TANIA HERSHMAN – THE WHITE ROAD AND OTHER STORIES

Finally! After what seems an age, this debut collection from a most intriguing writer has its own webpage, we can see the cover, read the blurb.

I was sitting with the author Tania Hershman in Anam Cara Writers' and Artist's Retreat in Ireland when the email came through to say that Salt wanted to publish this book... and I remember the joy of that moment. That was last year, June, I think...

Due out on September 1st 2008 now, (which will make this one eligible for the Frank O'Connor award next year) The White Road and Other Stories contains several stories I know well. And others I don't.

What makes Tania such an interesting writer is her 'take ' on things. We chimed straight away when we 'met' in cyberspace, she having taken First Prize in a flash fiction comp, and me trailing in second... I emailed her to say how much I loved her winning story. ('Plaits'... included in this collection)

So here you go. Here are the blurb, and Tania's bio from the web page. And a mug shot, for good measure!



Main description: What links a café in Antarctica, a factory for producing electronic tracking tags and a casino where gamblers can wager their shoes? They're among the multiple venues where award-winning writer Tania Hershman sets her unique tales in this spellbinding debut collection.

Fleeing from tragedy, a bereaved mother opens a cafe on the road to the South Pole. A town which has always suffered extreme cold enjoys sudden warmth. A stranger starts plaiting a young woman's hair. A rabbi comes face to face with an angel in a car park. An elderly woman explains to her young carer what pregnancy used to mean before science took over. A middle-aged housewife overcomes a fear of technology to save her best friend. A desperate childless woman resorts to extreme measures to adopt. A young man's potential is instantly snuffed out by Nature's whims. A lonely widow bakes cakes in the shape of test tubes and DNA.

A number of these stories are inspired by articles from science magazines, taking fact as their starting points and wondering what might happen if . . .? In these surreal, lyrical stories, many of which are only a few pages long, Tania Hershman allows her imagination free reign, as her characters navigate through love, death, friendship, spirituality, mental illness and the havoc wreaked by the weather.



Author Bio: Tania Hershman was born in London and in 1994 moved to Jerusalem, where she now lives with her partner. She is a former science journalist and her award-winning short stories combine her two loves: fiction and science. Many of Tania Hershman’s stories, which have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published in print and online, are inspired by articles from popular science magazines. In November 2007, she founded The Short Review, a unique website dedicated to reviewing short story collections, which attracts several hundred visitors a week.


THE WHITE ROAD AND OTHER STORIES INFO HERE

Concerned about the environmental impact of her book, Tania is partnering with Eco-Libris, who will plant a tree for every copy. For further information, visit Tania’s website: www.taniahershman.com.

CORNWALL AND KAFKA'S AUNT

Off to Cornwall for a week, with two sixteen year olds.

I will leave you with something to read. A series of letters has been uncovered, purporting to have been written by Kafka’s Aunt to a minor official in Prague - The Secretary to The Controller of Pedestrian Ways.

The series starts with a letter from Kafka’s Aunt complaining that she was crossing a road and was assailed by thoughts of scallops for supper. She requested that the official removed whatever it was that inspired thoughts of scallops in a town where carp, in her experience, is the only water dweller of any consequence.

The following letters are taken from later in the series, as the minor official turns out to be something of a kindred spirit, whose father helped to build that road…


(Muchas gracias to Douglas Bruton, alias The Secretary…the series is approaching fifty letters... and is growing apace.)


*********



Dear Secretary to The Controller of Pedestrian Ways

I would be grateful for less thought in your letters. And by that I do not mean to seem ungrateful.

But look. Let us consider the iris. Among flowers in a vase. And prior to that, among flowers in an armful handed to your mother in an orchard. And prior to that in the arms of a man who waited for her. And before that, the selection, and before that the growing and if flowers wonder what their role will be, that wondering.

It is a singular thing to consider what it was that set that iris aside for the role it played.

I too have a windowsill. And although there have passed many years since there was in actuality a vase of flowers there, there once was. And that is enough. For is there not always a disturbance in the air made by everything that exists, everything that passes. And therefore, some memory in the ether that collects imprints of things?

I have no more need to replace those flowers than replace my heart. I can return to them so long as I can think.

And it is strange that your grandparents came from Osek. And that your mother should have had just such a vase on a windowsill.

But I often feel for flowers on windowsills, Secretary. Placed where they can perhaps have a sense of where they were, once. Where they can catch a glimpse of other greennesses -where it is soil that feeds, and water filtered through strata and humus. And where the air is not clogged with the smells of bread baking, fish frying, urns making coffee.

Flowers, cut, are sad things, after all.


as ever,

Kafka’s Aunt



Dear Kafka's Aunt

I am, if I read correct, bid by you to write and think less. I should like to know how that could be, how I should write these letters to you if I am not to think, how words will just come if not in answer to my calling of them, just appear, on the page, like the sudden summer-returning geese, come from nowhere, leastways nowhere I know or care for, except that they come, and their arrow-script writ acrsoss the blank sky above the city telling me where they fly, and where that is I also know not and care for even less. How words dropped from my pen, like shot geese, my grandfather's smoking gun, and a bulge in his game bag after the hunt, and a dead bird then on my grandmother's table and feathers in every breath, and sneezing and laughing, and all over a dead bird and nothing making sense in my child's eyes - how you think shot words, dropped from nowhere, and then plucked of all meaning, can afterwards make sense on my page, your page soon, I do not know.

How I might think of an iris, and the role it had, without thinking is another puzzle, but one I am bid to not think on, but cannot help but think, prompted as I am by what you say, of flowers that once were and are no more except in your memory, and in my imagination now.

And what is imagination but another word for thinking? Imagination in your letter, too, for I never said the man who once gifted my mother picked-flowers was waiting for her, and the flowers snatched maybe rather than selected, and the man soon gone, but not soon enough, I dare to think, not soon enough for the holding together of the pieces of my mother's heart. And Iris, my dead sister, flowers into flesh, a living reminder, so long as she lived, of the man in an orchard and the disturbance in the air he left behind, and my mother's thinking ever after a green and liquid thing, and something like a fright-eyed fish darting into the dark whenever I asked her what.

Flowers cut are, indeed, sad things, but there are sadder things in this world, I think, and that quick dark flick-of-the-tail-gone fish is one.

And flowers not in a vase on your windowsill, there is a sad thing too, and one I would make right, if I could. But, from what you have writ, your thoughts scratched out in black and white, the ink making small disturbances on the page, and in the white spaces of my thinking, too, it is maybe true that all the cut flowers of the world would not be enough to fill that not-vase on your empty windowsill.

Dear Kafka’s Aunt, if I may be so bold as to call you dear twice in the one letter, if I may presume to think and then to act according to fancy, or reason, which is another word for thinking, please find enclosed a dry-pressed flower of my own, not an iris, but something pink and meadow-small and another story in the picking and the keeping, but no explanation given, rather one for you to think on, to plant and wet with green water, and watch grow in your imagination, if you like. Since our stories seem to overlap so neatly, and in so many places, perhaps the flower is one you recognise.

I continue to be, in thought and in fact,

Secretary to the Controller of Pedestrian Ways






Dear Secretary to the Controller of Pedestrian Ways.

I am returning your flower. But as you see, one petal must have become detached in transit, and that I have kept, purely for the colour. It looks well on a small handkerchief of white linen, one I keep in a box as it was sent to me a long time ago.

But I have to say I was not ready for the dreams that accompanied the flower. You must be a most disturbed person, if you do not mind me making that observation. For the last three nights I dreamed of road mending. And brick walls. And roof timbers carved with small animals on the sides they would never be seen, except perhaps by a very small child crawling against his parent's wishes, up in the rafters.

Were you retrieving a balloon?

best wishes


Kafka’s Aunt



Dear Kafka's Aunt

For my flower, imperfectly returned, I submit thanks. That you have chosen to keep just one petal, for the colour, is entirely satisfactory. It was the colour that drew me to it, pink like a girl's skin pinched, her cheeks, or her shoulders kissed by too much sun, or the inside of a cat's mouth, a cat's small tongue dipping into a saucer of cream. Some of the colour has been lost to time, but enough remains, for memory.

As to the dreams, I assure you that they were not sent by me. Dreams are not encouraged here in the offices of Pedestrian Ways. Even if there was time allowed for dreaming, there would be rules and regulations to follow, and I think (there I go, thinking again) that small animals carved from wood and a child and a balloon would not be the stuff of our dreams. No, these are of your making, I believe, though I do recognise something in your description of the house, the wooden rafters and the carvings, rabbits and dogs and running deer. In Osek there is such a house, you must know of it, and a woman there who smiles at children when they pass, and there are no teeth in her smile, just pink. How strange that your dream should make me think of her, and the pressed-flower on my desk, pink still. She gave my sister a balloon once, the woman without teeth, red or blue or green, I forget, except that it hung on a string, trailing behind her like a pet. And the wind or a jealous brother set that balloon-pet free and I did indeed retrieve it, not from the rafters of any house, but from the branches of a tree where a summer apple still was, shrivelled and brown and forgotten.

Your dream and my memory and something the same. I do not understand why this should be, and in that I am disturbed, a little, but in no other regard. I asked Maraisa if she thought that I might be, disturbed, that maybe you were right and me not knowing; she laughed and said I was just ordinary, and that was what she liked, and she shook her head and laughed some more as she walked away from me.

so, an ordinary Secretary to the Controller of Pedestrian Ways closes here, with his best wishes in return for yours.



Dear Secretary to the Controller of Pedestrian Ways,

I wonder if there are such things as dreams at all. For the rafters exist.

We think of dreams as being something less than real, when I wonder, in truth if they are uber-real. Taking on their own life to be able to move freely between minds and consciousnesses, to appear in your memory, and in my sleeping thoughts.

My memories of Osek are slight. But I do remember I think, carvings of animals on wood in more places than roofs. And believing as a child that the houses were all held up thanks to nature rather than the hand of man. Although I might well have that muddled with memories of a Noah's Ark made for me by one of my brothers. But not Hermann.

Hermann was always cruel. He seemed to have no sense of belonging. And I wonder if that is the root of cruelty?

My nephew Franz suffered greatly because of Hermann, and now that he is dead, I sometimes wonder if he might have survived longer had his father been someone less harsh.

But then. Plants sometimes grow in the most unforgiving of soil. Who can say what nutrients are necessary to produce something strange and wonderful? A condition of the weather, the angle of the sun, a drop in the wind, and the vestiges of some tarry substance dropped on that earth over fifty years ago, whose transformation over time turns death into life.

You see. I am happy with empty windowsills, a small box containing an old linen handkerchief (now blessed with the petal, although pink is too strong and definite a word for its colour). I am blessed with a small stove on which to cook my supper.

But I do worry about the thoughts of unsuitable foodstuffs. that still seem to be everywhere in your streets.



As always,

Kafka's Aunt


Dear Kafka’s Aunt

I think it was Havel who set my sister’s balloon-pet free, sent it skywards on the wind and catching in an apple tree. It might have been an act of cruelty for I saw him once pull the legs from a spider, some not all, to see, if it could walk still and if the web it might weave would be a crooked one or lame; and once he put a pin through a butterfly and stuck it to the wood of our bedroom windowsill, like a pressed flower, the petals fluttering in a breeze until it died. Yes, it might have been cruel what Havel did. It might also have been something other; my sister gave the balloon a name and called it to heel as she walked, and made it sit, still, as you might do with a puppy, and talked to it as though it lived. Havel said he was giving the balloon the freedom it needed to be what it was, that balloons are of the air and should live in the air, not be held down by string and bumping on the grown where sharp things sometimes are. It made some sort of sense to me. My sister thought him cruel.

I walked to work today, for the air and to see, the streets and the people. The secretary to the Controller of Pedestrian ways should, I think, be a pedestrian some of the time. I took the long way, crossing the Charles Bridge with its stone-carved saints and martyrs, and St John of Nepomuk being thrown from the bridge and brass-shiny from so much touching, for luck. And below, swans sitting on the water, as they have always been. And I thought on what you wrote, about plants and the accidents that make some grow and others not, and cruelty, and devils and saints being plants that grow out of a cruel soil.

Maraisa sometimes calls me cruel and I do not think that I am. She says that I do not always notice when she is different, her hair or a new scarf, or her make-up changed. It is just that I do not always like the change and so say nothing to be kind, for if I said what I was thinking I know she would think me cruel, and I should feel cruel. So, I say nothing, out of kindness.

I write all this to you, because I do not think the matter of cruelty is so easily pinned down, not like a butterfly on my windowsill and Havel not laughing but interested, in something, like a scientist or a collector of beautiful things.

Havel confessed to me when he was almost a man, that he did not dream, or if he did he did not recall what things there were in his dreams. For Havel sleep was a mushroom-dark place, where spiders moved on quick legs, and the place he was when he woke was where butterflies and balloons hung in the air. I did not make sense of what he said, not then or now, but when he told me these things I understood that he was not so cruel as so cruelly done to, a plant growing in poor soil, perhaps.

There was a woman on the bridge today, wearing a woollen shawl the colour of Havel’s caught butterfly, her fingers curled into knots, like the bodies of dead spiders. Seeing her maybe helped my thinking. She was selling carved wooden animals. She had not made them herself. They were the work of her father who was blind. I thought it strange, again strange, that reading of your carved Noah’s ark I should meet with this woman and her menagerie in wood. It cost but a few crowns for the leaping hare that now sits on my desk.

And maybe these are dreams of which I write.


Ever, but not forever, the Secretary to the Controller of Pedestrian Ways






Dear Secretary to the Controller of Pedestrian Ways

I have never come to terms with Charles Bridge. Indeed, I have never come to terms with bridges at all.

When crossing them I find myself walking along a strip as narrow as my foot, placing one in front of the other as though I was on a tightrope. It becomes necessary to walk a completely straight line in this manner, thus carving the most direct route from one side to the other.

It was on Charles Bridge that this habit began. I found the presence of the high towers behind me quite oppressive. As though I was being watched from above. One's instinct was to run a random course through the crowd, for there was a crowd that day... it was a feast day and the statues were garlanded with paper flowers. I don't know why. I have not seen it since.

But instead, I was fixed on this single course, walking a line straight through the crowd. One foot in front of the other, heel to toe. If I had looked back there would have been a line in bronze where I had walked, set in the ground. But I knew if I turned, it would disappear. So I kept my eyes to the front.

At the archway there was a man selling puppets. he had several on a gallows, hanging there. A judge in a long wig and black robe, with a hooked nose. A soldier carrying a musket. A witch, or old woman in tatters, with a tall hat. The man was working one puppet, while a monkey played a barrel organ. The monkey was wearing a tutu and one eye wept. As I passed, the monkey screeched and beat its chest. And the puppeteer paused.

That day I was in a green coat and hat. Brown ankle boots. One with a black lace. And the puppet, Secretary. The same. But it had mud on its coat.

Exactly the same. I did not want to look at the puppet's face. So I walked on fast. Turning the corner towards the church, I tripped and fell. When I stood, my coat had mud from waist to hem.

I remember the windows of the conservatoire were open, and there was a violin playing.

I do not remember what I cooked that night, or where I was staying.

Yrs

Kafka's Aunt

THOUGHTS ON ARROGANCE...

Hmph.

There's me congratulating a Workhouse inmate on a fast acceptance by a decent publication, and commiserating with her that she now needs to 'withdraw' the same piece from a magazine that has held it since January, without replying to repeated requests for information as to its status. She sim subbed after six months. Seemed reasonable to us.

Its a Welsh mag.

Now as a Welsh writer and as someone who's delighted to be going back to Wales to study with more Welsh writers later this year, I am sad that it's a Welsh place that does this.

But it isn't an isolated incident.

I've had a few. All from Welsh mags/presses.... asking for submissions according to websites, then ignoring requests for information. Preventing writers re-submitting the work elsewhere with an easy heart. I'm not in the naming and shaming business here. But I don't think this is treating writers with respect. After all, if it wasn't for submissions there wouldn't BE magazines!

Would they have this on their guidelines? - Send us your best work. We might respond if we like it, but cannot tell you when this will be. Or we might not. Again, there's no telling how long you might have to wait. But if you want to be published by us, you'll just have to put up with it, won't you? Oh... and don't sim sub. That is a big no no. Editors talk, you know...

And if it is only work from well known writers they want, then why not say so! Its simple and easy to say something like: It is unlikely that your work will be of interest to us unless you are well published in nationally known literary outlets already.

And wouldn't it be so easy in their submissions guidelines to say: "if you haven't heard back within six weeks/ten weeks/four months, your submission has not been successful. We apologise for this lack of feedback but have to cope with many many submissions, and cannot respond to them all."

Simple. Takes a few seconds to put it up there. Think about it, please??

Diolch yn fawr.

SHORT FUSE READING

Had a lovely evening yesterday, a party in Lewes , then a quick flit to Brighton where I was reading at Short Fuse, Brighton's literary short story fun event held at the Komedia... bar, music, and short stories, read by the writers.

Stories from Tara Gould, one of the organisers, fab stuff. Some lovely images, transparency, glass, birds, surrounding a moving story. Wonderfully read, too. Then a writer called Jak who turned out to be female, a great piece set on a beach in South Africa, and children defacing a sign. Though-provoking. Again, superbly read.

Then Jo Horsman, with 'Sparks', a story that's also caught the eye of Steve Finbow and he's published it on Red Peter.

JO'S STORY HERE ON RED PETER

Then me, with Dodie's Gift. And a great natter later on with the other writers, and a wee bit of book selling, which makes the world go round and keeps me in ink cartridges.

Thanks for the invite, Tara and Polly. I love this event. One of Brighton's best!

ECLECTICA INTERVIEW

I'm interviewed by Tania Hershman on Eclectica this issue.

INTERVIEW HERE

Also interviewed is a writer I admire, Jai Clare, interviewed by katherine Koromilas. Check that one out too.

JAI CLARE HERE

ITS FUN WORKING TOGETHER...

One of the things I love about working in a group is the joy of getting published together. On the Workhouse, we list where we have work accepted. And that is great, it leads to a flurry of subs to the same place. And competitions... there's usually a squad from The Workhouse somewhere about, trying hard.

Fish Anthology: Douglas Bruton, runner up publication, short story. Sarah Hilary, winner short short crime story, and runner up short histories. Michael Logan (new member since Fish) winner One Page Story. Second preface in anthology, self.

Southword 14 contains work from Joel Willans, Chelsey Flood and self.

See You Next Tuesday Anthology contains work from quite a few, including some who have moved on now. Bonnie Zobell, Melissa Lee, Elaine Chiew, Sara Crowley, self.

And the digital poetry place Ink Sweat and Tears has a veritable flood of Workhouse inmates coming up: Chelsey Flood, Jo Horsman, Julia Bohanna, Frances Gapper, Sara Crowley and self.

For a place that now has as many blokes as birds, that's interesting.....

D has acceptance at Transmission
J has been commissioned to write a review for BBC Wildlife Magazine
Jo and V are reading at Short Fuse tonight, Komedia, Brighton

SEX, POETRY, REVIEWS, and ROCK n ROLL

Now. Time I caught up on what else has been happening in my writing life.

SEX.

I am delighted to be a contributor to an anthology of sex-themed stories, the second anthology in a series published by Better Non Sequitur in California.


See You Next Tuesday: The Second Coming LINK HERE


As their own blurb says, See You Next Tuesday: The Second Coming is the second compilation of 50 sex-riddled (first-published) short fictions that try to transcend perhaps the most universal subject in existence.
Writing from across the globe, each 1,000-word text promises to evoke and provoke the existential and thoughtful corners of your most erotic of organs (namely the one in your head).
(This is a writer who finds erotica screamingly funny. I can’t take it seriously at all, let alone write it. And I loved the idea of transcending the mechanics, moving on past the lubricants and plumbing-manuals. Can’t wait to see what the other stories are like. I will report back when I get my copy…)

POETRY
I have two prose poems, Bone Magnet and Boys Will be Boys, online at Shadowtrain, alongside work by my poetry tutor David Grubb, among others.

SHADOWTRAIN LINK HERE

I’ve also has a poem accepted by the fabulous Ink Sweat and Tears, an online mag that cuts right through the ponderous and time-wasting submissions processes of so many. The editor often gives a response within hours.

INK SWEAT AND TEARS LINK HERE

I was delighted to see that the current issue of Mslexia was carrying a beautifully produced postcard to all subscribers from the editor of Ink, Sweat...… so if you write poetry and want to get a fast response, try them.

This from the editor, Charles Christian, on the site:

Ink Sweat & Tears is a new webzine that explores the borderline between poetry and prose in the digital age. In other words that point in creative writing where prose poetry (or free verse) meets poetic prose.

Good examples include the works of Anne Michaels, Jim Crace, Michael Ondaatje and Ian Marchant (see his 2006 book The Longest Crawl). However IS&T's brief also includes modern haibun (and haiku sequences) - and by this we mean the American influenced approach to semi-autobiographical haibun pioneered by Gary Snyder and even non-traditional fiction, such as Jack Kerouac's Trip Trap.


and now a special bit:

REVIEWS

The wonderful Short Review, edited by Tania Hershman, carries a review of Words from a Glass Bubble in the current issue :

Niki Aguirre says:

The author's prose is lyrical, poetic and appeals to the senses. Colours, sounds and descriptions are told in shades of light and dark. Sometimes bold, sometimes ethereal, the characters -- an Innuit family, a Serbian irrigation specialist, an Irish postal carrier, a young man who cleans shoes for a living, a kind-hearted priest who is not a priest -- all share a commonality of loss, dejection and hopelessness. What is comforting however is that in these tales the grave predicaments go hand in hand with introspection, love and the search for answers. …

COMPLETE REVIEW HERE

In the same issue, Niki Aguirre’s own collection, 29 Ways to Drown, also longlisted recently for the Frank O Connor Award, is reviewed by Sarah Salway:

29 Ways To Drown Review HERE

Niki Aguirre has a great voice for a short story writer.


ROCK n ROLL…
Onwards n upwards. I am looking after my father this week, he’s had surgery on an eye, and needs caring for. He’s 93, and as sharp as mustard. But no writing is getting done!

Looking forward to reading in Brighton on Thursday evening, at Short Fuse…