Laura Besley, "sum of her PARTS"

Congratulations to Laura Besley, University of Leicester PhD student and MA Creative Writing graduate, whose new collection, sum of her PARTS, has just been published by V. Press!

Laura Besley (she/her) is the author of Sum of her PARTS, (Un)Natural Elements, 100neHundred – shortlisted for the Saboteur Awards – and The Almost Mothers. She is an editor with Flash Fiction Magazine and runs The NIFTY Book Club - a monthly online book club wherein participants read & discuss novellas-in-flash. Currently, she is a Creative Writing PhD student at the University of Leicester. Having lived in the Netherlands, Germany and Hong Kong, she now lives in land-locked central England and misses the sea. Her website is here.    

About sum of her PARTS, by Laura Besley
sum of her PARTS is a collection of 30 micro pieces, each exactly 50 words with a one-word title. They explore female body parts and how they are used and abused by those around them, as well as celebrated.  

You can read more about sum of her PARTS on the publisher's website here. You can read a review of the collection on Everybody's Reviewing here. Below, you can read two sample pieces from the collection. 

From sum of her PARTS

solitary

most days
I like
living alone, 
no one 
to moan
about my
lack of 
culinary skills
or clothes
strewn around; 
only when 
a robin - 
breast aglow - 
frolics in 
a birdbath
or I
almost choke
on a 
piece of 
molten cheese
on toast
do I 
regret certain 
decisions made
long ago.

bold

It's an hour before sunrise when I wake and discover I've turned into a trombone, my body shiny-sleek. I try out my new mouthpiece, a short shy toot at first. Subsequent blows grow in length and volume until I am blaring, brass-band loud. This is my voice. Hear me. Listen. 

Congratulations to Laura Besley!

Many congratulations to Laura Besley, University of Leicester MA Creative Writing student, whose book of micro-fiction, (Un)Natural Elements, has just been published! 

Laura Besley is the author of micro-fiction collections (Un)Natural Elements (Beir Bua Press, 2021) and 100neHundred (Arachne Press, 2021), and flash fiction collection The Almost Mothers (Dahlia Books, 2020).  

She has been listed by TSS Publishing as one of the top 50 British and Irish Flash Fiction writers. Her work has been nominated for Best Micro Fiction and her story, 'To Cut a Long Story Short,' will appear in the Best Small Fiction anthology in 2021. 

Having lived in the Netherlands, Germany and Hong Kong, she now lives in land-locked central England and misses the sea. She tweets @laurabesley.

About (Un)Natural Elements, by Laura Besley

(Un)Natural Elements is a collection of micro fiction – none of the stories longer than 150 words, the shortest being only a handful. Many of the stories were written as tweet-length stories from daily prompts on Twitter under the hashtag: Very Short Story 365 (#vss365). 

While collating them, it became apparent that there were patterns and themes, and also a strong sense of nature. Therefore, the collection is divided into nine elements and each element is comprised of five stories.  

None of the stories have titles. There is no concrete reason for this, except perhaps that, while collating it, it seemed fitting, almost as if a title would detract from the brevity of each piece. 

You can read more about Un(Natural) Elements on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two sample stories from the book. 

From (Un)Natural Elements

Salt 

III

Tangs of sea-salt air and vinegar-drenched chips lure me to my home town. 

A charity shop window displays my mother’s dinner service and I realise she’s dead. 

Overhead, gulls cry. 

Skin

I

It’s everywhere. It’s there when I close my eyes to go to sleep at night. It’s in my dreams. It’s the first thing I see when I wake up in the morning. It’s stenciled onto my retina, overlaying all the good memories I have of my daughter. It’s there when I recall her body with bruises in all the wrong places. 

That smile is everywhere.

 

That it-wasn’t-me smile; that I-know-people-in-high-places smile; that released-due-to-inconclusive-evidence smile. 

The same smile I saw fade just before I cut it from his face. 

At home, I pull down my daughter’s childhood worry box and blow off the dust which curls and dances in the quiet of her room. I open the lid, and without looking at the faded notes in her child-like scrawl, put the smile inside. ‘All gone,’ I whisper, just like I always did, and put the box back on the shelf. 

(Previously published as ‘Silenced’ in Emerge Literary Journal and nominated for Best Micro Fiction).

Laura Besley, "The Almost Mothers"

Laura Besley writes short (and very short) fiction in the precious moments that her children are asleep. Her fiction has appeared online (Fictive Dream, Spelk, EllipsisZine) as well as in print (Flash: The International Short Story Magazine) and in various anthologies (Adverbally Challenged, Another Hong Kong, Story Cities). The Almost Mothers is her first collection and is published by Dahlia Publishing.

About the book
The Almost Mothers by Laura Besley is a flash fiction collection exploring the theme of motherhood.

A first-time mum struggles with her newborn baby. An alien examines the lives of Earth Mothers. A baby sleeps through the night at long last.

Written with raw honesty, Laura Besley's debut flash collection, The Almost Mothers, exposes what it really means to be a mother. 

Below, Laura talks about the experience and process of writing the book. 


Writing The Almost Mothers 
By Laura Besley

I stopped writing for about a year after having my eldest son. Not because I wanted to, but because I was exhausted: physically, mentally, emotionally, and it left no space for anything else. When I started writing again, in fits and starts, one of the first pieces I wrote was ‘The Motherhood Contract.’ Elspeth, the main character, is not me, but like me, she is struggling with becoming a mother, and making sense of her world now that she is a mother. 

As I started writing more, I noticed that I had a growing number of pieces about motherhood, with different characters, covering different facets of motherhood, and in 2018 I did FlashNano (write a piece of flash fiction for every day of November) and most of these pieces were about motherhood too. In December 2018 I put the collection together to enter into a competition. It was long-listed and this gave me the confidence to submit to Dahlia Books when Farhana Shaikh, editor and director, put out a call for submissions in April 2019.  

There’s been a surge in ‘honest’ writing about motherhood, something I felt was lacking only five or six years ago when I first became a mother. There was an expectation of motherhood and the gap between that and reality, I felt at least, was insurmountable. I’d like to think that the overall message of this collection is honesty; we’re not all going to find it easy. 

Here’s an extract from one of the stories:


From ‘The Motherhood Contract.’

You must not tell the mother-to-be that she will lose herself.

Elspeth feels cheated. No-one warned her that she would no longer recognise herself: physically, mentally, and in every other way. She looks in the mirror and wonders who that person is with pale skin and massive purple globs under her eyes; lank and greasy hair; and a body that still looks six months pregnant months after birth.

Meeting her old friends no longer holds appeal as she has nothing to talk about but the baby, and their frustrations seem so trivial. Meeting the women from her antenatal class is unappealing because all they talk about is babies. And going out without the baby isn’t an option.