discretion

by uzwi

This post from July 2011 turned out to be describing “Getting Out of There”:

So I’m writing a story set in a generic seaside town, when it decides it is interested in Rottingdean. Rottingdean, that little-known LHC of UK culture, smashing together the Ballardian & the Kiplingesque so we can look for new matter in the resulting fragments! etc. Also, I like its shabbiness & that Enid Bagnold is buried in St Margaret churchyard. But now the story wants me to see Rottingdean through its eyes. It will not cooperate much longer if I don’t use it as a way of looking at Rottingdean, although nothing resembling Rottingdean may ever appear in the final item. This is always an interesting but scary moment. The story also wants me to use it as a way of looking at Vanessa Bell’s garden pond. I’m less sure about that.

Rottingdean was folded discretely into Hastings and I did, in the end, use the story as a way of viewing Vanessa Bell’s pond. Find it in Best British Short Stories 2014, ed Nicholas Royle, from SALT. (You may collect that edition before me, since SALT don’t seem to want to send me one.) Getting Out of There–or perhaps Here–was also going to be the title of the new collection, but now I’m not so sure.

Advertisement