ENSFR

Small Pleasures podcast: In the latest episode, Livi Michael and Sonya Moor look at two marvels of short fiction – Sarah Hall’s ‘Mrs Fox’ and Jackie Kay’s ‘My Daughter the Fox’. Hall and Kay use elements of realism to ask outrageous questions: What happens when a man’s wife becomes a fox? Or when a woman gives birth to a fox cub? By setting the wild figure of a fox in domestic spaces, Hall and Kay raise unsettling questions about what it means to be a mother, for a man to love his wife – and our fraught relationship with the natural world.

What can short stories expect from readers?
I expect you to remember that I am not a novel. If I say, ‘the queen died, then the king died of grief’, don’t ask what happened before or after. I shine a light on the particular, an event, a character, a time. The rest remains in the dark. I experiment with words and use them sparingly. Less is more. The last request: let me be a chameleon and turn into colours as yet unseen.

How do short stories relate, if at all, to borderless fiction?
I studied Comparative Literature because I believe that the best literature surpasses national divisions and political borders. Literature is too important to be restricted by what are often arbitrary partitions. Short stories can be universal because they are focused and can exist outside period and location. That makes it easier than any other form for the short story to move between languages and cultures. Write short story, can translate, will travel.

Which short story last made you jealous and why?
I am jealous of the writers who succeed in what I am trying to do, which is to have a recognisable style while making each text formally different. Lydia Davis always impresses, as does Gabriel Josipovici. His collection Heart’s Wings (2010) offers a range of forms, each story a world of its own. If you force me to name just one, then it is ‘Mobius the Stripper’. It is profound, funny and clever.

Vesna Main has published several novels – each stylistically different – and a collection of short stories, Temptation: A User’s Guide (Salt, 2017). Two of her stories have been selected for Best British Short Stories (Salt 2017, 2019).
Her latest novel, Waiting for A Party (Salt 2024) is a narrative told by a ninety-two-year-old woman longing for affection and sexual intimacy.

[References: ‘Mobius the Stripper’ is collected in Josipovici, Gabriel, Mobius the Stripper: Stories and Short Plays (London: Victor Gollancz, 1974) and Heart’s Wings and Other Stories (Manchester: Carcanet, 2010).]

This original new study explores the recent flowering of short fiction in Ireland. More specifically, it discusses the cultural, material, and ideological usages of the short form in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, engaging with the forces that have helped to shape the production, dissemination, and reception of short stories over the last few decades in Ireland. The book is generically fluid and reads short fiction in its many guises, from short-shorts to long stories, and from standalone texts included in periodicals and online forums, to stories that were published in volumes, miscellanies, and edited collections.

The book focuses especially upon anthologies and the act of anthologisation. The creation of an anthology is never a simple value-free act, since those associated with the curation of anthologies are always obliged to make decisions that are variously material, economic, formal, ideological, and aesthetic. Some of these decisions are founded upon personal preferences, others are grounded in subjective prejudices and biases; however, all have consequences for the ways that a literary culture is created, marketed, taught, and read. This new book explores this subject, and looks at the consequences for ways that we think about Irish short fiction in the contemporary moment.

Call for Papers

EVENT: 6th Annual GOTH Symposium
CFP DEADLINE: 12 January 2026
EVENT DATE: Friday 15 May 2026

ORGANIZERS: The Open University Centre for Research into Gender and Otherness in the Humanities
GUEST PANEL: The Open University Medieval and Early Modern Research Group
TYPE: F2F
HOST: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, School of Arts & Humanities
LOCATION: The Open University, Milton Keynes, Library Seminar Rooms 3&5.
THEME: Gender and otherness in drama, literature and visual culture, IV.

The Annual GOTH Symposium welcomes scholars from within and outside The Open University for productive interdisciplinary discussion and debate. The Program Committee invites proposals for presentations focusing on any aspects of gender and/or otherness in creative writing or pre-modern drama, literature and visual culture, in two formats:

1. Postgraduate students only: 5-minute lightning papers on any aspects of human gender and otherness in creative writing or drama, literature and/or visual culture.

2. Open call: 15-minute papers focusing on any aspects of gender and otherness in creative writing or drama, literature and/or visual culture, with particular emphasis on:

Panel 1: Gender, race, disability and/or human physical otherness in religious and secular medieval and early modern theatre, with topics including but not limited to:
performed otherness
otherness in secular dramatic texts
otherness in religious drama (eg convent drama, liturgical drama within the church, performances of Biblical episodes or Saint’s lives in religious and/or secular spaces).
understanding performed otherness through the study of performativity, gesture, costume, crossdressing and/or textiles.

Panel 2: Gender, race, disability and/or otherness in creative writing (Fiction, non-fiction, poetry, script), with topics including but not limited to:
Dark tourism and memorialisation
Ekphrasis
The portrayal and representation of “other” in creative writing
The role of the outsider in contemporary writing
The role of the body political in contemporary writing
The Gothic genre in contemporary writing

Panel 3: Female patrons and the fashioning of gender in medieval and early modern literary, dramatic and visual arts, with topics including but not limited to:
the role of gender in cultural creation, performance and patronage
cultural patronage as a pathway to female legal power and status.
Ways of using gender, costume, cross-dressing and textiles to study and reframe dramatic narrative (eg women as ‘story-weavers’ /embroiderers of vestments/costumes).

Panel 4: The Open University Medieval and Early Modern Research Group guest panel:
Radical Otherness? Utopia and other ideal societies in the medieval and early modern world, with topics including but not limited to:
Self and other in visual, literary and musical utopias
Gender, race, age and disability
Self and other in monastic and other ideal communities

Please submit your proposal (200 words max) and academic bio (100 words max) on or before the CFP deadline of 12 December 2025, to m.a.katritzky@open.ac.uk & FASS-GOTH-Admin@open.ac.uk. All presenters who stay for the whole symposium will be provided with 1 night of paid accommodation (14-15 May) and all refreshments on the day.

Further information on the event and registration is being posted on the GOTH website as it becomes available: http://fass.open.ac.uk/research/centres/goth.

Inquiries on any aspect of the symposium may be emailed to FASS-GOTH-Admin@open.ac.uk.

Circulated on behalf of Team GOTH
Consultant: Dr Chloe Fairbanks

Committee:
M A Katritzky – Director, GOTH & Professor of Theatre Studies, OU, ECW
Dr Andrew Murray, GOTH EDI Co-ordinator, Lecturer in Art History, OU
Mrs Jennie Owen, GOTH Health & Safety Co-ordinator, Lecturer in Creative Writing, OU, ECW.
Isabelle Lepore, GOTH PG Forum Convenor (OU, ECW)

Please check GOTH website for latest details: http://fass.open.ac.uk/research/centres/goth

A hybrid conference convened by the University of Warwick and Manchester in partnership with the European Network for Short Fiction Research.

We are excited to announce this call for papers on Ecological Futurity in ShortFiction. We welcome papers that consider the ways in which short fiction envisions radical alternative futures to a world threatened by socio-ecological crisis.

Key critical research that has recently been done in the field of Ecological Futurity revolves around dystopian and utopian depictions of humanity’s future. In Worlds Without US: Some Types of Disanthropy, for instance, Greg Garrad examines depictions of humanity’s extinction, considering the ways in which writers, artists and filmmakers have imagined a world, ‘completely and finally without people’, and the challenges these disanthropic representations pose to anthropocentric hierarchies and privilege.1 In contrast, Thom Van Dorren, Eben Kirsky and Ursula Münster consider in their introduction on Multispecies Studies, the ways in which cobecoming encourages, ‘the exchange and emergence of meanings’, between participants as they become immersed, ‘in webs of signification’, that might be, ‘linguistic, gestural, biochemical, and more’, and how these cobecoming relationships could foster greater harmony between the human and the more-than-human world in the future.2 These two diverging representations on the future of humanity are at the heart of what Deborah Lilley identifies as a New Pastoral movement in contemporary fiction:‘where the themes and conventions of the pastoral are being reimagined and reshaped in response to environmental crises’.3 This body of contemporary research highlights how studies into Ecological Futurity are shining a light on the political, economic and environmental systems in play in the current-day and-age, and how they will shape humanity’s future.

This conference foregrounds the role of short fictional forms in providing imaginative access into ecological futures. We are inviting abstracts of 450 words, including a 150-word bio on a broad range of topics, including but not limited to:

· Utopian Futures in short fiction
· Post-Apocalyptic/ Dystopian Imaginaries
· Short Fiction, Ecocriticism and the Environmental Humanities
· Speculative Fiction, Sci-Fi, and Climate Change
· Feminism and ecological futurity
· Indigenous Knowledge and Ecology
· Technological Innovations
· Queer futurity/ alternative reproductive futures                                                               
.The Weird tale in the twenty-first century
· The folktale and environmental folklore

The Ecological Futurity Conference will take place in-person and online at the University of Manchester on the 27th of June 2025. Deadline for abstracts: 2nd May 2025. To be sent to ensfrcg@gmail.com

Organisers: Paul Knowles (University of Manchester), Madeleine Sinclair (University of Warwick) and the ENSFR Network.

References 

1 ‘Worlds Without Us: Some Types of Disanthropy’, Greg Garrard, SubStance (2012), 41.1, 127, 40-60, p.41.
2  Multispecies Studies: Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness’, Thom Van Dooren, Eben Kirksey, Ursula Münster, Environmental Humanities (2016), 8.1, 1-23, p.2.
3 Deborah Lilley, The New Pastoral in Contemporary British Writing (Oxon, Routledge, 2020), p.156.