The Nude in Miss Mae's Bedroom is the attention-grabbing title of the 2004 prize winners' anthology, which brings together the winning entries, prose and poetry, in this year's Biscuit Publishing competition. At the Durham Literature Festival event held to launch the anthology and award the short story prize, guest speaker Denise Robertson gave a passionate defence of the short story form. A short story could make a deep impression on the reader: she carried a vivid memory of a short story she had read long ago, Katherine Mansfield's The Doll's House - "That's what a short story can do: it can touch you, it can make you angry, it can move you." The market for short stories was no longer as buoyant as it had been. One magazine editor had told her the price she was currently paying for short stories, and it was about a quarter of what Denise Robertson had been paid thirty years ago. Nonetheless, there was hope, she said: "I think Biscuit might be going to save the short story."
The short story was certainly showing every sign of being alive and well in Durham Town Hall that night, as five of the Biscuit Top 20 winners read tantalising extracts from their stories. Romi Jones left her heroine stranded in the Red Centre of the Australian outback, with "no phone, no fuel, no map, no water," cowering in the makeshift shade of a dustsheet. In The Fantasies We Live By, Silvia Sbaraini's heroine has a different remedy for a different kind of discomfort: she whiles away a tedious seminar with romantic sexual fantasies. Betty Weiner's A Tattoo for Rapunzel is set in a pub, in the saloon bar where a normally taciturn regular is persuaded to tell all about his tattoo - though the author failed to reveal all in her reading. Keith Wright explained how he had encountered his Mr Donnelly: "I had a really grim afternoon shadowing a door-to-door salesman on an estate in Hamilton". By the end of the afternoon he realised that he could never do this job; he could muster the nerve to knock on doors, but couldn't bring himself to take money from people who didn't have any. But the afternoon had given him his first published story.
This section of the evening ended with the award to Durham City's Gillian Garnham of her Outright Winner's cheque for £1,000. The winning short story, A Place Proper to Grow Wise In, is set in Highgate Cemetery: its title comes from Philip Larkin's poem Church Going, "a poem," Gillian Garnham explained, "which begins lightly but grows more serious. My story does the same thing." Denise Robertson, who judged the short stories, explains how she selected this one from the pile of anonymous entries:
"I chose A Place Proper to Grow Wise In because, when I finished reading it, I felt cold, wet, sad and nostalgic. The author had not written about Highgate Cemetery, he or she had taken me there."
After a break for refreshments, during which the audience queued up to buy the anthology and find out how all these stories ended, the entertainment continued. Val McLane is perhaps best known as an actor with films and TV roles to her credit, including Purely Belter, The Rag Nymph and Auf Wiedersehn Pet. But her current piece of work in progress is the autobiographical Celebrating the Women in My Life, which Biscuit plans to publish in 2005. Although it is constructed as a monologue, it is extremely varied in form; at times family saga, as the author explains how she came to be brought up by her mother, Laura, and her mother's aunts Sarah and Bella, at times drama as Valerie McLane acts out each of the women in turn, and ending in song with the anthem Women of Tyneside.
There was more music in the final part of the evening, as Biscuit publishing championed another neglected form, the novella - not, explained Brian Lister, a short novel but a long short story. Biscuit had commissioned Ruth Henderson, first Outright Winner of the Biscuit Short Fiction award in 2001, to write a novella, and the result was The Other Side of the Tide. Ruth Henderson chose to end each section of her text with a verse as if from some sea shanty, and Celia Bryce had set these to music. Not only was she there to perform the music on the night, it had been recorded on a CD which was included in the distinctive little square book.
There is another report of this event on the Biscuit Publishing website Visit it now, it will only be there for a few weeks!.
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Last update: 22nd October 2004