Alex Barr
DUST ISN’T DEATH

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

Those abandoned stories and poems gathering dust in a drawer—they may look like fossils but what if they’re embryos? I’d like to share my experience which I hope will be useful and encouraging. It’s about kissing your Sleeping Beauties and bringing them back to life, or rather, suddenly seeing the possibility of a magical transformation. Because don’t forget, in the years since you abandoned those works, you may have learned a lot more about style and structure.

I wrote a rather nasty story that ended in a murder. After it lay around for quite a while, irritating me whenever I looked at it, I suddenly had the idea that the murder was imaginary—the protagonist nearly murdered someone, stopped himself in time, was nevertheless bashed on the head by a guy who disliked him, and woke up in hospital thinking he really did it. The story was published in Tears in the Fence magazine here in the UK.

Another story lay about for ages gathering dust, weighed down by what was meant to be a highly significant and symbolic passage in which the protagonist emerges into the street through a previously unseen door in the depths of a junk shop he often visits. What a relief when I suddenly realised this passage was unnecessary junk, the result of over-thinking and trying to be ‘literary’. Free from this awful burden the story went on to win first prize in a contest in Ireland.

There was a similar problem with a story about a retired engineer on a canal journey. His memory of stairs in his place of work was another terribly significant and symbolic image, so clunky it blocked the writing. After twenty years, clearing out old papers, I found it and remembered the heavy feeling it aroused. But somehow I saw how satisfying it would be to get rid of the wretched stairs, and I did. Amusingly, the stairs came back, but in a different form, mixed up with the stairs in a tower crane the guy worked on. It became the Willesden Herald story of the month in January, titled “Cranes”. So dust and dog-eared paper and a heavy feeling can be overcome.

I have a fat hardback notebook full of first drafts and scribbles which I rarely re-read, consigning them to the past. But in an idle moment I did happen to find the first draft of a poem addressed to my late mother. The ink was faded (I like to use a fountain pen) but the words came alive for me. I like to think I’m progressing as a writer and that old stuff is of lesser value, but here was an example of something good among all the rubbish (oh yes, plenty of that) from my twenty years younger self. I rescued it, and it was published in The Dark Horse in Scotland. A reader wrote to say the poem helped to heal a bereavement.

Finally, another ancient text lay around for years and scowled at me. I could see the top page and liked it but somehow could go no further. Last year I realised the spanner in the works was simply the name of the protagonist! (It had the wrong connotations and once again was probably an attempt at heavy symbolism.) I changed the name, gave the story a massage and manicure, and here it is in this very magazine: “Zoran”. So not only might you find life in your old stuff, you might not realise what a simple thing held it back.

Alex Barr’s recent short fiction is in Tears in the Fence, The Lampeter Review, The Interpreter’s House, New Welsh Reader, The Last Line Journal, Otherwise Engaged Journal, Sixfold Fiction, Mechanics Institute Review, Litro Magazine, Feed Literary Magazine, Reflex Press, Samyukta Fiction, Streetlight Magazine, Literary Heist, and Willesden Herald story of the month. Alex Barr’s short story collections My Life With Eva and Take a Look at Mee-ee! are published by Parthian and Pont respectively in Wales, where he lives.