Light switch fiction

According to Island’s acting editor, Anica Boulanger-Mashberg, the short story ‘panders to our contemporary needs for immediacy, accessibility and diversity without ever sacrificing or compromising artistic integrity.’ This large claim is certainly true of the stories she has selected for the Spring edition.

In some of the thirteen stories in this issue, we are plunged straight into the whirl of characters’ lives, meeting them at crucial, life-changing moments. Most dramatic is Rosemary Gil’s ‘Salvage’, where we meet a father and a priest in the Flanders trenches. Less tragic, but equally engaging is a new mother’s struggle with breastfeeding and her dysfunctional relationship in Cate Kennedy’s ‘Five Dollar Family’.

In other stories there is a slow build. Kathryn Lomer’s ‘Blackberry Boys’, for instance, winds its way via psychosexual adolescence towards to a critical event. Meanwhile, in Felicity Castagna’s ‘Cold’, Sharon Kernot’s ‘Life Drawing’, Kate Rotherham’s ‘Shelter’ and Phillip Siggin’s ‘Return’, the resolutions fall somewhere between simple realisation and epiphany.

There is diversity too, in form and genre, with Diane Bell’s wry story in five parts and Alison Jones’ haunting and surreal tale.

Included in Island 122 is ‘Feeling for Light Switches’, a wide-ranging conversation about the short story form between award-winning writers, Cate Kennedy and Kathryn Lomer. Quoting poet, Billy Collins, Kennedy talks of creating a world for a reader to enter and ‘feel around for the light switch’ as they are reading.’ It’s an apt metaphor to describe the illuminating stories included in this issue.

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