HappenStance

Nell Nelson is winding down HappenStance. It specialized in poetry pamphlets (launching the career of several poets) then published a few books. An offshoot, Sphinx, reviewed pamphlets - usually 3 reviews/reviewers per pamphlet! It filled a gap in the market that's left gaping again.

Here's where you can read more about Happenstance -

• I interviewed her back in 2010 - see The Helena Nelson interview.
• Matthew Stewart's written An appreciation of HappenStance Press
• The last lap is a note by the lady herself.

I bought the remaining 3 copies of my Moving Parts pamphlet, so after 16 years I can finally say that it's sold out.

Windows

In Cambridge a cafe/performance-area has opened, dedicated to Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd.

Magdalene college, Cambridge

Coventry cathedral - some stained glass is still hanging on after the WW2 bombing

Why?

I didn't know what to make of this sign on a toilet window

Ely cathedral, I think

Colette Paul, Cambridge, 14 Oct 2026

With about 40 other people I attended the launch of Colette Paul's "A complete success", a short story collection. The stories were written over the last 20 years and are all set in Glasgow though she's lived in Cambridge for over 15 years. She thinks the stories are happier than others have thought. They often involve people who are close without being related (tenement neighbours etc). Some of the stories might have become a novel. Lots of them began with snatches of dialogue. She's written more stories from a male PoV. The editor included only one - the title piece that's maybe the author's favourite. Some have a leap-of-time at the end, which the author thinks cheap in some ways. "Rats" may have been the quickest to write. "The Tutor" might have required the most revisions.

Keeping secrets

There are several reasons why a fiction writer might initially deprive readers of information. The most common is that the story is being told in chronological order - the reader knows as much as the characters as they progress through the story. But there are other reasons -

• In a Whodunit the reader's not usually aware of all the past events. There are reasons why some characters keep secrets, and reasons why some other characters (who are representatives of the reader) want to know those secrets.
• There may be a delay giving information to the reader because the Point-of-View character may not consider the matter of any immediate importance. In a first-person piece, it may not pass through the character's mind that they're (say) called Sue, that they're a white woman (rather than a cat), aged 53, living on Earth (rather than Mars) in 1980 and they're childless. Such details often become clear later, indirectly.
  Do such delays matter? Without an initial infodump they're hard to prevent. Sometimes the punchline of a story works by revealing that the reader's assumption about a detail is wrong (e.g. the person's actually in a wheelchair) causing the reader to re-interpret the story (ah, so that's why they never went upstairs).
  First-person pieces in particular are prone to such delays. They can be irritating - rather than guess the gender, age etc (by default giving the persona their own traits), readers may suspend judgement, keeping multiple possibilities laboriously in mind. If readers guess too early and later find out they guessed incorrectly, they can lose their sense of immersion.
• In some books I've recently read there's an info-dribble rather than an info-dump - at the end of chapters a new piece of biographical information is revealed. Sometimes in a first-person narrative the details are increasingly embarrassing, so it's understandable why the info was withheld. More often it comes over as an authorial ploy.
• The withheld information may be in the forefront of the main character's mind - e.g. we're told that they're on the way to a funeral, but we're not told whose; the character tells us that they've just made a huge mistake, but we're not told what.
  It's a standard literary trick to add suspense, but unless it's psychologically justified (perhaps the persona's desperately suppressing the info) it feels contrived to me, an attempt to make musings into a page-turner.
• Information is often withheld because at the time of writing the author considered it irrelevant. However, to the reader the information may be crucial to the understanding of the piece. If, for example, readers don't know the era/setting of a piece, how can they interpret a character's casual use of the "N" word? This contextual information is often provided from outside the text.

A key issue is whether curiosity is incited, or indeed, whether readers even know that information is missing. Some readers want to know about the characters' appearance, the location, etc, and expect to be told the details sooner or later. But not all authors think such details are necessary. Not all first-person protagonists have names.

Dorset 2026

I stayed in a thatched cottage by Corfe Castle for 2 nights, visiting 2 old pubs. At night I took a photo of the standard jigsaw puzzle view.

The castle attracts artists and photographers. It's visible from miles away. It wasn't destroyed in a battle, it was deliberately ruined ("slighted").

It's common for National Trust places to have secondhand books. Inside the castle walls there's this hut.

A steam train from Swanage goes to Corfe, providing further photo-opportunities. We walked to Swanage on the hills and caught the train back. More books were available at the station.

We walked from Sandbanks Ferry along to beach to Swanage, seeing this seaside bookshop. We visited Brownsea Island too (a first for me). Red squirrels live there, and Corfe Castle is visible. We caught a ferry there from Poole quay where there was a poster advertising "Drag Bingo" - another first for me.

Using my free bus pass I went to nearby Wareham. "Anglebury House" is the pub where Hardy often wrote. Anglebury is what he called Wareham in his novels. On the side of the pub is a sign banning Traction Engines.

Bookshops - specialist shelves

The bookshops that impress me have "Short stories" sections. They're mostly in Dublin, though the Amnesty International shop in Cambridge and Saffron Walden's Oxfam shop have story sections. The Oxfam bookshop in Islington doesn't have one, though it has a section for "Literary Magazines" - Acumen, Pennine Platform, etc.

Blackwells in Oxford has a "poetry pamphlets" section.

"Poetry" shelves often have an "Anthologies" section. The Islington bookshop has that, and also has a section I've never seen before - "Contemporary Poetry" - which includes pamphlets and many slim volumes. It makes sense to display the spineless pamphlets in boxes - it makes browsing easier, like fingering through LPs in the olden days.

CB1, September 6th - Sue Rose

Though September's supposed to be the quietest month, there was a decent audience for headliner Sue Rose. Several of her poems were about identity, using Hebrew letters as a way to delve into her Jewish roots. Among the open-mic pieces were translations from German and Chinese. Anne Berkeley, Jane Monson and Joanne Limburg were among the readers. The supposedly nervous first timers did the longest poems again.