Issue 24, containing www.beingasheep.wordpress.com is now available for purchase from Blue Mesa Review
Fiction
The Lumberjack and The Sheep: Nashville Review Spring 2011
Magazine PublicationsThis story was inspired by a restaurant/tourist attraction in Clayton, Georgia called Goat on the Roof. You can read it online: Nashville Review Spring 2011
The Mid-American Review
Magazine PublicationsRelease, a short story set in the fictional Welsh village of Gorwedd Gwyn, is to be published in the Fall edition of Mid-American Review. This is one of thirteen stories that I have been working on over the last few years for my debut short story collection.
Blue Mesa Review Publication
Magazine PublicationsDark Tales Short Story Competition – Short Listed
Competition ResultsShort story, This is Oxford Road, has been shortlisted for the June 2010 Dark Tales short story contests:
June 30th Deadline
1st – Quickening by Anthony Murray
2nd – The End of Science by Raymond Little
3rd – The Affair by Fionna Barr
Also shortlisted:
This is Oxford Road by Chris Smith
Samuel by Stephen McQuiggan
Winner of Spike the Cat’s Flash Fiction Competition
Competition ResultsA Goat is a 200 word story which won Spike the Cat’s Flash Fiction Competition (word limit 200 words). A Goat is being published in Spikes Hot Flashes (ebook) along with the runners up.
The book can be purchased at Spike-the-Cats website by clicking on the cover to the right.
Long-listed for Brit Writers Award
Competition ResultsOne of my stories made it to the final 30, but I don’t know which one. It’s a great competition though!
Quasimodo – The Manchester Review
Magazine PublicationsIssue Four of The Manchester Review – published Quasimodo. Read Ian McGuire’s editorial below:
Welcome to the fourth issue of The Manchester Review.
This issue of The Review features the work of several established, indeed world-famous, authors alongside that of young writers who are at the very beginning of their careers. We are delighted to be able include an excerpt from Martin Amis’s eagerly awaited twelfth novel The Pregnant Widow, as well as a startling new short story from Craig Raine, and a fascinating and rare interview with Booker Prize winner Roddy Doyle. At the same time we are equally pleased to be able to provide an outlet for new young voices in the form of powerful stories from Kamila Rymajdo and Chris Smith – two writers who recently graduated from The Centre for New Writing here in Manchester and who are still in their early twenties.
Elsewhere in this issue of The Review we have work that travels widely but never manages to entirely shake off the past. (Perhaps it doesn’t want to). In the case of Chris Andrews’ poems the movement is from Melbourne to Los Angeles, for Thomas McCarthy’s sodden hitch-hiker it is from Brazil to Ballylee and back again, and for the troubled protagonist of Alan Drew’s story it’s from Sudan to the leafy banks of the Thames. Dore Kiesselbach’s poems offer a subtle and allusive commentary on the recent troubling history of Iraq, while in the interludes and waiting rooms of Patrick McGuiness’s work we feel the strange persistence of an old Europe “a leaving/ still entangling in itself years later like the sound of a train/turning the corner.” In the work of Leontia Flynn, Daisy Fried and Brendan Matthews the past is smaller scale, more personalised and individual perhaps, but no less adhesive for all that. We hear of fraternal bonds that can’t be broken, lovers who just won’t “move on” and the apparently trivial mementos (“this box of doodles, bills, old cards and prints”) which can affect us “like a high-kick to the heart.”