After over six months of the writing course, our efforts culminated into a short story collection, Tales from Garden Street, that you can download on amazon. The link for this can be found below.
It feels weird writing about a book in which my story is in because I still feel my writing is not that great. But it is out there and published and I do feel honoured and humbled to share this book with so many excellent writers.
The Stories
Garden Street was the name of the road on which the course took place. However, a garden is also a place where seeds grow and blossom with seeds in this instance being ideas for the stories we wrote. We underwent an extended email debate before coming up with the title!
The first story in this collection is The Liberator written by Sally Shaw. Sally was doing an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester while on this course. She would come up with many interesting and wacky ideas from the prompts we were given.
Next up is Your Beautiful Faces by Roma Dhameja. Some of her stories I read were so relatable not least because of their Indian setting. Her creative writing focus is on Indian women living n Britain.
The third story is mine.
The fourth story is Tintinnabulation by Sue Petty. Her working-class background is the focus of most of her writings and she also a very dry sense of humour. Sue is in the process of completing an autobiography, Coalminer’s Daughter.
Tracey Foster’s The Thatched Fox is the fifth story. One of many teachers in our class and with many interesting ideas. Her story has real depth and gravitas and is an excellent read.
This short story collection ends with the excellent Kevin Walker and his story Babooshka. He is a teacher turned storyteller and painter. His work focuses on the LGBTQ community.
Grateful
Finally, as well as thanking Comma Press for putting on this course, I must thank the wonderful teacher we had, Rebecca Burns. Along with being a mum, juggling work and writing her own books, she took time out of her evenings to teach this course and mark our work. And she did an amazing job. Her amazon page can be found here – Rebecca Burns
My other posts relating to the Leicester Short Story course can be found here:
An accountant and a Mum 