Sports Book of The Year. 

My short stories, articles, and essays have been published in The Stinging Fly, The Winter Papers, The Irish Examiner, The Irish Times, The42.ie, Aethlon, The Holly Bough, The Honest Ulsterman, Quarryman, Silver Apples and elsewhere."

https://tadhgcoakley.ie/

Whether you are just getting started in Irish Short Stories or have been and avid reader for fifty years, Cook Stories, published by Doire Press, will delight you with 18 Stories.

The best way to purchase this marvelous collection  is via the Publisher Doire Press 

https://www.doirepress.com/

"God and Ants" - A Short Story by Steve Wade - a Irish Short Story Work

"God and Ants" - A Short Story by Steve Wade - a Irish Short Story Work 

Irish Short Story Month XIII 

March and April - 2024

I am very pleased to once again feature one of Steve Wade’s award-winning stories during Irish Short Story Month.

I have been following the work of Steve Wade since March of 2013.  Reading all his work for the last ten years is my sincerest demonstration of my high regard for his work

His debut collection can stand with the masters of the Irish Short Story.

  Gateway To Steve Wade on The Reading Life 

Website of Steve Wade 

A Wide Ranging Q and A Session With Steve Wade 

This is the ninth  short story by Steve Wade that has been featured on The Reading Life.  The fifth  from his debut collection.

As “Gods and Ants” opens Alfred working on a painting of a boatin the harbour.  As he paints people strolling about ask him why the painting shows a different number of windows

on the boat than they see. Of course like any artist he does not take kindly to this.  He begins to imagine art connoisseurs and visiting Parisians at “encountering the painting during Alfred P. Parkinson’s first major art exhibition, which would one day be staged in Sacre Coeur, would experience thescene’s essence. He saw them marvelling at the paradise island blue sky and the more sombre blue reflecting in thesea below into which the overwhelmed sun bled white-gold. On their tongues the coastal-air saltiness blends with the plaintive sound of the gulls screaming their interminable plea before the endless sea. And the boats – patient, rusting leviathans, whose white, multi-eyed cabins have witnessed countless fishing adventures far out in the cormorant-black sea, watched over by a yellow moon, hours before the dawn spills across the horizon.”

His vision of his future exhibit is interupted by people strolling by. Of course he is offended by their philistine  observations on his work.

“The few aimless evening strollers who had gathered tentatively around Alfred and his easel pulled in others. They swarmed about him like ants crawling over a fallen raptor, flightless, though not yet dead. Their presence and proximity interfered with his concentration. Time and discipline was his defence – Gods were not peeved by Ants”. 

Arnold begins to imagine his work is great art.  Then something happens.

“Gods and Ants” is as I expected it would be,a perceptive, interesting and fun to read story.

About the Author - Steve Wade’s award-winning short fiction has been widely published in literary magazines and anthologies. His work has been broadcast on national and regional radio. He has had stories short-listed for the Francis McManus Short Story Competitionand for the Hennessy Award. His stories have appeared in over fifty print publications, including Crannog, New Fables, and Aesthetica Creative Works Annual. His unpublished novel, On Hikers’ Hill was awarded First Prize in the abook2read.com competition, with Sir Tim Rice as the top judge. He has won First Prize in the Delvin Garradrimna Short Story Competition on a number of occasions. Winner of the Short Story category in the Write by the Sea writing competition 2019. His

short stories have been nominated for the PEN/O’Henry Award, and for the Pushcart Prize.

From the Author’s  introduction 

“The stories in this collection first appeared in anthologies and periodicals. Some of them have won prizes or have been placed in writing competitions. Ostracised by betrayal, isolated through indifference, gutted with guilt, or suffering from loss, the characters in these twenty-two stories are fractured and broken, some irreparably. In their struggle for acceptance, and their desperate search for meaning, they deny the past”

A very worthy edition to the reading list of all lovers of the short story.

Mel Ulm

 

"Fire Starter" - A Short Story by Alan McCormick - 2022 - An Irish Short Story Month XIII Work

Irish Short Story Month XIII 

"Fire Starter" is the first story by the highly awarded Wiclow resident Alan McCormick to be featured in The Reading Life.  Going forward I hope to delve deeply into his work.

"Fire Starter" is set in an asylum of some sort, the exact location and nature of it are a  bit cloked in shadows. Conventional religion is employed as part of the therapy"

"Theo thinks he’s Christ.  At my first attempt to eat breakfast in the retreat’s communal dining room, he’s shouting:

‘I can save some of you but I won’t be able to save all of you!’

‘That’s fine, Theo, do whatever you can,’ Simon the warden replies, pulling him away

Later, as I try to eat, I hear sobbing coming from the lounge.

Simon’s head appears around the doorway: ‘Theo has had an unfortunate accident, kids,’ he says, ‘and won’t be staying with us for a while.’

Simon’s wife, Ursula, wears tight purple leggings that smell of citrus and sandalwood. She looks young for fifty, and speaks as if she’s a WW2 German spy expertly repeating dated bookish English, a Teutonic phrase occasionally intervening between exacting vowels and corrective grammar. She is also a healer.

I lie on my bed, eyes closed, head propped on a mound of pillows as she kneels beside me, lightly stroking my left temple, my face turned into the soapy incense of her legs, soothing purples filling my eyelids.

‘Breathe in the calm beautiful energy of God’s nature. God loves you if you are good, and he loves you even more if you are bad. God loves you and so does everyone else.’

‘Even Theo?’

‘Especially, this Theo,’ she replies."

The narrator is a patient, inmate  at the asylum.  There is a very powerful description of a therapy session.

I do not want to spoil the plot for first time readers but I do wish to share a bit more the amazing prose of McCormick.

"Tall red spikes of light jag above a bush behind them, and Theo arrives on the lawn swinging a flaming stick above his head. He runs past Saskia who dances unsteadily around an upturned wheelchair. Sparks scatter, the crackling sound of scorched wood; the pungent smell of sulphur as he gets near to us. Ruth walks purposefully from the house to stand in his way, licks from the stick’s flame reflected in her eyes. She holds out her arms to welcome him. Theo stops and prods the stick toward her, flickers of fire falling to the ground and dying by her feet. She stays still, her arms held open, and smiles. Theo drops the stick and walks slowly into her embrace. She holds him, and then frees one arm to invite me in too."

You can read "Fire Starter" and other stories on author's website 

https://alanmccormickwriting.com/

Alan McCormick lives with his family in Wicklow. He’s a Trustee and former writer in residence for InterAct Stroke Support, a charity employing actors to read fiction and poetry to stroke patients.

His writing has won prizes and been widely performed and published, including recently in The Stinging Fly, Banshee, Southword, Sonder and Exacting Clam magazines, and previously in Salt’s Best British Short Stories, A Wild and Precious Life – A Recovery Anthology, Modern Nature Anthology – Responses to Derek Jarman’s Modern Nature, The Poetry Bus, The Bridport and Fish Prize Anthologies, Popshot, Litro and Confingo.

Work has appeared online at Epoque Press, Words for the Wild, 3:AM Magazine, Dead Drunk Dublin, Trasna, Mono, The Quietus, Fictive Dream, The Willesden Herald and Found Polaroids.

His story ‘Firestarter’ came second in the 2022 Francis MacManus RTE Short Story Competition and ‘Boys on Film’ came second in The 2023 Plaza Prizes Sudden Fiction competition. Stories in the past have won the Ruth Rendell InterAct Stroke Support Story Competition, The Liverpool International Short Story Competition and the Middlesex Literary Festival Story Prize.

DOGSBODIES and SCUMSTERS , his collection of short stories with flash shorts inspired by Jonny Voss’s pictures, was published by Roast Books and long-listed for the Edge Hill Prize.  

Alan and Jonny also collaborate on illustrated shorts known as Scumsters – see more at Deaddrunkdublin and Scumsters.blogspot  

"The Big River" - A Short Story by Desmond Hogan - 2017 - An Irish Short Story Month XIii Post

 Irish Short Story Month XI

Today's Story, "The Big River" is included in the most recent collection of short stories by Desmond Hogan, The History of Magpies.

Shauna Gilligan's Highly Illuminating Introduction to  Desmond Hogan

http://rereadinglives.blogspot.com/2012/06/desmond-hogan-irelands-most-famous.html

I have been reading Desmond Hogan for 12  years now.  I take his work very seriously.  I was first introduced to his work by Shauna Gilligan, PhD, author of Happiness Comes From Nowhere.  Through her kindness I met Hogan in May of 2003, at the office of Lilliput Press.  We spoke of two authors for whom we share great admiration, Nathaneal West and Zora Hurston, among other things.

"We were here when the Christians first came to Ireland and we will be here when they leave" - A proverb of Irish Travellers 

A considerable portion of the work of Desmond Hogan focuses on Irish Travellers.  Irish travellers have an ancient history.   They Are  acknowledged as an ethnic group.

Travellers play an important part in "The Big River", numerous suicides mostly by hanging are alluded to in the story,

"‘Shannon Crotty was my cousin. He hung himself. His wife Ethlinn Flavin from Knocknaheeny in Cork hung herself before him. Her brother Besty hung himself in between them. A lot of Travellers are hanging themselves now. One man because he had cancer. A girl because she was pregnant and did not want her father to know it."

(Amusingly in the Comedy TV series Derry Girls Travellers are depicted as dangerous and terrifying.)

Hogan makes extensive use of colour and references to historical-cultural entities in "The Big River" which I find fascinating:

"In their trailer the newly weds had a picture of two elephants kissing, horns wrapped around one another’s trunks: a photograph of Santa Claus presenting a cup for hurling to Shannon as a child, in a black bow tie; the dead Hunger Striker Martin Hurson with miner’s locks, white shirt, white tie, smile reserved for weddings; a statue of Saint Patrick with ashen hair and peach lips; a parrot with flaked red head; a pair of beige polka-dot wellingtons; a donkey and four Edwardian children, boy in young Edward VIII cap, clinging to a little girl’s waist on top of the donkey"

I hope to post on other stories by Desmond Hogan during ISSM XIII.

Mel Ulm

"Fictive Dreams" - A Short Story by Brian Kirk - August 2017. Iish Short Story Month XIII

Irish Short Story Month - XIII

I first observed Irish Short Story  in March 2011.  Irish Literature and history is an important aspect of The Reading Life.

I first encountered the work of Brian Kirk in March 2013, during ISSM III.  One of the reasons I have continued on with ISSM for eleven years is to provide me with the motivation to keep reading writers as supremely talented and perceptive as Brian  Kirk, watching them develop, expand and keep up the grand tradition of the Irish Short Story.  I posted on two short stories by Brian Kirk in 2013 and with the post you are now reading have posted on two of his short stories in 2018. 

 We also did a very wide ranging Q and A session in 2013.  (There are now four links to stories by Kirk in posts on his work on my blog, all of which I strongly recommend to lovers of the form.)  

"Fictive Dreams" can be read at

 

www.briankirkwriter.com

"Fictive Dreams", told in the first person, relays the late teenage years of an aspiring young poet.  He is from a large family with numerous siblings, none at all a bit orienteering toward literary or intellectual pursuits. He lives a brief train ride from Dublin, the Emerald City of young Irish poets.  After high-school as his parents cannot afford college, he gets a job working on a farm.  

He has a mentor, a middle-aged aged gay man who sees himself riding to success as a literary agent on the young man's already one highly regarded poem.  

I do not want to divulge much of the intriguing plot.  I will share the opening of the story in order to convey a sense of the elegance of the work.

"There were times when I wished I was an only child. Sometimes I thought that if my parents were to die suddenly, in a freak accident or by some mysterious but swift illness, I would not grieve too sorely for them. I loved them both, of course, but at the same time I yearned for the certain changes, the endless possibilities, their deaths would surely bring.

I come from a big family, but worse, I am the youngest, the baby, the runt of the litter. I can never decide which of these pithy descriptions I like least. In the first case, even now as a young man, I am immediately infantilized, and in the second derided as being physically weak – which I must admit I am relative to many of my peers.

Even before my English teacher, Mr. McIntosh, singled me out for praise, I sensed I was different. My mother had always doted on me, her youngest, and gave me to think I was special, in a way that was always unspecified. But, at the same time, I was equally alive to my limitations, acutely aware of the possibility that I might be just another nobody. For this reason I sought to create the special person that I felt must surely live within me by altering my external appearance, and in so doing I became strange in the eyes of my family, my friends, my peers and the whole town.

The town was part of the problem. It encompasses the geographical site of the houses, shops and streets that make it up, but it also includes the surrounding town lands, the houses and farms, and more particularly all of the people who reside therein. It’s not that I disliked the town, but I savoured each moment I spent away from it. When I finished school I began to make regular trips to Dublin on the train and I relished those journeys."

His website has a detailed biography and links to this and other of his stories

http://briankirkwriter.com

I hope to follow the work of Brian Kirk for many years.

Mel Ulm

The Reading Life

The Scattering -A Collection of Short Stories by Jaki McCarrick - A Post in Observation of Irish Short Story Month

The Scattering - A Collection of Short Stories by Jaki McCarrick (2013, 235 pages)

March 1 to March 31

Jaki McCarrick

Dundalk

Posting on a collection of short stories presents more of a challenge, to me at least, than posting on a novel.    For me I find the best way to write about a collection of short stories, both in terms of assisting  possible readers or buyers of the collection and respecting the writer, is by  posting in some detail on a representative number of the stories and then make some general observations on the collection and offer my thoughts to prospective readers.

  For those in a hurry, I will say The Scattering - A Collection of Short Stories by Jaki McCarrick is an amazing body of work, withing shimmering and incredibly entertaining stories that go deep into the heart of many of the issues facing contemporary Ireland.  This book deserves tremendous success and a very wide readership.  It both confirms and rises above the common elements of the Irish short story I have spoken about this month;; the weak or missing father, the presence of the stage Irishmen, the uneasiness of the relationships of men and women,  the heavy reliance on alcohol, the temptation toward arrogance as a way of dealing with the humiliating consequences of colonialism, the obsession with death, and the false rebellions of posers of all sorts.  

"By The Black Field"

"There were times when Angel thought that the land
communicated with him. He knew that this was irrational, and
probably due to overwork, and to the fact that he had not yet lost
his city-born infatuation with green fields (and also, possibly,
because he’d spent his childhood summers in this place and had
fond and lively memories of it). He imagined that after a few
more years on the farm he’d be as hard nosed towards the land
as every other farmer he knew. Still, he could not dispel the sense
he had that wherever he went on his six acres he was not alone."

"By The Black Field", the lead story, gets this collection of to a marvelous start.  It is set on a six acre farm in Ireland, up near the border with Northern Ireland.  Angel not to long ago inherited the farm and he and his wife not to long ago moved back there from London. Angel loves working the farm but he misses the excitement of London and his wife misses it more than he does.    As the story opens he is building a fence on some wet land and he is thinking maybe he should have built a stone wall.  He and his wife live in an old cottage but all their neighbors live in modern houses.  This is a story, in an oblique way of how a returning exile feels a deeper connection with Ireland than those who never left.  (You can see this some of the better short stories of George Moore also.)  Like any short story  master McCarrick gets us interested in the people in the story (there is something different about them and I loved how this was slipped into the story so subtly), we learn a bit about their life history, a sort of conflict with a neighbor the man does not like, she reminds him of the things he does not like about London, then something big happens. We are left with a mystery as to exactly what did occur but that just makes the story all the better.  "By The Black Field" is a wonderful story, it also give you a kind of feel for what can be the darker side of Ireland, never far from the surface.  Death has been my constant companion this month as I read Irish Short Stories and he is with me today.  I do not mind him so much as I once did.  

"The Badminton Court"

"She says little at breakfast. The evening before she had been
on fire. Rapid, erratic thoughts, unfinished sentences, sentences
that unravelled, ending in lacunae, gibberish. She had been
rude, her inhibitors obstructed by that thing, growing,
multiplying inside her. Tumour talk, Frances calls it."

"The Badminton Court" is a very moving story about a debt repaid through service to seventeen year old Miranda, dying of a brain tumor. It is a story of the memories of twenty two years ago when the narrator never dreamed these would be her happiest times.  Her father is rich and always away on business trips an her mother is simply gone and no one ever speaks of her.  There are two people taking care of Miranda.  One is Francis, a household servant of long standing and the other is the daughter of a man who was in debt to Miranda's father for some dubious business deals and somehow the debt is being paid by his adult daughter being Miranda's final companion.  This is a tale which can only end one way or another in death.  It is also about how happiness comes often from small seized moments of joy as shown in these wonderful lines spoken twenty years after an amazing act of kindness and cruelty is committed.  We never quite know why but that works perfectly.

"Once he asked if I was happy. Before I had the chance to
reply, he said his own life had been good and prosperous, but
hardly happy. Mine was the same, I said. What is happiness? he
asked, as if I knew any better than he. I pondered on this. For
me, I said, happiness is two girls playing badminton under an
azure sky with clouds that are bird-shaped. Those summers
were best, he replied, when I used to watch you play. It occurred
to me then, that for nearly a quarter of a century we had both
been sustained by a few intoxicating memories squirrelled from
our youth. I told him it was high time we lived a little. He agreed
and told me then of his plans to flatten the court."

"The Scattering" 

"Further along the beach he saw a car parked above the dunes.
A woman was standing by the edge of the dunes looking at the
sea. She was holding a blue plastic bag tensely against her
cream coat. He thought of turning back as he was now alone
on this stretch and did not want to alarm the woman, who had
begun her descent to the beach. Suddenly a dog came
bounding towards him. He had seen the exuberant three-legged
collie on the beach many times, always alone, absurdly oblivious
to its missing limb."

"The Scattering", the title story of the collection, like the two prior stories I have posted on have death at its core.  The "plot action", not a phrase I am crazy for, is fairly simple. A man has died and following his wishes his ashes have been scattered in the ocean.  A quick look at images of the Ireland seacoast in Google will reveal lots of dramatic sea shore cliffs that would make an excellent venue from which to scatter ashes in the water.  I suspect this is what often leads to the request.  Maybe it also the fulfillment of a wish while living, to throw oneself in the water.  It is the story of contrasts of two scatterings, one with a large respectable number of people and one with just a woman with a blue plastic jug and a three legged dog for her company.  There is a great deal in this work and I hope you will be able to read it for yourself.  


"The Burning Woman"

"Despite his name, Quigley claimed
no Irish heritage, and John’s Irishness was meaningless to him
as he had left Limerick at fourteen and had never returned. To
find as neighbours two young Irish ‘artists’, was, John told me
later, an enormous relief to him. We gave him hope, he said, that
a gay man with no interest in hurling, in Leinster vs Munster, or
the Irish language, might be able to go home one day without
fear of being strung up. On the basis of our mutual disregard for
any particular nationalism, we four formed a strong friendship,
avoiding Irish haunts in London like the plague despite his name."

I really liked this story.  It begins with an invitation to a funeral.   Sometimes people say they going to someone's funeral means you won and they lost.   The deceased is an artist, from Ireland who moved to London in a time when he had no way to make a living in Ireland.  He made it big time as a painter, living out the dream of the crazy artist, his description makes it seem he looked a bit like Aleister Crowley.  There is just so much to like in this story.  In the figure of the man, who they have not seen or heard from in decades, John, we have the crusty embittered writer raging at the world for its failure to see his genius.  We also have occult elements, pentagrams, paintings of burning women and such.  I do not have a way to talk about what happens in this story without trivializing it so I won't.  It is about exile, about wanting to forget your are Irish, about why Jack Kerouac still matters, about what London means to the Irish, about failure of nerve.  In this  story I came to see the full power of McCarrick, it is deeper, danker and darker than the first three works I spoke about. 

"Blood"

"What are you researching, Lara?’ he asked.
‘Oh. Settlers to this area in the fifteenth century.’
‘From Britain?’
‘No,’ Lara replied, scanning the huge ivory pages. As she did
not elaborate, and as he was afraid to enquire further, Fred
turned to his wastepaper basket and began to sharpen his
pencils. The room seemed to fill with small, intrusive noises:
the trembling chalky sound of the ivory pages being turned, the
pencil shavings hitting the screwed-up balls of paper like rain,
the swish of Lara’s dress each time she moved, her assured slow
breathing."

Like "The Burning Woman", "Blood is in part about an Irish writer.   I have come to see this as kind of a license for eccentric behavior sometimes accompanied by the arrogance mentioned above, almost as if it were on loan from W. B. Yeats and James Joyce to name but a few exemplars.  

One of the characteristics of a society in which the old certainties are dying is a preoccupation with non-standard accounts of history,  occult systems.   One saw this in Ireland when for a time leading figures flirted with the theories of the Order of the Golden Dawn, the Waite Tarot and such.  Knowledge of arcane systems brought with it a feeling of superiority a smugness made all the more annoying as it was parasitic upon the backs, the blood of others for whom they claimed to speak but for whom they had contempt.  There are two on stage characters in "Blood" a simply marvelous, very smart, very funny story that helps explain why vampires are central to Irish culture and why they always seem to be so elitist acting (Carmilla this means you.)  We have Fred, he is a 30 year old who has never done anything but go to school.  His aunt is a world famous researcher into middle Eastern culture  and is often away at international conferences.  She has an incontinent cat and in exchange for taking care of the cat, he gets to live in her mansion.   The mansion contains a library of rare books and manuscripts and Lara has a letter authorizing her to use the library.  She is also female, something Fred has had no personal knowledge of for six years and sees as way to complicated a topic.   He will stick with academia.   Besides the cat, they are the only ones in the mansion so of course they talk.   I want you to read this story (and the whole collection) without it being spoiled for you.   I will just say it is flat out hilarious and you will marvel at the close.  

"Trumpet City"

"There was a danger to what he could smell in the
music, and he liked that. He liked that a lot."

I have recently started reading, after hearing it was chosen as the One City One Book selection for April James Plunket's classic novel set in Ireland in 1913, Strumpet City and I am betting this title is a play on that account of the mean streets of old Dublin.

The crazy musician seeing more in the world than the mundane people of the world do is a standard character in lots if novels and short stories.   This story does a great job with that idea.   The trumpet player dreams of playing in New York City or New Orleans, the holy cities for jazz music.  I believed in his love of music.  The story is also about the changing times in Ireland, the hard times where it is not easy for an aging musician to make a living.   A very good story.   

"The Hemingway  Papers"

"She felt it would be
like reminding him of his enormous failure as a father. That
he’d neither seen to the removal of their furniture from London
to Ireland – nor to the transportation of his own things, that
he’d hung back in London while her mother had reared her and
her siblings alone and that he’d only holed up with them years
later when he’d run out of money. That was the truth of it and
Clare knew that somewhere inside her father, he knew it. But
there was no point in going through all of that again. They had
rowed about it for too many years – about his drinking"

"The Hemingway Papers" is a very good story and almost a text book illustration of the extreme importance of the weak or missing father to Irish literature.  It also is about a man who hid behind drinking and his ability to be a good friend to other men, if not a good husband or father.  Story telling, whether real stories or made up lies also is a big factor in the Irish short story.  Another one is the complications involved in the relationships of adult children to their parents.  In this story the father is in a hospital ward.  For thirty years now he has been claiming he had an extensive correspondence with Ernest Hemingway.  He  had sent Hemingway a number of short stories to read and he had told the father to submit them to his publisher and he will try to help him.  Of course the man never followed up on it and he always told the family he left the letters and stories in a box in an apartment he illegally sublet to somebody when he lived in London.   The daughter somehow tracks down the man who now has the box and she brings it back (spoiler alert) and yes the father was actually telling the truth all those years.  The big story of his life was true. The ending is very suspenseful and I will let you have the pleasure of reading it yourself.

I totally endorse this very Irish collection of short stories with themes that are universal and people that those far from Ireland can see as totally real.

There are eleven  other marvelous stories in this collection, each one a delight to read.   



I want to share the description of the book from Seren Books, the publisher of this and lots of other great books.

The Scattering is a collection of 18 stories, many set on the Irish border, where this London-born author currently lives. These stories explore states of liminality: life on the Irish border, dual identities, emigration, being between states - certainty and doubt, codependency and freedom. Some explore themes of catastrophe and constraint. All explore what it means to be alive in a fraught and ever-changing world. This first collection from prizewinning author and playwright, Jaki McCarrick explores the dark side of human nature, often with a postmodern ‘Ulster gothic’ twist.

One of the stories ‘The Visit’ won the Wasafiri Prize for new fiction, and many have been published to much acclaim in literary magazines.

Author Bio

Jaki McCarrick

Jaki McCarrick lives in Dundalk and studied at Trinity College, Dublin, gaining a Master of Philosophy Degree, Creative Writing – Distinction. Before this Jaki gained a BA Performing Arts, First Class Honours Degree at Middlesex University. She has also completed an RNT Directors Course, 2001.

Jaki is a playwright and short story writer who is also working on a novel. She has won many awards for her work including: Winner of the 2005 SCDA National Playwriting Competition for The Mushroom Pickers; Shortlisted for the Sphinx Playwriting Award 2006, Bruntwood Prize 2006, Kings Cross Award 2007 for The Moth-Hour; Shortlisted for the 2009 Adrienne Benham Award for Leopoldville and the 2009 Asham Award for short fiction for The Congo – in this collection. Most recently her short story The Visit, included in the Badlands collection, won the Wasafiri Prize for New Writing in October 2010 and Jaki was declared the first ever winner of the Liverpool Lennon Paper Poetry competition, which she was awarded by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy. Another story from the collection, Hellbores, was recently shortlisted for both the Fish Short Story award and Bridge House Publishing's World Stopping Event writing prize. Bridge House want to publish that story in a new anthology and it has also appeared in the Irish Pages journal.

Jaki McCarrick's blog jakiscloudnine.blogspot.ie

I hope to read and post on more of her work in the future.  She has kindly agreed to participate in a Q and A Session for Irish Short Story Month so please look for that.

Mel u

“ Creeping” - A Short Story by Pat O’Connor from his debut collection - People in My Brain - 2019

 “Creeping” - A Short Story by Pat O’Connor from his debut collection - People in My Brain - 2019

During the last 18 months, here in Metro Manila, I have been pretty much under lockdown the entire time.  The government has strict regulations and my wife and three adult daughters have imposed stricter ones.  We suffer no material deprivation, while many here do have real food anxieties, I have videos, a virtual and real library, six cats and a newly added Shin Tsu for company.  I am grateful for my privileged situation but sometimes I miss going to the mall, dining out and other things.  Compared to millions who live day to day struggling to survive, like the man in “Creeping”,I am so very fortunate.

I have been working my way through The stories in 

People in My Brain,  creatively a very diverse exciting collection, for the last few months.

Today’s story, “Creeping”, centers on a quite old man, recently widowed.  He lives in a terrible urban slum, nearly dystopic.  Once his neighborhood was not to bad, it all went to hell when his wife Gracie died.  He stays in their house but afraid to Go out to get food because of the children.

“Evening has deepened. Darkness falls. Out in the street, roars and shrieks echo against the walls, the blare of loud cars and motorbikes is angry, ever-changing. I can’t know who might be in the garden. The windows are useless because of the bushes. I dread those windows. I’ve dreamed of sheets of wood, of corrugated iron, so that when they come they must at least come by the door. But corrugated iron is as impossible as anything else.”.

We can feel the old man’s fear.

In just a few pages O’Connor brings us into this horrible world.

From The author’s website

Pat O’Connor lives in Limerick in the southwest of Ireland. He was a joint winner of the 2009 Best Start Short Story Competition in Glimmertrain, and in 2010  he was shortlisted for the Sean O’Faolain International Short Story Prize. In 2011, he was shortlisted for the RTE Francis MacManus Award for radio stories, and won the Sean O’Faolain Prize. In 2012 he was shortlisted for the Hennessy New Irish Writing Award and the Fish Short Story prize.  In 2013 he was longlisted for Over the Edge New Writer of the Year.

His stories have been published in Southword, Revival, Crannóg, The Penny Dreadful, the Irish Independent, the Irish Times, anthologized by the Munster Literary Centre, and broadcast on RTE.

His radio play This Time it’s Different, was broadcast on 95fm as part of the Limerick City of Culture program in 2014.

In autumn 2014, he was one of eight International Writers in Residence in Tianjin, China.

His story Advice and Sandwiches was included in the Hennessy Anthology of New Irish Writing 2005-2015, published by New Island.

"High Flyer” - A Short Story by Steve Wade from his debut collection In Fields of Butterfly Flames and other Stories - 2020 - An Irish Short Story Month Work

 “High Flyer” - A Short Story by Steve Wade from his debut collection In Fields of Butterfly Flames and other Stories - 2020

Irish Short Story Month XIII- 

March and April- 2024

I have been following the work of Steve Wade since March of 2013. I only follow an author for over a decade if I hold their work in high esteem.

This collection can stand with the masters of the Irish Short Story.

  Gateway To Steve Wade on The Reading Life 

Website of Steve Wade 

A Wide Ranging Q and A Session With Steve Wade 

This is the eighth  short story by Steve Wade that has been featured on The Reading Life.  The fourth from his debut collection.I first read his work during Irish Short Story Month Year Three in March of 2013.  I found his short story “The Land of the Ever Young” fully qualified to stand with the great occult fairy tales of Sheridan Le Fanu or Andrew Lang.

“The Land of the Ever Young" recreates and helps us understand the stories of fairies stealing human children and substituting changelings for them.  Part of the root of these stories comes from the famine years where people had to find ways to deal with the starvation of their children.  On another darker side, this story also  treats of the fact that one more hungry child could be the tipping point in a family on the edge of starvation that can  send everyone else into the grave.  

First and foremost 'The Land of the Ever Young" is a tremendous lot of fun to read.  Joseph Sheridan le Fanu or Andrew L)ang have no better stories than this.  

The other  stories covered on The Reading Life show the extent and depth of Wade’s range. (Some of the stories can be read online at links found in my posts)

Today’s story way more than justifies my belief in the immense talent of Steve Wade.

I am slowly working my way through his debut collection, In Fields of Butterfly Flames.  The stories are just so powerful I think you must space them out.  This is my second from his debut collection.

Isabel’s husband of some twenty years recently told her he was ending their marriage.  She is on a train. A handsome younger man is looking at her, checking her out.  She cannot help but enjoy this.

“Isabel remembered this type of look from men. Almost. A look they pretended you weren’t supposed to notice but made quite sure you did. A look she couldn’t remember inspiring for years, not since before she and Don had yet to find each other. Long before Robert existed.”

She is being left financially secure, she gets the house and their son will get his father’s expensive German car, A BMW convertible.  Perfect to impress girls.  He decides to take it for a drive:

“A black BMW convertible. A gift from his father – what a gift. And he had just turned nineteen. The break-up between hismom and dad no longer seemed as crushing as it had been these past months. He climbed down the gears at the sight of a couple of women wheeling strollers in the distance. Always worth a look. Bingo. Yummy-mummies. That’s when the moron in the Golf whizzed past.”

In just a few moments, the gift of Robert will destroy four lives.

In this brief work Wade shows us how fragile life can be.

The closing is one of horror and heartbreak, years of hoped for happiness gone.

About the Author - Steve Wade’s award-winning short fiction has been widely published in literary magazines and anthologies. His work has been broadcast on national and regional radio. He has had stories short-listed for the Francis McManus Short Story Competitionand for the Hennessy Award. His stories have appeared in over fifty print publications, including Crannog, New Fables, and Aesthetica Creative Works Annual. His unpublished novel, On Hikers’ Hill was awarded First Prize in the abook2read.com competition, with Sir Tim Rice as the top judge. He has won First Prize in the Delvin Garradrimna Short Story Competition on a number of occasions. Winner of the Short Story category in the Write by the Sea writing competition 2019. His

short stories have been nominated for the PEN/O’Henry Award, and for the Pushcart Prize.

From the Author’s  introduction 

“The stories in this collection first appeared in anthologies and periodicals. Some of them have won prizes or have been placed in writing competitions. Ostracised by betrayal, isolated through indifference, gutted with guilt, or suffering from loss, the characters in these twenty-two stories are fractured and broken, some irreparably. In their struggle for acceptance, and their desperate search for meaning, they deny the past”

A very worthy edition to the reading list of all lovers of the short story.