Howard Firkin
This is a rather hotch-potch collection of stories and a couple of longer poems. I don't write a lot of prose (because writing is tedious and I've been spoilt by writing poetry which is so much easier) and I haven't been very good about trying to preserve my stories.

I will try to add more if I ever discover an easy way to digitize my stories (and I can find where they are currently buried), but as examples come to light, I will plonk them here.

Not a story in the sense of 'short story', but a narrative poem and therefore a story in my book. It is based on Ovid (isn't everything?). I am proudest of my innovation of conflating the young woman with the old. In the traditional tale, the young woman is undone by the cunning of an older women; in mine, the older woman is the young woman's own inner voice.

A short 'longer' poem. Written in a hurry, but I still like it. The two voices - one unpunctuated, the other punctuated and in italic text - may seem a bit clunky, but clunky is what I do!

This is a strange little story. A rather repressed narrator uses the example of bees to try to clarify his own situation.

An early story. An attempt to describe the dysfunction of a relationship in the vocabulary of dysfunctional behaviour. Or something.

This was written in the mid 1980s. It was a reaction to pink champagne in flutes, designer hair, and nouvelle cuisine - a French term which meant adding butter to everything to make a sauce. Not a great time for me...

This was written in the early 1980s, I think. It was meant to be one of a cycle of stories, all set in or about Wuppertal in (then) West Germany. My attempt to capture conversational speech may have set a world record for use of the ellipsis and the em dash. Perhaps that would have been a better title: The Ellipsis and the Em Dash. You decide.

Pure autobiography, this one, but one of my favourites nonetheless. Younger readers may be puzzled by the concept of a 'department store' or phones that can be 'slammed down' or even by people carrying clipboards and notes, but you can't explain history. At least, I can't.

Another true story. Straight reportage. Based on my years of governmental service.

Oooh. This is a very early one. Written when I was twenty-two, perhaps. Everyone gets excited by Wells and Asimov and Verne and how well they predicted the future, but I doubt any other twenty-two year old has as accurately depicted his fate forty years on as I did in this story. For some reason, when you're young, you think it's important to chronicle the ordinary.

Probably written in the early 1980s. Hard to say why I was so interested in old men reviewing their lives, but clearly, I was. I was tempted to rework the story to tighten it, but decided in the end to respect the younger man's work and leave it as it was. That and I really couldn't be arsed.