My involvement with 'The Best of CafeLit 12'

 

I often interview other people about their contributions to our anthologies so this time I thought I’d talk about my stories in this collection. 

What inspired me to write my stories ‘’Doing the Right Thing’ and ‘Socrates’ Wink’?

We all try to ‘do the right thing’ but I worry that some ‘cures’ might be worse than the disease. Remember, we started using single use plastic bags to save paper. We’re asked to recycle but to wash out our recyclable items first. What does that cost in water and energy? Electric cars, sure, but what is the carbon cost of producing them? I’ve tried to crystallize these ideas into a piece of creative non-fiction.

As for Socrates – he’s fascinated me for a long time especially since I attended a couple of U3A philosophy groups particularly during lockdown where I think we all grabbed at straws.  Except that this seems to be a rather sturdy branch. In this story Father and son unwittingly use Socratic discourse techniques to find some common ground. Father is a fan of Socrates.       

What made me think of CaféLit? 

It was partly about creating a platform where some of my writing friends and the creative writing students I used to teach could send work. The stories we accept are diverse in subject matters, length (with the parameters of 50 – 3000 words) and style, so we need something to unify them. So, we look for tales that would go well with a brew, particularly at 4 pm. We’ve been going quite a while now – since 2010 in fact. We have over 3000 stories on the site. We ask writers to allow us to display the stories for a year but only take them down if they ask us to.  We’ve only ever been asked to take two down.      

 What’s special about short stories for me?

A short story or piece of flash fiction will stay for you a long time after you’ve read it. Of course the same is true of a novel but it takes you longer to read it in the first place. So, the effect of the short story or the piece of flash fiction is stronger. Here’s an example. The novel I wrote for my PhD was over 103,000 words. When Mary Hoffman put out a call for stories for the Lines in the Sand anthology I told the same story in 1000 words. All have their place: novels, novellas, short stories and flash fiction.   

 

Find your copy of The Best of  CafeLit 12  here