Chris Armstrong's Blog: CuratedLines, page 3

Short Stories #30

Chris

Congratulations if you have stuck with me through this marathon – we have today reached the final, the 30th, short story in my collection When I Am Not Writing Poetry. Welcome to ‘A Writer’s Life’.

Once I had an uncle – before he died in Africa when I was a toddler – and once he had a fiancée. This long short story – almost a novella – tells the story of neither of them: it is a fictional account of the birth of a writer: the birth of this writer. It blends fact and fiction, places ...

Short Stories #29

Chris

The twenty-ninth  story in my collection, When I Am Not Writing Poetry, ‘The Birth of a Story’, describes what lay behind the writing of ‘The Endless Border’, and like its parent, plays with structure and format. In the formatting I have tried to distinguish between the different voices in my head while I was writing of ‘The Endless Border’; I have played with narrative, and with time, interweaving short extracts from the story itself to indicate my progress.

He thought that the tr...

Short Stories #28

Chris

The twenty-eighth  story in my collection, When I Am Not Writing Poetry, your last taste of life at sea, is ‘Such Sweet Sorrow’. I have said before that it is easier – less painful – to leave than to be left, and others have written about how navy wives have two separate lives – and it just as they are getting used to being alone, to managing life – the house, perhaps the children – alone that their lives are rudely interrupted and all of their routines turned on their head. And then s...

Short Stories #27

Chris

The twenty-seventh  story in my collection, When I Am Not Writing Poetry, is ‘Only Me’  – another tale of escaping from solitude!  Waking to discover normality, the very stuff of everyday life had vanished would be unnerving enough but with the grey fog hiding every vestige of outside life, the author is plunged into an Orwellian nightmare world – or into a post-apocalyptic world such as that of Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague or better, perhaps, Vaughan’s Under the Dome.

I had go...

Short Stories #26

Chris

The twenty-sixth  story in my collection, When I Am Not Writing Poetry, is longer than most you have read so far – ‘The Endless Border’ is a story of two men trying to escape from their daily life: from, perhaps, the world of Covid: searching for life beyond. A journey made by two friends into the unknown. And I wanted to use their contrapuntal conversations – a little like Beckett’s Mercier & Camier as a means of adding a further dimension to the story. At the same time it was to be a...

Short Stories #25

Chris

The twenty-fifth  story in my collection, When I Am Not Writing Poetry, is ‘Last Words’ which is in fact the last you will hear of my three friends. And I give them the stage. Each, in their own words, has written something that brings everything that you have learnt – if you have followed (read the stories) them through this volume. Jan speaks first and then Professor Neil. Simon has the last word. The first excerpt is from Jan’s diary, the second from a letter which Simon sent to me....

Short Stories #24

Chris

The twenty-fourth story in my collection, When I Am Not Writing Poetry, is ‘The Poetry Reading’ – not something that I often do as I don’t think I do them very well and, unfathomably, have a knack of misreading my own lines! But this is a fiction – perhaps based on one of my readings, perhaps not! The short poem by Malcolm Lowry that I have quoted in full at the end shows that I am not the only poet to have problems with words!

I have never really liked giving readings of my poetry...

Short Stories #23

Chris

The twenty-third  story in my collection, When I Am Not Writing Poetry, ‘Diary Extracts of a Lockdown Addict’ is a series of snippets from my imaginary diary. None of them – except perhaps the last which memorialises a friend – is particularly significant. It was my life during lockdown! The first showed the state of my writer’s mind! There are six more!

Looking back at what he had just written, it occurred to him that in naming two of his characters he had somehow evoked that stag...

Short Stories #22

Chris

The twenty-second  story in my collection, When I Am Not Writing Poetry, ‘Kinderszenen’ once again inhabits the back stories – possible back stories – of characters from The Dark Trilogy. Kinderszenen is the name Schumann gave to a collection of 13 short piano pieces, and the documentary I mention in the first paragraph was in part about Schumann … each of the 13 names that he gave the individual pieces can be found hidden in my story! I imagine meeting those same three friends from pr...

Short Stories #21

Chris

The twenty-first  story in my collection, When I Am Not Writing Poetry, ‘There’s Whisky in the Jar’ is another short account from my time at sea. This time from the early days when I very junior and very unsure over my supposed authority!

I always thought how intelligent was the approach taken in Hobart. But that was a couple of years after I had suffered the joy of loading whiskey in Glasgow. In Hobart, each hatch is given a crate of apples for their own use and this simple expedi...