"Millie and Bird" by Avril Joy - The 2012 Costa Award Winning Story

"Mills and Bird" can be read here in The Sunday Express

Webpage of Avril Joy

Kathleen Jones Webpage

My Post on Katherine Mansfield - The Story Teller by Kathleen Jones 

Note Added April 29, 2015.  The Long List for The Frank O'Connon Prize was announced yesterday.  Avril Joy's collection, Millie and Birds - Tales of Paradise was on the list. In May I hipe to do a major post on her full collection.  Also please look for a Q and A session with Avril Joy coming soon.  

Sometimes a long path leads us from one writer to another, the reading life can take us down many an unexpected road.  About five and a half years ago I was just starting to overcome a very misguided life long disinterest in the short story.  I used to check almost daily to see what the short story of the day would be on the webpage, East of the Moon Short Stories.  One morning the story was "Miss Brill" by Katherine Mansfield.  I liked this story so much I ended up reading and posting on all of her short stories in her four collections.  I was just getting into short stories and I realized she was not just a great writer but a figure of significant cultural importance.  I very happily was given the opportunity to read a just published biography Katherine Mansfield - The StoryTeller by Kathleen Jones.   Ever since then I have looked to the webpage of Kathleen Jones for other new to me reading ideas.  Recently after reading of her great admiration for the work of Avril Joy I felt a strong need to read Joy's 2013 Costa Award Winning Story, "Mille and Bird".  Once I knew the central characters were two sisters 16 and 13 I thought being the father of three daughters, two still teenagers, I really felt this was a story I really should read right soon.

Having now read "Millie and Bird" three times I can give it my highest endorsement.  The girls are from a at least partially dysfunctional family, their mother is a heavy drinker and their father is, in this  story at least, missing.  The narrator is the sixteen year old.  As any parent can tell you, the gap between a 13 year old and a 16 year old is huge.  Joy does a great job of showing us the many subtle nuances in the relationships between the girls and their mother. The conversations are small gems. The sixteen year old is growing up a little to fast, for me as a father at least, but with an often passed out drunk mother she does not have a lot of options.  I don't want to tell very much of the marvelous plot of the story but the starting event is when a neighbor   gives 13 year old Millie a bird, which she calls just "Bird".  There are interesting minor characters in the story and all is not bleak with the mother either.  Something terrible and a bit mysterious happens that really intrigued me.  I very much enjoyed this great story. 

 Official Bio from Author Webpage

I was born and brought up on the Somerset Levels, the setting for my first novel, The Sweet Track, published in 2007 by Flambard Press. I left Somerset for  U.E.A, and a degree in the History of Art, then lived in London where I taught in Greenwich and Deptford and did a year at Goldsmith’s before moving north.

I travelled in India, Kashmir and Nepal for a while and when I came back I started work as a temporary teacher in a women’s prison HMP Low Newton, on the outskirts of Durham city.  I met Writer-in-Residence Wendy Robertson here and that’s when I started writing. Until then I had no thoughts about being a writer.

In 2003 I won a Northern Promise Award, from New Writing North and in 2008 I left my job, I was by this time a prison Governor with responsibity for learning and skills development, in order to write. I hadn’t meant to stay at Low Newton for so long but almost from the start I became deeply involved with the women and their lives – read more here and in many ways that never leaves me.

I for sure hope to read a lot more by Avril Joy. In just a few pages her story took me into a world different from mine and in so doing made me see connections in lives very diverse from each other, on the surface at least.  Daughters can be a mystery, especially teenagers, to a father and this story made me think about my relationship to my girls.

Mel u