Remember Me The Bees – The Big Clean

The Big Clean cr Louise Boulter

The second story in my debut short story collection Remember Me To the Bees is The Big Clean. An earlier version was published by The View From Here literary magazine. The artwork is by Louise Boulter.

I’ve always been interested in the way different people’s minds work, and at what point those differences become defined as madness. This story takes the point of view of a small boy who is witnessing his mother’s latest ‘episode’ and worrying about how his dad will react when he gets home.

In an homage to earlier tales of women’s madness, such as the outstanding The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the story also contains echoes of the understated sexism of yesteryear.

A short excerpt from The Big Clean

Mum’s gone mad again. That’s why I’m sitting in the tree house. It’s just a few planks of wood nailed together, but it feels safe up here. When the wind blows the branches creak and I imagine I’m on a boat sailing far away. We had an astronomy lesson at Scouts today, so I can use my telescope to navigate by the stars.

Dad’s not home yet, but when he gets back from work I know he’s going to go mad too, not in a crazy way, like Mum, but in a shouty, angry way.

He hates it when Mum gets like this. I wouldn’t mind her madness so much if it wasn’t for the way it makes Dad so cross. Sometimes when she’s mad Mum’s magic to be around. The usual rules disappear and life becomes a game. I never quite know what to expect. Right now though, she’s busy digging up the garden and filling the house with soil. She’s doing it ever so thoroughly, sprinkling a fine layer of earth over every single thing and making the whole house smells damp and dusky, like a cellar. She calls it “the big clean”.

When I walked into the kitchen earlier, she told me to be careful not to get dirty footprints on her nice clean floor, so I tiptoed across the soil to the counter and tried to open the biscuit tin without tipping any of the chocolate-brown mud off. I couldn’t do it though, and half of it fell on the floor in a heap, but Mum just smiled brightly, passed me a custard cream and layered the earth back on top of the tin.

Photo illustration of short story The Big Clean

Remember Me The Bees – Never Seen The Sea

Never Seen The Sea cr Louise BoulterEver wondered where a writer gets their ideas from? It’s something I’m often asked about, so over the next 20 weeks I thought I’d offer you a bit of an insight.

As you may know, the official launch of my short story collection, Remember Me To The Bees, is going to happen in March, and over the coming weeks, I’ll introduce each of the 20 short stories in turn, let you know the inspiration behind them and share a short extract to hopefully whet your appetite.

The first story in the collection is Never Seen The Sea, which tells the story of Sally, who, funnily enough, has never seen the sea. The original seed of it was me trying to imagine how the sea would look to someone who’d never laid eyes on it before, and then I started thinking of the reasons someone might never have had the opportunity to see it for themselves. Living on a tiny island like Britain, it’s a difficult thing to grasp!

I also wanted to think about how not having experienced a thing most people take for granted might colour an individual’s personality – how it might set them apart.

An earlier version of Never Seen The Sea was published in The Love of Looking, an anthology from Scopophilia Publishing, and led directly to me being offered the chance to have my debut collection published.

In case you were wondering, the artwork is by Louise Boulter.

A short excerpt from Never Seen The Sea

Gusts of air buffeted the Fiat as they raced along the motorway. Sally fought the urge to open the window and hang her head out, mouth agape. She’d never felt anything like it before, this sense of wild abandon. No one knew where she was, not even her mother, no one but this man, Paul, this almost stranger, driving the car and her towards the sea.

“So, you’ve never been there?” He’d been disbelieving at first, half watching the road and half gazing at her in what she supposed was amazement. “Not even as a small child?”

“Never,” she said defiantly, for the first time feeling the power in that statement. Rather than flushing with shame, as she usually did when the topic came up, she felt the novelty of her innocence, saw the way he stared into her, a girl who needed educating. She saw the yearning in his cloudy blue eyes when he contemplated being the one to reveal it to her, as though he was showing her the world.

Tintagel beach1

Remember Me To The Bees update

Remember Me To The Bees coverA few of you have been asking for updates on my debut short story collection Remember Me To The Bees. Thanks for your interest!

Well, the book exists, which is really exciting! The official launch (more details to follow) will be in March this year, and it will be widely available from that point.

The book contains twenty of my short stories, each accompanied by artwork from the talented Louise Boulter, who also designed the gorgeous cover.

Author Tania Hershman has written a lovely foreword for the book, which made me quite blush! Rather marvellously, she says : “The title is, in fact, very apt: bees may be diminutive (relative to us, at least) but they possess power not only to inflict pain but also to give us the gift of intense sweetness. To my mind, as a reader, painful sweetness is a wonderful way to define the best of short stories, a honeyed sting that this excellent collection most certainly delivers.”

Yeeps! No wonder I blushed.

The back cover copy states:

“The twenty stories in Judy Darley’s debut collection cover the moments that make us the people we are, where actions are taken and sights seen that will change the protagonists’ lives forever – with sometimes startling consequences.

From the small boy grappling with fears both real and imaginary to the married woman being ardently pursued by a man who seems able to read her deepest thoughts, we catch our breath as Judy’s characters make emotional as well as physical journeys, twisting and turning to the very end.”

Over the next few weeks you will see copies of Remember Me To The Bees popping up in independent bookshops and art galleries across Bristol and beyond as well as appearing on sites such as Tangent Books’ online bookshop. Go on, buy a copy, and make a writer very happy!

Happy New Year!

Simpang Mengayau Borneo cr Judy DarleyI always feel such excitement (once the hangover subsides) on January 1st. The excesses of Christmas are over and a pristine shiny new year awaits – 12 whole months of possibilities!

2013 was a pretty impressive beast, all things considered. Short story queen Alice Munro received the Nobel Prize in Literature, helping to ensure the form receives the respect it deserves. Eleanor Catton became the youngest ever Man Booker Prize winner for her novel The Luminaries – a vast book with what feels like a cast of thousands.

Tea cr Judy DarleyIn art, the Turner Prize was won by Laure Prouvost for ‘Wantee’, a film about the powers of tea drinking, art and family, featuring a fictional grandfather and ideas about artist Kurt Schwitters. Laure, who lives in the UK but is utterly French, says the award made her feel adopted by her host nation. Aww.

And my own debut short story collection Remember Me To The Bees came out – which was a great note for me personally to finish the year on.

So storytelling has been top of the agenda in creative circles – and aren’t we all glad about that? Who knows what 2014 will bring?

Book review – Recovering Apollo 8 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Recovering Apollo 8 book coverMost fiction writers shy away from using real people in their work, but not Katrine Kathryn Rusch (hereafter to be called KKR in this review).

The title story of Recovering Apollo 8 And Other Stories is an award-winning re-imagining of the Apollo 8 launch, examining what would have happened if that space flight had been unsuccessful in its mission to orbit the moon.

By telling the tale from the point of view of Richard, a man who had been a child when the launch took place, she gives the piece a deeply personal viewpoint that makes it identifiable to all, so that the moment when he believes he about to meet the recovered crew for the first time is palpably intense. ‘”He had waited a lifetime for this. He wished the internal mikes were off. He wanted to whisper, “Welcome home, gentlemen.'” Continue reading

Stories of social media

FriendFollowText coverEarlier this year I had an idea for a story that was prompted by something I saw on Pinterest. Like most writers I know, I spend an inordinate amount of time dabbling on social media sites, giving my brain a rest while trying to untangle that next thorny sentence, plotline or conundrum.

What I saw was a photograph of an owl. Except it wasn’t an owl. It was a cup of milky coffee that someone had dropped two Hula Hoops into. The salt in the crisps and the crisp potato rings created the illusion of an owl’s face.

I loved it, and thought about who I should share it with.

Weirdly enough, a fictional, half-formed character I’d been carrying around for a while, came to mind as the person who would be most glad to see this.

And so the character consolidated, and the story began.

Shortly afterwards I saw a call for submissions from a anthology seeking tales inspired by social media. Editor and writer Shawn Syms was inviting submissions of stories inspired and about all kinds of social media channels for Friend. Follow. Text. #StoriesFromLivingOnline. It seemed too good a chance to miss.

I sent over my tale, called Coffee Owl, and it was selected for inclusion. Very exciting, but even more pleasing, it was being published by prestigious Canadian literary imprint Enfield & Wizenty. My story was only one of two by British writers published in the anthology, and only one of three by none Canadians.

Proud? Me? Just a little. #understatement!

So now Friend. Follow. Text. #StoriesFromLivingOnline is finally out, and is a thing of beauty. You can buy it on Amazon and find out more on the FriendFollowText website.

Pressed Leaves in print

Pressed leaf cr Judy DarleyI’m very excited this week because my short story (actually an extract from a novel-in-progress), Pressed Leaves, has made its way into the pages of gorgeous ‘love life’ magazine The Simple Things, issue 18. The magazine goes on sale today and is packed with delicious ideas for relishing each day, plus, of course, my very short story.

‘Pressed Leaves’ is a moment in time, in which a young girl, Anna, helps her mother clear out the artist’s studio of the grandfather she’s never met. See a midweek writing prompt about creative spaces here.

If you head to any WHSmiths or look online you’ll be able to get a copy of The Simply Things 18, and if you do, make sure you turn to page 77 where my story nestles, waiting to be read.

Word art at Spike Island

I recently attended an outdoor writing workshop led by Spike Island’s writer-in-residence Holly Corfield Carr.

Judy Darley cr Holly Corfield Carr

The workshop was one in a series taking place each Sunday from 2pm until December 6th, exploring the area around the Spike Island art gallery. They’re part of a collaborative literature project called Spike Archipelago.

On the day I went along, the air was bright and uncommonly warm. We strolled down past to Lockside to an area where we could see both the Floating Harbour and the Avon Gorge with Clifton Suspension Bridge hanging across it. We gazed up at the colourful stacked houses of Clifton and down at the river sucking at its mud. Holly had brought extracts from works including Dart by Alice Oswald, and other pieces on rivers and that day’s theme, circles.

Wheel and river mud cr Judy Darley

As we walked and paused and looked about, and talked about our lives, hot air balloons rose into the blue sky. Not quite circles, but close enough.

Our wanderings resulted in a collaborative piece of writing called Concentric, which Holly describes as “a lyric narrative for two voices”, adding: “We wrote around each other, leaping from one circular frame to the next, producing this pleated poem of first loves, last loves, a guilty city and coffee-rings.”

A wonderful experience. You can see the outcome here, and find out about future workshops (which are free to attend) here.

Mid-week writing prompt – imperil your characters

This is a good trick that sometimes has breathtaking results. Take your characters and place them somewhere perilous – abseiling down a cliff face, on a small boat in a stormy sea, far underground – and then get them to have that conversation they’ve been putting off for far too long.

Judy abseiling

Their emotions will be heightened by the circumstance you’ve stuck them in, which will add drama to every niggling complaint, accusation, declaration of love, or whatever fearful thing you want them to own up to.

If this image prompts you to write something, I’d love to know. Just send an email to Judy(at)socket creative.com. You could end up published on the site!

Short story readings for November

Art trails in Bristol have developed to include musicians and others performers, which is great – especially as I now seem to fall under the category ‘other performers’!

Totterdown Front Room Art Trail artworkI and a couple of writer friends will be reading short stories and novel extracts as part of Totterdown Front Room Arts Trail, 15-17 November 2013. It’s aimed at grown ups (though children won’t be scarred too badly if you bring them along). After all, why should kids be the only ones to get to enjoy being read to?

That’s us, just above. I’m the one on the far left.

Remember-Me-To-The-Bees-cover-smlWe have two performance slots at the Cinema on the Green, Higham Street, in Totterdown, from 1-2.30pm on the Saturday and from 1-1.45pm on the Sunday. Find out more. I’ll be reading stories from my collect Remember Me To The Bees, which will be fresh off the presses!

I hope to see you there!

Halloween may have passed, just, but there’s still a chance to be creeped out. I’m taking part in a night of eerie readings on Wednesday 06 November at The Thunderbolt’s Word of Mouth event.

Word of Mouth is a monthly literary event, and for November Bristol Fiction Writers’ Group (that’s us, pictured below – I’m the blue-tinged one, bottom row, second from the left), will be hijacking it to read tales from our anthology A Dark Imagined Bristol.

Doors open at 7.30am, and I’m going on first (eeps!), reading my short story Untrue Blue. It’s a strange story set in and around Bristol’s Cabot Tower, as well as in the skies over the city. It’s a free event, so why not come along to see what you think of it?