"Omni (M)potent" by Caroline Healy (2013, 4 pages)

March to April 7

Caroline Healy

Belfast

ISSM3 will continue until at least April 7.  If you would like to do a Q & A Session, publish a short story on The Reading Life as numerous multi-awarded writers have done, or contribute a non-fiction work of some kind related the event, e-mail me please.

"Omni (M)potent" by Caroline Healy is an interesting,  challenging and creative story, both for its content and for its presentation  on the pages of The Bohemyth - A Literary Journal.   I do not want to say to much about this story as you can read it online in just a few minutes.   

The story is told in the first person.  The opening lines had me intrigued as well as wondering who the narrator might be:  "I am omnipotent, I see everything, I know everything".  There are a few possibilities who the narrator might be.  She talks, the story is conveyed via an interior monologue, about people she says she knows everything about, from their descriptions and life style it appears they are 20 something year old women.  So one possibility is that this is just kind of a small space drama with a woman thinking catty thoughts about the secrets she knows about her friends.  That is what I thought at first.   Then the narrator says there is ship in the harbor and she names the men working on it and what they are doing right now.   Either she is making it up or the speaker is in fact God.  You can decide or maybe we will ask her in the Q and A Session she has kindly agreed to do.

The type setting is unconventional.  I got it the first time it was done but I will have to ask her more about this,  The observations about the lives of the women are very interesting and it does seem the speaker sees to the heart of their relationships with the women in their lives.

You can read this story here.

Author DataAlice Sebold

Caroline Healy is a writer and community arts facilitator. She has recently completed her M.A. in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University, Belfast. She published her first collection of short stories, entitled A Stitch in Time in August 2012, having won Doire Press’s International Chapbook Short Story Competition. Her work has been featured in publications such as Wordlegs, Prole and the Irish Writers’ Centre Lonely Voice. Caroline is completing the edits to her second short story collection, The House of Water and is working on her second young adult novel entitled The Wolf Mirror. You can follow Caroline on Twitter @charliehealy8 and check out her wonderful website: www.carolinehealy.com

Mel u