The Bed Book of Short Stories

A collection of short stories by new and established Southern African women writers on the theme of Bed to be published this year.

Contributors:-

1. Pamela Newham, “A natural combination”
2. Joanne Fedler, “Bedrock”
3. Lauri Kubuitsile, “In the Spirit of McPhineas Lata” (BOTSWANA)
4. Melissa Gardner – “In sickness”
5. Rumbi Katedza, “The Corpse” (ZIMBABWE)
6. Anne Woodborne, “The quilt of wife-beating crimes”
7. Sarah Lotz, “Heaven or something like it”
8. Jayne Bauling. “Stains like a map”
9. Gothataone Moeng, “Lie Still Heart” (BOTSWANA)
10. Joanne Hichens – title still to be decided
11. Jeanne Hromnik – title still to be decided
12. Arja Salafranca, “Desire without borders”
13. Sylvia Schlettwein, “To own a bed” (NAMIBIA)
14. Liesl Jobson, “On a broomstick”
15. Karabo Moleke, “Nompumelelo’s Sinxoto’s Bed”
16. Margot Saffer, “Imagining Monsters”
17. Megan Ross, “Finding a mother”
18. Ellen Banda-Aaku, “Made of Mukwa” (ZAMBIA)
19. Isabella Morris, “The Outsider”
20. Novuyo Tshuma, “Ikej” (ZIMBABWE)
21. Romaine Hill, “Every Picture Tells”
22. Marina Chichava, “Sleeping Through Heartbreak” (MOZAMBIQUE)
23. Erika Coetzee, “How to Improvise”
24. Bronwyn McLennan, “Portrait of a woman in bed”
25. Claudie Muchindu, “Wings on Indi’s Pillow” (ZAMBIA)
26. Nia Magoulianiti McGregor, “Hunters and lovers”
27. Tinashe Chidyausika, “Fools Gold” (ZIMBABWE)
28. Rose Richards, “Mary Mary”
29. Luso Katali Mnthali, “A requiem for Daniel” (MALAWI)
30. Helen Walne, “Crazy”
31. Rosemund Handler, “Lena My Lovely”

Published by Modjaji Books.
Compiled by Lauri Kubuitsile; edited by Joanne Hichens.

My Top 30 Reads

Isabella Morris selects her Top 30 Books in no particular order

1. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini – Afghanistan, women, pain.

2. The Blue Bedspread by Raj Kamal Jha – Shocking story of incest. Technical masterpiece.

3. In the Country of Men by Hisham Mitar. – Coming of age story against the backdrop of Libyan suppression.

4. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison – Technically perfect book. Morrison understands social issues and how to wield them.

5. The Reader by Bernard Schlink – The story of the holocaust as you’ve never read it.

6. Silk by Alessandro Baricco – Love story. Mysterious, haunting.

7. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez – A book about love, what can I possibly say?

8. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne – Adultery.  Hester Prynne is a character that I found difficult not to empathise with.

9. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy – Gosh, this was the most confounding story I ever read. But ultimately I felt Hardy succeeded because I really, really felt Jude’s absolute obscurity!

10. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini – Children, social issues, my favourite kind of book.

11. A Map of the World by Jane Hamilton – The loss of a child – who could not feel something about that?

12. I Know This Much is True by Wally Lamb – Family dynamics. Lamb’s a master at exploring them.

13. The Art of Fiction by John Gardner – Great advice for writers.

14. The Consolations of Philosophy by Alain de Botton – Hilarious in parts. Alain de Botton is to philosophy what Jamie Oliver is to cooking. Refreshing and accessible.

15. The Right Questions by Debbie Ford – Helps one to think about important decisions.

16. The Hiding Place by Trezza Azzopardi – Children, social issues.

17. The Outsider by Albert Camus – Set in the desolate North African landscape that appeals to me.

18. The Art of Seduction by Robert Greene

19. I Remember by Denis Hirson – Beautifully styled book on fleeting memories that hold pockets of emotion.

20. The Book of Fred by Abby Bardi – Fostering. What is family?

21. Beyond Culture by Edward T Hall

22. White Oleander by Janet Fitch – Abandonment.

23. The Writer’s Brush edited by Donald Friedman – Great book to come back to again and again.

24. The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay – First South African book that I really loved.

25. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver – Children. Africa. Lots of social stuff.

26. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro – Beautiful love story.

27. Atonement by Ian McEwan – Forgiveness, love, family, betrayal.

28. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte – Passion, drama.

29. Pookie, the rabbit with wings by Ivy Wallace – Set up the adventurer in me when i was 5 years old, I ran away a lot.

30. Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks – Tender story about trench warfare. I finally understood why my grandfather was such a silent man.

El Gouna Writers Residency 2010

I’m really pleased to be attending this residency. It’s my first residency and I’m looking forward to engaging with writers from other parts of the world, and having a full month to just write without the distractions of daily life. I am grateful to my family for agreeing to live without me for a month

“El Gouna is a unique fully developed town on the Red Sea, acknowledged for preserving local traditions and culture throughout its 20-year existence. This can be seen through its multicultural living community, international school, international university campus, church, mosque, museum and all other locations where residents can encounter traditional Egyptian architecture, and customs.

A few years ago, El Gouna celebrated the opening of El Gouna Library, a branch of world renowned Bibliotheca Alexandrina and home to one of Egypt’s six “Culturamas”.

Aiming to expand our efforts in cultural enrichment and hoping to make El Gouna a platform for literary exchange, El Gouna offers the first Writers’ Residency Program in the MENA region intended to provide writers with a wide variety of exciting and inspiring life experiences to feed their art and help develop valuable projects.”

http://www.elgouna.com/writers-residency/default.html

Paying It Forward

2010 is a year that’s filled with writing projects and publications for me, and I’m really grateful to have such a full calendar. Writers cannot possibly take on every single project that comes their way, and the reasons may vary from time constraints, to not being particularly inspired by a project.

In 2008 I was approached by someone who wanted me to write their story; the subject herself is a complex character and while her story might be compelling, I didn’t feel psychologically trained to deal with all the issues that would have been concomitant with the project. It was a situation that demanded sensitivity, so I decided to ponder on it before saying I was unable or unwilling to take it on.

An evening or two later, I was browsing in the local EB and came across a South African book about a family, and when I read the writer’s bio I realised that I had found the writer for the project I didn’t feel capable of writing. I emailed the subject and explained that I didn’t feel I was the best writer to tell her story, but asked her permission to pass her on to the other writer who had the right credentials to write her story. She agreed. I emailed the writer and the result is that she is now writing this girl’s story.

Almost a year later, I received an email from the same writer to say that she had been approached to write a biography but was unable to do so because of her geographical location. She had remembered that I’d passed on the book I didn’t want to write, and was now returning the favour.

I met with the publisher and signed a contract shortly thereafter to write a well-know South African entrepeneur’s biography.

Not all writers share projects that they can’t manage, some are downright selfish. I remember sharing my travel contact list with a fellow travel writer, but when it came to him sharing with me, he suddenly grew vague and then changed the topic of conversation. I was annoyed, and think I had every right to be, considering that we had agreed to share industry contacts.

There are also mean-spirited editors who won’t accept a travel story from freelancers because the publication didn’t get the original sponsored travel offer. I suppose it comes down to finding which writers and editors are into sharing and working with them only. My new year’s resolution is to work with writers and editors with healthy egos – I don’t have the energy to deal with fragile, jealous, unsupportive colleagues anymore – being petty and picky is unprofessional and I’m not prepared to engage on that level anymore.

Two weeks ago a publisher phoned me and asked me if I could help her source some Cape-based writers and a London-based writer, for a huge project. It’s worth a lot of money to a lot of writers, and considering the profiles they’ll be writing, it will elevate their writer status. I sent out emails to writers that I felt were capable of writing to the brief, and as and when the replies came in I passed them on to the publisher.

It felt really good to be able to pass on work to fellow writers, and the responses from some of the writers who have now been commissioned by the publishers was well worth the effort. I believe in paying it forward – try it, you never know when it’s going to come back and reward you.

The Stories We Tell and Those We Don’t

I remember standing in a bank queue with my two youngest children when they were about six and seven years old. The queue was long and there was an elderly man standing in front of us; I can still smell the grease in his hair and see the dandruff embedded on the neck of his brown jersey; he turned to me and we had a conversation about his war experiences. In no time at all, it seemed, we’d reached the front of the queue; the electronic board above the teller station beeped and the man proceeded to Teller 5. My son tugged my sleeve and I looked down at his earnest blue eyes. “Do you know that man, mommy?” He asked; I had to admit that I didn’t. My children were perplexed that a stranger would share his story with me and as explanation I told them that my mother had said I would always hear the life-stories of people because I had a face that strangers trust. I now know that if I don’t want to hear every stranger’s life-story, I follow my husband’s advice and avoid eye contact.

Seeds of story are scattered everywhere and often I scribble down a word or a phrase or impressions in my notebook that I overhear or observe. Goldie stood sobbing in her bare feet, wrapped in a pink gown at a phone booth in a hospital waiting area. Natalia confided how her sister wouldn’t eat broken food – crumbs of crisps or biscuits. Michelle told me she was heartbroken when her next door neighbour stopped playing with her; Michelle’s mother tried to cheer her up by saying, “You’ll be friends again once she’s stopped being Jesus’ new best friend.” Carrington told me how he spent a summer in Harare converting the school playground into a golf-course and how thirty boys played golf with one broken golf club. Each of these incidents are seeds that I have been able to use as starters for my short stories.

Other stories are delivered to me – sometimes with the written permission from people to tell them. An immigrant wants me to expose corruption at a world-renowned medical training institution. It is an alleged tale of academic corruption, mining-bosses, xenophobia and American spies. A lady once phoned to say that she had the solution for South Africa’s political problems – God had given it to her – and she wanted to relay the solution to Thabo Mbeki who was the South African president at the time. There are of course legitimate people who contact me from time to time, and after deciding not to take on their stories, I have, with their permission, passed them on to colleagues who were more inclined to their stories, or who had the necessary expertise to write them.

There are stories that I know would be delightful to use as the foundation for my own short stories, but I have chosen not tell them and the reasons vary. These stories are usually very intimate and while they would offer great scenes for my fiction, my friends would recognise themselves in an instant.

It would appear then that I sometimes feel conflicted about what I do and what I don’t write. I guess I don’t want to be a peddlar of someone else’s pain. I can write about painful issues, but I can’t insert the real stories of friends and family because then it would cause pain for them. That said, I do admit to having included personal impressions in some stories or articles that have hurt some of the people I love and I’ve had to apologise for that. Choosing what to write then is quite a delicate balancing act. Yes, writers should be able to write uncensored, but then they must be prepared to pay the price of that choice.

At present I’m writing an inspirational biography. I was genuinely surprised that I was awarded the contract because I had researched and written a paper on biography during my masters degree, and I had been quite turned off the genre because it is such a contested genre and there are too many agendas to be served – at least the writer’s and the subject’s. The only reason I agreed to write the biography was because it is not intended to be sensational – I don’t want to dish up dirt on anyone. I’m writing the biography because the intention is to serve as an inspiration to youth who badly need role models and hope for a future that they might not be that hopeful about. That said, it will not be a sanitised piece. The hardships and the experiences of the subject will be discussed, but not in the Hollywood-Tell-All exposé way.

One of the major issues for writers is that of making choices. We all have to do it, and we all make different choices and these choices result in a wonderful diversity for readers.

(Image: The Storyteller 2 – produced here with permission by the artist Jamie Winter)

You Know You’re a Travelwriter when…

You only pack two pairs of shoes. Practical granny-style shoes and one pair of sexy sandals to remind you that you’re a woman instead of an automaton.

Your bathroom at home has miniature-sized everything – shampoo, body lotion, soap.

You spend half an hour going through your dressing table at home trying to find the room service menu.

You speak in hushed tones when you walk down your passage at home.

You ask your housekeeper what else is on the menu for dinner.

You forget you have a car parked in the garage and phone for a taxi.

You dial 9 hoping to book an early wake-up call.

Every inch in your handbag is accounted for.

You go to the bookshop and head straight for the travel guides.

The rotator cuffs in your shoulder are stuffed from lugging heavy wheelie bags through airports.

Roam on / Roam off is no. 2 on the speed dial of your mobile phone.

The constant concern in your life is how many pages you have got left in your passport for foreign visa requirements.

You wear three watches – New York, London, Johannesburg.

Your wallet carries US Dollars, Egyptian Pounds, Euros and Thai Baht, but you have no Rands to pay the local car-guard.

You phone your friends and they say, “Isabella who? God, I thought you’d fallen off the face of the earth!”

Survival Kit for Romance Writers

Every romance writer needs a survival kit to help them out when they find themselves in a romantic writing drought.

1. A great memory of a first kiss.

I kissed Michael over the handlebars of his Chopper bike. He smelled of chlorine and he tasted of oranges. The memory of a first kiss brings back the tingly sensations that you have to relate in your love story every time your characters kiss.

2. A vine of jasmine outside their writing room.

The surprising hint of a delicious scent titillates the senses and awakens your response to sensational writing. Make sure your readers are as sensually aroused as you are by including sensational details.

3. A bottle of their favourite male fragrance.

Does he smell of pine or moss, does he exude a woody scent or a mature scent that reminds you of pine cones crackling in the hearth? Make his scent attractive and alluring; make it so your reader also wants to rip his clothes off.

4. Chandeliers and long white curtains that billow in their writing room.

Crystals catch and deflect the light and creates a sense of luxury. Long white billowing curtains adds to that full sensuality.

5. A day alone with love songs playing loud.

Play your love songs from morning til night on full volume, choosing the sad ones for the “we’re destined to never be together again” moment.

6. The handkerchief you kept from your first breakup.

That handkerchief you kept has got salt crystals on it from all the tears you shed. Cry all over again and tell your readers where it hurts.

7. Calendar of male pin-ups.

You know you’ve got a favourite part of the male anatomy – share it with your readers. Is it that delicious line that runs down his tummy separating his abs, or is it the hollow in his throat above his massive pecs?

8. Catalogue of dates.

Make a list of great places to spend a date and then keep them on file so that you’ve got a brilliant candlelit dinner in a nature reserve or an evening star-gazing when you need it.

9. A best friend.

Best friends always offer a shoulder to cry on or great advice. Turn to her or him when you’re not sure what your characters should do.

10. A great relationship.

You can’t write about one if you haven’t had one. Use the highest and lowest parts of your most sizzling relationship in your stories to create a believable romance that your readers will enjoy.

2009 PEN/Studzinski Literary Award finalists announced

The South African Centre of International PEN (SA PEN) is pleased to announce the finalists for the 2009 PEN/Studzinski Literary Award.

The award for original short stories in English by African authors attracted an unprecedented 827 entries, 625 of which met with the rules of entry. Just under 200 stories were longlisted, and 34 stories were chosen as finalists by the PEN Editorial Board comprising Shaun Johnson (Chair), Anthony Fleischer, Justin Fox, Harry Garuba, Alistair King and Mary Watson. Nobel Laureate JM Coetzee is currently judging the shortlisted stories and will choose the winners of the first (£5 000), second (£3 000) and third (£2 000) prizes. The winners will be announced in May 2009. (Details regarding the announcement will be posted on www.sapen.co.za in due course.) The finalists’ stories will be included in an anthology of new writing from Africa to be published later this year.

The writers and their stories to have been selected as finalists for the Pen/Studzinski Literary Award 2009 are:

Ken Barris – The life of Worm; Nadia Davids – The visit; Ceridwen Dovey – Survival mechanisms; Joan du Toit – An informed decision; Graham Ellis – No match for Fanie Smith; Rosemund J Handler – Strident night; Jeanne Hromnik – Love In troubled times; Karen Jayes – Where he will leave his shoes; Suzanne Jordaan – Beulah; Bobby Jordan – Metalhead and Situation Orange; Chisanga Kabinga – Display cabinet; Ken N Kamoche – A kiss in Nanjing; Yvette Kruger – What I wore; Lauri Kubuitsile – Pulani’s eyes; Beatrice Lamwaka – The star in my camp; Jennifer Lean – To each his own; Irene McCartney – Pauline’s ghost; Jenna Mervis – The lives of dogs; Kirsten Miller – Only in art; NoViolet Mkha Bulawayo – Snapshots; Wame Molefhe – Rainbow-coloured dreams; Natasha Moodley – Spirit of Madala; Isabella Morris – Bluette; Kyne Nislev Bernstorff – The last supper; Naomi Nkealah – In the name of peace; Maik Nwosu – In Leopardville; Tolu Ogunlesi – River Falling; Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi – Area boy rescue; Andrew Salomon – A visit to Dr Mamba; Alex Smith – Soulmates;Dineke Volschenk – Glorious wounds; Phillippa Yaa de Villiers – Keeping everything the same; Hayet Z – Flypapered days

The PEN/STUDZINSKI Literary Award has replaced the HSBC/SA PEN Literary Award and aims to encourage new creative writing in Africa. It is open to all citizens of African countries writing in English, and offers talented writers on the continent an exciting opportunity to develop or launch a literary career. www.sapen.co.za

email: rudebs@icon.co.za

Ready, steady… win!

Contests are a fabulous way to announce your presence on the local writing scene. If you are placed in a contest, it helps you to establish a writing cv or bio that many publications require and it also boosts your confidence. Not having a publishing record can be intimidating for beginner writers, but don’t allow yourself to be disheartened. A story well told will be enjoyed by an editor or contest reader.

WHICH ONE IS RIGHT FOR YOU?

It is important to be selective about which contests you enter. Without diligent research you could end up sending entries that don’t comply with the rules. If a publication says they only want fiction entries, then that is all they want. They will summarily reject poetry and non-fiction entries, no matter how brilliant they might be. A recent local contest received hundreds of entries, but about a hundred of them were rejected because the entrants did not comply with the rules. If a rule states that you have to be a citizen of Burramunga to enter, then that’s the rule, don’t waste your time or the contest organisers’ time by submitting anything to them.

RESOURCES

If you’re serious about entering contests then you need to establish which ones are suitable for the genre that you write in. Good resources can be found in comprehensive listings in publications like The Writer’s Yearbook and Writer’s Market UK available at good bookstores, and obviously, the internet. Many writing sites have a listing of writing contests.

PLAN

The best way to ensure that you enter the competitions that you are able to comply with, is to have a Contest Plan. In November/December every year, I spend about a week researching contests online and in the Writer’s Yearbook and Writer’s Market. I make a list of those I want to enter by listing them according to the earliest closing date. I cut and paste the submission rules of each into a Word document entitled Contests 2009. At the beginning of every month I see what’s coming up, trying to read three months in advance. If I feel that there is a contest I want to enter then I print that contest’s details and put it into the plastic folder. Date order is essential because at a glance I am able to see what’s coming up. Being forewarned, so to speak, gives me time to consider what story I would like to write, it also gives me a chance to check through unpublished work for a suitable story. This list is invaluable and can be added to throughout the year if new contests appear. It also provides a template for the following year.

KEEP A SEPARATE FOLDER

I have a plastic see through box where I keep all research material, contest rules and drafts of competition entries, this cuts out the confusion of having to remember where I have filed an article or an idea.

JOT DOWN IDEAS

In the plastic folder I keep a notebook for ideas that I want to jot down. An idea don’t remember itself, if you don’t write it down, consider that idea a cigarette that you enjoyed, but once it’s gone up in smoke, you can’t reclaim it. If all your ideas and rules and research are centrally located you won’t waste time.

TRACKER

If you’re going to be a serious contest entrant then you need to keep track of which submissions you’ve made to which publications. Many contests do not accept simultaneous submissions, i.e. it’s not protocol to send the same entry to several competitions at the same time. Knowing where your stories are is essential. A good idea is to download manuscript management software. The best tracker that I’ve found is SAMM which is completely free and downloadable at this link. It’s fabulous because you can customise it according to your needs and it’s unobtrusive. You can enter all your manuscripts, you can enter markets and market types. It’s a no-fuss application that will alert you with follow-ups if you so require.

CHECKLIST

Before you send your entry, make a checklist from the rules sheet. Have you double-spaced your entry? Must you include your name on the manuscript or mustn’t you? Have you included your contact details? It is so easy to avoid silly mistakes by using a checklist, but remember to be flexible because different contests have different criteria, some want three copies of an entry and others require only a single copy. Some contests allow email entries, others do not. Make it your business to establish the rules for your checklist.

Good luck.

Resolving to Write

New years are notorious for setting up people for failure, and writers are no different. A new year is a blank canvas waiting for you to fill in the colours of your aspirations, but it is easy to get carried away. With eagerness you allow the colours to swirl into each other so that instead of having a clear picture of what you’re hoping for, you end up with a chaotic picture full of muddy colours that have bled out your pure intentions.
There are a myriad of resources to consult in order to design a writing plan and books such as Maisel’s Coaching the Artist Within and Jurgen Wolff’s Your Writing Coach can also get you upright at your desk with ideas about how to best approach this business of writing. But there are some basics that you don’t need a book to tell you about. Trust me, this I know after years and years of making plans, or should I say, setting up the traps of self-sabotage.
Firstly, spend some time thinking about what you want to achieve as a writer. Do you want to be a novelist or a environmental journalist? You need to have your mind firmly set as to what it is you want to achieve. To establish a career as a writer, you can’t be a jack-of-all-trades. Case in point: I decided to go to the Richmond Book Fair. I approached a local newspaper to do an article on the fair, but the books editor didn’t want a general piece on the fair, she wanted a review on one of the books being launched at the fair. Interviewing the writer and going to the launch took all my energy away from the fair itself, and it took another two to three weeks of reading the book and writing the review. I am not a review writer, I don’t want to be one, I shouldn’t have agreed to do it! The review was okay, even if the editor didn’t like it, and yet it was a colossal waste of time and energy. Time and energy that would have been put to much better use at the writing projects that I’m committed to and passionate about.
Secondly, take some time to plan out blocks of time to devote to the writing projects that you’ve chosen to do. If you are aware of deadline dates for short story competitions or for novel chapters, then you’ve got an idea of the amount of time you need to allocate to achieving each one of the projects.
Thirdly, don’t set yourself up for failure. If you’re writing erotic science-fiction short stories, don’t send them to You magazine for consideration. Don’t send a non-fiction book proposal to a poetry publisher. You must identify your markets so that your writing has the best chance of succeeding. Also, don’t over-extend yourself. If you’re a part-time writer, then your output is going to be considerably less than a full-time writer, so try not to be over-ambitious. Be realistic – the amount of time you have will usually determine how much you can achieve.
Fourthly, write. I am amazed at how many people consider themselves to be writers, but don’t actually write. They either read about writing or they have ideas in their heads! Neither will get you published. To be a writer you have to write – I believe every day, but you may disagree. However, if you’re not putting words on a page you cannot be a writer. Writers write, it’s that simple. And the more you write, the easier it gets.
Finally, if you don’t have the luxury of being able to share your writing with anyone, invest in Peter Elbow’s book, Writing without Teachers.