A Collaborative Valentine's Day Personal Anthology
Thanks to everyone who contributed to this collaborative Valentine's Day letter. The editor, damn him, has managed to lose a couple of contributions down the back of a digital sofa, and will post those as an addendum when he finds them.
‘The Balloon’ by Donald Barthelme (First published in The New Yorker, April 1966 and available online here. Collected in Sixty Stories, Putnams, 1981). Chosen by Carolina Alvarado Molk
‘The Balloon’ is as understated as a love story can get. A balloon appears one morning, covering miles of the Manhattan skyline, and remains without explanation for twenty-two days. The narrator talks us through the city’s varied reactions to the balloon, its speculation over its purpose, before revealing, in the last paragraph, that the balloon is “a spontaneous autobiographical disclosure,” a response to a lover’s brief absence. The subdued affect of the writing gives way, finally, to the enormity of feeling the balloon represents. I love the element of mystery in this story, the unassuming tone, both the relish and the fear of the balloon. There’s something almost claustrophobic about its descriptions – “There were no situations, simply the balloon hanging there” – that feels just right. Sometimes you miss someone, and the missing them clouds and shades everything.
Carolina Alvarado Molk writes essays and short fiction, often about loneliness, motherhood, and immigration. She tweets at @caro_molk
‘I Love Our Voices When We Sing Off-Key’ by Timothy Boudreau (Published on spelkfiction, July 2019) Chosen by Gaynor Jones
This gorgeous flash piece outlines a loving, long-term relationship. Although it begins with the romantic cliché of a couple's shared breakfast it soon becomes clear that this is no post-one night stand meal, but a well practised routine, 'nothing fancy, but that's the arrangement.' Through references to 'corny love songs', it needing to be warm before the couple venture out and the 'salt pepper and pepper spare tire dude.' we learn that this a couple whose relationship has lasted through the years. And if we were any doubt, the following paragraph describes their sex life in humorous detail, swiftly followed by a section on knee surgery. Then we return to the prose which, for me, treads the line between corny and loving in such a way that you no longer care about the corniness - 'Feel our same light, for we have light between us, I swear we do.' I like this story because it gives me hope, and it's refreshing to read a piece that delves way past the immediacy and urgency of first love.
Gaynor Jones is an award-winning short fiction writer and spoken word performer based in Oldham. She is the recipient of the 2018 Mairtín Crawford Short Story Award and holds the title of Northern Soul’s 2018 Northern Writer of the Year. You can read her full Personal Anthology here.
‘A Woman Seldom Found’ by William Sansom (First published in A Contest of Ladies and Other Stories, London: Hogarth Press, 1956. Available to read online here) Chosen by Chris Greenhalgh.
Sansom’s story holds out the possibility of a perfect encounter on a romantic night in the streets of Rome. And everything seems to be going well for the narrator from its fairy tale opening – all too well, of course – until the final twist. The story is a bit of fun, but it is also a work of perfect scale, swiftly dispatched with a gut punch in just under two pages. Something of Hitchcock, Roald Dahl, with the compression of Kafka, or even Nabokov in gothic mode.
Chris Greenhalgh is the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors. He has published three volumes of poetry, two novels, and wrote the screenplay for Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky. You can read his full Personal Anthology here.
‘Wild Berry Blue’, by Rivka Galchen (First published in Open City 25: High Wire. Collected in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009 and in American Innovations, FSG, 2014) Chosen by JL Bogenschneider
He was my first love, my first love in the way that first loves are usually second or third or fourth loves.
‘Wild Berry Blue’ is not a love story, although it is a story about love, the nine-year old unnamed narrator’s first. And being her first, she is adrift; lost in a labyrinth. She is drawn to Roy, a recovering heroin addict employed by a fast-food franchise. He has impossibly blue eyes and an impossible blue vein. He calls the narrator sexy and it doesn’t seem wrong but it's not exactly right. Maybe she knows this and maybe she doesn't. There are only three encounters with Roy, who the narrator likens to a beautiful monster. The first time is discombobulating, like being knocked over by a wave you never saw coming. The second is voyeuristically distant. But the third encounter is like being swept off your feet by the undercurrent whose total existence you were ignorant of. Pulled under, she blurts out that she will be at the Medieval Fair and Roy – unaware, not-even caring Roy – casually mentions how much he likes the wooden puppets they sell there.
Thinking about that puppet for Roy eclipsed all other thoughts … that puppet was going to solve everything.
The puppet is attained, but it is ugly, and cracked. No way can it be given to him under any circumstances. The narrator takes herself off to the bathroom to cry, and to let her love slough, and we arrive at the hopeless and defiant gut-punching last line:
‘I never got over him. I never get over anyone’
JL Bogenschneider is a writer of short fiction, with work published in a number of print and online journals, including Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Island Review, 404 Ink, minor literature[s], Hobart, PANK and Ambit.
‘That Colour’ by Jon McGregor (first published as a broadside by Jon McGregor, and in his story collection This Isn’t the Sort of Things That Happens to Someone Like You, Bloomsbury, 2012) Chosen by Grahame Williams
I don’t want to write too much about this story because the story is so short itself (it will take you just about as long to read as it will to read this). A man does the dishes while his wife tries to describe the turning colour of the trees outside their house. It reminds me of the love my Dad showed my Mum when he used to reach out and squeeze her hand whilst he was driving: a reflection of deep, long-lived love. I have a copy of the story framed next to my front door. I don’t read it or even properly notice it every time I leave the house, but I really ought to.
Grahame Williams is a fiction writer from County Down and his work has appeared in the Stinging Fly, the Lonely Crowd and, most recently, on BBC Radio 4.
‘The Adventure of a Clerk’ by Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver and Ann Goldstein (First published in Difficult Loves and Other Stories, 1953. Available in Vintage Classics, 2018) Chosen by Jane Roberts
(Dedicated to those of us who have loved for one night only, and equally to those of us who have never loved for one night only.)
We meet our protagonist in the early hours of post-coital bliss: “It so happened that Enrico Gnei, a clerk, spent a night with a beautiful lady.” Bedroom antics are hinted at, allowing the reader to wander off the pages of the present and join Enrico in his imaginings of the sensual and tender “inheritance of that night”, whilst embedded in the converse mundanity of the morning’s necessities. The basic human urge to broadcast his nocturnal exploits, seems here something more than the braggadocio of a lad about town. This is the middle class, middle man, middle of the road, clerk who has undergone an abrupt metamorphosis from the constrains of his bourgeois humdrum. The moment merits marking; as we bask in revelation and comedy, Calvino, the descriptive master of both microcosm and macrocosm, ensures the world breathes into life with an intense – almost pixelated – ecstasy of “boundless Edens”.
From the exquisite idealisation of those early hours of the morning when he leaves the house at the top of the hill, Enrico the Adventurer descends back down to earth – or the office – “mad with love among the accountants” – with a bathetic crash. The unexpected illicit beauty and joy of the day is stripped away by thwarted communication of various kinds; and his fate is to wonder the “what if” of a one night stand. Often love can be realised when the moment passes – the orgasmic glory, a fleeting moment of tenderness never to be reclaimed, maybe never to be spoken of again once passed: all eventually fades into a “ secret pang of grief” and a closed account book of passion.
Jane Roberts is a freelance writer living in South Shropshire. Her fiction and non-fiction have been published in anthologies and journals including: Litro, Bare Fiction Magazine, The Lonely Crowd, Wales Arts Review.
‘A Love Match’ by Sylvia Townsend Warner (first published in A Stranger With a Bag and Other Stories, Chatto & Windus, 1966. Available to read online here, with a short introduction by Edith Pearlman) Chosen by Stuart Heath
While on leave in London, having survived the horrors of the Battle of the Somme, Justin finds solace in the arms of Celia, a young widow. Justin and Celia, however, are brother and sister. Living in a society that would be shocked by their love for each other, the couple go on to establish an outwardly conventional life together in a Northern English town. Included by Sylvia Townsend Warner in her 1966 collection A Stranger with a Bag (published in the US under the title Swans on an Autumn River), 'A Love Match' is a tale that permitted its author to comment indirectly on her own position as a lesbian in a long-term relationship in mid-20th Century England. Her prose here is, as nearly always, sharp & precise, yielding ample evidence of her wit and intelligence. Straightforwardly happy endings are as hard to come by in Warner's fiction as they are in life, but this story of lovers never parted, and of a secret kept safe, comes closer to having one than most.
Stuart Heath is a middle-aged IT Consultant based in South Wales with no literary ambitions.
‘And Back Again’ by Eley Williams (First published in Attrib, Influx Press, 2017) Chosen by Susanna Crossman
‘And Back Again’ by Eley Williams is a DIY of how I’d like to declare my love this year, not in ”units, deeds, quests, behests” but through an imagined trip to Timbuktu staying in a cheap hotel with a blue painted face, because, as the 1960 Oliver West End musical song goes, “I’ll do anything. For you dear anything.” As the narrator’s romantic daydream unfolds, mesmerizing details lure us to a Mali hotel where a fan “slices the air into swallowable rashers.” A lorry draws up outside, advertising La Vache Qui Rit, driven by a guy wearing Chelsea away strip smoking cloves-scented cigarettes.
In ‘And Back Again’, language is dissected, turned inside out and upside down. Song lyrics thread through the story, and words are examined from all angles, metaphorically and visually: the word Timbuktu “has just the right mix of spiked and undulating letters…the verticals of boat masts riding easy waves…” Yet the conceptual nature of ‘And Back Again’ doesn’t override the vivid narrative and delicate poetry, as love will be declared on a morning “woken by the starlings…shouldering the dawn.”
Following my reading, for Valentine’s Day, I have booked my flight to Timbuktu, and for the blue face paint am contemplating a Klein bleu. Thanks Eley!
Susanna Crossman is an Anglo-French prize-winning essayist and fiction writer. Her debut novel Dark Island is currently under submission. More here.
‘Souls Belated’ by Edith Wharton (from Roman Fever and Other Stories, Virago Press, 1998) Chosen by Catherine Taylor
"I didn't know that we ran away to found a new system of ethics. I supposed it was because we loved each other."
In Edith Wharton’s story, published in 1899, Old New York meets fin-de-siècle Europe as Americans Lydia Tillotson and Ralph Gannett, a younger writer for whom she has left her wealthy husband, run away together to the Continent – but instead of finding the freedom to pursue their relationship, society dictates that they pose as a married couple. We first encounter them on a train in Northern Italy, where all discussion around the ‘thing’ resting in a bag in the luggage rack is avoided – ‘the thing’ being the divorce papers from Lydia’s husband which have caught up with them – and while Lydia is now free to marry her lover, the nub of this complex, emotional story is that she does not want to.
She reasons that their love has opposed convention, so why enter into a legal binding that defies, rather than defines, their feelings:
“the secret fear of each that the other may escape, or the secret longing to work our way back gradually – oh very gradually – into the esteem of the people whose conventional morality we have always ridiculed and hated.”
‘Souls Belated’ is one of Wharton’s earliest and finest stories. I first read it when I was selecting short fiction by 19th-century women writers for a Folio Society collection. It is intensely emotional, but also pragmatic, and neatly skewers the hypocrisy of a society which thwarts natural happiness, and wears down real love, while upholding the sham of status or protocol, as resonant this Valentine’s day as it was 120 years ago.
Catherine Taylor is a critic, editor and writer. She has been a judge on prizes from the Guardian First Book Award to the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate and is part of the team behind the Brixton Review of Books. You can read her full Personal Anthology and other selections here.
‘Flor’ by Natalia Borges Polesso, translated by Julia Sanches (collected in Amora, Editora Dublinense, 2016. Translation from Amazon Crossing, 2020) Chosen by Joanna Harker-Shaw
There are words that perplex and fascinate us when we are children, words adults will not explain, but hush us when we echo them. This beautiful short story from Natalia Borges Polesso tells of a young narrator's search for understanding, her innocence starkly contrasted by adult prejudice (a prejudice quickly learned as twelve year old Celoi explains with exasperation – do you like pink or blue, dolls or tag, boys or girls).
Flor herself is iconic, captivating, an indisputable denial to the adults claims that machorra is a kind of sickness.
Joanna Harker-Shaw is a poet, illustrator and writer. She is working towards a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at St Mary’s University, Twickenham.
‘A Spot of Love’ by Giles Gordon (Published in The Illusionist and other fictions, Harvester, 1978) Chosen by Nicholas Royle
In this three-page story by the late experimental novelist, short story writer, anthologist and agent, who would have been 80 this May, baby comes first, sitting unclaimed in the middle of a room full of women, wearing a nappy. The story proceeds to look for the baby’s mother, allocating that role to a young woman, an unhappy and unmarried company director, who then needs to be found a man. It is 1978, after all. The story is included in Gordon’s third collection, published in that same year. My copy contains a handwritten set of notes. Referring to the present story, the reader writes, ‘Does the inability to have “a single decent relationship with anyone” prevent one from having an identity?’
Nicholas Royle is the author of seven novels and three volumes of short fiction. He has edited twenty anthologies and is series editor of Best British Short Stories (Salt). Reader in Creative Writing at the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Met, he also runs Nightjar Press and is head judge of the Manchester Fiction Prize. You can read his full Personal Anthology and other selections here.
‘A Rose for Emily’ by William Faulkner (First published in The Forum, April 1930. Collected in the Collected Stories, Vintage, 2009) Chosen by Hazel Boyle
She carried her head high enough--even when we believed that she was fallen.
Miss Emily Grierson lives with her father in Jefferson, a town known for The Battle of Jefferson in the War of Northern Aggression. The mood is such that you can smell magnolias and trepidation below the surface. Miss Emily puts a foot wrong, so the townspeople believe, when, after her father’s death, she takes up with Homer Barron, a manual labourer and a Yankee! [pass me the sal volatile!] Not only that but she refuses to acknowledge that property taxes are required of a woman of her status, nor does she need to provide a reason for purchasing arsenic. Various cousins arrive to provide companionship/spying for the family, but Miss Emily is going to do what she is going to do. Spoiler: Miss Emily and Mr. Barron do not live happily ever after but they do stay in close contact.
This is a twisted tale that I first read in 8th grade when I thought I was a genius and invincible and that I would still never have a boyfriend. This spoke to my inner awkwardness and anger, but also gave me a creepy forbidden thrill that Emily just did it. “Don’t you know how amazing I am! Why aren't you willing to stay.”
Hazel Boyle has a lifelong obsession with books and writing and works as an office manager to pay her husband's library fines.
'Captain Patch' by T. F. Powys (first published in book form in Captain Patch: Twenty-one stories, Chatto & Windus, 1935) Chosen by Michael Caines
Theodore Francis Powys – a younger brother of the now more celebrated novelist John Cowper Powys – has always seemed to me the more interesting of these two prolific brothers. (I think, or I kid myself perhaps, that I can see why people rave about JCP, but he usually leaves me cold.) One more attractive feature, perhaps, is T. F. Powys's particular mastery in shorter works of fiction, such as his Fables (in which, for example, a church mouse talks theology with a holy crumb dropped from the communion table). ‘Captain Patch’ is a nice piece of silliness in which a tailor, in a coastal town, lives modestly but dreams of being great: “He rose to glory, he commanded, and he was obeyed”. In this precursor to James Thurber's ‘Secret Life of Walter Mitty’ (1939), the fantasy life takes over for a while; there is indeed, on a comically modest scale, glory of a kind; but there is also love. Reading it again now, with great pleasure, some years after my Powys-mania was perhaps at its height, I think of ‘Captain Patch’ as a story of misplaced love, and a chance encounter making things right. Not everybody in a Powys story is so lucky. (Spoiler: that church mouse eats the crumb.)
Michael Caines works at the Times Literary Supplement. He is writing a short book about literary prizes, and a slightly longer book about Brigid Brophy. He is founding editor of the Brixton Review of Books. You can read his full Personal Anthology and other selections here.
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