The Fish Publishing Anthology Launch 2011

The winning writers and  the dedicated organizers of the Fish Publishing Anthology Launch 2011

The Fish Poem

Centos are collaged poems made up of fragments of other poems. For the official launch of the FISH Anthology in Bantry, Ireland, Brain Turner composed a Cento from the winning Fish poems — otherwise known as “The FISH Poem” 

With the Sails Unfurled

At the border, I forget who I am—

like a leaf changing into a verb, I toss and turn,

going nowhere. Now,

                                     let us speak of love.

Don’t think I don’t know

the crackle of the fire at night, how

the granite boulders burned

like nascent magma

as we waited there. For you,

               I’ll search until the end of time,

with the wind from the west,

sea spray on my face, ‘til the grass is gone

and the rivers run dry, ‘til the end of time,

wherever that is—now,

and now  

and now.

 Brian Turner reading at The Fish Publishing Anthology 2011 launch

The work of the following poets were included:

Ken Taylor, Jean Tuomey, Stephanie Scott, Diana Adams, Michael McCarthy, Jo Bell, Kita Shantiris, Cecile Callan, Malissa Priebe, Kirsty McCormack 

Poem celebrating the launch of the Fish Anthology by Ken Taylor, winner of the Fish Publishing Poetry Prize 2011

in st brendan's church, bantry



the collar of christ is not mock

incantation but gothic & round

with nimbus behind coming off

as the lid of a shell so he has

the bearing of heroic oyster or

even pearl with steely eyes to

meet the mouth that will take

him in: grim push toward or

rebuttal of transubstantiation.

then it’s an oyster disguise as

he rises from canonical camo,

right hand in nonchalance,

aimed loosely at heaven. is

this my struggle or intention

of the stained-glass maker who

crafted a righteous sword stare

or the happenstance of sand

becoming both lucent, colored

glass & trope of grain of sand

becoming pearl becoming savior.

his stare goes over my head

through parallel stained window,

past wolf tone square as if call

to the halal falafel shop across

the street, with no customers –

the owner’s head bowed to allah.

New Contemporary Memoir Course

With the success of the Flash Fiction Course, Fish Publishing  is very excited to announce  a new Contemporary Memoir Course.  This is a one-to-one online program that should take no longer than 6 months to complete and students can choose their own pace.

This course is designed to stimulate, organise and craft your writing and develop an ability to write based on personal experience and with literary purpose. The aim of this course is not necessarily to come away with a full-length memoir under your belt but it will point you in the right direction by focusing on elements of the genre including characterisation, plot, dialogue and description that you can build upon. Most importantly it will make space in your life for writing. 

Details of the course can be found at www.fishpublishing.com

Fish celebrates One Year of the Flash Fiction Creative Writing Course

The Fish Publishing Online Flash Fiction Course continues after a successful first year. One of this year’s graduates: Jette-Julie Rosendal,  was a runner up in the Fish One-Page Story Competition with “Cover”.

These are some of the things that former students said about the course:

I enjoyed the course very much and it provided me with more than I expected. It was a tool to motivate me to write on a continuing and regular basis and it also introduced me to the pleasure and challenges of flash fiction work. I thoroughly enjoyed working with Mary Jane. I would say there was the right level of straight forward critique balance with positive prompts and encouraging feedback.

Andrea Wicks

It helped me focus on my writing much more than before, the combo of being able to take my time, still someone waiting for my stories made WRITING a much more “real” thing. My writing has improved greatly, I can see that myself when rereading some of my stuff.

I´m much more aware of making choices rather than just scribbling along, which has made me feel I have a pretty great toolbox now. And it was great fun too! Great variety in exercises, additional stuff to do, and constructive, hands-on advice! One of my stories written on the course made it into the Fish Anthology 2011, which I´m still trying to fathom, but have no doubt is a direct result of the course – and its teacher. The teacher- Mary-Jane Holmes had a feel for what I wanted to say, where I wanted to go with my stories, and guided me with clarity, professionalism and human warmth. She has made me much more aware of making choices rather than just scribbling along, which has made me feel I have a pretty great toolbox now. And she made it great fun too!

Jette-Julie Rosendal

I found the course to be hugely beneficial, challenging and also a lot of fun. For me, it was also a great driver to actually write “stuff” day in-day out for an extended period.

Mary-Jane was very encouraging right from the start and she always found something positive to say about each assignment. Her criticism/analysis was always very clear and accurate (when I read it, I could immediately see the pertinence of it). At one point, I described her criticism of an assignment as “gently incisive” and I think that could be use to sum up just about all her interaction.

Kieron Lyons

Mary Jane is an excellent teacher – prompt, direct, precise, encouraging and clear. This is my first experience of tuition in writing. It’s been enjoyable and stimulating in equal measure.

Nancy Fermanagh

Thank you for a high quality course with prompt, valid feedback from an engaging writing professional.

Fiona Sussman

Details of the course can be found at www.fishpublishing.com

Simon Mawer on Judging the Fish Short Story Competition 2010/2011

On Judging the Fish Short Story Competition, 2010/2011

Short story writing is a bit like painting in water colours. It’s an art of precise strokes in which you need to be deft, accurate and sensitive to the faintest imbalance. And if it’s good then the finished whole is somehow more than the sum of its parts. On the other hand, novel writing is more like painting in oils. You can layer, rework, scrub things out, move near, stand back, live with the thing in your studio for a year or more, counterbalance a lapse here with a successful passage there. And all too often the whole is somehow less than its various parts. As a writer I feel I can do the oil painting, more or less; it’s the water colours that make me feel inadequate.

So it was with some trepidation that I received the final twenty stories that had made the cut in the Fish Short Story competition this year. No committee decision from now on: it was up to me alone. Aside from being a novelist I have also been a teacher – not of English or Creative Writing but of workaday Biology – and as soon as I turned to the first story I found the teacher in me asking questions: what are the criteria? where is the mark scheme? how can you be objective about this? The answer is, of course, you cannot. Assuming all the stories are competently written (they were) any further judgement must be purely subjective. So, feeling guilty, I threw years of pedagogical conditioning out of the window and sat down to read. I wasn’t a teacher marking exams, I was a writer doing the impossible: trying to rank works of art. And the only way I could do it was by deciding which of these stories I liked best.

What struck me forcibly was the preponderance of family anguish stories. Isn’t this theme a trifle hackneyed? Perhaps it comes from that injunction of the Creative Writing course, that you should write about what you know. I’d say, write about what you imagine. Let your imagination take you to places and inside people whom you couldn’t possibly otherwise have known. Imagination is the key, the crux, the hinge on which all art turns.

So I was captivated by the desolate mining world evoked in Big Spirit Blow with its awful shrivelled corpses and the bewildered Ozzies trying to make out what was going on. And the biologist in me loved the gruesome mutated Cordyceps fungus attacking humans as the current species attack insects. The tone is right, the language is right, threat is expertly hinted at. You breathe in the spores as you read.

Closer to home, La Paix seemed a beautifully oblique portrait of a marriage broken by a single, mundane tragedy – half a lifetime distilled into a few thousand words, emotions alluded to rather than stated bluntly. I enjoyed the bleak detachment of the narration and the bitter irony of “insurance”, which is the leitmotiv of the story.

Finally my winner was The Space Between Louis and Me, for its humour and its gentle mockery of our current obsession with the virtual world. With social networks and online gaming replacing human interaction, who can doubt that someone like Louis, or Louisa, is waiting just round the corner for you? Yet beneath the veneer of humour was a real evocation of the isolation that imbues so much of modern life. And, as with a fine water colour, this piece was created with minimal brushstrokes. 

So that’s my verdict. And why do I still feel guilty? It's the damn teacher in me again, having awarded marks and then thinking, "Have I got it right?" as though there is some absolute rightness against which we will all eventually be judged …

Simon Mawer

Rome

March 2011

The Fish Anthology 2011

The Fish Anthology was launched today at the West Cork Literary Festival. You can obtain a copy from www.fishpublishing.com