A Publisher's View O'Connor

Telegram's Rebecca O'Connor

An Editor's View - Rebecca O'Connor

A short story insists upon itself in the way a poem will. It’s like a dog with a stick. It keeps coming back. And yet it is not a poem

It’s an odd predicament in which to find oneself, writing a short story. A short story insists upon itself in the way a poem will. It’s like a dog with a stick. It keeps coming back. And yet it is not a poem. It has a will of its own. It has a world of its own, in which it wants to kick back, live a little.

If poetry is, as Wallace Stevens wrote, ‘a pheasant disappearing in the brush’, then the short story is that pheasant’s momentary reappearance. But how does a short story know that that’s what it is? How does it know not to persist? I wouldn’t write if I knew. I doubt if anyone would.

I work as an editor at Telegram, an international literary fiction imprint. Part of our remit is to publish a series of women’s short story collections from around the world. Last year I put together an Irish collection entitled Scéalta (which simply means ‘stories’ in Gaelic). I was at pains, in the beginning, to justify such a project. Introducing fiction written by women in Pakistan, Iran, Palestine, I could understand. But Ireland? Ireland is one of the most prosperous countries in the world, and Irish women are well represented in the UK fiction market.

But a collection of female voices – no matter where it originates – offers a unique take on contemporary life. For it’s still true, after all this time, that most anthologies feature more male writers than female. Is this because there are more good male writers than there are women? Hmmm. I don’t think so.

The joys of editing this collection: reading literary fiction of the highest quality, more often than not from writers I hadn’t come across before; short fiction that is often irreverent, subversive, funny; short fiction written by poets, novelists, opera singers. (How did they know they had a short story?)

Finally, an awkward point of confluence. I had reached that stage in the editorial process where I was enjoying the subtle cadences of the book as a whole – how each story complemented the one gone before – and a story I had written seemed to fit. My writer self, at first, was insulted by this recognition. It was as if my editor self had taken pity. My editor self, meanwhile, was suspicious. Was my writer self simply using this opportunity to promote my work?

But if the work was good enough, my editor self argued, what was wrong with giving it a leg up? Perhaps my writer self was worried people would think me vain, lazy. And so it went on. But an editor, in the end, has to overlook the author’s vanity, and so it went in.

I’m sitting at my desk in the Telegram offices writing this. And that opening line from Scéalta, ‘I’m writing from my old room in the Hotel Furkablick,’ still remains brimful of possibility. A flash of tail or wattle. The pheasant’s blinking eye.

(May 2007)

Rebecca O'Connor

Rebecca O’Connor was awarded the Geoffrey Dearmer prize for ‘Best new poet’ in 2004, and was shortlisted for the New Writing Ventures Poetry Award in 2005. She received a bursary from the arts council in Ireland to complete her debut novel He Is Mine and I Have No Other, and her short story ‘The Mayfly’ was an award-winner in the 2003 Virago/Marie Claire short story competition.

She was a writer-in-residence at the Wordsworth Trust in 2005 (her collection Poems was published by them in 2006), and she recently edited a book of Irish women’s short stories called Scéalta. She works as a fiction editor at Telegram in London.