Stories

Fiction

These are the most recent short stories, dating from 2010. This section will be added to as new stories are written and edited.

• • My Fall with Danny.
  • Room for Confusion.
  • Nora’s Chance.
  • Home.
  • What I Hold Against Dickens.
  • A Sticky Mess.
  • Outside.
  • The Lovely Family.
  • Young Love.
  • Edith.
  • Forgiven.
  • A Gentle Wife.
  • Poor Betty.
  • The Boy With A Bike.
  • Knitted.
  • That Unfortunate Business.
  • Tears.
  • The Four of Us.
  • Kind and Good.
  • W is for War.
  • Satisfied.
  • Camping Week.
  • ‘Last Love’.
  • ‘A History’ .
  • ‘Constructing.
  • ‘The Brick Dislodged’.
  • ‘The Escape of Melanie James’.
  • ‘Watching’.
  • ‘Two Pigeons’.
  • Never Finished.
  • Heather’s Dream.
  • Found Loss.
  • Decision Time.
  • Granny May.
  • Rita’s Fall.
  • Tessa’s Place.
  • Family Mess.
  • Smell.

  These are stories written between 1980 and 2010. They are presently being selected and edited for publication in this section by Fatima Raja.

  • Thirty Years On.
  • Henry’s Relations.
  • In the Wrong.
  • Sophia’s Wounding.
  • The Romance of Charlotte.
  • Her Name was Mary Deacon.

  Early Published Work

  These stories appeared in UK and New Zealand literary journals during the 1980s.

  • In Search of Mothers. Appeared in Islands 37, 1986.
  • Martha. Appeared in Writing Women, circa 1983.
  • Sylvia Blake. Appeared in Landfall 140, 1981.

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  Hybrids

  Writing about exchanges taking place in the consulting room, over a period of time, is problematic.

  Whose story is it?
  Is the therapist entitled to make their version public?

  To avoid disclosing too many details and the specific context of the person’s life, most discussions of clinical work are written in the form of a theoretical appraisal of the patient. Yet the conversation in the consulting room is in ordinary language, is not generalised, but is in relation to the particular person at a given moment.

  The following pieces are not clinical accounts in the accepted form, although they attempt to show something of the understanding which underpins a practice of psychotherapy.

  They reflect the appeal of the work of RD Laing.

  • A Bouquet for a Grave (1995).
  • Versions of the Murder.