Beneath its academic titles and heavyweight participants, the 10th International Conference on the Short Story in English has a festival's heart and an artist's mind, writes Mary Leland.
Co-incidentally THIRTY FIVE - and counting. More than 35 universities and colleges from all around the world are to be represented at the 10th International Conference on the Short Story in English, which opens at University College Cork on Thursday. That's only the scholarly, paper-delivery side of the programme, which has a hearty list of readings (from Colm Tóibín to Tobias Wolff, Mary Morrissy to Edna O'Brien) as lunchtime and evening attractions and a large supporting cast of other participants, from writers, publishers, students, agents and professors to the great community of readers.
It has to be wondered, however, just how many readers are likely to be enticed by titles such as "Cognitive Analysis of Sensory Information in Divakaruni's The Unknown Errors of Our Lives", or, in the same strand of the programme, "Cognitive Poetics Theory in Practice: Fiction, Reality and the Conceptual Metaphor of the Divided Self". However, quite a few readers find discussions of this kind, managed at an academic but accessible level, absolutely fascinating. If they didn't, it wouldn't be happening, although perhaps an examination of the coded use of ellipsis in the short fiction of Edith Wharton is taking enthusiasm a step further than most of us, writers as well as readers, really want to go.
Coming to Ireland for the first time, the conference is being organised through the Triskel Arts Centre, where Ann Luttrell is managing affairs in partnership with the English department at UCC. As an event, it began 10 years ago with the Society for the Study of the Short Story under the directorship of Dr Maurice A Lee, of the University of Central Arkansas in the US. Held every two years, it goes to Taiwan next time. The last session, in Lisbon in 2006, was attended by poet and novelist William Wall, who will be reading at the Cork event.
"The idea is to keep academic interest in the short story alive, but I was surprised by the size of it when I went to Lisbon," says Wall. "I was expecting an academic conference and that's what we got. It's not a festival as such, but it's productive, one can make lots of contacts, and it does enlarge the profile of the national literature of the people taking part, rather than of the individual writers."
The choice of Cork is largely down to Pat Cotter, director of the Munster Literature Centre (MLC), which organises and hosts the International Frank O'Connor Short Story Award. He invited Maurice Lee to visit the city for the award event and Lee was a member of the jury in 2005.
"The specific aim then was to get some Irish writers invited to Lisbon for the conference in 2006, and William Wall, Nuala Ní Chonchúir and Claire Keegan were asked to attend," says Cotter. The MLC will not be involved in running this year's event, as that would demand a diversion of the centre's resources.
Triskel is celebrating its 30th anniversary and will be the administrative hub for the conference. However, it is the issue of concerts rather than conferences that is currently pre-occupying director Tony Sheehan. Cork City Council has committed €1.5 million to the restoration of the historic Christ Church, most recently the home of the Archive Centre but long promised as a performance venue to Triskel.
This was a corporation church and the crypt contains the remains of prominent local merchants and civic officials; this will be sealed over again, while the balconied nave will offer one of the city's most attractive and unusual recital spaces. However, this won't be until 2010 and, in the meantime, Triskel will host the public workshops and readings within its own walls on Tobin Street.
"Triskel doesn't have a prominent literary strand nowadays," says Sheehan. "I am advocating specialisation; for example, that the MLC should have the primary role in the delivery of literature in the city, as they're the literary experts, while our strengths should be concentrated on the visual arts, music, arts education and the hosting of festivals."
ALTHOUGH WILLIAM WALLsays that this conference isn't a festival as such, its administration sits easily into the Triskel structure, which is handling the bookings for the workshops that will be led by Pulitzer Prize-winner Robert Olen Butler, Ana Castillo, Mary Morrissy, Bharati Mukherjee, Clark Blaise and Kirpal Singh.
While both the university sessions and the workshops require a fee, Cork City Council has provided scholarships for four local writers to attend. Perhaps as a result of Maurice Lee's work with the Frank O'Connor Award, the conference is run this year under the headline "The Lonely Voice", the title O'Connor had chosen for his own study of short fiction.
Although there is a strong Irish flavour to the conference programme - William Trevor, Elizabeth Bowen, John McGahern and O'Connor, among others, are up for discussion - one contributor refers to "O'Connor's modest little book", and another challenges his treatment of Katherine Mansfield (he considered, with some justification, her work "considerably dimmer than her legend") within those pages.
"What's unusual about this conference is that it's not overwhelmingly literary in content," says Prof Colbert Kearney of the Faculty of Letters at UCC. He feels that the more or less 50 per cent quotient of scholars and critics balances the number of writers signed on for the academic sessions, although it's a good thing that there is an availability of practitioners for the different panels and debates.
"Academic critics should never be too far away from that they are criticising," he believes, adding that, in this case, UCC's role is the provision of lecture-halls, restaurant and living accommodation. The participants (one of whom, Gurney M Norman, actually attended Frank O'Connor's class at Stanford in 1961) come from universities such as Granada, Rouen, several New York institutions, California Berkeley, Leeds, the Cayman Islands, Warsaw, New South Wales, Ottawa, Puerto Rico, Nanyang, Nagoya, New Delhi, Iowa, Queensland, Trinity College Dublin and UCC itself.
Looking at the list of topics - the work of Aidan Higgins, Tennessee Williams, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Samuel Beckett and a host of Canadian, Australian, Indian and European writers, all producers of short fiction in the English language - I couldn't help wondering if all this isn't a lot of fuss about short stories?
Pat Cotter, predictably, believes not: "There seems to be a lot of things happening with this genre now, even a groundswell of publishing interest. Also, we find with the Frank O'Connor award that so many of the writers entered for it are excited even to be on the long list. As well, at least three other international short-story festivals have been established, in the UK, US and Poland, since the Frank O'Connor event was inaugurated. It's a form that's being re-invigorated; that can't be bad."
AS IT HAPPENS, the jury for the award - Eileen Battersby of The Irish Times, Cork City librarian Liam Ronayne and Grantamagazine short fiction editor Rosalind Porter - will be in Cork during the conference, which also stretches into the first week of the Cork Midsummer Festival of the Senses in an appealing piece of creative, if coincidental, symmetry.
Literature, short and long, is heavily featured in a number of almost adjacent events: the West Cork Literary Festival brings Joseph OConnor, Jennifer Johnston, Colm McCann, David Mitchell and Colin Dexter to its platforms, while Kinsale Arts Week has Carlo Gébler and Salley Vickers on offer. So no, perhaps the 10th International Short Story Conference isn't a lot of fuss: Edith Wharton's commas and the problem of useless jazz in the short stories of Gilbert Sorrentino are only ingredients of a programme which, in William Wall's words, "can make you think differently about how you look at texts".
Considering the Cork gathering, he remembers Lisbon as a very fruitful event, with its meetings, exchanges, invitations and introductions to the work of other writers and to other critical approaches. "But then I like listening to academics. It's a perverse position to take in life, but I do enjoy it."
www.shortstoryconference.com,
www.triskelartscentre.ie or tel: 021-4272022
