I try to cover my ears with floating images of you
But on the stage of boring energy, I can’t escape from the applause
I don’t know what to sing I don’t know how to dance
The applause never ceases
It looks as if endless discord dives into me
Lips of Summer
Lips of summer kiss my eyelids fiercely
I feel the heat I feel the beats
Waves of vehemence and ripples of softness mix on my eyelids, then, I’m soaked in a curtain like fire
Yuu Ikeda is a Japanese based poet. She loves writing, reading mystery novels, and drinking sugary coffee. She writes poetry on her website. Published poems are in Nymphs, Sad Girl Review, and JMWW.
It feels slightly embarrassing to admit that I enjoy editing my short stories—like confessing to some long out-of-date taste. For many writers, especially early in their careers, editing can feel like a chore—or worse, a kind of punishment inflicted just when you want to be celebrating all the hard work it has taken to create a draft. But, like most of the important parts of being a writer, editing grows easier the more you practice—and the more you understand what kinds of editing techniques work for you. Someone once told me that there are two kinds of writers: those who make their writing better by adding to it, and those who improve by cutting away. While, like most writerly ‘rules,’ this misses a lot of the nuance that makes everybody’s own practice unique, it can be a useful place to start—particularly since I know that I tend to trim, rather than add.
I begin most stories by over-writing. My first draft is usually at least 25% longer than it will end up. In the most extreme examples, I have written stories four or five times the length that they really need to be. I like to think of this as a sculptor might—preparing a block of marble that I can refine down to the shape it needs to be. There are several things I look for in this paring back. Normally, I’ll edit out two thirds of my descriptions. These can make the story heavy, and distract the reader from those really crucial descriptions that carry the story’s weight. I also remove a lot of explanations that I needed for myself—characters’ motivations, details about their histories. In short fiction, you don’t want to give the reader more background than they absolutely need. And finally, I turn to shape.
By shape, I mean the trajectory the story follows—the way that it moves. This will differ from story to story, and sometimes it isn’t obvious exactly where the emphasis should be. But there are some rules of thumb that tend to hold true. Most stories rely on a short opening and conclusion—most of our attention should be on what happens in between. Normally, I find that I can edit down the three opening or closing paragraphs into a single one. To make the story’s movement clear, it helps to have something that connects these ends—a repeated image or motif, a phrase or scene or just a mood. But a story has to change, it has to take the reader somewhere new. So when I’m shaping, I am focused on the end. What shift do I want to show the reader, and what kind of feeling do I want this shift to have?
As I said though, there isn’t just a single rule for how to edit. There have been plenty of times when I have come to a draft and found that there is a missing piece, rather than too much. I tend to look for places where I can add another scene between two characters, so that I can build and complicate their relationship. You’ll often see discussions of ‘round’ and ‘flat’ characters, but I prefer Kazuo Ishiguro’s perspective: it is three dimensional relationships that make writing interesting. If I do want to add to a single character, I will look for ways to weave in memories. Fiction allows you the freedom to play with past and present in ways that usually seem awkward in visual media like film. In particular, it allows you to capture the way that our own memories disrupt or blend without experiences of the present in our everyday existence. Drifting between the present and a memory allows you to reveal something of that character’s outlook or experiences, or else to add resonance to something that occurs later in the tale.
Of course, that leaves the least glamorous part of editing for last: proofreading. You will find all sorts of tricks out there for catching minor errors (like reading your story from the last word to the first) but I prefer to use this as a chance to work on another component of my style at the same time—the rhythm of my sentences. My technique is pretty simple: I read my story aloud, really emphasising the cadence of each sentence. Not only does this help me catch any little problems, it also allows me to do something that I think is even more important: getting the rhythm of my story’s movement right. By controlling how your sentences speed up or slow down, you can exercise control over when your reader pays attention, and when they will rush on forwards, heading to a climax. Because rhythm matters just as much as content. It shapes feeling, and response. And it gives you something else. Style.
Hailing from Aotearoa, Sam Reese is an insatiable traveller and award-winning critic, short story writer, and teacher. His first collection of stories, Come the Tide, was published by Platypus Press in 2019. A widely respected literary and music critic, his study of The Short Story in Midcentury America won the 2018 Arthur Miller Centre First Book Prize. Currently a lecturer in Creative Writing at York St John University, Sam formerly taught at the University of Sydney, where his inspirational teaching was recognised with an Excellence award. His forthcoming collection, on a distant ridgeline, is published by Platypus Press.
Parts of the morning collide with the eventual winner
of the home & away series. Not much is left. A few shards
cause craters in the eyes, a part- pennant does pennance as it
wraps around the nearest set of ankles. Then a dog sled ar-
rives, still moist with snow. We welcome it with closed arms.
elephant cup cakes
‘ Pachyderms and pastry! I love it.’ Tom Beckett
That a pachyderm is highly comp- etitive in the global pastry market does not adequately capture the true sense of how unlikely scenarios such as this are. Those Instagram influencers who talked this up were all probably tickled by the ivory. Money may have changed hands. But the natural attri- butes of the animal are ideal for the task — tusks, tail, trunk; all master mixers — why be surprised? & those feet! Pancakes galore. The perfect size for carving out cheesecake casings.
A line from Billie Jean King
An exciting update is coming. A chart’s been prepared to illustrate the main points. Small popups will appear that use
colour & typography to provoke a psychological reaction. There’s certainly a place for that, simple or complex, since we are both
made up of energy & used to the use of icons to represent emotions. It won’t be that long before you have command of
the update, can use all parts of it intuitively. Savour the small win — this victory is fleeting. Another update is now only days away.
Hosomaki
The queue outside the sushi bar melts into one another as the bagpipes suddenly arrive. Raw fish & rice is no match for tartan, even one only rarely worn. That’s the
problem with living in a garrison city — too many con- tradictions, too much bias. Too few true conflicts. Which is why the military make what they can out of what’s available.
A Paumanok Picture
Later, when the road had opened,
Walt Whitman was allowed to pass.
Mark Young was born in New Zealand but now lives in a small town in North Queensland in Australia. He has been publishing poetry for over sixty years, & is the author of around sixty books, primarily text poetry but also including speculative fiction, vispo, creative non-fiction, & art history. His most recent book is The Sasquatch Walks Among Us, from sandy press, available through Amazon.
You can find more of Marks’ work here on Ink Pantry.
Greg Freeman is a former newspaper sub-editor, and now, news and reviews editor for the poetry website Write Out Loud. He co-comperes a monthly poetry open-mic night in Woking with Rodney Wood, and his debut poetry pamphlet Trainspotters was published by Indigo Dreams Press in 2015. Marples Must Go! is his first full-length collection.
The writing is on the wall. MARPLES MUST GO! So who was Marples before he was consigned to history? Being of the same era as Freeman, I remember the name well but, for the sake of the younger generation, I will add that Ernest Marples was a British Conservative politician who served as Postmaster General and then Minister of Transport in the late 50s and early 60s. Nothing unusual about that, you might think, but he was responsible for many things that we now take for granted such as the introduction of Premium Bonds, postcodes, the opening of the M1 motorway and the appointment of Richard Beeching whose drastic cuts abandoned more than 4,000 miles of railway track. Details of his later life were colourful resulting in him fleeing to Monaco at very short notice to avoid prosecution for tax fraud. Freeman delivers Marples’ life story in five stanzas touching upon every detail. Apart from anything else, it is a model of precision, honed no doubt after years spent in a career in journalism.
In this generous collection of 60 poems, Freeman draws inspiration from politics, popular culture, football and family. The earlier part of his collection is primarily about growing up in the post-war era and the swinging sixties. There are poems about iconic TV programmes such as Space Patrol and Juke Box Jury; popstars such as Dusty Springfield, Cilla Black, Chuck Berry and the Dave Clark Five and one about an influential, if somewhat unconventional, teacher whose readings from the Penguin Book of Contemporary Verse gave Freeman his first introduction to the world of poetry.
Freeman has a journalist’s eye for detail. He knows instinctively what makes for a good story. Out of all the stories recast as poems, the title poem must be at the top of the list. Other ‘scoops’ include an account of Margaret Thatcher’s visit to a girl’s school in Leamington Spa which sparked a large student demonstration (Dust-Up in Leamington) and the discovery of a huge cannabis farm on disused private land near Berrylands station (Berrylands). Freeman’s description of the station which I used to pass through on my daily commute into and out of London is spot on:
An apology for a station on the way to Hampton Court, the place where the fast slowed down for Surbiton. It overlooked a sewage farm we’d cycle past, a short cut. Lower Marsh Lane more or less summed it up.
This extract is a good example of how Freeman condenses his words to their essence, omitting anything that is unnecessary while getting to the heart of the subject.
His years spent in newspaper journalism are celebrated in poems such as ‘The Overmatter’, ‘Classifieds’ and ‘The Local Rag’ where the ageing aroma of old newspapers brings to mind:
Crashing typewriters bashing out wedding details, film previews, match reports. Telephones shrill with complaints, demands, rare tip-offs.
In ‘Goodbye Farringdon Road’ Freeman records the historic moment when the Guardian newspaper relocated its London offices from Clerkenwell to King’s Cross and refocused its priorities from print to the internet. There is a telling line in the final stanza:
Print’s long goodbye, but at what cost?
A series of poems on the subject of football betray more than a passing interest in the sport. In one of them, (The Battle of Hastings as Summarised by Roy Keane), Freeman deftly combines his love of football with history. This is something he is particularly good at. Other poems that simultaneously work on more than one level include ‘Fine and Dandy’ which is an interesting cocktail of comic characters, politicians and history, ‘Clacton’, a clever fusion of pop song titles, film titles, place-names, politicians and Brexit, and ‘Return of the Daleks’ which uses a TV series as a hook on which to hang a poem about Brexit. In a further poem on the theme of Brexit, Freeman reminds us how times have changed with these telling lines:
Back then you couldn’t speak your mind; now you can shout it out loud.
Freeman admits that he is very much a poet of place and this is reflected in his poetry, whether he is writing about places in his native Surrey or places further afield such as Marbella, Barcelona, the Stockholm Archipelago, the Loire Valley or Bruges. These references help to ground the poems, establishing a backdrop to the stories that he unfolds.
Towards the end of the book, there is a sequence of poems about four bronze statues in Woking town centre by Woking-born sculptor Sean Henry. These poems represent a series of back-stories for the figures, as Freeman saw them. These four statues are ‘Woman (Being Looked At)’ at the entrance to the Peacocks shopping centre, ‘Standing Man’ in Jubilee Square, ‘The Wanderer’ outside Woking railway station and ‘Seated Man’ inside the station on a seat on platform one. Freeman’s tribute to these works has received a nod of approval from the sculptor who told him he had accurately captured some of the thoughts that went into the works as well as bringing in ideas of his own which he felt were somehow right. These verbal descriptions of a visual work of art represent a new exciting departure for Freeman.
Poems closer to the present moment bear references to the pandemic (there is one about clapping for the NHS), Nigel Farage scanning the channel for migrants, the anniversary of V.E. Day and a retrospective on the singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse.
These engaging poems are more than one man’s memory of significant moments in his life. They are my memories too and they will resonate with many other readers. They are the kind of poems that work well in performance as well as on the printed page. The collection captures with wit and compassion ‘our time’. Fully recommended.
Marples Must Go! by Greg Freeman is published by Dempsey & Windle (2021).
Neil Leadbeateris an author, essayist, poet and critic living in Edinburgh, Scotland. His short stories, articles and poems have been published widely in anthologies and journals both at home and abroad. His publications include Librettos for the Black Madonna (White Adder Press, Scotland, 2011); The Worcester Fragments (Original Plus Press, England, 2013); The Loveliest Vein of Our Lives (Poetry Space, England, 2014), Sleeve Notes (Editura Pim, Iaşi, Romania, 2016) Finding the River Horse (Littoral Press, 2017) and Penn Fields (Littoral Press, 2019). His work has been translated into several languages including Dutch, French, Romanian, Spanish and Swedish.
the almost and the always and the never and then everything in between
close yr eyes
do you see now?
let the map take you from here to there
let the desert be your starting point and your destination
no walls and no water
no true purpose
you’ll live and you’ll die just like the rest of us
you’ll be forgotten
maybe you already are
golgotha postcard
pilate shot through the throat and then the crows at his heart
the dogs drinking his tears
grow up fast or not at all, right?
a lifetime of dying played out in the space of an hour and i forget if i ever told you i loved you that summer
i forget if you were the one who taught me how to bleed
was too busy making promises that turned without effort into such heartfelt lies
muted splendour
and then dali grows old and then dali dies and i am left in this room with your sister
says she’s cold, but she won’t get dressed
won’t get up off the floor
just tells me she hates me while i kneel down to kiss her feet
modigliani’s gun
barefoot on broken glass at the end of november and maybe it feels as good as a bullet through god’s filthy heart
maybe only children will be killed in the war
each tiny death made into a movie and all of them playing in another room while we’re trying to sleep, and so how can you claim to be famous if no one wants to see you naked?
why would you keep on bleeding all over the carpet when it’s all you’ve been doing for the past 30 years?
there’s a got to be a better way for you to waste the rest of your life
first attempt at escape
late winter snow from dull pewter skies, driving west but never fast enough, laughs & tells me he’s the one who took the pennies from christ’s blind eyes
says he’s looking for a girl named jennifer to fall in love with then says the heater’s broke
tells me i look like shit
asks how long I’ve been bleeding to death
turns the radio up way too loud while i’m trying to think of an answer
westward
and then you and i and the sleeping face of christ, all of us radiant and each of us alone here in the sudden warmth of november, in the flickering shadows of falling leaves, beneath the ominous web of powerlines, blue sky reduced to meaningless geometry, startled birds, endlessly crashing planes and the children laughing, screaming, running home across barren fields or down haphazard sidewalks, the memory of their motion, the way i tell myself over and over again not to forget this moment and then the ease with which i forget it
the reasons i write these meaningless poems
the idea that maybe even one of them might find you
John Sweet sends greetings from the rural wastelands of upstate NY. He is a firm believer in writing as catharsis, and in the continuous search for an unattainable and constantly evolving absolute truth. His latest poetry collections include A FLAG ON FIRE IS A SONG OF HOPE (2019 Scars Publications) and A DEAD MAN, EITHER WAY (2020 Kung Fu Treachery Press).
You can find more of John’s work here on Ink Pantry.
We have taken to living life as if it were jazz rouging wan days with bright notes born from barren weeks
hollow as the tin-can lanterns recycled and strung up in the spindly birch trees by kids, next door. Each cylinder’s dark interior is pierced with geometric patterns so they gleam with empty space marking out the night with absence, as death is cut into our lives.
We philander from the garden and let it straggle, feeding on its own leaves, drunk with fermenting sugars set to sweeten autumn without us.
Grief’s time-signature surges days in eight bar riffs dubbing evenings to waves of past voices – ghosts we drink to extinction – and stand at last in the darkness of a new street awake and broken with dawn.
Unbearable Lightness
I lent Kundera’s novel, and then separately, a pair of daisy spotted culottes (smart enough for an interview) to friends light enough not to return, their words, ceiling trodden and walked to air.
I find I still wonder where the pages spore their print in absence from my shelf as if they were chilli pepper seeds – papery and disk like skimming ideas to flame even after they are eaten and gone.
And whether clothes absorb memories with their wear to larger shapes, stained and stretched to age.
The rails of thrift shops hung, heavy and spooling sky, touched, scraped with the beyond of these days.
Somerset
The plough’s metal ribs are turned to the sky. Rust flakes in fingernails from the iron core of abandoned machinery amongst the unmown grass sprung with daisies and summery warmth. Flattened clouds rule the sky, pulled taut as clavichord strings that hum with a storm’s jigger at the afternoon and its wobble of espaliered peaches. We run barefoot with the children, laughing, circuiting the field, drunk with exertion, feeling the rub of damp roots fleck with the music of first rain.
weather charts blue sky to numbers rain blurs us
False Advertising
Billboards feather boa the street taxiing minds and high balling eyes to palm tree spas kissed with sangria and sunshine’s strut in snakeskin thigh highs.
The adverts promise the everything of lies to anoraked pavements apace with slow stepped lives loitered with the fur of Friday night zooms and the lurch between stops to and from home in buses pelted in more soft sell.
the earth a dream mumbled in pentameter curved, foetal and asleep beneath a tarred city’s rumble
Jenny Middleton is a working mum and writes whenever she can amid the fun and chaos of family life. She lives in London with her husband, two children, and two very lovely, crazy cats.
That line, that grey smudge, in the sky—like a shadow of something moving out beyond the world Was it a passing ship? A sail wide as limbo The mind reels at the distances, knowing they can only be fiction, that only the self is real
Lost now (because a petrified forest is really just a field of rocks) I sit down in the shadows of the palm fronds reaching over me with dagger fingers What am I—but a sinking wetlands, methane-rich refuse rotting into usefulness? Or really I think I am the output of some formula—a reductive algorithm Definitions slip through the cracks between their own words, eel-slick and mucosal It’s June now, and this too must pass, this uncertainty Things do, pass, always
Richard Helmling is a teacher and writer living and working in El Paso, Texas.
