Guest Editor, January 2011: Sarah Salway

Short story writers to fall in love with:

How can you pick just some writers? Why should you pick one and not another? The joy of short stories are that they are short enough so you can read more. And more. And then some more. Of as many different authors as you can find. But the best short stories also have limits, so I have limited my choices for every category on this page to five. And in this category, I have picked five alive American women – simply because I love American women, and alive is normally a good state to be…

Ann Beattie, Alice Elliott Dark, Lydia Davis, Karen Russell, Lorrie Moore

Sarah Salway

Sarah Salway is an author, journalist and the co-founder, with Catherine Smith, of Speechbubble Books.

Neil Gaiman has called her ‘the Madonna of writing books’, and her novels include the alphabetically organized Something Beginning With and Getting the Picture, a story of love and pornography in a care home.

Short story websites with a difference:

There are so many fantastic short story pages, just go to the links page of this blog and look them up. So I’ve gone for something different – these are the web pages I often use as creative diving boards. When they work best – such as the clunk I can get from one of Judy Reeves’s inspirational prompts, of Jeffrey Davis’s gentle questions about living – I can jump in at the deep end of my writing. They also help me remember what I love about writing, and that is that it is creative. An art. A passion. And this hot state of desire is a better feeling than any useful rule.

A talk by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi on the State of Flow
A Yoga Writing Coach who pays attention
Keri Smith because I love her
Judy Reeves because she talks sense
Keep calm and read a short story…

But short stories remain her passion. She has won awards for her short stories, two of which have been made into films, and they are collected in Leading the Dance (shortly to be re-published by Speechbubble Books).

She was the co-author (with Lynne Rees) of the acclaimed experimental internet collaboration, Messages, which consisted of 300 pieces of exactly 300 words, and regularly posts 50 word photo-stories on her blog, www.sarahsalway.net. Sarah is currently the RLF Fellow at the London School of Economics, and has previously received two residential fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her latest book – a detective novel - is a collaboration with the playwright, Jerome Vincent, and she teaches regularly at universities and within the community. Sarah is faciliating an Arvon short story week with Tania Hershman at The Hurst in May.

Five must-read single author collections:

These are the five collections I keep coming back to, but are they my favourites? I’m not sure to be honest, but certain stories speak to me louder than most. Carol Shield’s quiet, heartbreaking ‘Soup Du Jour’, when it’s only at the end you realise just how destroyed the characters are, and why. Chekhov’s ‘The Darling’ – surely the best character study ever, ‘A Real Doll’ by A M Homes, true domestic horror, and everything by Munro and Carver. It’s the very individual voices I love in all these, because no one but these authors could have put any of their words next to another of their words in quite the same way.

What else to do with a short story:

Catherine Smith and I set up our short story publishing company, Speechbubble Books, because we wanted a focus for thinking about what else we could do with our short stories, and eventually others.

Of course other people have got there before us – our performances, our postcards - so here are some of them:

Teaching short stories (and writing) with a purpose
Writing them on a postcard
Taking them back to the oral tradition of a storyteller and an audience
Or listening to the Masters through headphones
And, of course, reading them on our phones

Some short story events for January:

* Finish your story for the Treehouse Chapbook competition
* 26th January - enjoy an evening of short stories in Manchester
* Results announced of one of the US’s biggest short story prizes
* Book your place for February’s Get Writing 2011
* Join in the Short Story Reading Challenge at ‘In the Next Room’