A Personal Anthology, by Jan Kaneen

I love short stories, have done since childhood and I’ve spent loads of time over the last five decades bingeing on the likes of Daphne Du Maurier, John Wyndham, Katherine Mansfield, Raymond Carver, Maeve Binchy and Lydia Davies, to name a tiny few of my favs. But none of these writers are included in the twelve stories I’ve chosen for this most personal of anthologies and here’s why. Ten years ago, at the age of 50, I took up storytelling doing the MA in Creative Writing at the Open University where I learned to read with an eye to the craft of how short stories are created. Since then, these ‘writer’s’ eyes have guided me through many, many new and contemporary short stories that I’ve either studied to learn from as I honed my skills, or that I’ve provided feedback for when they were in that magical and transient state of being created. Each story in this collection is a positive co-ordinate on my writer’s learning curve and is scribed by either one of my writing heroes or one of my writing feedback buddies, or both.

‘The Art of Foot-binding’ by Danielle McLaughlin (First published in Dinosaurs on Other Planets, The Stinging Fly, 2015; you can listen to a radio version of the story on RTE here)

I read this brilliant story at the very start of my writing journey and have studied and dissected it ever since, trying to work out its magic, so I might struggle to keep this brief, but as it’s taught me so very much about creating resonance and tension in my own writing I might have to bang on a wee bit. ‘The Art of Foot-binding’ tells the tale of Janice as she tries to hold onto a fractured marriage by tacitly accepting her husband’s infidelity, hoping that what remains unspoken will eventually blow over.

Her fourteen-year-old daughter intuits part of this and becomes increasingly contemptuous of her mother. The narrative is told in two voices. The primary voice tells Janice’s story in the present tense, from a third-person limited point-of-view, showing the reader everything Janice sees as if it were a camera sitting on her shoulder; but it also has access to what she’s thinking, knows what happened to her yesterday and is able to make insightful expositional reflections about her life.

This voice is contemporary, clear and to-the-point, but it is the secondary voice that readers first encounter, a voice that reads like an extract from an ancient Chinese instruction manual teaching the practise of foot-binding. This voice frames the story as well as running between scenes described by the primary voice, and is always presented in italics, implying that it is a quotation. It opens with:

“Begin on the feast day of the goddess Guanyin, that she may grant mercy. Or on the cusp of winter when the cold will numb bones splintered like ice on a broken lake. Begin when she is young, when the bones are closer to water, and a foot may be altered like the course of a mountain stream.”

The culturally alien similes and metaphors (to contemporary western ears) create a mystical tone that implies the torture it heralds is something artistic and spiritual. Straightaway, the reader feels a dissonance between the lyrical beauty and horrific subject matter, and starts asking questions: what is the significance of this distinct voice that assumes an allusive compliance with the reader? Is this a quote from a real text? Who is the assumed addressee? That this addressee was more appalled than in agreement with the voice’s culturally embedded assumptions, created a strong narrative jar that coloured everything that follows, imbuing the story with a sense of unsettling dread.

The two narrative voices do not speak to one another explicitly, so when the primary narrative voice places the reader into a starkly juxtaposed dramatic present, it does so without explanation, leaving the reader to make their own connections, to start actively wondering what the interplay between these voices might mean, and what might link the modern-day protagonist to the horrors described by the lyrically exquisite secondary voice. The narrative atmosphere this creates prickles with darkly foreshadowed unknowns that resonate through the story, creating a mesmerising tension. Seriously if you haven’t read this story, do.

‘The Mistletoe Bride’ by Kate Mosse (First published in The Mistletoe Bride and other Haunting Tales by Orion, 2013)

Reet, enough of overly detailed writerly descriptions of craft because I love this story too much to attempt to burst the bubble of its apparent simplicity. The first-person narrator quietly tells us her history in clear, girlish language that unpacks hundreds of years of longing and understated melancholy in a way that is both touching and haunting. The story also presents a subtle subtext of modern-day feminism as readers perceive the scant regard the protagonist was held in, in a world where she had no agency at all. It reads so smoothly and sadly – like a half-remembered childhood fairy story, which despite its strange, unsettling tragedy, ends on a surprisingly upbeat note.

‘Flamingos’ by Ali McGrane (First published in The Weight of Feathers, Retreat West Books, 2021)

Ali and I did the OU MA together and were in the same tutor group. When she emailed the first version of this story for feedback, it made me cry. In the finished version, her mastery of literary brevity immediately drops the reader inside the story which starts with a mum taking her kids to the zoo. “The children trail after her through the turnstiles. A cloudless sky like an insult, clusters of wooden pointing signs, a peacock dragging finery in the dirt,” and boom - there you are in place, time and mood. The heartbreak of what has happened to this fractured family and their relationships with each other, reveal themselves through deliciously insightful writing, helped along by the prosaic signs that detail information about the animals, signs that are laden with subtext.

‘If She Bends She Breaks’ by John Gordon (First published in Catch Your Death and other ghost stories, Patrick Hardy Books, 1984)

Though I was born in Bolton, I now live in the Cambridgeshire Fens, an eerie flat landscape with hanging mists that sit below sea level and has a distinct atmosphere all of its own. John Gordon lived here too, even went to the same school as my son and was deeply inspired by the landscape. I love everything he’s ever written but this story is my favourite. Set on a freezing winter’s day in a Wisbech classroom, it tells the tale of Ben who cannot focus on his lessons. The strangeness of the day is evoked straight away, in the opening lines, “Ben had felt strange ever since the snow started falling. He looked out of the classroom window and saw that it had come again, sweeping across like a curtain. That was exactly what it seemed to be, a curtain. The snow had come down like a blank sheet in his mind.” The narrative voice and boy’s Fenland idiolect are perfectly rendered, but Gordon’s genius in this piece, for me, lies in disclosure. The reader travels, or is steered, through this dreamtime day, slowly, surely coming to realise, at exactly the right moment, the truth of Ben’s backstory. This is the sort of tale you have to read again the minute you finish it to resee the moments with new eyes. I never tire of this tale. It gets better with the reading of it, even when you see the skill of the storytelling.

‘Abode of Eagles’ by Maureen Bowden (First published in The Weird and Whatnot, 2020)

Maureen is a seriously prolific writer and feedback buddy who’s sold over 200 tales since we started swapping stories a decade ago, but this is my favourite because I love a ghost story that takes me somewhere unexpected. It’s the tale of a journey on the narrow-gauge railway that takes travellers up Yr Wyddfa (the mountain sometimes called Snowdon or Eyri). It’s set off season so there are no other travellers to accompany protagonist Trish, except one who she was sort of expecting. The travellers chat as they chug their way up, engaged in conversation that doesn’t make proper sense, until you come to know what they are moving toward and away from. This story, which has haunted me ever since I first read it, taught me the valuable lesson that if a reader is misdirected skilfully enough to be suspecting other twists, then writers can take liberties with plot and spin perfect endings that, though they are seeded all the way through, readers will still not see coming.

‘City Of Specters’ by Bandi (First published in The Accusation – Forbidden Stories from inside North Korea, Serpents Tail, 2014. Available to read online on Lit Hub)

One of the reasons I started writing when I did, in this post-truth age of misinformation and fake news, was because I wanted to be able to tell stories that reveal uncomfortable truths, a determination that led me to Bandi. Bandi, (Korean for Firefly), is a North Korean samizdat writer still living under the Kim regime who in the 1990s wrote smuggled-out, anonymous short stories that reveal the horrors of living there. In honestly presenting everyday life and values, these stories show the culture’s madness and levels of control that western minds like mine might otherwise find hard to understand.

City of Specters is set in Pyongyang in the run up to the National Day of Celebrations - a day when everything must go perfectly, down to smiling the right smile and walking the right walk. When we meet Han Gyeong-hee, she is the well-fed and well-respected daughter of a martyr from the glorious revolution, with an inherited prestigious job and a flat in the capital’s main square. But she also has a two-year old son who is afraid of the huge pictures of Karl Marks and Kim Yong Il that hang opposite where they live. When the square is being prepared for the big celebration, she draws an unsanctioned curtain each night to stop the baby from crying. This sets off a chain of events that lead to her and her husband being accused of passing down negative thoughts to their son, a crime punishable by immediate exile to the starving countryside. The almost casual calm with which these events are told, punctuated by flashes of humour, normalises the unconscionable so seamlessly it’s terrifying.

‘A Sex Manual for the Over Sixties’ by Thomas Malloch (First published by Ringwood Publishing 2023, and available to read here)

Taboo-busting short stories can be hard to execute, running as they do the risk of putting readers off with near-the-knuckle subject matter and uncomfortable narrative re-creations, but Thomas Malloch’s techniques to keep you reading this story are skilful indeed. He adopts a first-person older female narrative voice that brings insight and humour to the opening of this prize-winning story. When his narrator starts to talk about oft-unmentioned issues like vaginal dryness and the practicalities of elder sex I winced. But the pragmatic humour and use of medical terminology offset this discomfiture enough for me to continue and once you’ve navigated past the geriatric sex, and cringed and laughed in equal amounts, you realise this story is about love and grief and loss and closeness and your original discomfiture morphs into empathy and understanding. Would I have stuck with this story if Thomas hadn’t been a feedback buddy? Not sure, but that would have been my genuine loss, so, you know, another valuable lesson learned.

‘The Witch Who Walked the Shore’ by Gaynor Jones (First published by Janus Litzine, 2021, and available to read here)

This gorgeous, lyrical, visceral flash fiction won first prize at Janus Literary in 2021, and no wonder. This story of loss and abuse focusses on a young teenage daughter whose mother has disappeared – murdered maybe by her abusive father. It reads like a twisted fairytale – set in an unspecified past but full of modern, feminist undercurrents. Gaynor often writes about young women and teenage girls caught in the process of negotiating dangerous worlds where default-setting opinions are apt to cast them as bad, but you want this protag to be bad, to fight back, to have had enough, and, come the end of the story, you are not disappointed. Dark, beautiful, twisted, genuine, this story blew me away.

‘Prototype’ by Judith Field (First published in The Book of Judith, Rampant Loon Press, 2014)

Another reason I took up creative writing was to improve my mental health. I find putting emotion on the page and not in me a cathartic and healing exercise, and I love reading stories that show authentic characterisation of people with, or recovering from, mental illness. This tale is told in the first-person narrative voice of Clare as she recounts events following her discharge from what readers intuit was a time when she was sectioned. It includes mental health struggles, neural a-typicality and everyday, casual antisemitism. Clare is a funny, clever, though not always knowing, narrative presence through which to experience the story, and readers often have more insight into her condition than she has herself. This dramatic irony is skilfully handled and when the reader ends the story not quite sure if the supernatural ally Clare meets inside the house she rents, was a real visitation or a delusion, the not knowing feels just right.

‘Angels Only Dance with Astronauts’ by Donna L. Greenwood (First published at Molotov Cocktail, 2020, and available to read here)

I love the Molotov Cocktail - it’s my fav e-zine, full as it is of dark speculative fiction with 50s B movie illustrations and wise-cracking razor-smart asides from its editors. On its submissions page they say, “The Molotov Cocktail is interested in volatile flash fiction, the kind of prose you cook up in a bathtub and handle with rubber gloves.” Well, this incandescent ugly-beautiful story that won their Flash Apocalypse comp in 2020 is exactly that. Exquisite, horrifying, lyrical, transcendental. How I wish, wish, wish I’d written it.

‘Tracey Miller Becomes A Cowgirl (Again)’ by Sharon Boyle (First published at Flash 500, 2024, and available to read here)

Sharon Boyle has an individual, Boylesque style of writing. Her use of verbs and regional idiolects give her very often working-class protags a vivacity and energy that is consistent throughout her work. This deeply arresting, killer opening is Boylesque brevity at its best, “She whips out a pistol and shoots him. Bang, bang, you’re dead.” Totally engaging and not, the reader immediately suspects, entirely what it seems. You lean in to get your bearings and gradually come to see via laugh-out-loud moments the eye-prickingly sad truth. A roller-coaster of a read despite its concision. Anyone wanting to learn how to give their writing energy, pace and pizzaz, and their characters real depth in as few words as poss, should read this story.

‘Just Because a Thin Spectre’ by Ruth Guthrie (First published by TSS Publishing in 2020, and available to read here)

An unpunctuated single sentence outpouring of grief and angst, a stream-of-consciousness wail of despair. This story is told in a rhythmical almost sobbing style that takes your breath away. When this story arrived for feedback in my in-box, I read it again and again, wondering if I should suggest any changes, so affecting did I find it in terms of flow and characterisation and pure emotion poured out and evoked. Sometimes you’re best leaving the creative energy of a story alone I reckon. Sometimes when it comes to storytelling, imperfections can be perfect. If you want to lose yourself on a wave of brilliant storytelling that presents a personal tragedy in a totally original and culturally important way - read this. End of Story.

* Jan Kaneen is a working-class granny and award-winning author originally from Bolton, Lancashire. Her short stories and flash fictions have won comps and prizes hither and yon including the Bath Novella-in-Flash Award in 2023 for her story, A Learning Curve, which was also short-listed for the Rubery Prize in 2024. Her short story collection, Hostile Environments, is forthcoming from Northodox Press in August 2025, pre-orders available here.

* You can browse the full searchable archives of A Personal Anthology, with over 3,000 story recommendations, at www.apersonalanthology.com.

* A Personal Anthology is curated by Jonathan Gibbs, author of two novels, Randall (Galley Beggar, 2014 and, in the US, Tivoli Books, 2025), and The Large Door, and a book-length poem, Spring Journal. He teaches on 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.