"The Governor's Gin" by Danielle McLaughlin

I as very happy to see that one of my favorite literary journals Long Story Short, which focuses on short stories longer than 4000 words, published as their latest offering a short story by Danielle McLaughlin.  I first became familiar with her work during Irish Short Story Month II last year when Ethel Rohan did a guest post on one of McLaughlin's stories.   This year during ISSM Year III I posted on an excellent story by McLaughlin "Midnight at Ali King's Kebab Take Away" and she also participated in a very interesting Q and A session.

"The Governor's Gin" is set in India  on the estate of a member of the British Raj. There are two very contrasting sets of characters in this story.  We have the personal servants of the governor, a family of a woman and her sons and on the other hand we have the governor and his eighteen year old wife.  The male servants speak among themselves of the longed for day on which they will make a drinking cup from the skull of the governor, while practicing complete servility.  The governor's wife, little more than a spoiled child speaks contemptuously of the servants as "little dark Hindus".   The governor is angry because they are out of his favorite gin and a ship is do to arrive.

This is a really well done story that lets us see how the British and their Indian servants viewed each other.   There is some exciting plot action regarding the young wife, who you will come to hate.

You can read the story Here.

Danielle McLaughlin lives in County Cork. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Stinging Fly, The Salt Anthology of New Writing 2013, Willesden Herald New Short Stories 7, The Irish Times, The Burning Bush 2, Inktears, Southword, Boyne Berries, Crannóg, Hollybough, on the RTE TEN website, on RTE Radio and in various anthologies. She has won a number of prizes for short fiction, including the Writing Spirit Award for Fiction 2010, The From the Well Short Story Competition 2012, The William Trevor/Elizabeth Bowen International Short Story Competition 2012, the Willesden Herald Short Story Competition 2012-2013 and the Merriman Short Story Competition in memory of Maeve Binchy. Visit Southword Journal to read another story by Danielle McLaughlin.

 

Mel u

  

"Balan" by Valerie Sirr (2013)

March 1 to April 14

Valerie Sirr

Dublin

I have been following the writing career of Valerie Sirr for over a year now.  I have posted on her flash fiction and her short stories.

She also did an excellent guest post on a collection of short stories by Geraldine Mills and we did a joint interview with her.  (You can find links to all of these posts here.)

"Balan", just published in Long Story Short (there will be a link to the story at the end of this post) is her latest and I think her longest work so far.  Balan is a wonderful story that brilliantly captures the relationship of a young man, in his early twenties or late teens, and his mother.  

As the day starts we can feel the closeness of Gerry and his mother, each feels it enough to require a need to recreate a balance through what we know is a long running ever developing bantering series of jibes.  They are getting ready to go out.  The family is affluent, they have a big Mercedes and a silver Audi and a full time maid, a young attractive woman from Poland.  The mother gets in the first shot of the day, something about how Gerry cannot seem to focus on anything but internet porn.  Gerry is in the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist.  He begins to think about the maid, Justina, and imagines her breasts, maybe leaking milk as was nursing up until recently and he gets an erection.  Just then, his mother decides to walk in the bathroom!  

He and his mother had been planning to go out on a "jaunt" in the Audi but it is in need of repair so they have to take the bus.  The mother tries to treat this experience, which will put her and Gerry in very close contact with people way below them in social standing and wealth, people who cannot afford a car, as an adventure to find away to relate to it.  His mother asks him where he wants to have lunch, and very much the teenager, he says he is not really into food so she can decide.  Of course if she had said in advance they are going to a particular place he would have insisted in picking the place.  Sirr does a masterful job of bringing us into the depths of their relationship with some very light touches.  

Gerry's father runs an advertising company.  Business is down a bit so his wife, Gerry's mother, has taken over collecting rents from their tenants.  She takes Garry along as she does not like to go alone.  You can feel a sense of xenophobia through out the story as the mother tells her many people will not rent to foreigners.  She also talks about which type of eastern European is the best tenant.  

Imagine their shock when their maid, Justina and her young son get on the bus.  Meanwhile Gerry is under going cultural shock as he has never really been in such intimate proximity to the poorer people of Dublin.  He imagines a bizarre fantasy about an old woman, from their he flashes somehow to the idea of his parents having sex, a nightmare for any teen, male or female.  This is intermingled with his sexual fantasies about the maid. I am assuming this fantasy is also somehow an economically based one in which he feels he may be able to obtain sexual access to her because she is the maid.  There are a lot of very telling details in this story about social class markers and the impact on Dublin of the influx of foreign workers brought in by the rise of the Irish economy.  It seems, though it looks like this maybe just before the decline, that things are starting to go down hill.  We listen in as people on the bus complain about foreigners.

There is an amazing heart stopping close to this story.  I will not tell any more of the plot.  The ending, as is the rest of this story is constructed in so well that we can easily feel we are on the bus, we pretend to be interested in what people we do not know say, we pretend not to be offended by depths of poverty we do not even want to think about. The close is really just flat out brilliant.  I went in just a few seconds from regarding Gerry as a typical semi-annoying teenager fully convinced he knows everything and that his parents are  clueless to a young man with whom I feel a very deep empathy.

There is much in this amazing story I have not mentioned.  I will be an eager reader of any and all new works by Sirr and I look forward to posting on her first collection of short stories soon.



You can and should read this story on Long Story Short, edited by  Jennifer Mathews


Author Data

Valerie Sirr has published short fiction and flash fiction in Ireland, UK, US, Australia & Asia. Publications include The Irish Times, The Sunday Tribune, The New Writer, The Stinging Fly, The Wisconsin Review.Some poems are forthcoming in anthologies from Revival Press, Ireland. Awards include 2007 Hennessy New Irish Writer Award, two Arts Council of Ireland bursaries and other national and international literature prizes most recently a flash fiction award (2011) from The New Writer Magazine (UK), judged by British poet and writer Catherine Smith. Valerie's flash fiction appears on the National Flash Fiction 2012 (UK) website. She holds an M.Phil. in Creative Writing from Trinity College, Dublin. She teaches creative writing and blogs on writing: www.valeriesirr.wordpress.com. Her short story collection is currently under consideration. 'Balan' was suggested by Flannery O'Connor's 'Everything That Rises Must Converge'.

Mel u

"The Shawl" by Brian Kirk

"The Shawl" by Brian Kirk (2013)

Year Three

March 1 to March 31

Brian Kirk

Event Resources

Please consider joining us for the event.  All you need to do is complete a post on any Irish Short Story  and let me know about it.  I will publicize your post and keep a master list.   If you have any suggestions, questions, or are interested in doing a guest post or having your work published, please

email me.

Brian Kirk's story "The Shawl" represents to me one of the most basic  reasons I have continued Irish Short Story Month for three 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.   Most online journals restrict themselves to publication of fairly brief short stories, that is one of the reasons the journal, Long Story, Short - A Literary Journal is so valuable.  They give their authors the amount of space they need to tell their stories.  

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 of 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.   Of course 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 as will, 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.

Author Bio

Brian Kirk was shortlisted for Hennessy Awards for fiction in 2008 and 2011. He won the inaugural Writing Spirit Award in 2009 with his story Perpetuity. In 2010 and 2011 he was a featured reader at The Lonely Voice platform for new short story writers at the Irish Writers’ Centre. He is currently seeking a publisher for his first novel and is completing work on debut poetry and short story collections. He was chosen to be part of the Poetry Ireland Introductions Series 2013. His poems and stories have appeared in Sharp Stick, Driven Nails published by The Stinging Fly Press, the Sunday Tribune, Crannóg, The Stony Thursday Book, Revival, Abridged, Southword, Boyne Berries, Wordlegs, Burning Bush 2, WortMosaik, Can Can, Shot Glass Journal, Bare Hands Poetry, The First Cut and various anthologies.

You can learn more about his work on his webpage.  It is a very good example of an author webpage.

You can also find links to more short stories and some of his award winning poetry.

I really like his short story "New Amsterdam" and I hope to post on it soon.  I think I will probably read all of his short fiction I can find via the links on his blog and look forward to one day posting on a collection of short stories or a novel by Brian Kirk.

I love this poem by Kirk.  It expresses the great sadness of losing a dear friend.  (I post it with his permission.  It is protected under international copyright laws and cannot be published or posted online without his permission.)   I think it will deeply effect those who can relate to it.  

I never thought that I would find him

Cold and dead, stretched out in a stranger’s yard,

As if sleeping – but not sleeping – numb, hard

As the frozen ground, draped in a fine skim

Of winter’s leavings.  Only an old cat,

An insignificant death you might say –

Aristotle certainly saw it that way –

When compared to a human life lost; that

Is what vexes some people, that feline

Or canine can be treated like human,

Cried over like lovers, valued like someone

You lived with and loved throughout their decline.

The divine in me with apt insouciance

Digs a shallow grave and buries nuisance.  "Suburban Sonnet" by Brian Kirk

Mel u