A Personal Anthology, by Dave Wakely

The task of compiling a Personal Anthology is, of course, impossible. I’ve sometimes daydreamed about what I would choose if I were ever invited onto Desert Island Discs, a programme I’ve always found fascinating in what it either reveals or knowingly conceals about its subjects’ predilections. And then realised that I own several thousand albums, and picking just eight tracks is like being asked to save the lives of a minibus-worth of the citizens from the population of a sprawling city.

Choosing the contents of The Personal Anthology is – apart from the thankful lack of bloodshed – little different. There’s a library’s worth of stories not included here and, although it’s surely a heresy for a literary festival organiser in 2024, I’ve abandoned any thought of curating against any list of boxes that must be ticked.  These are simply the stories that most immediately sprung to mind when I asked myself ‘What are the stories that have stayed with me and linger in the memory the longest?’ These may not even be the stories I would call ‘the best’: they have not been picked on technical merit, but they are ones I would be happy to be stranded with in some mythical hellscape with no other reading matter to hand. (My luxury item would, by the way, be a piano. I am a guitar player who longs to be a pianist, and isolation would give me the practice time. I could, after all, write in the sand with a stick and let the tides be a merciful copyeditor.)

‘The Melbourne Train’ by William J. Mitchell (Published in Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, ed. Sherry Turkle, MIT Press, 2007)

This first choice should, perhaps, be disallowed on a category basis. it’s not a short story: it’s an essay, or a snatch of autobiography. Or maybe that modish thing, creative non-fiction. It’s also glorious, so I’m including it. It’s one of several delightful pieces in Sherry Turkle’s curated collation where a wide range of people – scientists, musicians, designers and many more – write about something (or, more accurately, some thing) with a special meaning to them. A cello, an old car, ballet slippers, an early synthesiser. For William Mitchell, that object is rather larger. It’s a steam train.

Mitchell spent his earliest years in “a lonely flyspeck on the absurdly empty map of the Australian interior”, where the Melbourne to Adelaide express thundered through every evening, giving not just a glimpse of another, sophisticated, urbane world but a visible means of one day reaching and participating in it.

Later in life, it was on a train that he realised that he was learning to read, and his love of words grew the trains’ tracks and carriages and gave him a metaphor for thinking about writing (freighting sentences with meaning, shunting words into the right order, and that rhythm – of wheels on tracks or syllables in sentences – is a powerful element of language.)

Even later, after a life lived in major cities, trains are still a powerful evocation for him, although they now evoke the curious child that he once was. The personal joy of this piece for me is that, as a young child myself, I stood by level crossing gates watching the carriages of a branch line trains trundle to and from London, wondering about the lives of the adult strangers I could glimpse in the windows. If trains evoke Mitchell’s childhood for him, his writing evokes mine for me. A beautiful piece of writing, however we classify it.

(It also reminds me of a wonderful line from a Paddy McAloon lyric. Words are trains for travelling past what really has no name.)

‘Mountain Under the Sea’ by D. W. Wilson (Winner of the 2015 CBC Short Story Prize, and available to read online)

I first encountered this short story when DW (Dave) Wilson read it at The London Short Story Festival in 2015, where it evoked more audience laughter than many others that day. Yet the story is about grief, the difficulties of parenthood and of attempting human communication in a challenging emotional landscape – the impossibility of protecting someone else from the emotional pitfalls of life, even though you can’t stop yourself from trying.

The set-up is simple: a narrating Canadian father, addressing himself in second person, is on a trip to England with his 18-year-old daughter. But she had originally planned to take the trip with her boyfriend, who had since taken his own life. It’s the daughter who found the body. The humour here – which plays out in their interaction, but very much not in the interior life of the father - Is not the main ingredient, the lamb shank for the reader to gnaw on. Rather it’s deployed as the twist of lemon or the pinch of sea salt that heightens the flavour and makes their careful small talk so potent, as we are aware of what they are not saying, not discussing. That the father is aware of all the potential darkness of a human life, but knows that his daughter needs to be spared too keen a reminder just at this point. Knows that he can play to the disdain a teenager will always have for their dumb, ageing Dad, but that his love is both unbreakable and unspoken. (There may be more than one epiphany in this story, but the characters shake them off admirably.) And knows that laughter, playfulness and what the English call ‘banter’ is a previous normality that it would soothe both of them to return to if and when they can.

For such a short piece, it’s a remarkably rich portrait of a parent-child relationship. One of Wilson’s signature strengths as a writer is to show the fragility and apprehension behind gruff masculine exteriors: this is one of his finest examples, although all of his collection Once You Break a Knuckle is well worth reading. With Wilson, there is always a heart beating somewhere under the callouses.

‘Yorkshire’ by Graham Swift (Published in England and Other Stories, Simon & Schuster, 2014)

Another portrait of a complicated parent-child relationship, but a much less happy one. Our narrator here is Daisy, wife of Larry and mother of forty-eight-year-old Adele. Her story is an evolving reminiscence, related over the course of a sleepless night. As it begins, she is remembering being a teenage riding her bicycle down Denmark Hill, not caring that her skirt was blowing up in the wind. Her thoughts then were about her father, gassed in WWI, and that the perceived wisdom that darkness of the past should be left unspoken: the old-fashioned Stiff Upper Lip. But as the story unfolds, Daisy and her life unravel like a jumper snagged on a nail.

It’s impossible to say more without giving spoilers, but this is a story that is driven by accusations and their impact, and which explores that fragility even of a trust that has been built up over decades. It’s also a story about the very human resistance to believing developments that threaten to unseat us or unravel the foundations that we have built our lives on. Daisy’s urge to deny them is entirely believable – as are her anger and her self-doubt. Her life may not have been what she thought, and its patterns are shaken and blurry.

Swift’s final twist is to withhold the truth. While Daisy tosses and turns alone in bed, thinking of her husband in the next room, the reader no more knows who to believe than the narrator (if indeed, we believe her). Yet it leaves us knowing that all our lives are jumpers, and the world has a million potential snagging nails.

‘More than Human’ by Michael Chabon (First published in GQ, 1989, and collected in A Model World and Other Stories, William Morrow, 1991)

Chabon’s story is another about father-child relationships and the pains of family life. This is one of a series of stories in a sequence called The Lost World, which charts the unfolding of the divorce of the parents of Nathan Shapiro and the boy’s realisation that this is what is now definitely happening. As the dents in the carpet where some of the furniture once stood quietly but telling testify, his father really is leaving the house.

One of the few short stories I can remember ever making me cry, especially in its ending, as we see – through Nathan’s eyes but from his father’s written testimony – how the closeness they both sought has evaded both of them. Yet the story is as bottled, unspoken and afraid to bare its emotions as its characters (indeed, the father is referred to as ‘Dr. Shapiro’ throughout). It’s what they can’t say – or can only hint at – that is so strong here. Yet we are also left wondering if the outcome would have been the same even if they had: even conquering male reticence might have left Nathan and his father in separate houses, unsure of their futures, although they may have preferred imperfection to absence.

‘The Disco at the End of Communism’ by Christos Tsiolkas (Published in Merciless Gods, Allen & Unwin, 2014)

A story that, in the context of this anthology, confirms Tolstoy’s dictum that ‘each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’. And a story that demonstrates how Tsiolkas’s characters – and by extension, his stories and novels – have conflict running through them like proverbial sticks of rock.

The relationship here is between siblings: the recently deceased, bohemian, gay Leo, living a life at the fag-end of Marxism-inflected hippiedom, and the still living Saverio, living his life in mainstream, heterosexual suburban orthodoxy. Visiting Leo’s home for the funeral, Sav’s grief comes to encompass love, hatred, contempt, compassion and much more. Never accepted by his younger brother’s well-read, erudite social circle, we see through Sav’s eyes that their impeccable ‘Spirit of 68’ socio-political positioning does not prevent them from being either condescending to or dismissive of him, and ‘as moralistic as the old believers’.

The story cleverly plays with our sympathies: readers of this author – an outspokenly gay, working-class Greek-Australian typically keen to admonish orthodox hypocrisy and with a reputation for shocking the reader – are likely to more closely resemble, or at least sympathise with, Leo or his friends that Sav, yet is Sav we are more likely to feel for by the story’s end.

Like most of Tsiolkas’s work, this can be read as a morality tale, and one where punches and kisses are likely to land in equal measure, but there’s a richness of wider context here that’s not always otherwise present. And for all the brutality and conflict, there is still tenderness: Sav’s speech at Leo’s funeral is sensitive and deeply moving, acknowledging that his brother’s friends became his ‘family’ while revealing how left behind he had always felt.

‘Graphology’ by Bernard Cooper (First published in Blithe House Quarterly and available to read online here. Collected in Guess Again, Simon & Schuster, 2000)

Another story that shows us how grief can make us behave uncharacteristically. When her husband dies unexpectedly, Libby doesn’t expect to find a notebook listing his clandestine encounters with other men. Though their coded references are readily deciphered, her dead husband’s newly revealed dual identity is not, and she finds herself turning to graphology – a ‘science’ to which she is embarrassed to give credence – as she tries to make sense of the man she thought she knew.

Not only do we see the concealment of a gay life from a heterosexual partner’s point of view, but we also see the destructiveness of the deceit on someone we assume the concealer had intended, however misguidedly, to protect. The one thing he had withheld from her becomes his overriding legacy. In a notable use of the quietly foreshadowed small detail, it will also quite possibly make you see choice of wallpaper in a whole new light. (If you are ‘courting’, pay very careful attention in B&Q with your betrothed.)

‘Devotion’ by Adam Haslett (First published in The Yale Review and collected in You Are Not a Stranger Here, Nan A. Talese, 2002)

If Tsiolkas’s brazenness seems cartoonishly Australian and Cooper’s characters are unmistakenly American, this story wrongfoots assumptions. It is set in a leafy part of South London and, like the others in the collection, quietly told, but its author is American.

The sibling scenario plays out very differently here too, although no more happily. Owen and Hillary still live, unmarried in mid-life, in their parents’ house. Since they discovered their mother’s body as children after she had taken her own life, Hillary has felt keenly protective of Owen. He, meanwhile, has lost several of his friends in the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s/90s, and his connection to a (gay) life outside the house with it.

But many years previously, they both met and fell in love with the same man: Ben. After their shared object of desire went back to America, neither potential relationship having found the courage of its convictions, there were letters to Hillary that Owen has hidden from her, afraid that he would lose her. Now Ben – a married man with children - may be about to visit again. Owen and Hillary may each be convinced of the need to protect the other from life’s dangers and from emotional damage, but truths are revealed nonetheless.

The devotion of the story’s title is double-edged: they are guarding each other, but they do so both as protectors and gaolers.  

‘Pauly’s Girl’ by Jonathan Corcoran (Published in The Rope Swing, Vandalia Press, 2016)

Another story of emotional and psychological captivity, albeit in this case from beyond the grave. In small town Appalachian America, Pauly has been the town’s flamboyantly gay florist for decades and beloved by the townswomen. Especially Moira, his platonic life partner: carefully using the language of its setting, the story never quite says ‘fag-hag’, but its is clearly implied. Like Adan Haslett’s siblings, both have had fleeting affairs with other men, but these have not blossomed (pun intended).

After Pauly’s death, and a funeral where Moira’s reads out his carefully chosen words (he is an impeccably controlling character, even after death), she ‘unexpectedly’ inherits his entire estate: a beautiful family home, a lot of money – and the florist’s shop. (There is a tacit suggestion throughout the story that Moira might be a little slow on the uptake.)

Whether his legacy is a gift or a burden becomes a moot point. Has her (platonic) life with him been a joy, or a distraction from making a life of her own? The story underlines this with a beautifully deployed use of the sense of scent: an overwhelmingly sweet sickliness of gifted flowers by his hospice bedside, and the stench of dying blooms in a florist shop left closed for days after his passing.

A visit from the dead man’s former lover and a garden conversation hints at a turning point, although the resolution remains beyond the story’s final page. The dead man has – perhaps deliberately, perhaps unknowingly, perhaps unintentionally – set Moria free, but she must take the next step herself. To borrow a phrase that may be Mark Zuckerberg’s finest legacy, it’s complicated, but the ending is not without hope.

‘The Mainland Campaign’ by Kevin Barry (Published in Dark Lies the Island, Jonathan Cape, 2012)

A story that doesn’t clearly lay everything out neatly for the reader. We know from the title, and from a few brief references in the text that we are following a young Irishman planning a bomb attack on Camden Town tube station at some point in the 1980s. Chris Power, reviewing the parent collection for the Guardian, compared it unfavourably with William Trevor, as “Steven's motives remain unexplored.”

Much as I hesitate to disagree with such a knowledgeable commentator, for me that is actually a strength of this as storytelling. Barry’s use of close third person POV gives us a slight distance from his protagonist, but we are in Steven’s world, seeing it his way. Taking his minder’s admonishment to not get “emotional” about his task, he is as focused on his new German girlfriend and their possible life together (rather romantically imagined in Steven’s head) as on his mission. The horror of the scenario is not ignored -contemplating his potential victims, we see Steven think “They were his own kind, and if that was proof of cold valour, what was?” – but neither is it laid on with a melodramatic trowel. There is suspense: to borrow Hitchcock’s definition, we literally see the bomb being left under the market bookstall, although the story has finished before it is scheduled to go off. We see no explosion or human carnage: we are not in Jed Mercurio territory here.

The shock is not so explicit. It may be a perverse and twisted place to us, but we are in Steven’s ‘normal’ here. It is our error to assume that it follows the same logic and framework as ours – we will, I hope, not be bombing the people we danced alongside last night – and the withholding of a clear explanation makes the story all the more chilling. Answering the question ‘how has this young man come to be this way?’ is complicated, especially if we stand back (in time as much as geography) to contemplate responsibility.

‘The WHITES ONLY Bench’ by Ivan Vladislavic (Published in Propaganda by Monuments, D Philip, 1996)

A playful, clever, and witty writer, Vladislavic’s writing of the 1980s and 1990s closely chronicles the emergence of post-apartheid South Africa, and plays close attention to the country’s urban spaces. The WHITES ONLY Bench (his capitals) comes from a collection whose original title is particularly telling: Propaganda by Monuments.

Set in a museum, we learn through the wittily-conveyed horror of some of the staff that the example of the titular bench of which they had been so initially proud – featuring so prominently in a press photograph (captured, of course, in black and white) – is a fake, created in their own workshop as ‘the real thing’ had proved so hard to find.

What follows is a satire of bureaucracy and of urges to be ‘correct’ and ‘authentic’, a reminder that cities are palimpsests where histories are continually overwritten, and an exploration of the horribly complicated nature of ‘truth’.  Under the wit, there is true horror: as well as the day-to-day cruelties of the now defeated apartheid, the story also takes in the victims of the Soweto Riots. The objects that remind us of the past have not entirely lost their potency, even if their meanings have grown more complex. Not as playful with form as some of Vladislavic’s work, the story is perhaps an accessible entry point for those unfamiliar with his writing (they should purchase The Restless Supermarket immediately), and one that may delight lovers of Kafka and Terry Gilliam in equal measure.

‘The Examination’ by Ryan O’Neill (Published in The Weight of a Human Heart, Black Inc., 2012)

Another playful writer, and one who is happy to get very ‘meta’ with the reader. The collection from which it comes includes a story composed of fictional book reviews, a fictional memoir compiled as an author’s account of their own bibliography, a story about (and written on) a malfunctioning typewriter, and many such conceits. What is impressive about them is how well they work: we are not simply admiring the literary equivalent of a dog riding a unicycle.

I could have chosen several stories here, but my first choice is The Examination. If this were a flash fiction – and it’s only slightly too long to qualify – it would be called a hermit crab flash: a story snuck into a different verbal form. Here, in the format of a Rwandan English Examination Answer Sheet, we see a young man’s examination answers that – while they conform to the chosen form – tell a heartbreaking personal story. We learn, for example, that he has the eight-letter word section of a Scrabble dictionary carried with him for five years in refugee camps. “There are so many of these words like LOVINGLY, MERCIFUL and OPTIMISM, and my father’s name, INNOCENT. There is also GENOCIDE.”

What is hinted at in that answer is revealed in the response to a Composition question, describing “A wedding you once intended”, where the full personal horror of civil war between rival tribes unfolds. Yet, in a coda to an earlier question, the story ends with the young man refusing to abandon the innocence and optimism he found in his Scrabble dictionary. O’Neill’s cleverness in the construction of this story is, by now, entirely beyond the point.

‘Bs’ by Eley Williams (Published in Attrib. and other stories, Influx Press, 2017)

A desert island library would need some lighter moments, and this would be a fine choice. The stories in Williams’ debut collection are not merely ‘drunk on prose’: they have swallowed a whole shelf of dictionaries and are now working their way from optic to optic, necking books of proverbs, puns, and rhetorical devices with gay abandon. (Having had the pleasure of twice interviewing the author, her obsession with dictionaries and lexicography would, I hope, make her proud of that description.)

It’s like reading a Dundee cake while drinking a pint of port, and the linguistic fireworks are hard not to enjoy. Like many of her stories, Bs is a riot of possibilities, interrogations, quandaries and definitions, a brain obsessively and almost manically playing word-association with itself – and that ‘with itself’ is important. Many of Williams’ stories focus on misunderstandings or failures of communication (or failure to communicate). Imagine Fawlty Towers if Stephen Fry had taken the helm. The best approach is simply to surrender to the joy of a writer so utterly in love with words and what they can do, but who can leave you smiling at a moment of very human fallibility and tenderness at the same time. Stories can bring you delight as well as broken hearts, after all.

Dave Wakely is the Online Programme Manager for Milton Keynes Literary Festival, and co-organiser of The Lodestone Poets. His writing has been shortlisted for the Manchester Fiction Prize and Bath Short Story Awards, and his poems and short stories have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies.

* A Personal Anthology is curated by Jonathan Gibbs, author of two novels, Randall, and The Large Door, and a book-length poem, Spring Journal. He is Programme Director of the MA/MFA Creative Writing at City, University of London.

* And if you are interested in contributing your own Personal Anthology to the project, then please let me know by replying to this email. I’m always on the lookout for guest editors!

* Finally, if you enjoy this Substack you might enjoy Creative Digest, a collaborative Substack produced by the Creative Writing team at City, and to which I contribute. Read and subscribe here.