"Fictive Dreams" - A Short Story by Brian Kirk - August 2017. Iish Short Story Month XIII

Irish Short Story Month - XIII

I first observed Irish Short Story  in March 2011.  Irish Literature and history is an important aspect of The Reading Life.

I first encountered the work of Brian Kirk in March 2013, during ISSM III.  One of the reasons I have continued on with ISSM for eleven years is to provide me with the motivation to keep reading writers as supremely talented and perceptive as Brian  Kirk, watching them develop, expand and keep up the grand tradition of the Irish Short Story.  I posted on two short stories by Brian Kirk in 2013 and with the post you are now reading have posted on two of his short stories in 2018. 

 We also did a very wide ranging Q and A session in 2013.  (There are now four links to stories by Kirk in posts on his work on my blog, all of which I strongly recommend to lovers of the form.)  

"Fictive Dreams" can be read at

 

www.briankirkwriter.com

"Fictive Dreams", told in the first person, relays the late teenage years of an aspiring young poet.  He is from a large family with numerous siblings, none at all a bit orienteering toward literary or intellectual pursuits. He lives a brief train ride from Dublin, the Emerald City of young Irish poets.  After high-school as his parents cannot afford college, he gets a job working on a farm.  

He has a mentor, a middle-aged aged gay man who sees himself riding to success as a literary agent on the young man's already one highly regarded poem.  

I do not want to divulge much of the intriguing plot.  I will share the opening of the story in order to convey a sense of the elegance of the work.

"There were times when I wished I was an only child. Sometimes I thought that if my parents were to die suddenly, in a freak accident or by some mysterious but swift illness, I would not grieve too sorely for them. I loved them both, of course, but at the same time I yearned for the certain changes, the endless possibilities, their deaths would surely bring.

I come from a big family, but worse, I am the youngest, the baby, the runt of the litter. I can never decide which of these pithy descriptions I like least. In the first case, even now as a young man, I am immediately infantilized, and in the second derided as being physically weak – which I must admit I am relative to many of my peers.

Even before my English teacher, Mr. McIntosh, singled me out for praise, I sensed I was different. My mother had always doted on me, her youngest, and gave me to think I was special, in a way that was always unspecified. But, at the same time, I was equally alive to my limitations, acutely aware of the possibility that I might be just another nobody. For this reason I sought to create the special person that I felt must surely live within me by altering my external appearance, and in so doing I became strange in the eyes of my family, my friends, my peers and the whole town.

The town was part of the problem. It encompasses the geographical site of the houses, shops and streets that make it up, but it also includes the surrounding town lands, the houses and farms, and more particularly all of the people who reside therein. It’s not that I disliked the town, but I savoured each moment I spent away from it. When I finished school I began to make regular trips to Dublin on the train and I relished those journeys."

His website has a detailed biography and links to this and other of his stories

http://briankirkwriter.com

I hope to follow the work of Brian Kirk for many years.

Mel Ulm

The Reading Life

A post in observation of Irish Short Story Month - March 2022- The Visitor by Brian Kirk

 

 A post in observation of Irish Short Story Month - March 2022- The Visitor by Brian Kirk

 “The Visitor” by Brian Kirk

An Interesting Q and A with Brian Kirk

The Very Well Done Information rich website of Brian Kirk

I first became acquainted with the work of Brian Kirk when I read his very well done short story, "The Shawl" in Long Story Short.  Brian Kirk's story "The Shawl" represents to me one of the most basic  reasons I have continued Irish Short Story Month for eight years and hope to continue it many more.   It is a great feeling to me to read a story by a new to me writer who seems just at the start of his writing career and hope I will be able to watch her or him develop into a major writer.  I have learned enough about the life and business world of Irish writers to know that it takes more than just talent.  You have to find people willing to read your work and at some point pay you for it.   This is far from easy, I know.  (My post on "The Shawl" is here-it contains a link to the story.)

From my post of March 2013

I am very pleased to include a story by Brian Kirk in Irish Short Story Month VIII. (You can read the story at the link above, reading time is a very well spent ten minutes or so).  “The Visitor” is the third story by Kirk upon which I have posted.  

The story is set on Aran, an island of the coast from Galway.  The narrator, a woman writer has come there to escape from the distractions of the city which blocked her writing, she feels.  Aran is not named but she does, in a morning amble she thinks of Antoine Artaud, a French theater of cruelty writer, who in 1937 came to Aran to find peace, six weeks later, he was deported.  I sense she  tries to understand herself almost as a daughter of Artaud, trying to find a peace he never did.

The narrator came to Aran to be alone, but she finds this too painful.  She has invited a formed college boyfriend to stay with her.  He has brought with him thr city she longer to escape from but she is not yet ready to be alone.  She cannot escape her involuntary memories, try as she might.

I find the prose of Kirk exquiste, he brings out hidden truthes

“I try to imagine living in the city again, dragging myself from fretful rooms to busy workplaces day in day out, suffering the passive cruelty of the commute and the ritual inanity of office talk. My heart sinks and my pulse races as I pause before the door and turn my face once more to the sky, feeling the early morning September sun—what little there is of it—wash over my face. I open the door at last to find him sleeping on the battered sofa in the open kitchen. For a moment I imagine he is dead, but his nasal breathing sets me straight. And then I see an opportunity. If I bludgeoned him with one of his dumbbells he might never wake at all. What would that mean for him? Would his senses have time to register the final shut down or would a sudden curtain fall on his flickering dreamscape, never to be raised.”

I can relate to a fear or hatred of the return to the city, I think many will.

She wants the man to leave but she fears being alone.  She smells whiskey in his empty battle.  Whiskey means something in west of Ireland it might not mean elsewhere.  Maybe she wants the man with her as a kind of affirmation of her sexuality, her ability to hold a man, one who has had many women.  But she hates her weakness and she knows she lacks the depth of self knowledge to rid herself of her dependency. She knows the man will leave her and is probably already unfaithful.

There is much more in “The Visitor”.  It is a very Irish story but the characters are universal.  I did feel I was back in west of Ireland.

I endorse this story to all lovers of Short Stories.  I also urge the Reading of My Q and A with Brian for his insights into a very interesting set of topics. Be sure to visit his very well done webpage.

Brian Kirk is a poet, short story writer, playwright and novelist from Dublin, Ireland. His work has appeared in the Sunday Tribune, Crannog, The Stony Thursday Book, Revival, Boyne Berries, Wordlegs and various anthologies.

The Green Man and The Fool - A Short Story by Brian Kirk - published in Fictive Dreams - October 17, 2021

 The Green Man and The Fool - A Short Story by Brian Kirk - published in Fictive Dreams - October 17, 2021

You may read today’s story here

Gateway to Brian Kirk on The Reading Life.  Included is a wide ranging Q and A session on Ireland, short stories and more.  There are links to nine short stories by Brian Kirk in my posts 

I first encountered the work of Brian Kirk in March of 2013.  Since then I have posted on nine other works by Kirk and was honored by his participation in a Q and A Session.  Obviously I would not follow a writer so closely if I did not have great respect for their talent and insight.

My main purpose today is to let my readers know he has a new story that can be read online and to continue my voyage through his work.

This story focuses on a long married couple.  The husband was a solicitor, they always lived in City but now are renting a home in the country. He has retired.   They had one child, a son, who died quite young. The wife often wonders what he would be like if still alive.  As most anyone long married knows time changes things, the passion of youth fades, if there are children they become the focus.  There has been no sex in a long time in the characters marriage.  The wife broods on the past more than the husband.

Kirk is a Master at depicting relationships.  His prose is exquiste.

Brian Kirk is a poet, short story writer, playwright and novelist from Dublin, Ireland. His work has appeared in the Sunday Tribune, Crannog, The Stony Thursday Book, Revival, Boyne Berries, Wordlegs and various anthologies

“Do You Play County” - A Short Story by Brian Kirk - November 2020

 

“Do You Play County” - A Short Story by Brian Kirk - November 2020

You may read today’s story here

Gateway to Brian Kirk on The Reading Life.  Included is a wide ranging Q and A session on Ireland, short stories and more.  There are links to nine short stories by Brian Kirk in my posts 

I first encountered the work of Brian Kirk in March of 2013.  Since then I have posted on eight other works by Kirk and was honored by his participation in a Q and A Session.  Obviously I would not follow a writer so closely if I did not have great respect for their talent and insight.

My main purpose today is to let my readers know he has a new story that can be read online and to continue my voyage through his work.

“Do You Play County” is narrated by a young Irish woman.  From the start we are taken deeply enough into the consciousness of narrator to see her self image and she a woman somehow used, a woman who undervalues herself and needs a better man.

“The first time we had sex was after his mother’s funeral. Paul said grief made him horny. I blushed, but when I looked at him, I saw that he’d said it without any irony. His father was getting drunk in the living room with his cousins while his sisters fretted about in the kitchen. We stole out to the back garden and he let me into a fancy shed they called the garden room. We lay down on a makeshift sofa bed and it was over in seconds. He didn’t say anything while we tidied ourselves up before going back inside. I tried to catch his eye so I could smile at him, to let him know that everything was alright, but he wouldn’t look at me. He cried that evening when we said goodbye after he walked me home, even though I was the one who was sore”.

Her boyfriend’s father, an affluent house contractor and once a soccer star, just calls her “The girl”.  The father feels she is hurting his chances of becoming a big time soccer player  “for the county”.  You can tell she wishes she could be accepted by the boy’s family.  Maybe she is just not posh enough.  The girl hopes having sex will bind the boy to her.

Kirk in just a few pages sharply develops the personas and the place setting.

“Do You Play County” is a first rate Short Story

Brian Kirk is a poet and writer from Dublin. His first poetry collection After The Fall was published by Salmon Poetry in 2017. His poem “Birthday” won the Listowel Writers’ Week Irish Poem of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards 2018. His short fiction chapbook It’s Not Me, It’s You won the Southword Fiction Chapbook competition and was published in 2019.

He blogs at www.briankirkwriter.com/.

I hope to continue following his work as long as The Reading Life endures.

Mel u

I Love You Now Leave Me Alone - A Short Story by Brian Kirk - June 2020

I Love You Now Leave Me Alone  - A Short Story by Brian Kirk - June 2020

You may read today’s story here.

Gateway To Brian Kirk on The Reading Life.  Be sure To read his very insightful Q and A Session.

In March 2013 for Irish Short Story Month Three I posted on a very well done story by Brian Kirk, “The Shawl”, my first encounter with his work,  that goes deeply into how money can govern  a romantic relationship.

“The Shawl" by Brian Kirk has a great deal to tell us about how money permeates our relationships and can be too important in determining self esteem if we have no  anchor in life. It is a story to which  anyone who was once riding high on what they thought was an endless wave of prosperity can directly relate.   Women may wonder what they would do if the same thing happened in their relationship and men will wonder what their partner might do. 

 Some time ago I read in a Japanese novel (I cannot recall the name of it) showing that when a man loses his money, often his relationship with the woman in his life takes a down turn or ends.   The man will quickly think, "OK I am broke so she left me".   In fact it is often the man does not have the strength or the inner resources to live with out his money propping up his ego and he behaves in a way calculated to drive the woman away so he can then tell himself that this shows she never loved him.  Of course then the woman who leaves will also wonder about her own values

It is wonderful stories like this that have kept me following Kirk’s work for seven years.

“I Love You Now Leave Me Alone” is told by a widow with grown children.  I thought the depiction of the relationships was wonderfully realized.  You see how time has changed things as the mother tries to develop here own life, no longer living really near her children.  Her children are trying to do their duty.

“One of them always calls when I’m busy. Either I’m in the bath or sitting down to a supper of smoked mackerel and brown bread when the phone bursts into life. From the moment I answer I can tell that they want to ring off. I often consider telling them it’s okay – I’m okay – that I feel the same, but I never do. They would be horrified, as much by my lack of maternal feeling as by the knowledge that I fully understand their haste to end the conversation.

‘How are you, Mom?’ they ask.

‘Fine. I’m fine,’ I say.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, I’m sure.’

‘I just worry about you, that’s all. Off on your own, miles away from everyone you know.’

‘I like being on my own.’

Silence.

‘And anyway, I’m not always on my own; I have friends here too.’

‘But it’s not the same since you moved.’

‘Of course, it’s the same. I’m just further away.’

But I don’t mind the phone calls too much – they never last long. And I always make it easy for them to extricate themselves: I have something in the oven, there’s someone at the door, my show is starting on TV. To be honest, I don’t watch much TV at all. Once – just for mischief – I kept my son, Jamie, on the phone when I knew he was in a hurry to be somewhere else.

‘I suppose I should go, let you get on with things…’ he said.”

The mother senses sometimes they are in a hurry on the phone.  There is a lot of emotional chain pulling in most relationships of mothers to their adult children and Kirk depicts this perfectly.

We learn about the lives of the children.  The daughter is in a same-sex relationship which the mother totally accepts.  Her son is married with children.

The children and widows both have a hard time of it when the mother begins to date a man her age.  She doesn’t really know much about dating anymore.  She seeks but is trepidatious about intimate contact.

“I Love You Now Leave Me Alone” will delight all lovers of relationship centered source stories.  Those of us who have been in the situation of either the mother or the children will for sure be drawn to reflect on their experiences.

I hope to follow Brian Kirk’s  work for a long time.

Brian Kirk is a poet and short story writer from Dublin. His first poetry collection After The Fall was published by Salmon Poetry in 2017. His poem “Birthday” won the Listowel Writers’ Week Irish Poem of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards 2018. His short fiction chapbook It’s Not Me, It’s You won the inaugural Southword Fiction Chapbook competition and was published by Southword Editions in 2019. His novel for children The Rising Son was published in 2015 He blogs at www.briankirkwriter.com.

There is a detailed bio and a list of his publications at

http://briankirkwriter.com/

Mel u

“Special” - A Short Story by Brian Kirk - - August 13, 2017

“Special” - A Short Story by Brian Kirk - from festivedream.com - August 13, 2017

A post for Irish Short Story Month Year Ten

My Prior Six Posts on Brian Kirk

Brian Kirk’s very informative and insightful Q and A Session

In March 2013 for Irish Short Story Month Three I posted on a very well done story by Brian Kirk, “The Shawl” that goes deeply into a romantic relationship and made me reflect on my self image.

“The Shawl" by Brian Kirk has a great deal to tell us about how money permeates our relationships and can be too important in determining self esteem if we have no  anchor in life. It is a story to which  anyone who was once riding high on what they thought was an endless wave of prosperity can directly relate.   Women may wonder what they would do if the same thing happened in their relationship and men will wonder what their partner might do. 

 Some time ago I read in a Japanese novel (I cannot recall the name of it) showing that when a man loses his money, often his relationship with the woman in his life takes a down turn or ends.   The man will quickly think, "OK I am broke so she left me".   In fact it is often the man does not have the strength or the inner resources to live with out his money propping up his ego and he behaves in a way calculated to drive the woman away so he can then tell himself that this shows she never loved him.  Of course then the woman who leaves will also wonder about her own values

It is wonderful stories like this that have kept me following Kirk’s work for seven years.

“Special” is a story for all of us who never quite felt at home in our birth families, I think many deeply into the reading life will know what I mean. 


The speaker is a young man living outside of Dublin.  He is the youngest child in a large farm family.

“There were times when I wished I was an only child. Sometimes I thought that if my parents were to die suddenly, in a freak accident or by some mysterious but swift illness, I would not grieve too sorely for them. I loved them both, of course, but at the same time I yearned for the certain changes, the endless possibilities, their deaths would surely bring.”

There is something different about him, he is a poet.  Kirk does just a marvelous job letting us see how he feels.  After high school there is no money for college.  He has died his hair orange and has multiple facial piercings so he can find work only as a potato picker.  

“But then school ended and college was way beyond my parents’ means. I would like to get a job, any job at all, in Dublin, but so far I’d had no luck. My mother blamed the way I looked. Not so much my clothes but the way I wear them, so carelessly that even in a suit and tie I can look slovenly. Those dreadful nose rings I’d acquired, and my hair – she begged me to let it grow, let it return to its original light brown shade. How would any employer consider taking on a young lad with shaved peroxide hair and insolent piercings?”

He is mentored by an English teacher who fancies him sexually.  He comes to love taking the train into Dublin and wishes he could live and work there.

It was so much fun to go along in Kirk’s presentstion, when he reads his poem at a big Dublin event along with famous writers, with lots of important people there. 

He is given a vision of a new life.  I found this a very poigant and moving depiction of a Young “Special” man.


From. Briankirkwriter.com

Brian Kirk is a poet, short story writer, playwright and novelist from Dublin, Ireland. His work has appeared in the Sunday Tribune, Crannog, The Stony Thursday Book, Revival, Boyne Berries, Wordlegs and various anthologies.

His website has a longer bio detailing his numerous awards and publications.  There are also Links to four of his stories and several of his poems.

I hope  to post on at least one more Short Story by Brian Kirk this month.   If you have not yet read his work, you are in for a very good experience.  He is deeply insightful and is one of the writers I hope to follow for a long time.

Urgent and Important - A Short Story by Brian Kirk - 2019

Gateway to Brian Kirk on The Reading Life

I first began reading short stories by Brian Kirk in March of 2013.  This will be the ninth time he has been featured on The Reading Life.  Only writers for whom I have great regard, from any era, are given such treatment. (In the link to the Q and A session you can find links to his stories.) I urge anyone interested in the short story to read his Q and A session.

Like others of his stories "Urgent and Important" is set in a contemporary office. The narrator is a middle aged mid level civil service employee.  Here is how he introduces us to his professional circumstances.

"I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I will never be rich, never be what people call a successful man like my manager, Andrew Farrington. It doesn’t really bother me. There are other compensations, and one of those is to take a certain amount of pride in the work I do. Certain people think Civil Servants are lazy and over paid – and to be honest I have known some who have spent their days watching the clock – but in the main we are a diligent bunch who do important work under difficult circumstances without much thanks.  
     The department in which I work is constantly in the news and never for good reasons. Some of my more senior colleagues have developed the harried expressions of hunted animals in recent years. We started out young with ideas of career progressions that would see us end our days heading up departments or running divisions, retiring into a golden age of respectable ease. Perhaps an appointment to the board of one or more state bodies might be the only interruption to our leisure after a lifetime of service.
     But the reality has been quite different. Here I sit, mid-career, at a tiny desk loaded with files in the middle of an anonymous open plan office in an ugly building in the centre of town. But I don’t complain. My role is clear. I have found my level and it is very much in the middle of things; I possess little power and therefore have little responsibility. Others carry that burden, those with more ability, more ambition, those who are not afraid to lead. People like my boss, Andrew."

I do not wish to tell the intriguing story line but anyone into office politics will relate.  The story is funny, poignant, and very accurate in its depictions of interoffice relationships.

I look forward to following Brian Kirk for many years, to follow him and watch to see what paths he will take.

Mel u

It's Not Me It's You by Brian Kirk - 2019

Brian Kirk's Website

My Q and A session With Brian Kirk 

Brian Kirk is a poet, short story writer, playwright and novelist from Dublin, Ireland. His work has appeared in the Sunday Tribune, Crannog, The Stony Thursday Book, Revival, Boyne Berries, Wordlegs and various anthologies.

I first began reading short stories by Brian Kirk in March of 2013.  This will be the eighth time he has been featured on The Reading Life.  Only writers for whom I have great regard, from any era, are given such treatment. (In the link to the Q and A session you can find links to his stories.) I urge anyone interested in the short story to read his Q and A session.

It's Not Me, It's You features three of Kirk's stories.

I will share enough about two of them to try to convey why I like his work so much.

That New Girl

"That New Girl" will resonate with anyone who has worked in an office with a high rate of employee turn over, especially an office in which a lot of the workers are relatively young.  Whenever a new woman, they call her a girl, starts everybody wonders what she will be like.  Sexual curiosity runs high. The narrator of the story, married a couple of years, sees the girl interested in Dan. He seems a bit jealous of the fact that the girls all seem to like him.

Kirk has a gift for bringing characters to life in a few sentences:

"Anyway, when I was single I was never that popular with the girls, so I can’t see how my being suddenly unavailable would affect anything either way. Sure, I enjoy a night out and used to do my best with the chat up lines when I had a few drinks inside me, but I was never a player; not the way Dan is. All the clichés you hear about women liking a bastard appear to be true in his case. For some reason this bothers me; probably because I consider myself a nice guy. Over the years that he’s been with the company Dan’s dated most of his female co-workers. Some have been one-night stands, some longer, but never for more than a month or two. I don’t mean to judge him or anything, but somehow it doesn’t seem right.

It’s always the new girls he goes for. Fresh meat, he calls them. We laugh, Sara and I, when we talk about it."

As the story progresses we see the strains the narrator's marriage is under.  

Nothing shocking or flabbergasting happens in "That New Girl".  It is simply a great pleasure to read the elegant prose of Kirk while maybe you think back on your days working in an office, either as a young man or as a "new girl" or you contemplate the state of your marriage.

The Shawl

Brian Kirk's story, I will just describe it briefly as I do not want to spoil the experience of reading it for the first time for you, is about a subject few will like to think about.  Among other things, it is about what can happen to a romance when the money runs out.   Robert and Helen have been living together for some time.  Robert is a stock broker, the time of extreme prosperity in Ireland, called the Celtic Tiger, is winding down.   There are murmurs of staff reductions at his office.  He and Helen push these thoughts out of their minds.  

One night they find an almost magic shawl.

"They found the shawl on the back of a chair in a bar, forgotten or discarded by its owner. It was beautiful, golden, with many coloured threads woven into it. Robert saw it first, and showed it to Helen. He imagined an elegant older woman with pale complexion and red lips wearing it, loosely thrown around her shoulders against the chill of a late summer evening. They were about to leave and, rather than hand it in to the barman as she would normally have done, Robert watched as Helen simply folded it neatly and placed it in her bag."

 Soon the shawl takes on, or almost takes over their sex lives.   

" When he was naked he started to undress her slowly, removing each garment methodically, not kissing or even touching her flesh yet. When she was completely naked he reached down to the floor and took up the shawl from where it lay. He coiled it like a rope and bound her two hands loosely to the wrought iron headboard.

          Helen’s eyes opened in surprise as he did this, but she did not attempt to stop him. He felt a rush of excitement, a throb like a dull ache at the back of his skull, and he noticed how she smiled as she lay back on the covers, apparently surrendering herself to the exquisite otherness of restraint. Robert wasn't sure why he had done it. There was something about the shawl, and the way Helen was attracted to it, that told him it was okay. "

Soon they do not go to bed together without using the shawl in a bondage routine.   Both feel much more sexually aroused than without it.

In addition to Robert and Helen we meet some of his work friends.   One of the men is getting married soon and he cannot wait as he says he has found the perfect woman.  Of course his mates give him a hard time about it.   The good times do not last forever and relationships have their ebbs and flows.   I hesitate to tell to much of the story so I won't give away more of the plot.  The denouement of the story is in fact very complicated, not simple norbwill, I think, be the reaction of most people.   

I urge you to read this story.   "The Shawl" by Brian Kirk has a great deal to tell us about how money permeates our relationships and can be too important in determining self esteem if we have no  anchor in life. It is a story to which  anyone who was once riding high on what they thought was an endless wave of prosperity can directly relate.   Women may wonder what they would do if the same thing happened in their relationship and men will wonder what their partner might do. 

 Some time ago I read in a Japanese novel (I cannot recall the name of it) that when a man loses his money, often his relationship with the woman in his life takes a down turn or ends.   The man will quickly think, "OK I am broke so she left me".   In fact it is often the man does not have the strength or the inner resources to live with out his money propping up his ego and he behaves in a way calculated to drive the woman away so he can then tell himself that this shows she never loved him.  Of course then the woman who leaves will also wonder about her own values.   

You can read this wonderful story here.

Here is the story behind this work, from Brian's website

"Last Thursday, 26th October 2019, Southword Editions published their first two Short Fiction Chapbooks: A Middle Eastern No by Jill Widner and It’s Not Me, It’s You by Brian Kirk (that’s me!).

Both publications are now available from Munster Literature Centre and Amazon. I hope both books gain many new readers and also some reviews over the coming weeks and months. I’m very proud of the three stories that appear in my chapbook and want to thank Southword Editions for doing such a great job in publishing them. I’d also like to thank the editors of the magazines and journals who published these stories originally.  That New Girl was published by Steve Moran, Willesden Herald New Short Stories in November 2018; The Shawl was published by Jen Matthews in Long Story Short Literary Journal in March 2013; The Invitation was published by Valerie Sirr in Issue 7 of The Lonely Crowd in June 2017.

I’d also like to acknowledge the support I received from South Dublin County Council Arts Office by way of a bursary in 2017 when I was writing these stories. My final and particular thanks go to John Murphy who has been a first reader and a vital critical eye for me for many years and t0 Dermot Bolger who mentored me during 2018 and 2019 as I prepared my full collection of short stories for which I am now actively seeking a publisher."

I hope to follow the work of Brian Kirk for a long time.

Mel u

“That New Girl” - A Short Story by Brian Kirk - 2018

Brian Kirk on The Reading Life-Includes a Q and A session, my prior posts, and links to his stories 

Brian Kirk’s Website


“That New Girl” by Brian Kirk

Brian Kirk is a poet and short story writer from Dublin. He was shortlisted twice for Hennessy Awards for fiction. His first poetry collection “After The Fall” was published by Salmon Poetry in November 2017. Recent stories have appeared in The Lonely Crowd Issue 7 and online at Fictive Dream and Cold Coffee Stand. His story “Festival” was long- listed for the Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize 2017/8. www.briankirkwriter.com.

I have been reading short stories by Brian Kirk since March of 2013.  I am always pleased to learn he has a new readable online short story. 

"That New Girl" will resonate with anyone who has worked in an office with a high rate of employee turn over, especially an office in which a lot of the workers are relatively young.  Whenever a new woman, they call her a girl, starts everybody wonders what she will be like.  Sexual curiosity runs high. The narrator of the story, married a couple of years, sees the girl interested in Dan. He seems a bit jealous of the fact that the girls all seem to like him.

Kirk has a gift for bringing characters to life in a few sentences:

"Anyway, when I was single I was never that popular with the girls, so I can’t see how my being suddenly unavailable would affect anything either way. Sure, I enjoy a night out and used to do my best with the chat up lines when I had a few drinks inside me, but I was never a player; not the way Dan is. All the clichés you hear about women liking a bastard appear to be true in his case. For some reason this bothers me; probably because I consider myself a nice guy. Over the years that he’s been with the company Dan’s dated most of his female co-workers. Some have been one-night stands, some longer, but never for more than a month or two. I don’t mean to judge him or anything, but somehow it doesn’t seem right.

It’s always the new girls he goes for. Fresh meat, he calls them. We laugh, Sara and I, when we talk about it."

As the story progresses we see the strains the narrator's marriage is under.  

Nothing shocking or flabbergasting happens in "That New Girl".  It is simply a great pleasure to read the elegant prose of Kirk while maybe you think back on your days working in an office, either as a young man or as a "new girl" or you contemplate the state of your marriage.

Mel u

“Festival” - A Short Story by Brian Kirk - 2017

Brian Kirk on The Reading Life-Includes a Q and A session, my prior posts, and links to his stories

Brian Kirk’s Website

“Festival” by Brian Kirk

GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS SHORT STORY PRIZE 2017/18

I first encountered the work of Brian Kirk in March 2013, during ISSM III.  One of the reasons I have continued on with ISSM for eight years is to provide me with the motivation to keep reading writers as supremely talented and perceptive as Brian  Kirk, watching them develop, expand and keep up the grand tradition of the Irish Short Story.  I posted on two short stories by Brian Kirk in 2013 and with the post you are now reading have posted on two of his short stories in 2018.  We also did a very wide ranging Q and A session in 2013.  (There are now four links to stories by Kirk in posts on his work on my blog, all of which I strongly recommend to lovers of the form.)  

“Festival” is a very interesting, challenging, entertaining story uniquely narrated, in just a few pages our understanding of the story changes as we listen to the interior monologue of the narrator, a Dublin man seemingly on an extended lunch break from his  hated office job.  Telling anything at all of the plot of this story will negate a first time readers pleasure in trying to figure out what is really going on so I won’t.

I will share enough of the story to give you a feel for the very elegant prose of Kirk:

“We often talk about you back at the office. We wonder how you are getting along.’ He laughed. ‘Does he miss us, we ask ourselves. Not bloody likely, eh!’

    He finally released my hand, and perhaps noticing that I had yet to speak he cocked his head and stared at me. I never liked to be stared at. I let my gaze fall to my shoes. I would’ve liked to speak, just to end the awkwardness of the moment, but I had no idea what to say. I was on the edge of remembering something important about work.

    ‘The boss will be looking for you,’ I said finally, pointing at my watch.

    ‘Yes, yes, some things never change, but I’m on legitimate business at the moment. I’ve been promoted since you left,’ he said.

    ‘I see,’ I said, and I suddenly understood that I no longer worked at the office, although it was not apparent to me what I did now to fill the days, and what the hell was I doing here today pretending to take a lunch break.”

As the story closed I began to feel something truly terrible had happened to our narrator.

I read “Festival” three times.  I highly recommend this this story.  I suggest you visit Kirk’s very well done webpage.  

Brian Kirk is a poet, short story writer, playwright and novelist from Dublin, Ireland. His work has appeared in the Sunday Tribune, Crannog, The Stony Thursday Book, Revival, Boyne Berries, Wordlegs and various anthologies.

I hope to follow his work for many years.  

Mel u

“The Visitor” - A Short Story by Brian Kirk, February, 2018

“The Visitor” by Brian Kirk

An Interesting Q and A with Brian Kirk

The Very Well Done Information rich website of Brian Kirk

I first became acquainted with the work of Brian Kirk when I read his very well done short story, "The Shawl" in Long Story Short.  Brian Kirk's story "The Shawl" represents to me one of the most basic  reasons I have continued Irish Short Story Month for eight years and hope to continue it many more.   It is a great feeling to me to read a story by a new to me writer who seems just at the start of his writing career and hope I will be able to watch her or him develop into a major writer.  I have learned enough about the life and business world of Irish writers to know that it takes more than just talent.  You have to find people willing to read your work and at some point pay you for it.   This is far from easy, I know.  (My post on "The Shawl" is here-it contains a link to the story.)

From my post of March 2013

I am very pleased to include a story by Brian Kirk in Irish Short Story Month VIII. (You can read the story at the link above, reading time is a very well spent ten minutes or so).  “The Visitor” is the third story by Kirk upon which I have posted.  

The story is set on Aran, an island of the coast from Galway.  The narrator, a woman writer has come there to escape from the distractions of the city which blocked her writing, she feels.  Aran is not named but she does, in a morning amble she thinks of Antoine Artaud, a French theater of cruelty writer, who in 1937 came to Aran to find peace, six weeks later, he was deported.  I sense she  tries to understand herself almost as a daughter of Artaud, trying to find a peace he never did.

The narrator came to Aran to be alone, but she finds this too painful.  She has invited a formed college boyfriend to stay with her.  He has brought with him thr city she longer to escape from but she is not yet ready to be alone.  She cannot escape her involuntary memories, try as she might.

I find the prose of Kirk exquiste, he brings out hidden truthes

“I try to imagine living in the city again, dragging myself from fretful rooms to busy workplaces day in day out, suffering the passive cruelty of the commute and the ritual inanity of office talk. My heart sinks and my pulse races as I pause before the door and turn my face once more to the sky, feeling the early morning September sun—what little there is of it—wash over my face. I open the door at last to find him sleeping on the battered sofa in the open kitchen. For a moment I imagine he is dead, but his nasal breathing sets me straight. And then I see an opportunity. If I bludgeoned him with one of his dumbbells he might never wake at all. What would that mean for him? Would his senses have time to register the final shut down or would a sudden curtain fall on his flickering dreamscape, never to be raised.”

I can relate to a fear or hatred of the return to the city, I think many will.

She wants the man to leave but she fears being alone.  She smells whiskey in his empty battle.  Whiskey means something in west of Ireland it might not mean elsewhere.  Maybe she wants the man with her as a kind of affirmation of her sexuality, her ability to hold a man, one who has had many women.  But she hates her weakness and she knows she lacks the depth of self knowledge to rid herself of her dependency. She knows the man will leave her and is probably already unfaithful.

There is much more in “The Visitor”.  It is a very Irish story but the characters are universal.  I did feel I was back in west of Ireland.

I endorse this story to all lovers of Short Stories.  I also urge the Reading of My Q and A with Brian for his insights into a very interesting set of topics. Be sure to visit his very well done webpage.

I hope to post on another of his Short Stories in April and in May.  I hope he will be back for ISSM IX

Brian Kirk is a poet, short story writer, playwright and novelist from Dublin, Ireland. His work has appeared in the Sunday Tribune, Crannog, The Stony Thursday Book, Revival, Boyne Berries, Wordlegs and various anthologies.

Mel u