Cambridge Writing Centre: Short Story Micro-Festival

On 30 April I attended a workshop run by Chris Beckett ("The Turing Test") then listened to a panel discussion with Naomi Wood ("This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things"), Karen Stevens ("Brilliant Blue") and Nicholas Royle (BBSS editor, etc), chaired by Alison MacLeod.

• Naomi Wood said she'd spent 15 years writing novels and failing to write successful short stories before studying examples of the form, which she thought closer to the poem than the novel.
• Nicholas Royle thought that his pieces often began with an idea rather than a character. With the short story he could be experimental without taking too much of a risk.
• Karen Stevens' recent collection has linked stories. She thought intimacy was a characteristic of the form.

I wouldn't disagree with any of these comments. I think the statement about the poetry/story connection needs modernising though. Poetry has "moved on" since there was a UK poetry mainstream where the comparison made more sense. In the US, the situation's murkier still. In what sense is (say) Jorie Graham's poetry more like stories than (say) David Means' novels are?

I think CS Lewis in 1961 was onto something when he wrote "poetry is now more quintessentially poetical than ever before; 'purer' in the negative sense. It not only does (like all good poetry) what prose can't do: it deliberately refrains from doing anything that prose can do" ("An Experiment in Criticism").