More Facts and Fiction of Short Story Writing (with Ailsa Cox) [Part Two]

Ailsa Cox is a professor Emerita at Edge Hill University (UK) and a short story writer. In this second part of the interview we discuss famous pieces of short story writing advice like “show don’t tell”, the Freitag pyramid, ending with a moment of insight and much more! Listen to find out what is a fact and what is fiction!  Works mentioned:  Sarah Hall, ‘Sarah Hall on why we should have a short story laureate’, Guardian, Oct. 11 2013, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/11/sarah-hall-short-story-laureate. George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (Bloomsbury, 2021). Katherine Mansfield, ‘At the Bay’, in Selected Stories (Oxford University Press, 2002). Ailsa Cox, ‘How Loud the Birds’, in Katherine Mansfield and The Garden Party and Other Stories, ed. by Gerri Kimber and Todd Martin (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), pp. 143-52. Susan Lohafer, Reading for Storyness: Preclosure Theory, Empirical Poetics, & Culture in the Short Story (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). C.D. Rose, Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea (Melville House, 2024). Sarah Schofield, ‘Safely Gathered In’, in Safely Gathered In (Comma Press, 2021). Charles Baxter, ‘Against Epiphanies’, in Burning Down the House. Essays on Fiction (Graywolf Press, 1997), pp. 51-78. Chris Power, Survival of the smallest: the contested history of the English short story, New Statesman, 27 June 2017. Malachi McIntosh, Parables, Fables, Nightmares (Emma Press, 2023). Daisy Johnson, The Hotel (Penguin, 2024). Elizabeth Strout, Anything is Possible (Viking, 2017). Grace Paley, ‘A Conversation with My Father’,  The Collected Stories of Grace Paley (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1994), pp.232-237 (minute 28-29) Paul March-Russell, The Short Story: An Introduction (Edinburgh University Press, 2009).  Writing on the Wall, https://writingonthewall.org.uk/.Podcast intro and outro credits: Shield, Leroy, Taylor Holmes, and Robert W Service. The shooting of Dan McGrew. 1923. Audio. Retrieved from the Library of Congress.

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