in other news…

Sometimes it feels like life is so busy, that it’s easy to forget to celebrate the way that stories and poems find their way out into the world. Towards the end of last year, my short story, ‘Psychology, or The Pram’, was published in Katherine Mansfield and London (Edinburgh University Press). Based on a true story about the experience of my grandparents during the Second World War, it explores their encounter after long absence, and the tragic loss of first one child, and then another. My grandmother gave birth to two daughters, neither of whom lived more than a week. Her third child, again born while my grandfather was away serving as a medic on HMS Cumberland, was my father, born in 1943. I was told this story by my own mother, when I was expecting my first child, and when she wanted to buy me a pram. As we wandered around the department store with its modern array of models, I learnt about my paternal grandmother, and a pram she wouldn't let go…

In her story Psychology, Mansfield explores the multiple tensions between our public and private selves: the question of what to reveal or conceal, and those things it isn’t even possible to articulate, for so many different reasons. First published in the collection Bliss and Other Stories in 1920, her story steps into the conversation developed by Freud and his contemporaries, listening for the whispers of what she called ‘the secret self’. I was commissioned to write a story which could incorporate elements of Mansfield’s’s style, and use her influence as a starting point for something of my own. I chose this story because I love its combination of depth and light touch. Beginning with her words gave me an unexpected framework, one in which the surface tension of grief, and wide gaps of experience, might not be easy to resolve, but one in which the undercurrents might be felt.

In other poetry news, two poems were also shortlisted in October for the Bridport Prize, and three longlisted.