Selected Writing
Some stories and essays available to read online
One Long Holiday
a short story in The Interpreter's House
Before they came, her dad said it would be like being on holiday all the time, although it isn’t really. They don’t go to the beach very often, and it’s nothing like a holiday when you have to do normal things like go to school. The girl’s new school is much like her old school — brick-built and drafty — and even the uniform is the same colour, so that she could almost forget she’s somewhere new, until the teachers call dinner ‘lunch’ or she says something without thinking, something ordinary, that the other kids pick up on. For instance, if she says she hasn’t had owt to eat since breakfast, they’ll titter and say ‘I haven’t had in to eat,’ collapsing in giggles as if it’s the most hilarious thing ever...
The Light of Day
a short story in The Honest Ulsterman
also featured as Seren Books' Short Story of the Month
It was one of those blustery, changeable days with the wind chasing the clouds across the sky like a film on fast-forward. Lovely one minute, dark and ominous the next – she’d put her washing out before she got the bus into town and then fretted about it the whole time she was out...
Expecting
a short story in The Lampeter Review
It was in May, when the baby was exactly one week past her due date, that it occurred to me she might never come at all.
I never knew, until I got pregnant, that pregnancy officially lasts forty weeks and not nine months as I’d always thought. And that they start the counting two weeks before you even became pregnant, as if time rolls backwards because a life is going to begin…
Root
a short story in FlashBack Fiction
Twelve midwives have come already. Have bustled through the sharp wind with their bundles of charms and bitter herbs. Have sighed and prayed and despaired. Frau Mueller now, her cold hands on Ilsa’s belly, prays to the Virgin, the Virgin’s mother, and all the Holy Mothers. Calls on them to ease the infant out, to end the heaving pains of five long days…
Good Enough to Eat
a prose poem in the Mom Egg Review
We talked a lot about eating you in those early days. You were made of apricots and berries and soft new bread and cotton candy, your tiny nose like a chickpea. How could we not want to consume you?…
In My Mother’s Garden
a creative non-fiction essay in Literary Mama
It has been a year since she died. It’s the strangest thing to have become a mother just as I lost my own mother; only the tiniest sliver of time where I was both mother and mothered…