A Personal Anthology, by Rue Baldry
I hope you will enjoy this mix of stories, which I have selected and ordered as though it were a published anthology. Consideration has been given to variety, balance, and pacing. There are some recurring themes, settings, and questions within the collection. None of the stories has previously appeared on A Personal Anthology; some of the writers have. They include well-established contemporary authors, fresh emerging talent, and pillars of the literary canon.
Sitting comfortably, the reader begins, by turning to the first story.
‘Ernestine and Kit’ by Kevin Barry (First published in Columbia Journal Issue No. 49, 2011. Collected in Dark Lies The Island, Jonathan Cape, 2012)
We will begin and end this collection with fictional women who are in late middle age, like me. Ernestine and Kit are “in their sixties”, respectable and judgemental, with wittily well-observed dialogue.
“The skirt’s barely down past her modesty, are you watching?”
They are taking a drive on a summer’s day through County Sligo in Ireland, visiting some tourist attractions.
“As the engine cut the car filled with the sound of anxious birds and the nearby chatter of the castle visitors. For a moment, the ladies pleasantly listened – they did love a summer-afternoon crowd.”
But the reason why they love a crowd is not what the reader might expect. What opens as a light read with a little social commentary, soon takes a turn which makes it much funnier and much darker. ‘Ernestine and Kit’ greatly rewards a reread, when phrases which might have seemed ordinary will take on more meaning.
Researching for this anthology, I discovered that there is a ten-minute film of ‘Ernestine and Kit’ directed by Simon Bird, starring Pauline Collins. Unfortunately I couldn’t find it available to watch anywhere, but I have high hopes for it when I do.
‘Turnstones’ by Carol Farrelly (First published at Granta online, here, 2nd June 2021, and anthologised in I Cleaned The- and Other Stories, Paper & Ink, 2021, both as a result of winning the Canada and Europe Region of the 2021 Commonwealth Prize)
Carol and I were both Jerwood/Arvon fiction mentees in 2015, mentored by Ross Raisin (of whom more later). Carol’s settings and situations become solid through a few, perfect details. Within them she explores relatable characters’ complex emotions and psychologies.
In ‘Turnstones’ the protagonist is Jo, a student whose immediate problem is that she has forgotten her pass card for the library. While she is arguing her case with the security guard, the narrative takes us gently through her background, revealing her insecurities about being too working class to belong in this prestigious university.
“A finger of rain fell on the flagstones. A mottled brown bird darted past her and ducked beneath the turnstile, then hopped, all twiggy orange feet, onto the staircase. A turnstone, she thought. She smiled at its quicksilver audacity. Not one flap or stumble or glance over the shoulder. No notion of trespass. It trotted inside as though the library was its usual, wintering home.”
That turnstone is followed by others breaking in and causing chaos until Jo is presented with an understated epiphany.
“They moved like one stretched beating muscle, an echocardiogram that was strong and healthy and still had far to go.”
‘Dreams’ by Anton Chekhov (First published as Мечты in New Times No. 3849, November 15 1886. First collected in In the Dusk, 1887, St Petersburg. I read it in Selected Stories, translator unknown*, Introduction and Notes by Joe Andrew, Wordsworth Classics, 1996. It is available to read free online in a different translation here)
“Before them lie ten yards of dark-brown, muddy road, behind them lies as much; beyond that, wherever they turn, rises a dense wall of white fog. They walk and walk, but the ground they walk on is always the same; the wall comes no nearer; the spot remains a spot.”
This road is the location for the whole of ‘Dreams’. Two soldiers are escorting a vagrant with amnesia. In some ways, this is a scene of the grittiest naturalism, yet the weather and the past-less man give it a tint of the supernatural. The three working class men discuss their ambitions. They unearth the homeless man’s roots. But, in the end, after all their efforts to fill the future with particulars, it remains as blank as the fog.
I wish I hadn’t waited until I was in my fifties to read Chekhov. But I am glad that there are lots of stories by him which I have yet to read.
* Wordsworth Classics publishers say on their site: “A note on the translation: our edition was first published in 1996 and no details of the translator were included. We have made a concerted effort to identify the source of the translation, but without success. The stories seem to have a continuity of style which suggests they are all the work of the same translator. Should anyone be able to cast any light on this, do please let us know.”
‘Dancing in the Grass’ by Alice Fowler (Collected in The Truth Has Arms and Legs, Fly on the Wall Press, 2023)
From nineteenth century mud and fog, we move to vistas on chalk grasslands, where orchids are growing wild in June 2018. Alice Fowler writes outwardly tidy stories, in which tangled darkness hides beneath apparently comfortable domesticity. ‘Dancing in the Grass’ begins with the narrator and her cleaner, Agata, meeting by chance. “Then, together, we stepped on to the down: the great expanse of waving grassland, sweet-scented, opening before us; so we became explorers, poised upon its edge.”
The first sentence of ‘Dancing In The Grass’ is about climate change and the narrator is concerned with nature conservation, but also with not appearing racist. Dead flowers are weighed against living humans.
“‘This is England. Wildflowers are protected here.’
My voice flared louder than I wished. The outcome of the vote was known by then. England – Britain – weren’t words that I said easily. Agata was applying for residency, she’d said”.
The sympathies of the reader keep shifting, as do the relative statuses of the two women, certainties about morality, and the narrator’s sense of who she is. Both women behave badly and claim victimhood, both develop and change over the course of the story. The ending is great.
‘The Cart’ by Mariana Enriquez, trans. Megan McDowell (Collected in Los Peligros de Fumar en la Cama, Editorial Anagrama, 2017. First published in English in The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, Granta Books, 2022)
‘The Cart’ is an evocative morality tale, which also illustrates the way many people currently live only a touch of bad luck away from absolute poverty. Like many of the stories in this Personal Anthology, it balances absolute, highly detailed reality with an element which is a bit weird.
Two drunks get into a fight in a working-class Argentinian suburb. The outsider is humiliated then forced to abandon his shopping cart full of “bottles, cardboard, and phone books.” A couple of weeks later, bad things start happening in that street. People get ill, are arrested, disappear. The local drunk claims this means the shopping cart is cursed.
“After two months no one in the neighbourhood had a phone anymore – they couldn’t afford it. After three months, they had to tap the electricity wires because they couldn’t pay their bills.”
Enriquez builds a community of interesting people through cumulative specifics, then goes on to destroy almost every one of them in individual, contemporary ways. Only one household is secretly safe. The subtlety of the writing is such that it is never made clear whether there is a supernatural factor, or just a coincidence of ill fortunes.
“The taxi driver ventured on foot to the other side of the avenue. There, he said, everything was fine as could be.”
‘The Fishing-boat Picture’ by Alan Sillitoe (Collected in The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, WH Allen & Co, 1959. A video of a reading by Garry Cooper is available here)
Growing up in the South of England, Sillitoe’s Saturday Night, Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner shaped my views of English life further north. ‘The Fishing-boat Picture’ is more sentimental than my usual taste, with a sweet, pure sadness runs through it, but we have reached a point in this anthology where the reader might like a break from dark, cynical stories. It describes one ordinary life within huge historical events, one of my favourite things.
“[M]aybe they were the best times we ever had together in our lives. They certainly helped us through the long monotonous dead evenings of the war.”
The narrator is a postman, Harry, who is conscious of narrating: “If I started using long and complicated words that I’d searched for in the dictionary I’d use them too many times […] so I’d rather not make what I’m going to write look foolish by using dictionary words.” He recalls the previous twenty-eight years (from the 1920s to the 1950s), in which he married Kathy, she left him, she came back to visit years later, in a sorry state, and eventually she died.
“I looked up and caught her staring at the picture of a fishing boat on the wall: brown and rusty with sails half spread in a bleak sunrise, not far from the beach along which a woman walked bearing a basket of fish on her shoulder.”
This picture passed between Harry and Kathy over the years, a symbol of their relationship in a clear but never overstated way. They remained always fond of each other, but Harry was too unadventurous, Kathy too reckless, and neither managed to learn balance from the other.
‘The Danger is Still Present in Your Time’ by Robyn Jefferson (Published by MIR Online, 18 April 2022, and available to read here)
From a well-established short story author, let’s turn to a young, exciting, twenty-first century writer. Since 2022, Robyn Jefferson’s work has been being published in journals and highly placed in competitions.
‘The Danger is Still Present in Your Time’ is Lauren’s coming-of-age story, but she lives in a village where everything is overshadowed by the disappearance of a sixteen-year-old girl ten years before.
“Maybe Meggie’s expression in the picture on the wall in the Queens Head will become a cipher she can solve, as if the commonality of their newly shared age will shift them sideways onto the same transcendental plane.”
Jefferson captures the universality of being a teen girl, as well as Lauren’s unique experiences. She also describes well the current which runs under communities where a major crime remains unsolved (in York, we have Claudia Lawrence). When Lauren and her friends experiment with Ouija, it is Meggie they try to contact.
But then, the action moves on and beyond in a direction I was not expecting, but felt I should have been, given the extent to which Meggie’s mystery has been woven into Lauren’s upbringing.
‘In The Field’ by Tim O’Brien (First published in Gentleman’s Quarterly, 1989. Collected in The Things They Carried, Penguin Books, 1991)
Leaving Lauren and her friends partying in a field behind a pub in southwest England, we move to a very different field, in the Vietnam War, where the mud is even worse than that endured by Chekhov’s soldiers in ‘Dreams’.
Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is my favourite linked story collection, and one of the most effective of all fictions I know at conveying the experience of war.
The protagonist of ‘In The Field’ is an entire platoon, up to their thighs in excrement, in continuous heavy rain, searching for the body of one of their number, Kiowa.
“He was under the mud and water, folded in with the war, and their only thought was to find him and dig him out and then move on to someplace dry and warm.”
Their reluctant First Lieutenant, Jimmy Cross, is mentally composing, editing, and rewriting a sanitising letter to Kiowa’s father. He has been ordered to think of the men under his command as “interchangeable units of command”, but prefers to see them as human, which makes this more painful.
As is pointed out by one of the soldiers, the “shit field” is a metaphor for the war they are all moving through, or trapped in, like Kiowa, or floating on top of, like Cross does at the end, contrasting his stinking present to memories of a golf course.
“But they also felt a kind of giddiness, a secret joy, because they were alive, and because even the rain was preferable to being sucked under a shit field, and because it was all a matter of luck and happenstance.”
‘The Undertaker’s Apprentice’ by Hana Gammon (First published at Granta online, here, 12th May 2023, and anthologised in Ocoee and Other Stories, Paper & Ink, 2023 , both as a result of winning the Africa Region of the 2023 Commonwealth Prize)
Following the deaths of Kiowa, Meggie, and Kathy, we will now consider their corpses:
“He explained to us at various street corners and crossroads, gesturing with his long, thin hands, how he stitched the lips of the dead and cleaned their flesh of its blood. He told us how he washed their faces and their hair, and how he folded their hands over their hearts before sending them down to be cradled by coffin wood in the dark, warm earth.”
The narrators of ‘The Undertaker’s Apprentice’ are a town’s children, the central figures are an undertaker, who exchanges objects with them for symbolic equivalences, and his apprentice, who always carries a large, shiny black, unadorned box. It might or might not be a coffin; all of the symbolisms are kept vague, making them more haunting.
None of the characters have names and their physical descriptions are scant. Hana Gammon is from Cape Town, so I assume the “little town” in which they live is in South Africa, but it is so lightly sketched that it has both a universality and a rootless, mythological unreality. Objects, textures and moments, however, are minutely described, like this dead bird:
“The splinters of bone ground against each other under the skin, which I remember felt so soft and thin that my shaking fingers seemed to pose the danger of unwittingly pulling it apart.”
The result is an unsettling read, the sensation of which lingers.
‘Ghost Kitchen’ by Ross Raisin (Anthologised in The BBC National Short Story Award 2024, Comma Press. A reading by Ashley Margolis is available here and the text of the story is available here)
I was lucky enough to be mentored by Ross Raisin on the Jerwood/Arvon scheme. I learned an enormous amount from him. His writing is always pure, his phrasings imaginative and his stories give voices to those who need them.
The protagonist of ‘Ghost Kitchen’, Sean, is a delivery cyclist, his job, in some ways, the 2020s equivalent of Harry’s post round in ‘The Fishing-boat Picture’. Sean’s precarious freelance status contrasts with Harry’s twenty-eight contracted years. They both avoid prolonged human contact as a result of loss.
Sean takes a few shifts in a dark kitchen on an industrial estate, where he encounters Ebdo, an immigrant, who, unlike Agata in ‘Dancing In The Grass’, is in the UK illegally. “[F]ar as anyone else is concerned, they don’t exist. Just ghosts.” With no access to protection, Ebdo is bullied by the managers in increasingly violent ways.
“How easy it was, to do nothing; to let it become normal. But every night, when Sean pedalled away down the lane and through the dark industrial shapes of the buildings, a rekindled feeling of guilt would cling to him, as he replayed each incident, and imagined all the ways that he could have stopped them.”
This reminds him of the incident he is trying to hide from, and eventually leads him to befriend Ebdo. By the end of the story this has subtly changed his life.
‘Household Gods’ by Tracy Fells (Anthologised in Unthology10, Unthank Books, 2018. Shortlisted for the 2014 Commonwealth Prize. Collected in The Naming of Moths, Fly on the Wall Press, 2023)
‘Household Gods’ pulls together several themes from previous stories. I don’t want to say too much about its plot, because part of its power comes from how it skilfully leads us to discover what is going on for ourselves. Tracy Fells has the captivating ability to hold a reader inside someone else’s reality, whether their truth is entirely grounded or contains elements of magic.
“Multiple prayers to multiple deities distributed your fielders across a dangerous pitch.”
The central character, Mo, is easy to like. He works at a plant nursery, is polite to his elderly neighbour, cares for his incapacitated mother, his wife, and a baby in Intensive Care. “A nappy hung off the baby’s bony hips. From her nose, protruded a plastic tube, taped across her tummy. She wore one pink, hand-knitted mitten, on her right hand.”
Mo gradually offers truths about his life, until we are completely absorbed, possibly to the point of weeping. I could have chosen any of the stories in Fells’ collection, The Naming of Moths, but ‘Household Gods’ was the one which made tears run down my cheeks, which is rare for me when I am reading.
‘Physics and Chemistry’ by Jackie Kay (Collected in Why Don’t You Stop Talking, Picador, 2002, and published in The Barcelona Review, issue 29: March - April 2002, available here. I read it in The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story, selected and introduced by Philip Hensher, 2018)
We come to the final story in our anthology, the bookend which circles back to Ernestine and Kit, those older ladies who seemed so respectable when we started reading, a dozen stories ago. ‘Physics and Chemistry’ is about two women who are referred to by the subjects they teach, but are entirely individual characters. Physics, particularly, may appear stern, but their relationship proves the depths of her emotions.
The lives of most LGBT+ people in the past had to be habitually secretive and repressed.
“Sometimes they had two teachers from Lenzie High School round – Rosemary and Nancy, PE and music, who also, like them, lived together and bought each other comfortable slippers for Christmas. Neither Rosemary and Nancy nor Physics and Chemistry, ever, ever mentioned the nature of their relationship to each other.”
‘Physics and Chemistry’ centres around one day when everything changes for them. It is not a long story, but Kay manages to sketch out the two women’s histories, their daily normality, what happens to change that, and what the results are, without it ever feeling rushed.
So this anthology ends. The reader looks up, feeling in a particular way because of the final paragraphs of that last story, and the end sentence: “It could always change colour.”.
Then, I hope, you sit back and take a moment, thinking about your journeys in time and place through all twelve stories, about their common themes and their contradictions, and all you have been told about human experiences. And I hope that you will be glad to have read them.
* Rue Baldry’s debut short story collection, Nice Things, will be published by Fly On The Wall Press in December 2026.Thirty of her stories have appeared in journals such as Granta, Ambit, MIR Online, Fictive Dream, The First Line, Litro, and Mslexia. In 2023 her story, ‘Lech Prince, and the Nice Things’, won the Canada and Europe region of the Commonwealth Prize. Others have placed in the Reader Berlin and Odd Voice Out competitions. Rue lives in York, has an MA in Literature with Creative Writing from Leeds University, was a Women’s Prize Discoveries longlistee, a Bridge Awards/ Moniack Mhor Emerging Writer, and a Jerwood/Arvon mentee. Her debut novel, Dwell, won the 2024 First Novel Prize and is forthcoming from Northodox Press in February 2026.
* 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! In fact, there is a spare slot next Friday 9th May, so if you have free time over the long weekend to get reading and writing, then let me know!
* 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.