ISSUE 34JULY 2014

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EDITORIAL

Welcome to this issue of Brittle Star. It’sstruck me over the last few monthsthat people in the main are incrediblygenerous, I don’t just mean generousthrough money, but through time and

care and thought. I saw this in the Small Grass fundraisingcampaign, where we raised £1001 for Stonewood Press topublish new writing, but I also saw it through ourcompetition and through the general entries to BrittleStar: a generosity of thought that encourages talentedwriters to send to us. Yes, you can argue that there’s aprize at the end of the competition, but it’s not a Bridportor a National Poetry-sized prize and it still underlines thefact that, out of all the many, many competitions outthere, writers chose ours to enter. It’s very heartening.And enter you did! As one of the judges I read almost 700entries of poetry and short stories – the electronic entrieson a Kindle (bought second-hand, it’s already paid foritself in the paper and time it’s saved, but I still would havepreferred an iPad – oh, if only my coffers would havestretched…) and the postal ones I read sat on my sofawith a cuppa tea and a notebook. The range of the entrieswas far-reaching from sci-fi flash fiction to longernarrative or discursive poems (we capped at 60 lines), and the quality was in the main excellent, which made itall the harder to choose a good selection to send to Mimiand David.

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As I write, a jackdaw is arguing with a squirrel at thebird feeder and, corvid-friendly garden that we have, amagpie is looking on (not the magpie from the cover, butone very like it). There are enough meal worms andpeanuts to share, but they’re not to know; a rich food-source is a precious thing in nature. And although thereare acts of sharing and community in nature I have towonder if there are acts of generosity, and if not, is it, inpart, our generosity that sets us aside from the otheranimals with which we share the planet. Or is it the poemsand the stories?

Jacqueline Gabbitas

We’d like to thank our judges...

MIMI KHALVATI has published several poetrycollections with Carcanet, her most recent, Child: Newand Selected Poems, a PBS Special Commendation (2011).The Weather Wheel, is due out in October this year.

DAVID CONSTANTINE has published several books ofpoetry and short stories, most recently, Tea at the Midlandand Other Stories (Comma, 2013), which won the FrankO’Connor International Short Story Award 2013.

Cover illustration: ‘Magpie’ by Frances Barry (www.francesbarry.com)

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IN THIS ISSUE

BRITTLE STAR WRITING COMPETITION7 Mimi Khalvati – Judge’s Report: Poetry9 Joint First Prizes (Poetry): Di Slaney

– West of Dolgellau / Three-ply12 David Constantine – Judge’s Report: Short Fiction14 First Prize (Short Fiction): Douglas Bruton

– Our Mam, but not all of Her there19 Second Prize Poetry: Julie Mellor – Spermaceti20 Second Prize Short Fiction: Uschi Gatward

– Birth Plan28 Third Prize Poetry: Jennifer Carr – The Layer29 Third Prize Short Fiction: Douglas Bruton

– Sleight of Hand35 Commended Poetry: Jan Heritage

– Knots for Climbers36 Commended Poetry: Myra Schneider – Magenta38 Commended Poetry: Michael Brown

– Nightjars Near Sheringham39 Commended Short Fiction: Vicky Mackenzie

– The Floral Clock45 Commended Short Fiction: David Mathews

– Florence, who made mustard

POETRY AND SHORT FICTION54 Jeremy Page – All Souls55 Terence Dooley – In Carrickfergus 56 Mike Loveday – Walls58 Anna Reckin – Fish59 RCJ Allan – Rewriting 198460 Lucy Anderson – Time Moves61 Yvonne Green – All Artist62 Sheila Martin – Field67 Athanasia Hughes – To See The World

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74 Jonathan Greenhause – Fold/Unfold76 Sarah Parkinson – Welfare Demolition77 Maryann Cowie – The Wandering Sailor78 Subhadramati – Door-to-door appeal84 Andrew Pidoux – The Shoe Fairies90 Gus Gresham – Tick Tock92 J. Johannesson Gaitán – Flying is Not a Natural

Thing for the Living93 Nicola Warwick – The Gentleman Farmer94 Howard Wright – Off The Map103 Sally Ashenhurst – Silent Pond104 M. Stasiak – Glace Bay106 Eluned Jones – This Particular Woman107 Geraldine Bell – Fitting II108 Adam Nathaniel Furman – Babel113 Kitty Coles – I Would Picture Your Belly114 Roger Allen – Storm116 David Ball – The Fugitive Tartan117 Clive Donovan – Still Day118 Nicky Phillips – Tea Cosy123 Emma Balmforth – A Different Feeling125 Setareh Ebrahimi – Frozen Youth126 Simon Robson – Look What I Found – Shopping List127 Stewart Sanderson – Lascaux128 Marcus Smith – Another moment like this, please129 Vernon Pearson – Bi-cycling in the Wet130 Caroline Natzler – Drawn

ARTICLES AND REVIEWS63 Andrew Bailey – Poetry column: How to do it79 Sarah Passingham – Short fiction column:

The Science of Festivals95 Paul Blake – Review: Jemma L King, The Shape of

a Forestand / Maeve O’Sullivan, Vocal Chords110 Robert Chandler – Nikolay Zabolotsky / Afanasy Fet119 Agnes Meadows – No Longer the Need to Hide

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Jeremy Page

ALL SOULS

My day of the deadis not grey, nor wet,does not fall in October’s wake,blown in by whatever gustsBeaufort registers.

On my day of the deadthe sky is at its bluest,clouds are wispy and benign;the sun has rediscovered itselfand in the barn’s raftersswallows celebrate their return.

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Terence Dooley

IN CARRICKFERGUS

It’s easy to transform the plainest placeby thinking and remembering aloud.

He comes and goes as wanton as a mistswirling and pooling, the accordionist.Is what he plays lament or serenadeor dance of hours? He menaces our peacewith harmony, the enchanter in our midst –it is like being tickled or being kissedunwillingly or willingly, being changed.

Whoever he is, he must be daft or strange,to give himself for free, out in the road.

Wherever he stands, we cannot see his face and yet we long to ask him who he is,where from and why he haunts us with his song, and tell him all our sorrows and our joysand when he leaves us, will he wield us on?

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Mike Loveday

WALLS

[21.24] Rows of notebook pagescover the walls, ceiling to skirting board, apart from the thin window peering over Oxhey Wood.

There is a condition worse than blindness,and that is seeing something that isn‘t there

[21.39] No paintings, photos, posters.Only pages ripped and scrawled upon – quotations, every word in violet ink. A4 sheets, narrow-lined, and sellotaped.The hand-writing’s tidy, simple, small.

Silence may be as variously shaded as speech

[12.32] Two and a half centimetres between each page, left and right.Top and bottom gap – eight centimetres.

The angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone

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[23.28] I’ve started to pick up patterns: no poetry at all,a preference for female characters, whole rows devoted to opening lines,nothing in translation.

And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick

[23.56] The landlady says they rarely spoke. There is a bed, unsheeted. A table (no lamp), a pine wardrobe. The books themselves are absent.

My heart – I thought it stopped. So I got in my car and headed for God

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Anna Reckin

FISH

Afew hours after dawn, under a bridge in themiddle of the city, a wooden rowing-boat,with two fishermen in it. Downstream isthe outlet from the printworks, where theswans gather in a rush of warm water;

upstream the corrugated cardboard factory, a chokingsmell of damp paper. Along here, the river’s shut in, withstraight-sided banks and paved paths, squared off like acanal. I would never expect fish to be here. I would thinkthat they would stay in the greener shady places where theriver edges were once water-meadows (sand and gravelstill), now playing-fields.

That night I dream of the fish in the river. The river’scourse has straightened, blocked off into a long narrowpool: a tank in a Mughal miniature. The city walls aresmooth and high, fortified, with watchtowers, and thebuildings crowd up against them: towers, domes andminarets. It’s after dark, and a single fish hangs in thewater, gleaming and still in the night-time stone.

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RCJ Allan

REWRITING 1984

Today the class wrote of birds offering songs to the tired man as he arrived at Victory Mansions.

A spring breeze shimmied him through the door his scarf snuggling his neck. Instead of boiled cabbageone girl described the scent of tulips tickling his nose,another smelt oranges, or mouth-watering roast beef.

Winston Smith’s pulsating ulcer was soothed. No, better still, cured! He was back from the gym.He bounded up the steps, strolled easily into the lift, disappearing as the electric door slid shut.

The leering face of Big Brother was nowhereto be seen. A seascape hung in his place.The child in the corner, unsmiling, read an alternate caption: NO ONE CAN SEE YOU.

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Subhadramati

DOOR-TO-DOOR APPEAL

for bringing literacy to Maharashtra. The second time I call he asks me in.His solo supper’s done – beside his platea sardine tin – the lid peeled back. He tellsme how he nursed her till six months ago,right there, where the settee is, was her bed,and that’s her on the wall, just turned eighteenon holiday in Lyme – the skinny dipping!the fossils found! He drops one in my palm,heavier than stone. I weigh salts wept as a sea-urchin died. He writes the cheque,his signature beside her absent name.

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Sarah Passingham

THE SCIENCE OF FESTIVALS

Inever believed that a Literary Festival was for meuntil I went to one. And ain’t that so often the wayof things?

It was about ten years ago and, although I hadthree books under my belt, I’d only been writing,

what can be described as ‘creatively’ for a short time. Iwent to help a friend who was hobbling on crutches at thetime, and two things happened. Firstly, I discovered thatit’s almost worth shoving your leg in plaster and lookingin pain in order to be whisked into the front row seats,along with your ‘carer’ who has to hold handbag, coat,and carriers of signed books! Secondly, I found thatalthough I felt a bit of a fraud because I believed I wasn’tenough of a ‘serious’ writer to justify being there I lovedevery minute and couldn’t wait to go to the next one.

The friend I accompanied throughout that first festivalwas a scientist taking a year out to write poetry with thehelp of a NESTA fellowship, and her approach to thewhole event was noticeably different from my own. Shewas well respected in her field and had the self-confidenceto go with it. I was star-struck by the celebs on theplatform and could no more contemplate approaching anagent or publisher than give a lecture on deoxyribonucleicacid. Contacts are important in science so my friend

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understood how to network efficiently, and she wasn’tgoing to let the fact that she wasn’t known in the worldof writing change her behaviour. She never hesitated toask questions, introduced herself to everyone she sat near,and she took a notebook everywhere.

I can’t claim to be a veteran festival attender (and I’vestill to visit the Hay Festival – the Granddaddy of themall) but since that first one in my home city I’ve learnedthat you only have to be a reader and lover of books, andnot necessarily a writer, to enjoy a literature festival. Andthese days I ensure that I make the most of those I doattend – usually one or two a year – although bySeptember this year I shall have visited three, includingone in Ireland.

But you don’t have to travel that far if you don’t wantto; at the last count, there are over three-hundred and fiftyliterary festivals a year held in the United Kingdom andIreland. You can find them taking place during almostevery month of the year, “with only January and Decemberdeemed too chilly and dark for literary bookish types”,according to the website www.literaryfestivals.co.uk,which lists a festival to suit every choice of geography,taste and pocket.

So, having got over my gibbering, round-eyed, rabbit-in-the-headlights response, I now follow my friend’sexample and try to make every ticket worth its cost.However, I don’t possess the scientist’s forensic approach,and I have a tendency to get over-excited at the start. Dayone is invariably my binge day and, although I promisemyself every time that I’ll take things slowly, the feast ofliterary deliciousness laid out in the programme like anall-you-can-eat buffet means that I can’t help but becarried away. Sometimes the programme isn’t availableuntil the day the event opens, so pre-planning isimpossible. Terrified to miss anything that might be betterthan the next, I agonise over clashing presentations,

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miscalculate the time needed to run from one venue to thenext, sit too long on back-breaking chairs, forget to eatand drink, lug around too much stuff, and find I’ve startedmeaningful conversations, only for us both to abandonthem in favour of the next talk. By bedtime, my head feels ready to explode and my eyes spin like Kaa’s whenhe hypnotises Bagherra in the Jungle Book – thoughemphatically not in any useful way.

However, by the second day I can settle down and startto ‘work the festival’. Not too much as I really don’t wantit to feel like a duty, but enough to warrant the trip. I maynot have had enough time to discuss everything I wantedto discuss on that first frenetic day, but I will have a fistfulof names, email addresses and business cards so I canfollow up later.

Asking around, I’ve found that festival attendees wantdifferent things from the event. Some come for theworkshops only and simply use it as an opportunity for aMasterclass. Workshops are a great way to bond withother writers at the same level as you, and to meet anauthor you admire on a personal level. Others go for the‘industry’ panels to hear the latest take on what agentsare looking for in an author, or how publishers make theirchoices. A nugget of advice I took to heart was fromCarole Blake of the Blake Friedman Literary Agency, who said that being agreeable can be as important assubmitting a heart-stopping manuscript. A discussiongroup of publishers made the point that the marketingadvisors of large, commercial publishing houses oftenhave the last say on whether that heart-stoppingmanuscript gets a publishing contract – a good reason forconsidering the small independents, perhaps.

Some events can feel a bit ‘us and them’, steering theirstar attractions behind the scenes as soon as their readingis done. Small, quirky venues may subject you toovercrowding, poor sight-lines and terrible toilet facilities,

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but they often feel more intimate and give an opportunityto mingle with everyone, including the folks on the stage.When I’m feeling brave, I’ve usually found authors to bemore approachable than expected – they all havesomething to sell, after all – and even after a large seminarheld in a conventional theatre, you can get lucky. SeeingA L Kennedy walking back to her hotel alone afterdelivering an inspiring writers’ workshop at the theCambridge Literary Festival one year, I caught up withher and asked if she’d like to join me for a drink. To myastonishment, she said yes, so we spent an hour talkingwriting and memoirs before my train was due.

This year, for the first time, I’m augmenting mynetworking with a burst of guerrilla PR, handing roundpromo cards to anyone who looks remotely interested. AtBorris in June, it was gratifyingly easy and even thebooksellers were keen to hear what I had to offer; the Irishtake their writing and authors as seriously as theirGuinness, and both are respected as a universal pleasure.

‘The reason some writers write…’ a determined non-festival goer once warned me, ‘…is that they’re not verygood speakers.’ While that is occasionally true, it’s oftenthe case that a taciturn or burned out author at the endof a year-long book tour, can be brought to life by skilledinterviewing techniques. Small festivals save money bypairing two or three authors together to interview eachother; it’s a risk, but sometimes they’re friends who knoweach other’s work well, and you get insights that noprofessional interviewer could access.

Personally, I love listening to authors read and talkabout their books. So, not everyone is a professionalreader, but an author reads their book in the way theywant it read. They choose the passages that they love andthat frequently leave you wanting more. There’s a chanceto ask about a book that you may know well, to discoverthe research behind it, to hear how they felt about the film

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that was made from their novel, or to discover the bits thatdidn’t make it into the final draft. And every day bringsopportunities to buy signed copies.

I love the surprises. I want to hear the unguardedcomments you won’t read in newspaper interviews,although John Banville suggested earlier this year thatTwitter has all but put a stop to that. Those going to hearRuth Padel read her poetry can be delighted when shebursts into song with a more than half decent voice. I hadno idea that Donal Ryan was an accomplished comedian –he doesn’t do standup, it’s just his personality – but I hurtwith laughter after listening to him talk about scapegoats.And, in a bad surprise, I’ve been shocked to learn thatsome agents don’t bother to read the covering letter of amanuscript, but plunge straight in without knowing ifwhat they are reading is fiction, non-fiction or somethingelse entirely – no names!

For writers, whose work by its nature is solitary, orthose who might have no aspirations to write, but countthemselves as readers and book lovers, literature festivalscan be joyful events, where you can find ‘your’ people andenjoy the entertainment. I do all that, but I like to channela bit of the scientist these days and, not only am I neverto be found without my notebook, but at the end of eachday – just like my friend, whose career has nowskyrocketed way beyond mine – I write up a diary, file mycollected business cards, make notes to remind me of thepeople I’ve met and whose work I’d like to follow. Andwhen I return home, I really do look back at my notes,make those contacts, try to follow advice and tips that I’velearned, and best of all, I cement friendships madeamongst the crowds, the chat, the organised chaos, andall those wonderful books.

Gus Gresham

TICK TOCK

There’s a fragility and tightness in his wife’sface after the argument. And he’s strugglingto break free from a familiar destructivesilence, from blaming her, making her feelhis power, making her suffer.

They’re side by side on a park bench. Hard to say whyshe stays with him. She wants a child. Maybe not withhim, though it’s getting late ...

Yesterday, he read that it’s possible to trick yourself intofeeling happier simply by smiling. Approaching theproblem from the outside in. Apparently, it’s difficult tomaintain anger or disdain if you force yourself to sit upstraighter and plaster a smile on your face.

Yeah right, he thinks cynically, That’ll work.From the expanse of wet grass, a woman walking a dog

glances over and offers a friendly wave. Gets nothing backfrom him but a dark stare.

Twelve years from now, the dog-walker’s daughter willsmile at him. The ward is hot and airless and the lightsare too bright. She’s never met him before, but she talkseasily and compassionately about the transfer to thehospice. He hears the swish of a plastic curtain, the clinkof instruments in a neighbouring bay. With a frail andtrembling hand, he adjusts the white sheet at his throat.

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Where did it all go?He sits up straighter, feels the ridges of the park bench

against his back. He forces a smile and the darkness ebbsa tiny bit. He takes his wife’s hand. She turns to him, herfeatures soft with surprise and gratitude. The sun is highabove the trees. It’s still a long way from evening.

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M. Stasiak

GLACE BAY

On the ice-walk to Joanna’sthrough February snow on urban streetsI handed myself over from one safe spot to another, my own hand reaching back for memy own hand handing me on.

I made my way on broken turquoise glass, trod over thrown-out Christmas trees and cardboard tossed on ice – the dirt the fightthe arguments all wrapped inside that silent whited flat fluorescent light.

And I was nearly home and nearly there, on holiday in others’ lives, until I edged across a junction, sheeted over and frosted hardsplaying round a tiny city green of terraces and cherry trees, which as I fell

revealed itself a frozen lake, a frozen land of larch, black spruce and balsam fir silent dark demanding and intent upon a shore which is no distance and all distanceslandfall which is neither yours nor mine.

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Only a consummation of skeletonshazing in and out through blizzard winds,we are grown slow together and ill-assortedout of shallow rock and ancient air and crowsto do the work of re-evolving life.

It takes so long.

Come back when all these houses grow mimosa in the yard, when everyone has been appeased and everything cleaned up. I’ll not have crossed the road.I’ll not have gotten to Joanna’s.