Books: Tales of rueful regrets, and a reflection on pandemic times

How does a book of short stories start?

Unlike a novel, a collection of short fiction grows and accretes over years, and usually isn’t the product of one singular bolt of inspiration. (Bolts of inspiration, I’ve found, are pretty thin on the ground, even with novels.)

So if you’re a short story writer, you’ll always have a couple on the boil, or more accurately, simmering, in the background.

It’s more than eight years since my last collection and I’ve written and published a novel in between - Penelope Unbound, from local press Banshee, who’ve just brought out a beautiful paperback edition - https://bansheepress.org.

So Twenty-Twenty Vision was already in gestation when my last book of stories, Prosperity Drive, was published.

In 2022, I began looking at my back catalogue of stories and realised, to my surprise, that I’d written enough for a collection - too much, as it happened!

During covid, I had begun writing flash fiction - stories between 100 and 1,000 words long - which is a growing niche area in fiction. My original plan was to alternate more traditional short stories with a scattering of flash to create a looser mosaic of narratives.

The original manuscript was significantly longer than what has ended up between covers of Twenty-Twenty Vision. The mix of short and flash just didn’t fly with publishers - lots of admiration for playing with form and stretching the definition of what a collection was, but not enough for them to offer publication.

In the face of rejection, I had to go back to the drawing board.

The first decision was to abandon the notion of mixing flash with short fiction. This was a real pity, as flash stories are energising and energetic, but perhaps sometimes a bit too soundbytey when read in large numbers together.

Reading a whole collection of flash together can lead to literary indigestion - like being offered a whole lot of canapés but no main course at a restaurant.

Mixing the two seemed like a good way to counteract this, to expand the readership for flash fiction and to enfold it into the general tradition of short storytelling.

Short stories are a notorious hard sell in the publishing world. It seems generally accepted that people don’t read short fiction and that’s mirrored in sales figures.

It’s a fact that has always amazed me in the era of the short attention span. You would think the short fiction would be the ideal commuter read, the perfect length ( 2,000-4,000 words) for the screen-addicted. But them’s the statistics.

So, in 2022, I had more than two dozen stories that I wanted to combine into a unified collection. The date is significant. Many of the stories had been written pre-covid and I hit on the notion of revisiting some of the characters I’d written about before to see how the pandemic had treated them.

So the collection contains many twinned stories - characters seen both before and after covid.

For anyone writing short fiction, which I’ve always considered to be like ‘news from the front’ in the literary world, it would be absurd not to include covid. How could you ignore one of the most world-altering experiences of our current century that had happened to you but not in the world of your characters?

So, in Twenty-Twenty Vision, as the collection gathers pace, the pandemic creeps in.

Now, five years on from covid, we seem to be ready - or perhaps finally able - to look at the pandemic in its entirety.

Recent Liveline programmes have featured harrowing stories of death and survival that perhaps we’ve not been ready to hear before now, so intent have we been on getting over it and getting on.

From this perspective, it’s easier to see the long-term effects of the pandemic on our working lives, our social lives, and in our intimate lives.

Which is where the stories of Twenty-Twenty Vision come in. The characters are all of a certain age - close to my own - so the three Rs are greatly in evidence - retrospection, recrimination and regret. They’re looking back and seeing their mistakes, inevitable for anyone hitting their sixties.

And then covid arrives.

And although the theme is hindsight - the 20/20 vision of the title - it’s also a vision of those early days of the pandemic.

So, in the collection Marie uses covid restrictions as a cover to drop her best friend whom she suspects of having an affair with her husband; Olivia recognises she’s been staring love in the face her entire life in a queue at a vaccination centre; lockdown gives Adrienne an out after she forms an obsessive attachment to a young woman at work; and Carmel can’t forgive her husband for his bankruptcy even after he becomes one of the pandemic’s early casualties.

Eagle-eyed readers will also spot several Cork locations in these stories - the Elysian, Ballintemple, the Fingerpost roundabout.

Given my age and the resistance of the market to the short form, Twenty-Twenty Vision will probably be my last collection of stories. I’ll go on writing single stories, but this will be my last word in book form.

After three collections, I feel I’ve come full-circle from my first collection in my thirties - entitled A Lazy Eye - which explored a flawed, youthful vision of the world - to the more rueful, backward glance of Twenty-Twenty Vision in my sixties.

Two different perspectives 30 years apart. And who’s to say whether hindsight is always right?

Twenty-Twenty Vision, by Mary Morrissy, is published by The Lilliput Press - https://www.lilliputpress.ie