Postcard Stories 2 E-Book

Jan Carson

• Herausgeber: The Emma Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: The Emma Press Prose Pamphlets
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 61

Beschreibung

In 2015, suffering from a dreadful case of writer's block, novelist and short story writer Jan Carson set herself the challenge of spending an entire year writing short pieces of microfiction on postcards and mailing these to friends around the world. When 2016 ended, she found it impossible to stop writing postcard stories. The stories in this collection represent the best of some five hundred postcard stories Jan has written since.

Leseprobe

POSTCARDSTORIES 2

POETRYPAMPHLETS

Elastic Glue, by Kathy Pimlott

Dear Friend(s), by Jeffery Sugarman

Poacher, by Lenni Sanders

priced out, by Conor Cleary

The Stack of Owls is Getting Higher, by Dawn Watson

A warm and snouting thing, by Ramona Herdman

Vivarium, by Maarja Pärtna

SHORTSTORIES

First fox, by Leanne Radojkovich

Postcard Stories, by Jan Carson

The Secret Box, by Daina Tabūna

Once Upon A Time In Birmingham, by Louise Palfreyman

Tiny Moons, by Nina Mingya Powles

POETRYANTHOLOGIES

In Transit: Poems of Travel

Second Place Rosette: Poems about Britain

Everything That Can Happen: Poems about the Future

The Emma Press Anthology of Contemoprary Gothic Verse

BOOKSFORCHILDREN

Wain, by Rachel Plummer

The Adventures of Na Willa, by Reda Gaudiamo

When It Rains, by Rassi Narika

Poems the wind blew in, by Karmelo C. Iribarren

POETRYANDARTSQUARES

Now You Can Look, by Julia Bird, illustrated by Anna Vaivare

The Goldfish, by Ikhda Ayuning Maharsi Degoul, illustrated by Emma Dai’an Wright

Menagerie, by Cheryl Pearson, illustrated by Amy Evans

For Hannah, who sings it far better than I’ll ever be able to say it.

THEEMMAPRESS

First published in the UK in 2020 by the Emma Press Ltd

Text © Jan Carson 2020

Illustrations © Benjamin Phillips 2020

All rights reserved.

The right of Jan Carson and Benjamin Phillips to be identified as the author and illustrator of this work respectively has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

ISBN 978-1-912915-58-3

EPUBISBN 978-1-912915-59-0

A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in the UK

by Oxuniprint Ltd, Oxford.

The Emma Press

theemmapress.com

[email protected]

Birmingham, UK

CONTENTS

1. Botanic Avenue, Belfast

2. Annaghmakerrig

3. Annaghmakerrig

4. Clones

5. Edinburgh

6. Jaipur, India

7. Paris

8. Connswater Tesco, East Belfast

9. Brighton

10. Derry

11. Belfast Central Station

12. Belmont Road, East Belfast

13. Ulster Hall, Belfast

14. Antrim

15. Ulster Hall, Belfast

16. Bray

17. National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

18. Madison, Wisconsin

19. Baraboo, Wisconsin

20. Ulster Hall, Belfast

21. Ballymena

22. The Hudson Bar, Belfast

23. Ulster Hall, Belfast

24. Drogheda

25. Loughbrickland

26. East Belfast

27. Botanic Avenue, Belfast

28. Bath

29. Styrsa Island, Sweden

30. Ballymena

31. Gothenburg, Sweden

32. Ulster Hall, Belfast

33. Antrim

34. Cathedral Quarter, Belfast

35. Edinburgh

36. East Belfast

37. Ulster Hall, Belfast

38. Kells

39. Ballymena

40. Cathedral Quarter, Belfast

41. Madison, Wisconsin

42. Belmont Road, East Belfast

43. Sally Gardens, Belfast

44. Botanic Gardens, Belfast

45. Sunflower Public House, Belfast

46. East Belfast6

47. Ulster Hall, Belfast

48. The MAC, Belfast

49. The Buff’s Club, Belfast

50. Dundonald

51. Belmont Road, East Belfast

52. Ulster Hall, Belfast

53. East Belfast

54. Queen’s Film Theatre, Belfast

55. Bedford Street, Belfast

56. Castlebar

57. Queen’s Film Theatre, Belfast

58. Ballina

Acknowledgements

About the author

About the illustrator

About The Emma Press

1. Botanic Avenue, Belfast

JANUARY 4TH 2015

Jason O’Rourke

In the year 1974, 4% of the American population applied for tickets to attend Bob Dylan’s comeback tour. Things were different in 1974. With online booking services as yet unavailable, eager concert goers lined up outside record stores and venues, or sent cheques and postal orders in the mail, hoping they wouldn’t boomerang back, un-cashed. In the year 1974, twelve million Americans politely asked, in writing, for Bob Dylan tickets. Eleven and a half million were disappointed. Elsewhere, in America: Watergate, Ted Bundy, the Cold War, and other more pressing disappointments.

2. Annaghmakerrig

JANUARY 8TH 2019

Diane Holt

A situation is unfolding in the front bedroom of the big house. The poet who is occupying this particular room for a period of some fourteen nights has left his spectacles back in Dublin. And though this oversight (pardon the pun) will have little impact on his ability to read works by W. B. Yeats or compose long villanelles on mostly pastoral themes, it will unfortunately render the same man incapable of discerning objects at a distance greater than two feet.

‘Good job I’m short-sighted, not long-sighted,’ he explains to his fellow poets and artists when they gather for dinner in the big house kitchen.

‘Indeed,’ says the sculptor who’s over from Brussels, and the children’s writer from Donegal.

But the ghost who haunts the house’s residents cannot bring herself to agree. She has spent all week pacing the floors of the poet’s room. She has hovered, and sashayed, and evaporated once. He has mistaken her efforts for the grunts and shudders of an old house settling. She cannot face the indignity of making herself more obviously spectral. Yet if she continues to haunt in her usual manner, tthe feeble-eyed poet will leave without knowing he has even been visited.

3. Annaghmakerrig

JANUARY 11TH 2018

Inga Zolude

After lunch, several of the writers went swimming in the lake. Swimming in the lake was a thing they associated with writers from the past. Hemingway, for example, and possibly Keats. The lake in question was brown and muddy. Frogspawn clung to the edges like the jellied skin on potted ham. The swimming writers swore that the water was quite warm for January, though it was entirely possible they were comparing the water to something much colder than a January lake: ice cubes perhaps, or the Arctic tundra. During the swimming, the non-swimming writers stood around the edges of the lake passing witty comment and taking unflattering photos to be posted later on social media.

After swimming, the swimming writers said they did not regret swimming one little bit and felt invigorated by the experience. The non-swimming writers said they did not regret not swimming one little bit either, and felt ‘absolutely foundered’ just watching the whole thing. Secretly, the swimming writers were so cold they could not stop shivering all afternoon and found themselves incapable of even holding a pen. Secretly, the non-swimming writers felt pissed with themselves because once again they had not fully embraced the moment. They wondered, as they often wondered, if this inbuilt reticence was to blame for their writing, which rarely seemed to fulfil its own potential.

4. Clones

JANUARY 12TH 2018

Jackie Law