ShortStoryLove at ShortStoryVille

Last Saturday I got on the train to Bristol to go to the very first ShortStoryVille. Organised by the lovely Joe from the Bristol Short Story Prize, it was a day dedicated to the brilliance of the short story. I was honoured to be on a panel discussing how we read short stories, chaired by the brilliant Tania Hershman (read our interview with her here), Scott Pack from the Friday Project (and his impressive 365 short story project) and David Hebblethwaite, blogger extraordinaire (read the nice things he says about some of our stories here).

Tania opened our discussion with the confession: ‘My name is Tania and I am a short story addict.’ And so our conversation began… I was fascinated to learn about the different ways people approach reading short stories, and their favourite places to read them (Scott’s was on the toilet – I suspect that goes for more people than will admit to it!).

What was really refreshing though was the no one asked why we read short stories. To a room full of short story fans, it’s a silly question – we read short stories because they are great! But when I tell people about Shortfire Press and explain that we specialise in short stories, a shocking number of people reply, ‘Oh, I don’t read short stories.’ I completely understand that not every short story is for everyone, but the idea of not reading short stories at all is one that always surprises me. After all, aren’t we all brought up reading short stories – or at least having them read to us by our parents? My introduction to short stories, like most people’s, I imagine, was through fairy tales. Then, as I grew older, I got into Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald and went from there.

My feeling is that some people perhaps are intimidated by the short story form. There is often such a lot of pretentious rubbish talked about in reference to short stories, that it all sounds a bit too difficult. Sure, short stories are difficult to write (all power to those who can do it well), but they are not difficult to read. And Shortfire is on a mission to prove it! It was great to see some of those short story myths being confounded at ShortStoryVille. Now we just have to convince everyone else!

I would love to know what you think - how did you get into reading short stories? Did you find them intimidating to start with? How do you convince your friends to try a short story for the first time?
 

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