After the Christmas break and I presume the exam season, readings at Manchester's two universities are finally getting going again, in a stumbling sort of way. The reading programmes at both schools of writing are notably sparser than previously, I presume as a result of funding cuts, or funding used in other ways.
On Monday the Victoria University hosted two of its own creative writing alumni - my Myspace friend Clare Wigfall, who took the creative writing option for her BA at Manchester, and Jonathan Trigell, who did the Novel-Writing MA. It was a smashing reading: Jonathan, whose first novel, Boy A, which was written for the course and has since done so well it's been a TV film, was a fizzy and engaging reader, and as well as reading from his two novels he treated us to a short story (previously broadcast on Radio 3) which was so very accomplished that it was hard believe what he told us: that it was the only one he had ever written. Sometimes writers are just born, you can't get away from that...
And as for Clare: well, I somehow knew I was going to like her stories - I had already seen one somewhere - but in fact I was bowled over by their haunting, glancing nature, and their verbal precision (as well as by her amazingly gifted reading). One thing I found really interesting: there's been a long period in which there's been a fashion for publishing linked short stories (short stories trying to ape novels, and indeed pretend that they're not really short stories at all, in a climate where they're supposed to be unpopular). But the short stories in Clare's collection The Loudest Sound and Nothing are vastly varied in subject matter, tone and voice, which Faber are rightly pushing as a virtue, and a sign of her acrobatic gifts as a short-story writer. For the best short stories, like the best poems, exist alone and resonate so far that they have no need of being shored up by others on all sides...
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