Prose

There’s a lot of words in prose for a poet but writing & publishing literary fiction is one of my longterm ambitions.

 

WORK-IN-PROGRESS

At the moment I am working on a series of short stories with the working title, This House Will Not Withstand Another Fall. There is a recurring character in most of these stories – something I had not planned – and while I am proceeding with the drafting of the stories I will have to be mindful of this character. Below is a list of story titles and the opening two sentences of each.

Come home Johnny Bird

It wasn’t a good idea for Johnny Bird’s Mam to fall accidentally on purpose down the stairs. Johhny Bird found her lying on the bottom landing and he thought she was asleep.

I don’t want you to miss my finest hour

The silence passed and while I stood still with my arms folded across my belly I could think of nothing else but the man in the red sequinned dress. In every corner of the ballroom people stopped what they were doing and bowed their heads.

Reverse Thrust

Hector liked it that his nickname rhymed. As he walked along St Mary’s Long sands he repeated it over and over in his head.

The Elephant Rooms

In the eaves of the house a queen wasp sleeps in a nest of pulp and mulch no bigger than a ruby ball. Set hard, the outside is the colour of burnt oat meal, galleries and passageways bending over and around each other, hundreds maybe thousands of insects trying to stay on course with their assigned tasks.

This house will not withstand another fall

During the weeks Gary Nesbitt’s dad is away on the rigs Gary can do what ever he likes. He can stay up all night if he wants to and he did, for a while, but he got so tired at school that he decided to start sleeping again.

Trudy can’t turn right

Trudy’s mother had been living at Harbour Lights for nearly a year and all the residents came out of their rooms when Trudy visited and stayed for tea. Every other Thursday they’d sit and look at Trudy’s long red hair swishing around in the bay window of the ground floor day room, her woven poncho pulled up over her knees, revealing the beginning of two brown slender thighs.

Under the bridge

Missy climbs the stairs in front of me, pulling off her coat and dropping it before she reaches the landing. We fuck all day in the spare bed and at five o’clock she picks up her coat again and leaves in the blue light of darkness.

Under the piano

In the smaller of the two bedrooms off the half-landing four polystyrene heads wear my grandmother’s collection of wigs. Topaz, Silver Birch, Midday Sun and Monique.

 

THE MANUSCRIPTS UNDER THE BED

While I use prose a lot to help me write poetry I have had three attempts at writing works of fiction. One of the three has gone the journey, however, the two outlined below are works I plan to return to and complete, when the time is right.

The Power Station Feeling

My first attempt at a novel-length work of fiction this book was inspired by a meeting I had with a fine art illustrator way back in 2002. In 2006 I was awarded an Arts Council of England research grant to travel to Norway, one of the major locations of the narrative.

Plumb-lines

Plumb-lines is an experimental novella I began during my Masters degree (Creative Writing). I wanted to try and write the longest sustained metaphor I could and have ended up with 65,000 words that badly need editing but did attract significant attention when I graduated, with Distinction – and as the recipient of the Waterstone’s Fiction Prize – in 1998. The manuscript piqued the interest of two literary agents and the following year I received a Northern Arts Promise award to develop it.