What is Laurence Lumsden Reading?

To write a few good short stories you must have read many excellent short stories. Of course there’s no way I could know this from my own personal experience as a writer, but George Saunders says something like it and why would I doubt him?

Since emigrating from Dublin to Montreal in 2007 I’ve discovered some brilliant Canadian short story writers. Their work inspires me and sets an impossibly high bar for me to measure my development as a writer against. From the traditional canon I’m thinking for example of the stories of Mavis Gallant (e.g. the collection Montreal Stories). Of the many wonderful contemporary Canadian writer I particularly like the short stories of Heather O’Neill (e.g. Daydreams of Angels). Gallant and O’Neill have written about Montreal and Montrealers in ways that make their stories and characters widely universal, yet deeply personal too.

In this article I’d like to tell you about two brilliant Irish short story writers who are perhaps not so well known in Canada, one who wrote in the same era as Gallant and one who is contemporary.

Maeve Brennan grew up in Dublin before moving to New York, aged 18, in 1935. Her life was at times complicated and tragic, but she became a celebrated writer at the New Yorker in the 1950’s and 1960’s, when Mavis Gallant was also being published there. But by the 1980s she had faded from public view, her stories forgotten. She died in 1993. Recently in Ireland she has been championed by several writers and her short-story collection The Springs of Affection has become a best-seller. These are stories of the lives of Dubliners in the 1930’s, told in a deceptively simple style that captures an essence of how it is to live with love or its absence, loss and its quiet presence. Like Gallant, Brennan lived most of her life far from the city where she was born, but that gave her a quite personal and unique perspective on it. In her stories, she somehow saw Dublin more clearly that those who lived there. I’ve read this collection at least three times in the past few years, and each reading brings me something new, helps me to see Dublin with different eyes and to better understand its influence on me. In their own ways, Gallant and Brennan show how vital it is that stories be grounded in a place, and how that helps readers from other places feel grounded in the stories too.