Landmarks | Writer

London Trip

Posted by

A memory of a literary trip to London with Mike McCormack and Anthony Cartwright in 2017. A huge thanks to Anthony for instigating the idea, and for interviewing us both nights.

Mike & I read from our respective books Solar Bones and Greetings, Hero. Anthony himself has a new novel out: Iron Towns … “Once the furnace heart of industrial England, now the valley is home only to fading dreams.”

So August 2nd we met up at fabled Bookseller Crow-on-the-Hill in Crystal Palace. “Twee, kowtowing, conventional it ain’t,” it says on their website. More than a bookshop, Crow-on-the-Hill is an independent force on the books scene – they also hold writing classes there. Big thanks to Jonathan and staff there.

Anthony Cartwright on the left. None of us gave much thought to photographs, so this is the only shot from Crow … and unfortunately only Mike’s knee is in it.

Next night the three of us descended on the Quaker Bookshop, Friends House, Euston road. Different crowd, different conversation. McCormack sparked an animated discussion about the underappreciated role of engineers in shaping the world. There were also some words about the largely-forgotten tradition of Irish gothic fiction.

Mike McCormack reading at the Quaker bookshop.

Myself reading.

And the day after that, I headed up to Norwich for a pre-launch event of The End at UEA’s Enterprise centre. Fifteen stories inspired or sparked off by fifteen of Nicolas Ruston’s scratch paintings. This is The End my friends. And it comes with a black wax seal. Unthank Books Nicolas Ruston The End

Brought out by Unthank Books who are a powerhouse of extraordinary fiction and bring out a semi-annual state-of-the-art of UK short fiction. They call it the Unthology series, and Unthology 8 came out recently.

0 comments

The Guiltless Bystander – short story collection from the late David Wheldon

Posted by

My friend the doctor and writer David Wheldon passed away on January 7th 2021. His death was sudden: he had suffered from a degenerative nerve illness for many years but seemed to be in general good health otherwise.

I had posted about Wheldon’s novels in a blog years before I ever began to exchange emails with him. Then in 2017, after my debut collection of short stories was published, I wrote a longer article in The Stinging Fly on my first encounter with Wheldon’s strange early novels.

I had good the fortune to meet David in person in Bedford, in the summer of 2016. We went from the Bedford Swan to a couple of local pubs. He walked with the aid of a zimmer frame. At one point he pushed it aside to demonstrate that he had more than enough strength to walk, but he preferred to use the frame as something to hold onto and stop the trembling of his hands.

By then we had been exchanging emails for a year or so and continued to do so until his sudden death. Mostly our emails were chats about his medical work, my small son, the rapid pace of change. We also talked about stories we were working on. David was constantly writing new stories and revising old ones. He wrote every day, even though he had given up all thought of submitting his work for publication.

That changed in about 2017 when I alerted another writer, David Rose, to Wheldon's work. David Rose read Wheldon's stories and immediately appreciated them. He was able to pitch them to a couple of literary magazines, including Woven Tale Press and Confingo. Over the next two or three years Wheldon's stories began to appear regularly. A longer piece, The Automaton, was selected by Nightjar Press to be published in booklet form. (Nightjar run a beautiful limited-edition series of individually published stories.)

Wheldon's stories often take a premise and run with it: a man discovers medical documents relating to his birth which report that he was born without a brain, a woman gets a job in a factory making prayers, a boy suspects that the chess-playing automaton does more than just play chess, a man inherits the role of signal-tower keeper in a line of Martello-type towers of indefinite extent. The ideas kept coming to him. He wrote several stories set in the past, seemingly set in provincial England in the decade when he was a medical student. But in these stories too there are moments where we realise we are reading a surreal story and the historical details are vivid but don't pin the story down.

A few days after hearing of his death, his wife, the artist Sarah Longlands, told me that David had been working on the final edits of a short story collection due to be published by Confingo. This came as a surprise. David had never mentioned it in his emails – perhaps he didn't quite accept it was 100% certain.

David had been so long out of contact with literary circles that his passing went unremarked by the literary world. But through the efforts of David Rose and his publisher, a short obituary notice appeared in the Bookseller magazine. The title of the new collection was mentioned: The Guiltless Bystander.

Some time later Tim Shearer at Confingo contacted me. He had read my Stinging Fly Re:fresh essay on Wheldon's work some years before. He wanted me to write a foreword to The Guiltless Bystander.

I was surprised and humbled. I would have thought the honour would be more fitting for an established writer whose reputation could draw new attention to Wheldon's new work. But on the other hand Wheldon's life as writer and doctor makes for an interesting story and not many are in a position to tell it.

And so here it is today, beautifully illustrated by a painting of unfinished violins on a shelf, made by Wheldon's widow the artist Sarah Longlands.

David Wheldon's own minimalist website is still up and running and has lots of his poetry and some unpublished stories.

0 comments

David Wheldon, writer and pathologist, passed away

Posted by

I was saddened to hear that the writer and pathologist David Wheldon passed away on January 7th this year. He had lived in Bedford for many years.

A note on his life and work is in The Bookseller.

I read David Wheldon’s novels The Viaduct and The Course of Instruction in a different era, when I was working on the building sites in London. They made a deep impression on me, and a few years ago I wrote an essay for The Stinging Fly about these early novels.

I exchanged emails with David over the course of a few years and am proud to be able to call him a friend. In our emails we chatted about his medical work, about my small son, and about his wife’s artistic work – his wife is the artist Sarah Longlands. And occasionally about our own work.

He kept writing and working right up to his sudden death at the age of seventy. Some recent stories of his have appeared in Confingo, Nightjar Press, and Woven Tale Press.

He had a website with samples of his poetry and short stories, and several essays, including some on his medical work. The link to that website doesn’t work now – I hope it goes back online soon.

I will have more to write about Wheldon’s work soon.

0 comments

Mentoring

Posted by

I have edited fiction and non-fiction for Mira Publishing UK for some years. I have taught courses in creative writing and been involved in many writing groups. I also proofread commercially in my day job.

I am on the Irish Writers Centre list of professional mentors.

0 comments

Writers’ Workbench at IWC

Posted by

Enhance your creative/critiquing skillset and knock your writing into shape.
This course takes a hands-on approach covering:
Creativity,
Dialogue & description
Finding your voice,
Style, Structure/plot,
Editing

Practicing editing techniques will be a crucial component and some of the mechanics of dialogue, description, and POV will be covered. The course is suitable for those who have attempted some writing and for those in need of a new approach. Participants will be expected to complete two pieces of fiction or creative non-fiction.

At the Irish Writers Centre on Parnell Square

Bookings via the IWC website: https://irishwriterscentre.ie/collections/spring-2020/products/the-writers-workbench-with-aiden-oreilly-2020

0 comments

Backstory of a book

Posted by

This article first appeared on the Writing.ie website in September 2015.
The Backstory of a Book.

It’s been a year since my debut collection of short stories Greetings, Hero was launched to the world. My tales of drifters and deviants incapable of accepting any “central source of validation” were a long time in the making. The oldest was written in the Staatsbibliothek on Unter den Linden in Berlin, during a bitterly cold winter. Some were written in Poznan, one in Prague, and several in Dublin. They were written slowly, left to mature, inspected, pruned with a buzzsaw to meet submission wordcounts, rejected, reconstructed, lost in virtual space, found again, re-edited. Subjected to the above cycle a few times, and perhaps somewhere along the line accepted by a magazine in Ireland, the USA or the UK.

0 comments