rob mclennan, "On Beauty: stories"

 

Born in Ottawa (Canada’s glorious capital city) and raised on a farm near Maxville, Ontario, rob mclennan lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. With recent titles including World’s End (ARP Books, 2023), essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022) and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023), On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024) is his fourth work of fiction, after the novels white (The Mercury Press, 2007) and Missing Persons (The Mercury Press, 2009), and The Uncertainty Principle: stories (Chaudiere Books, 2014). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics and Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal], and co-founded the ottawa small press book fair in fall 1994, which he’s run twice a year on his own since. He is the Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and he regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices on his blog here. 

About On Beauty: stories, by rob mclennan
The thirty-two stories in On Beauty exist as lyrically dense bursts of short prose that move across wide swaths of narrative in compact spaces, offering explorations of characters working through small or large moments. The stories include parenting, pregnancy, the death of a parent, complications between friends, spouses, etcetera. These stories, in their own ways, explore moments as potential sequence, and how each of those moments might impact each other. To ask where, when, how or who: the “why” is the story; all else are facts.

You can read an excerpt from On Beauty below. You can read more about the book on the publisher's website here. 

On beauty
Upon the death of her widower father, there came the matter of dismantling his possessions. Emptying and cleaning the house for resale. It wasn’t as though either of the children were planning on returning to the homestead, both some twenty years removed, but it fell to them to pick apart the entirety of their parents’ lives from out of this multi-level wooden frame, a structure originally erected by their grandfather and great-grandfather immediately following the Great War. Theirs was the first house in the area, constructed on seventy-five acres of farmland, long since disappeared to development. Across the street, a smaller house of similar design and build, where the hired man and his family had lived. Where, originally, their widowed great-grandmother spent her final days, sixteen long years past the death of her husband.

The house was a local oddity, an obvious construction decades before the brown brick and stone-grey on either side, and contemporary infills. Where the neighbouring bungalow was once their back garden; another, where livestock spent fallow days. Where most likely a barn stood, then a shed, which now hold driveway and garage. Foundation maintenance that routinely uncovers the roots of an orchard. The difficulty of inground pools, and the puncture of linings.

Their father’s house: now that he was dead, it was though it had died as well. They had no choice but to bury it. Not a word. Silence. My wife and her sister, dismantling what would never exist again, and by dismantling, removing it from all but their memory. This, too, will fade.

Catherine Rogers, "Element"

 

Catherine Rogers is a co-director of Haarlem Artspace. She ran her own creative business for several years before working in arts development and local government. At Haarlem Artspace she is researching the practice of storytelling as a method of curating  as well as writing short stories. Some of these have made their way into collections, including the award-winning Overheard: Stories to Read Aloud, edited by Jonathan Taylor for Salt Publishing. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society for Arts, Manufactures and Commerce.

About Element, by Catherine Rogers

Element is a collection of short stories written by Catherine Rogers, inspired by Haarlem Artspace artists. It is the second publication from Haarlem Artspace following Woven/Ground by Geoff Diego Litherland published in 2020. Haarlem Artspace is not just a building, it is a community of fascinating individuals who change year on year. These stories are an attempt to capture an essence of their stories and the story the space holds. The wonderful artists whose work is featured are people who have shared fragments of their own stories, inspirations, motivations that make them who they are. The weavings that have come from this sharing are an attempt at an abstract form of storytelling - with one exception, the story that is the element of air, which is from the artist Chantal Powell and is her own creation. 

You can see more information about Element here. Below, you can read an extract from the book. 

From Element

Under Earth

Under her bare feet, seeds swelled in the furrows. She brushed her hands over the vines in the fields, and they responded quivering, knowing the weight of the fruit they would soon bear. Shimmering in the sun, the grass heads waved their purple feathered plumage in gentle greeting. Swallows dipped and darted around her, chattering all the while as the bees passed, noisily going about their business. The young goddess breathed in the sweet heady air of the summer sun and baked earth, gathering into a posy the papery scarlet poppies, forked purple cornflower tongues, delicate queen’s lace with peppered foxtail, haloed plantain, sweet vernal and cocksfoot grasses. Her skin connected to each cellulose fibre, and she felt the spongy warmth and hum of the land vibrating with life.

As she made her way through the fields, the hum grew deeper and the vibrations began to shudder through her body, into her knees, then her hips and up to her breasts and shoulders. Her heart was beating faster and faster, when all of a sudden, the earth beside her cracked like a huge stone in a hot fire. It created a wide mouth with its craggy teeth of unearthed rocks showering soil like breadcrumbs, sending the creatures who hide from the light scuttling for cover as the cavernous hole opened wider.

Then from the darkness poured a river of fiery larva carrying with it a golden chariot pulled by winged creatures with scaled skin, spiky horns, and sooty snouts breathing fire. Driving the chariot was the king of the underworld with his dark flowing hair and eyes burning with the blue heart of a furnace. She felt her entire body open when he spoke, his voice unused to shaping words in her tongue,  

‘Glorious goddess, come and join me as my underworld queen. I offer you my people, my life, my home which is as different as it can be, but as wondrous as this. I have watched you wandering the fields and seen your tender caress of the earth and I know you have what my people need, and what I most desire. I hope that I can offer you something that is equal and as powerful in return. My love for you is intense, as deep as the darkest canyon and with it comes the power to heal the broken and lost. This is what I offer to you in return for your hand.’

She stood still, weighing up the enormity of the moment and answered, ‘This is my home, I cannot imagine a life without the sky, the clouds, and the fields. So, charioteer, tell me about your world, your people, and their stories and I will come with you for a time.’

He then told her his stories and his people’s stories, he told her about death, destruction and transformation. He painted for her the mysteries and hidden depths, the wheel and cycle of all life and death. As he took her on this magnificent journey she knew somehow this was her path, her heart longed for the otherness of this world and the clouds and fields became memories in her dreams.

Above, her mother wandered the earth in despair, looking for news of her daughter. She came to the goddess of the night, of magic and witchcraft, the guardian of the past, the present and the future. The night goddess described to what she had witnessed.

‘As the world turns and the sun grows weaker in the northern hemisphere, the air crisp and the ground colder, your daughter is with her husband in the belly of the earth. She rules as queen of the underworld and of the dead. She was out in the golden fields gathering flowers when the god of the underworld came in his chariot and offered her his love. The earth roared apart and she took his hand, stepped into his chariot and the earth enveloped them both. I watched from my gathering place as the meeting took place and witnessed the fire between them. This is the story of how it was and how it is. I will journey to the underworld to carry your wishes to your daughter and bring you news of what will be.’

The witch prepared herself for the journey to the underworld, a passage she took often enough. She carried a scarf for the younger goddess, woven from fine hedgerow cobwebs and shining with dew pearls and rosebay down. Into it she whispered her secret, the stories of their ancestry passing from goddess to goddess. The frosts were already in the fields as she set out making her way to the caves with their luminous lichen eyes to guide her on her quest. Her familiars accompanied her as she travelled to the court of  the underworld deities, where she was welcomed and respected. 

The underworld queen immediately wrapped her mother’s gift around her, and the memories of the earth and its abundance flooded her senses. Mourning the loss of her old life she asked the dark goddess to tell her what she saw in the future. She brought out a leather skinned bronze pomegranate and with a sharp knife split its skin, the juice dropping to the stone floor like blood from a gaping wound. She pulled the two halves apart to reveal its jewelled seeds perfectly encased in their ruby settings. Her hands now covered with juice, she squeezed the seeds into a bowl which she offered to the queen, who in turn took out six. The witch closed her eyes and spoke,

‘The six seeds are the six months of the year you will be together, mother and daughter, nurturing the earth and bringing new life as the Spring and Summer. Then you will  return to the underworld, bringing the Autumn and Winter to the earth above. As the wheel turns, there will be these Seasons.’

As the witch saw it, so it was and so it is. The queen left the underworld and as she stepped above ground her skirts swept the bleached bones of the wintered lands bringing the brush of acid greens and pinks as the Spring came forth. The earth had rested and from its dormancy new life was now shining. Her mother opened her arms wide with joy at the return of her daughter. Her loss had almost overtaken her, but eventually she had slept with the earth, fasting in her winter hibernation. Now she unfurled with the ferns and danced in the growing season.

Then just as Spring had arrived so came Summer with its abundant green and the days long and hot. The earth became dusty and the bees lazy, so it was time for the queen to return once again to the under earth, to her husband and her people. On her return there was such partying, a mycelium feast, a myriad of fireworks and the pulsing hypnotic beats from the core of the earth. The partying lasted many days and nights, and being underground, there was no beginning and no end, just a looping continuum of making and unmaking until it was time for the wheel to turn once again.

Shreya Sen-Handley, "Strange"

Former television journalist and producer for CNBC and MTV, and East India head for Australasian Channel [V], Shreya Sen-Handley is the author of two books with HarperCollins, the recently published short story collection Strange, and the award-winning Memoirs of My Body, published in 2017. A librettist for the Welsh National Opera, the first South Asian woman to have written an international opera according to the international press, their multicultural opera Migrations will go on tour in the UK in 2021. Shreya is also a columnist for the international media, writing for the National Geographic, CNN, The Hindu, Times of India, The Guardian, and more, a creative writing teacher for British universities and other institutions, and an illustrator for Hachette, HarperCollins, Welsh National Opera, Arts Council England, and Nottingham UNESCO City of Literature. Her short stories have been published, broadcast, and shortlisted for prizes in Britain, India and Australia. This year she wrote her first ever poems, which went on to be published and broadcast in Britain and India, as well as spearheading a British national campaign against hate crimes. She is currently working on a new Welsh National Opera production Creating Change in which she combines poetry and illustration, and writing her third book for HarperCollins, the travelogue The Accidental Tourist, alongside her monthly column for top Asian newspapers The Asian Age and Deccan Chronicle.

About Strange

The thirteen twisted tales of the unexpected in Shreya Sen-Handley’s Strange are about everyday people whose lives take unforeseen turns. They find themselves suddenly and inexorably drawn into encounters and situations that weren’t part of their plan, but which result in the shocking revelation of buried parts of their psyches, haunting both them and their readers for a long time after their stories have come to an end. Author Prajwal Parajuly calls the book ‘a superb collection of profoundly unsettling and unusual stories,' whilst Ruskin Bond writes, ‘The author is adept at evoking an atmosphere of fear in apparently mundane situations. After reading some of these dark tales I found myself looking under my bed.’ 

For all its links to India, it has as many to the British Midlands, and the wonders and vicissitudes of life therein. Amongst the stories its people and places have inspired in this collection are ‘Room for Two,’ in which a Nottingham mother and daughter go on holiday to come to terms with difficult truths about themselves, and ‘Full Circle,’ in which the Bengalis of Leicester embrace enchantment in different ways. You can read an extract from the latter story below. You can also read a review of Strange on Everybody's Reviewing here. 

From ‘Full Circle’ in Strange, By Shreya Sen-Handley

The usually gloomy Bosworth Drive community hall had been transformed by a dozen large chandeliers, loud music, and even louder voices hailing each other in hearty Bengali, into a mela. Except that it wasn’t so much a mela as a pujo. A pujo, mind you, not a puja, Yana reminded herself in that exact finger-waggling manner Putul ‘Aunty’ had, and hid a little smile. A puja is worship of the gods, Biplob Uncle had explained in his pantomime villain way (twirling his moustache and booming at her jocularly), but a pujo is living it up like the gods. 

Pujo, anywhere in the world, means getting up at the crack of dawn to slokas sung in a gravelly, just-outta-bed voice. For Yana, it meant gathering at the festive hub of the community hall bright and early for the most enormous breakfast anyone had ever seen. Luchi, aloor dum, even prawn kochuri if the aunty in charge of the kitchen had woken happy. And the most mouth-watering range of soft, squidgy, syrupy sweetmeats ever served outside Bengal. That was just the start. For the rest of the day, the hall would fill with music and games and as much chatter as could be squeezed in, making up for months of maintaining a stiff, very British upper lip (which even the British no longer bothered with; not since Diana’s death, Biplob said). Lunch would see a mind-boggling array of delicacies, from paturi—spicy fish baked in banana leaf—to patishapta – sweet coconut and cream filled pancakes. And all this was just a prelude to the evening’s revelry! 

‘First you eat, and then you eat again, then you gossip, and (sometimes without being asked) sing until your jaw clacks loosely, and your belly grows so large from all the food, it obstructs your vision and makes you believe your singing is going down well,’ Biplob’s brother, Subir, said with that same twinkle in his eye. Clean-shaven as he was, there was no opportunity to twirl a moustache. ‘Then you repeat it all, till you’re round enough to roll home at the end, promising yourself to never do it again, and yet you do!’

The Bengalis of Leicester were her mother’s folk …

Call for Participants: Distributed Reader Study of Preclosure in the British Short Story

By Dan Powell

“The End is Nigh!" by Mikey, licensed under CC BY 2.0

Overview:

Preclosure sentences are those sentences within a story, prior to the story’s actual closing sentences where the reader feels the story could end. Preclosural method is an attempt to uncover what endings and the staging of closure can reveal about the cognitive processes experienced when reading a piece of short fiction. My research-led creative project examines how authors of short fiction employ preclosure in their work and investigates how preclosural method might inform the short story writing process.

Aims of this short research study:

• to gather preclosural sentence selection data from multiple readers of four stories
• to discover whether consensus exists between readers regarding the placement of closural sentences and the arrangement of putative stories within given stories.

As a participant in this short project, you will be asked to:

• attend an introductory lecture presentation on ‘preclosure theory’ where you will learn how preclosure theory can be used in textual analysis and as a pedagogical tool. You will discover how the data from this study will be used to help to identify closural staging in the British short story and develop frames for the writer/practitioner of short fiction.
• read four short stories (over a period of four-to-six weeks) – 'Tamagotchi' by Adam Marek; 'The Leafsweeper' by Muriel Spark; 'Markheim' by Robert Louis Stevenson; 'The Death Bed' by Amelia Opie.
• while reading each story you will be asked to identify any sentences prior to the story’s final sentence where you feel the story could end. Each sentence of each story will be numbered to facilitate a quick and easy response and you will only be required to list the number of each sentence you identify in each story on the simple response form provided.
• attend a closing presentation and discussion where the findings from your selections will be delivered. During this session you will have the opportunity to discuss the stories, your response to them, and the preclosural selections made by participants.

Attendance of the introductory session and your participation in the study will provide you with practical experience of and engagement with preclosure theory. Your participation in this project will develop and deepen your understanding of how authors structure narrative and how readers both perceive and interact with that structure. Experience of these ideas and their practical exploration will be of interest to all readers of fiction and useful to all students of narrative arts, in particular those studying literature and creative writing. 

The introductory session will be held on Weds 6 March at 11am in room CW2 BPA, Charles Wilson Second Floor LR Belvoir Park Annexe, University of Leicester, where the information above and other details of the Distributed Reader Study will be discussed to ensure you fully understand the aims and objectives of this short project, the narrative theory behind it, and your role in the gathering of the key data. Distance Learners at University of Leicester and participants from other institutions will be able to access the introductory session and the study materials digitally. 

If you are interested in taking part in this study, please contact Dan Powell: dcp10@leicester.ac.uk