When Covid was receding in 2022, I began looking at my back catalogue of stories and realised, to my surprise, that I’d written enough for a collection. Short stories can creep on you like that. Unlike a novel, a collection of short fiction grows and accretes over years, and usually isn’t the product of one singular bolt of inspiration. (Bolts of inspiration, I’ve found, are pretty thin on the ground, even with novels.) So if you’re a short story writer, you’ll always have a couple on the boil, or more accurately, simmering, in the background.
During the pandemic, I’d begun writing flash fiction – stories between 100 and 1000 words long – which is a growing niche area in fiction. My original plan with Twenty-Twenty Vision (The Lilliput Press) was to alternate more traditional short stories with a scattering of flash to create a looser mosaic of narratives.
The original manuscript was significantly longer than what has ended up between the covers here. The mix of short and flash just didn’t fly with publishers – lots of admiration for playing with form and stretching the definition of what a collection was, but not enough for them to offer publication.
In the face of rejection, I had to go back to the drawing board. The first decision was to abandon the notion of mixing flash with short fiction. This was a real pity, as flash stories are energising and energetic, but perhaps sometimes a bit too “soundbytey” when read in large numbers together. Reading a whole collection of flash together can lead to literary indigestion – like being offered a whole lot of canapés but no main course at a restaurant. Mixing the two seemed like a good way to counteract this effect, to expand the readership for flash fiction and to enfold it into the general tradition of short storytelling.
With the flash excised from the collection, I had a dozen or more stories left. Many of them had been written pre-Covid and I hit on the notion of revisiting some of the characters I’d written about before to see how the pandemic had treated them. So the collection contains many twinned stories – characters seen both before and after Covid.
For anyone writing short fiction, which I’ve always considered to be like ‘news from the front’ in the literary world, it’d be absurd not to include Covid. How could you ignore one of the most world-altering experiences of our current century that had happened to you but not in the world of your characters? So in Twenty-Twenty Vision, as the collection gathers pace, the pandemic creeps in.
Now five years on from Covid, we seem to be ready – or perhaps finally able – to look at the pandemic in its entirety. Up to now we’ve been concerned with surviving and recovering, getting over it and getting on . Now perhaps we’re ready to confront the trauma of the pandemic and to consider its long-term effects on our working lives, our social lives and in our intimate lives.
Which is where the stories of Twenty-Twenty Vision come in. The characters are all of a certain age – close to my own – so the three Rs are greatly in evidence – retrospection, recrimination and regret. They’re looking back and seeing their mistakes, inevitable for anyone hitting their sixties. And then Covid arrives. And although the theme is hindsight – the 20/20 vision of the title – it’s also a vision of those early days of the pandemic.
The characters are dealing on the hoof with the Corona Virus – as it was called way back then, remember? e.g. Marie uses Covid restrictions as a cover to drop her best friend whom she suspects of having an affair with her husband; Olivia recognises she’s been staring love in the face her entire life in a queue at a vaccination centre; lockdown gives Adrienne an out after she forms an obsessive attachment to a young woman at work; Carmel can’t forgive her husband for his bankruptcy even after he becomes one of the pandemic’s early casualties.
Short stories are a notorious hard sell in the publishing world. It seems generally accepted that people don’t read short fiction and that’s mirrored in sales figures. It’s a fact that has always amazed me in the era of the short attention span. You would think short fiction would be the ideal commuter read, the perfect length ( 2-4000 wds) for the screen-addicted. But them’s the statistics.
Given this, Twenty-Twenty Vision will probably be my last collection of stories. I’ll go on writing in the form – once a short story writer, always a short story writer – but after three collections, I feel I’ve come full-circle. From my first collection in my thirties – entitled A Lazy Eye – which explored a flawed, youthful vision of the world – to the more rueful, backward glance of Twenty-Twenty Vision in my sixties. Two different perspectives, 30 years apart.
When I look at them both together now, I wonder if, despite the general consensus, hindsight is always right?
Twenty-Twenty Vision by Mary Morrissy, published by The Lilliput Press, will be launched in Hodges Figgis Bookshop, Dawson Street, Dublin on March 26 @ 6pm.
mary morrissy 