Month: May 2025

1. Can you remember the first short story you ever read?

I remember thinking Kafka’s The Metamorphosis was ridiculous. Later I fell in love with short fiction and thought differently about Kafka’s work, considering story but also themes related to society, working life and family. Ideas or moments in reading often inspire my writing. For example, when they can’t rely on him Gregor’s family must become active, so they become active. In my book the single mother must do everything, so she learns to do everything.

2. What can people gain by reading more short stories?

When students join my creative writing classes, they often say they have difficulty finishing stories. Oral story-telling and reading short fiction means that you are thinking about stories as a whole. It’s a great way to learn about writing or the ideas you’re interested in. I’m currently reading and thinking about Kate Atkinson’s story The Void in her linked collection Normal Rules Don’t Apply and Katy Wimhurst’s An Orchid in My Belly Button.

3. You bring a researcher-author perspective to short fiction. How do your creative and academic writing relate to each other?

I wanted to write a new story for the mother sacrificed to the plot in the film Muriel’s Wedding. This negative treatment of middle-aged women is shown in the story Lentils and Lilies by Helen Simpson. I explored Bakhtin’s dialogism, invitational rhetoric and polyvocality, contemporary novel composition and short story cycles which value and include the older mother’s perspective e.g. Girl, Woman, Other or The Wren, The Wren. This influenced the structure of my novel.

Dr Emma Kittle-Pey has recently completed her PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Essex. Her thesis is a creative/critical exploration of place and gender in contemporary fiction. The novel is a (grand)mother-daughter relationship set in coastal Essex. The reflective commentary focuses on place, specifically local coastal communities, the evolution of the mother-daughter plot, working women and women who write, writing short fiction and using short stories in longer form fiction.

Emma has had two collections published by Patrician Press and has read her short fiction nationally and internationally. She teaches at the University of Essex, ACL Essex, at a primary school, and works on projects for Essex Book Festival. She is the founder and curator of Colchester WriteNight, a popular monthly community writing event.

The ENSFR reading group aims to provide a digital space for early-career researchers and postgraduate students to come together and informally discuss classic and contemporary short fiction. The reading group is co-coordinated by Paul Knowles (University of Manchester), Ines Gstrein (University of Innsbruck) and Maddie Sinclair (University of Warwick).

The group usually meets once per month during term time on Zoom. The link to the meeting room is circulated in advance via a mailing list, together with the set reading for the next meeting. For each meeting, there is a short story to read. There are also some questions to guide our reading and get the discussion started.

New members are always welcome! To sign up for the reading group, please send an email to the contact email address of the reading group: ensfrreadinggroup[at]gmail.com

Antenna: Journal of Arts, Humanities and Health welcomes words and images attentive to life, in its fullness and its fragility. For it is mainly in moments of heightened awareness of our vulnerability, and of the vulnerability of the world we inhabit, that life invites us to slow down, listen, look, feel, and try to find shareable words, images, and gestures. This happens both in the exhilaration of fellowship and in the experience of loss, illness, and grief. We know how difficult it is to articulate pain, grief or love. We know that there are experiences that challenge representation, be it verbal or non-verbal. Yet it is precisely because of how disruptive such experiences are that we are compelled to find ways to intimate the inchoate, to articulate the inarticulate, so as to make this knowable and shareable. For, as Clarice Lispector noted (2010), often it is by writing that we become aware of things that we didn’t even know we knew.

Within the context of the Project in Medical Humanities, based at the School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon, we have applied the methodology proposed by Narrative Medicine (Charon 2008 & Charon et al. 2016) in teaching, as well as in reading and writing groups for patients, students, and healthcare providers. In this praxis, we explore the potential of close reading and reflective writing to learn more about ourselves and others. Antenna welcomes these and other reflective expressions, for, as Arthur W. Frank (2022) reminds us, “to know my own story, I need to encounter stories that are not mine.” Likewise, it is through our own experience that we engage with the stories of others. If academic writing frames ongoing analytical thinking and scientific knowledge, creative expression enables us to explore other forms of integrating experiential and reflective knowledge. By re-connecting biology, biography, and culture, by inscribing the subjective in the communal, literary and artistic expression invites us to consider the multifaceted experience of health and illness, in the fullness and vulnerability of being alive. Antenna aims to air such expressions so that they may be audible and find resonance both among those receiving and providing healthcare, as well as in academic reflection, political decision-making, and civic engagement.

Antenna: Journal of Arts, Humanities and Health accepts texts, images, and videos in the following categories: poetry; fiction; literary non-fiction; graphic narrative; visual arts; video; reviews. The working languages are English and Portuguese

Submission Guidelines
Poetry: up to 3 poems
Fiction and literary non-fiction: 2000-3000 words
Flash fiction: up to 1000 words
Graphic narrative: up to 3 pages (high resolution)
Visual arts: up to 3 images (high resolution, at least 2000 pix)
Video (cinema, documentary, dance, music, theatre): up to 5 minutes
Reviews (of publications, films, documentaries, performances, exhibitions): up to 1000 words

Contact: antenna@letras.ulisboa.pt
Publication: annual

CFP Antenna 1/2025:
– Submissions: 30 June 2025
– Publication: Autumn 2025

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).]