Author: Karla Cotteau

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Online Short Fiction Reading Group – Monday 29th September at 5pm (UK time)

During the meeting, we will be discussing Maddie’s reading suggestion: the short story “A Song for Sleep” by Bora Chung. The text can be accessed from this link.

Our conversation will focus on the following key questions/themes that Maddie has selected:

  1. The first-person narration of the short story
  2. The use of language / the “language” of the elevator
  3. The structure of the story: does it follow a traditional short story arc?
  4. The theme of ageing/vulnerability
  5. The portrayal of technology
  6. The portrayal of empathy and/or consciousness

Link to join the online meeting. Any questions, contact: ensfrreadinggroup[at]gmail.com

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Survey for PhD research!

Please help Zohreh Baghban, a member of ENSFR. As part of her creative writing PhD research, she is conducting a survey on animals and food. The responses will contribute to her flash fiction collection.
The survey takes around 15 minutes to complete. It would be great if you could submit your response by June 30, 2025. Thank you!
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Mircea Eliade: Time, Death, and the Unspeakable Secret

Translated from Romanian by Mac Linscott Ricketts, Edited by Bryan Rennie

Istros Books

The Romanian writer Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) is best known in the English-speaking world as an influential Historian of Religion, author of such works as The Sacred and the Profane and The Myth of the Eternal Return. However, Eliade’s body of work is much broader, and throughout his life he kept the world of fiction and mysticism very close to his heart. Starting at the age of fourteen, Eliade continuously produced works of fiction alongside his academic work.
This volume consists of six of his best short stories, taken from over a 30-year period, starting in 1959 with “A Fourteen-Year-Old Photograph” – the tale of a distance healing in which the patient claims miracle while the healer admits artifice – and including perhaps his most famous short story, the time-shifting “At the Gypsies,” and culminating with “In the Shadow of a Lily,” the last story Eliade is known to have written. Each of these stories is dense with allusions and interwoven with connections and references drawn from the imagination and vast knowledge of a great man. Who knows what secrets they may conceal? One thing is for sure – they will repay repeated close reading, but will also charm on the first encounter.

 

 

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Writing Short Stories (third edition) by Ailsa Cox

The third edition of Writing Short Stories has been revised and updated to provide a complete guide to the craft of writing short stories. It emphasizes the importance of voice as a foundation for work on characterization, imagery, dialogue and pace, as readers move from their first sketches to working on more complex narrative structures.

Ailsa Cox guides readers through key aspects of the craft, providing a variety of case studies of classic and contemporary core texts. The wide range of writers discussed includes Edgar Allan Poe, Katherine Mansfield, Angela Carter, Alice Munro, Ali Smith, Iphgenia Baal, Octavia E. Butler and William Gibson. The diversity and flexibility of the short story genre is highlighted throughout, along with the specific challenges the writer faces. The book considers a range of genres, such as fantasy, science fiction, horror, autobiography, romance, comedy and satire. The new edition also includes extra insights into getting published, including publishing a first collection, with an updated list of resources and trends in short story writing.

This inspiring guide is the ideal companion for those new to the genre or for anyone looking to improve their technique. Each chapter contains a series of engaging exercises to help readers develop their skills and build confidence in their writing. There are also bolded key terms, with an extensive glossary at the end of the book.

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Call for Papers: ‘Letters and Literature 1500-2025: histories, forms, communities’

5-7 November 2025 (FREE online only conference)

Deadline for submissions, 20 June 2025

Letters have been described in one evocative image as ‘a form in flight’ (Liz Stanley). Seeking to appreciate more fully such descriptions and their importance for literary studies, we aim to bring together in this online event scholars, writers and researchers interested in exploring letters and literature from the sixteenth century to the present day.

This FREE 3-day online international conference’s broad focus is the letter in its material and textual forms, as manifested across literary history­—from the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet to the golden age of epistolary fiction, Kate Thomas’ ‘postal plots’ of the nineteenth century, and what Maria Löschnigg and Rebekka Schuh have identified as an Epistolary Renaissance in the work of 21st century writers. Participants are encouraged to engage with this theme in ways including but not limited to the following questions/topics:

  • how, where and why do letters feature in literary texts and literary communities?
  • what strategies of narrative, plot, or character do they illustrate and deploy?
  • the role of materiality in literary letters
  • letters as vehicles for exploring writers’ ideas about the public and the private, absence and presence, the global and the local, and/or notions of authenticity and the ‘authentic self’
  • letters and literary reputations
  • letter writing manuals and the development of literary history
  • what counts as a letter in twenty-first century narratives?

Letters have also been described as the ‘epistolary form of gift exchange’ (Stanley). We seek contributions investigating letters as makers and markers of creative communities, including but not limited to the following topics:

  • the role of letters in writers’ networks
  • imagined letters/letters unsent
  • writers’ letters from prison
  • representation or employment of letters in diasporic/migrant epistolary narratives

Creative responses to all these issues are very much welcomed.

And with a keen eye on issues of preservation and representation, we are interested to hear too from those working on the editing of writers’ letters (print and digital), and on letters in the archives.

We welcome individual paper presentations or round table discussions in any of the following formats:

  • Individual paper (20 minutes speaking time/2500 words)
  • Individual lightning talk (7 minutes speaking time/1000 words)
  • Round table panel, up to 5 participants (40 minutes speaking time in total)
  • Creative writing responses or creative/critical responses to conference themes (20 minutes speaking time/2500 words).

To propose a paper, response or panel to present at the conference, please submit a 300-word abstract and a brief biography (50 words) to Sara Haslam by 20 June 2025. We welcome proposals from individuals at all stages of their academic careers, including graduate students, and dedicated graduate student panels are anticipated for the event. We will aim to inform you of the outcome of your proposal submission by 30 July 2025. The conference will be FREE to attend, but registration in advance will be required. A Journal Special Issue is a planned outcome.

This conference is organised by colleagues in the Department of English and Creative Writing (Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences) together with colleagues in Languages and Applied Linguistics (Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies) at The Open University. The conference is supported by OpenARC, The Open University’s Arts Research Centre in the School of Arts and Humanities, the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP), and by the History of Books and Reading (HOBAR), Contemporary Cultures of Writing, Digital Humanities, and Literature and Politics research groups in the Faculties of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) and of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies (WELS) at the Open University.

Conference Lead Organiser: Sara Haslam

Programme Committee members: Francesca Benatti; Daria Chernysheva; Delia da Sousa Correa; Rachele De Felice; Jonathan Gibson; Ed Hogan; Peg Katritzky; Lania Knight; Philip Seargeant; Jennifer Shepherd; Emma Sweeney; Shafquat Towheed; Nicola Watson; Anne Wetherilt.

Conference website: https://digital-humanities.open.ac.uk/letters2025/

Visual 1: Detail from letter, Jane Austen to Cassandra Austen, Bath, 12 May 1801. Morgan Library and Museum. Public domain via Wikimedia.
Visual 2: Detail from Reginald Marsh “Unloading the Mail”. Photo by Carol M. Highsmith. Full scale image available at https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/highsm.24950. No known copyright restriction.