A Writers view Parkes

Former online writer in residence, Nii Ayikwei Parkes

We spent two weeks framed by latticed woodwork, trading stories about our drama-filled childhoods in Accra

The Short One and I

The serious phase of my relationship with the short story started with Short Shorts: An Anthology of the Shortest Short Stories, edited by Irving Howe and Ilana Wiener Howe. It had work by writers like Chekhov, Pirandello, Borges, DH Lawrence, Joyce and Hemingway, and none of the stories was much more than a thousand words long.

It was summer 1997 and I had visited the United States for the first time to reconnect with a secondary school friend who I hadn't seen for over four years. He lived in New Brunswick, New Jersey and had a porch that attracted sunshine and idle young men - a deadly combination that meant we spent two weeks framed by latticed woodwork, trading stories about our drama-filled childhoods in Accra.

On my way back to Manchester (where I was doing a science degree but was known as one half of a performance poetry duo) I picked up the Short Shorts anthology at a Newark Airport bookstand. By the time I landed, I was in love with Joao Guimares Rosa and Octavio Paz, whose stories I have since recommended to a few score of people. A seed had been planted.

Three years later I quit my job as a Food Technologist in Ghana with the intention of becoming a full-time writer. I ended up in London, doing the rounds of poetry open mic events until I met Courttia Newland at a reading I had helped organise. He came up, spoke to me and invited me to some kind of creative get together at his base, The Post Office Theatre.

What Courttia had pulled together on the Sunday I visited the theatre was a range of creative folk - graphic artists, beat makers, actors, writers and singers - sitting and talking over drinks and nibbles. At some point, as though by an inaudible decree, against a backdrop of several large and lively canvasses, a phase of 'sharing' began. Courttia encouraged me to unveil one of the short stories that I had, until then, hidden beneath the circuitry of my hard drive. Within minutes my story had been read by an actor, and I was being congratulated.

Courttia became an informal mentor, helping me weed out the poetic excesses from my prose. It was at one of our irregular editing sessions that we wondered aloud why there couldn't be a short story reading similar to the poetry nights that were springing up all over London in the early 2000s. That was the genesis of the Tell Tales project. I was charged with copy editing and laying out a pamphlet for the original 2001 event, a task that triggered my career as a fiction editor.

In late 2004, I found out that one of the poets I edit, Roger Robinson, had a book of short stories, Adventures in 3D, published under a dormant imprint. I engineered the acquisition of the imprint, lubin and kleyner, and sat around for months wondering what to do with it. Then, in May 2005, I met Tash Aw, who was reading a short story about an opera singer with a dark past and a burning love for bananas, during a recording for BBC Radio 3's The Verb. After the recording I cornered Tash and told him I had an idea for a short story anthology and would like him to co-edit it if I got funding for it.

The project I had in mind was a collection of short stories from around the world centred around stories previously published in x magazine (which I edit). We named the collection x-24 as a way of paying tribute to the magazine, and also representing the mathematical unknown, which was apt because we had no idea what we had let ourselves in for.

With Tash and I both travelling a lot, we knew we wouldn't be able to sit together very much and, indeed, x-24 took us six months to edit. Nevertheless, we put together a fantastic collection of short stories by authors who I am certain will go very far in the literary world.

Yet, for me, the journey began before Tash and I started slinging files across optical fibre corridors. It began on a porch in New Brunswick, drinking six-packs of Miller beer and reminiscing about sun-flooded days in Accra, long before I sat in random cafés in London, with Courttia Newland telling me all the reasons why my short stories weren't working.

Nii Ayikwei Parkes

September 2007