Two Wonderful Podcasts of Stories by Colm Toibin and Elizabeth Bowen

Two Brand New Podcasts of  Short Stories

by Elizabeth Bowen and Colm Toibin

Posted in Honor of Mothering Day In the UK

Irish Short Story Week Year Two

March 12 to March 31

Resources and Ideas for Irish Short Story Week 

Please consider joining us for Irish Short Story Week Year Two, March 12 to March 31.  All you need do is post on one short story by an Irish author and send me a comment or an email and I will include it in the master post at the end of the challenge.   

The Manchester Guardian, one of the very best online newspapers in the world, has given those who love the Irish Short Story a wonderful Mothering Day gift in the form of PodCasts of short stories by Elizabeth Bowen and Colm Toibin, both are about a mother and child relationship.   Both are flat out great stories.   

I will post the links where you can hear the stories, both are under twenty minutes.   My comments on the stories will be brief as I really want to let everyone know of these stories.  

"Please join us, and no Rory I do
not need a custom shoe fitting"
Carmella

"The Song" is both written and read by Colm Toibin.  It is the first time I have heard his voice and it is very Irish and very pleasant.  There is always something special about an author reading his own story!   The mother in the song deserted her family 19 years ago, leaving them to go to England with another man.   The family never heard from her.  The son was raised alone by her father who was turned very bitter by this.   I do not want to give away too much of the story as it is wonderful but in the intervening 19 years the mother produced an album of Celtic and Irish songs that is said to be the best and most beautiful such album ever produced.   She became in musical circles world famous but she never looked up or asked about her son.  When we meet him he and his mates are going to play in their band at a local bar.   I will leave the rest of the story for you to hear if you like.   If you do please post on it and let me know.

"Carmella, lets bury the
hatchet, let me fit you for  some
custom boots"

You can listen to the story HERE.  It is 18.5 minutes long.  There is a simply stunning 30 second or so addition to the story possible only in a podcast that really left me almost in shock

"Homecoming" by Elizabeth Bowen (read by Tessa Hadley) is a particularly good thing to find as there is so little of Bowen's work that one can read or listen to online as she is not yet in the public domain.   "Homecoming" is a gem of a story told from the point of view of a young girl, the age is not given but she seems from seven to ten or so.   She has just come home from school and has some exciting news to give her mother but she gets really mad when her mother is not home.   She is first mad then she gets worried.  There is servant who tries to do her job and humor the girl but she gets nowhere.   The servant child relationship is a very subtle account of class distinctions.  I admit I sighed when the child says to herself  "life is just a long wait for awfullness to happen".  

You can listen to the story HERE.  It is 18 minutes 44 seconds long.   It is perfectly narrated.  

Please feel free to post on either one of these stories.  I have just scratched the barest surface on these works.   

Mel u

Podcasts of Four Short Stories-Eudora Welty, Grace Paley and two Raymond Carver Works

Podcasts of Four Short Stories

 "Where is the Voice Coming From" by Eudora Welty (1963, 33 minutes, read by Joyce  Oates) listen here

"Conversations with my Father"  by Grace Paley (15 minutes, read by Ali Smith)  listen here

"Fat" by Raymond Carver  (17 minutes, read by Anne Enright, 1989)-listen here

"Chef's House"  by Raymond Carver (1981, 18 minutes, read by David Means-listen here

I have just recently began to explore using podcasts to listen to short stories.   Yesterday I listened to Carson McCuller's "The Jockey" which I greatly enjoyed.    Since then I have listened to four more podcasts,  two on the web page of The New Yorker and two at the Manchester Guardian.   On both of these web pages the story is read by a well known author and their is a conversation with that author and a story editor about why they selected to read the story they did.    It is interested to here a story editor and a well known writer discuss the story you have heard.   On the down side, if the speaker reads at the normal rate of around 125 words a minute and you read much faster than that then you lose some reading time.    Of course you could place the stories on an Ipod or DVD and listen while you drive, for example.   

I will just make a few brief comments on each story.   I liked each one a lot and found the readings flawless.

"Where is the Voice Coming From" by Eudora Welty.     This story is told in the first person by a white man who killed a black civil rights worker in Mississippi in 1963.   It was inspired by the murder of Medgar Evans.  

Oates and the fiction editor both say this is the most brutal of any of Welty's stories.   This is only my 5th of her 41 stories but it is shockingly different from other works, in my experience.  I saw the world world through the eyes of the killer.    Some the language is shocking.   The sheer hatred of the killer comes through perfectly.   It is also a tale of class hatred.   It goes a long way toward understanding the roots of racism in America.    I see a Eudora Welty Reading Life Project coming soon!

"Conversations With My Father" by Grace Paley is about the obviously long running argument between an author and her very old very sick father.    The father, a retired doctor and artist, is deeply read in the 19th century short story and is harshly critical of his daughter's post modernist works.   He especially finds her use of magic realism a cheap trick.     I could tell the conversation had been going on for a long time.   The father very much respected his daughter's short stories, he simply wants to make them better.   His models are Chekhov and De Maupassant where hers are Mansfield and Woolf.    I found the conversations totally credible and felt the sadness coming for the narrator when they no are longer possible.   I hope to read more of Paley's short stories.

"Fat" and "Chef's House" have turned me into a Raymond Carver  fan.   "Fat" is just an amazing story about a waitress in a simple restaurant   serving the fattest man she has ever seen.    "Fat" is a study in minimalism so I will not say much on it other than to say it was really quite an amazing story.   I know that his long time editor, Gordon Lish, very heavily edited Carver's work and would routinely cut 40 percent from his stories.   He even changed the names of some of Carver's characters.   "Chef's House" centers on recovery (sort of!) alcoholics.  Evidently much of Carver's work centers on the effects of heavy drinking on people's lives.  My post reading research indicated Carver was an alcoholic for many years.    The collected short stories of Carver come to about 900 pages.   I can see in perhaps next year a Raymond Carver project.

Podcasts are fun, they are painless, on the down side they are slower than reading.     I will be listening to more of them for sure, including at least two for Irish Short Story Week. 

"I hope to see you next week for Irish Short Story Week-3/14 to 3/20"-Rory

Mel u