I'm back from the 13th International Conference on the Short Story in English, held last week in Vienna. It was a pretty amazing experience, a fascinating and stimulating insight into the latest thinking about the short story, which I know has given a boost to my practice. I'm still digesting it all, and hope to blog about it soon.
While I was in Vienna I had an email from Tim Love, who has been devoting himself for some time now to thinking seriously and blogging about the short story, telling me that he had posted a blog about my work. It's an attentive piece in which he very much puts his finger on the kind of thing I'm trying to do in my writing - it's so wonderful when that happens. I'm especially touched that he includes a photo of the page in an exercise book where as a schoolboy he copied out one of my stories, 'Cautionary Tale' - in fact, one of the first I had published (he's written and told me this before). (It's not one in my collection Balancing.) I thank him for his thoughtfulness and insight.
