Last year, fewer than 25 books of short stories were produced by mainstream publishers. And two-thirds were by writers from abroad. Where are all the good British short stories? Are we witnessing the death throes of an entire genre? In Part 2 of ‘Endangered Species’, Debbie Taylor, Editor of women’s writing publication ‘Mslexia’, charts the parlous state of the literary short story in the UK.
CLICK HERE to read Part 1 of ‘Endangered Species’.
David Almond spent decades in the literary wilderness with his perfectly crafted short fictions before hitting the headlines with his multi-award-winning children’s novel, Skellig. ‘I’m really a short story writer,’ he says. ‘But my agent said no-one would publish a collection unless I produced a novel.’ Yet his stories had won prizes, appeared in the best literary mags and been broadcast on Radio Four. ‘None of it mattered to anyone. I sent a collection to five publishers and it came back so fast I don’t think it was even read.’
Almond believes that commitment to the form is ‘in a downward spin’ in the UK. ‘Radio Four have cut their late afternoon slot and closed the door to unsolicited submissions. The regular Best Short Stories of the Year anthology has been axed.’
So why is the form in such a bad way here? Phillip Gwyn Jones blames newspaper publishing. ‘In France and Italy, newspapers publish news. That’s all.’ But here they also publish reviews and essays, lifestyle features and interviews. In this way, he argues, they have usurped the role of the upmarket cultural magazine that, in the US and elsewhere, is the main mass-market outlet for the literary short story. In the UK there is no equivalent to the New Yorker, Harper’s or Atlantic Monthly. So the general public never encounters a literary short story – and never has a chance to cultivate a taste for them.
Back in issue six [of Mslexia,] we bewailed the parlous state of poetry publishing. But compared with the short story, poetry is positively blooming. It receives half of the Arts Council’s budget for literature; it has major institutions like the Poetry Society, the Poetry Book Society and the National Poetry Library dedicated to its well-being; its most prolific publishers are heavily subsidised from the public purse; it has its own festivals and high-profile prizes. There has even been a government Green Paper on the subject.
If poetry is surviving well, albeit in captivity, the literary short story is hanging on by its fingernails in the margins of the small-press world. A survey of the small-press scene reveals a minuscule core readership, precious few publishing outlets, and little or no debate. Though 24% of small press mags publish a mixture of literary forms, only five per cent are devoted to the literary short story, compared with the 29% that focus solely on poetry.
Margaret Wilkinson links the decline in the British short story with the demise of literary magazines specialising in the form. Iron, Panurge, Northern Stories and Writing Women all folded within a few years of one another, as subsidies were cut or editors wearied of producing texts for a handful of subscribers. Again, the contrast with the US is dramatic, where journals like Story, Fence and Rand Street are available in every bookshop and garner many thousands of readers.
Sales of the UK’s main surviving short story journals are disturbingly low. Granta, the brand leader, subsists on institutional and overseas sales. Ambit’s circulation stalled at 3,000 years ago, despite an Arts Council subsidy of £4 per reader; London Magazine sells fewer than 3,500. The now-defunct Panurge’s sales peaked briefly at 1,200 in the early 1990s when editor David Almond stomped around the nation’s bookshops with his rucksack (back in the days when it was possible to talk to a Waterstone’s manager without a Papal Dispensation). Writing Women never sold more than 1,000, despite a spirited marketing campaign in its latter years. QWF struggles on with 300 due to the determination of editors Jo Good and Sally Zigmond.
‘We don’t need a short story campaign,’ argues Philip Gwyn Jones. ‘We need investment in a well-designed, well-produced, well-marketed mainstream magazine that people feel they have to buy.’ Granta doesn’t fulfil this brief because its content is skewed towards nonfiction and Carveresque narrative rather than experimental literary work. ‘Granta’s a status quo publication,’ says short story editor, Ra Page. ‘It’s not experimental. It’s not new writers coming through.’
Page is trying to find new ways of promoting the form. With bookshops harder for a small publisher to penetrate than Fort Knox, Page has been experimenting with new ways of marketing the literary magazine Comma in and around Manchester.
Using his contacts as deputy editor of City Life (Manchester’s Time Out), he distributes Comma as a free supplement to boost knock-on sales in local bookshops, where he distributes 3,000 copies of each issue. These are seriously big numbers for a local small-press magazine. With print costs underwritten by sponsors and advertising, it seems to be a formula that works. Its success persuaded Penguin to commission The City Life Book of Manchester Short Stories, which went on to sell a healthyish 3,500. Page’s next plan is to piggy-back on the free magazines on long-distance trains – and expand into Leeds.
Another short-story pioneer is Matthew Smith. His idea is to sell individual stories through station vending machines. Though supported by leading authors, including Ali Smith and Irvine Welsh, the idea was scotched by Cadbury’s, which owns the franchise on London Underground vending machines and charges a prohibitive £3,000 for the use of each outlet.
But lack of outlets and poor sales are not the only problems. Many editors I spoke to were worried about the standard of short story writing in the UK. ‘American authors have a better feel for what the short story is about,’ says Jo Good of QWF. ‘People in the UK don’t seem to understand the form. They either write in the style of a novel – and cut it to short-story length – or they submit pieces more suitable for a women’s weekly magazine.’ Gwyn Jones agrees. ‘Apart from a few brilliant exceptions, short story writers here seem very raw and unpolished.’ This is due, he believes, to the lack of mainstream publishing of the form. ‘There’s no forum for debate here; no feedback; no chance of refining the art.’ Small wonder publishers tend to look outside the UK for foreign collections.
Margaret Wilkinson thinks the problem may stem from the way the short story is taught: as an exercise for would-be novelists rather than as a form in its own right. We are left with the bizarre situation of apprentice novelists producing short stories for their MA portfolios, while passionate short story writers are being pressurised by publishers into producing novels. ‘I see people forced to write novels who should be writing short stories,’ says Wilkinson. ‘They are natural short story authors and we are just losing them.’
‘You can’t survive as a short story writer in this country,’ agrees Bridget O’Connor, author of two critically-acclaimed collections. Like Wilkinson, she has wrestled with the novel form for years. Both are now writing for radio, stage and film, but still feel the short story is their natural genre. They have witty, acrobatic, voicey styles that work perfectly at short-story length, but which have to be diluted for the long haul of the novel. If they lived in Germany or the US they would never have had to compromise their art in this way.
‘Experimentation in a novel can be tiring for the reader,’ says Mark Robinson of Northern Arts, ‘but a short story can contain it.’ In the end both genres benefit. Robinson has made the ‘Save Our Short Story’ campaign a priority for 2003, and hopes the cause will be adopted by publishers and the media.
It’s a corner that needs fighting, it seems. ‘I can’t see the Arts Council redirecting funds to the short story in the near future,’ says Head of Literature Gary McKeone, regretfully. ‘The crux of it is that short stories don’t sell.’ But neither does poetry. That’s precisely why it receives the lion’s share of the national literature budget. Surely the short story deserves at least as much support?
‘Mslexia’ Editor Debbie Taylor has kindly offered her permission to run this story on Arts Hub.
