First word: Nigel Featherstone

By Nigel Featherstone
Updated April 23 2018 - 11:05pm, first published August 1 2014 - 11:45pm

It’s there beside me on the desk, adjacent my elbow, and it feels like the most valuable thing, but also the most useless. It’s orange, A4-sized, and inside are 20 pages – a short story and a covering letter. On the front of the envelope, written in my dreadful scrawl, is the name of a literary journal and its overseas address. On the back is my own address, in the hope that good news – the best – will be sent in reply. This is what I do: I write short stories and send them away, even though the odds are firmly stacked against me, against this thing that occupies so much of my time, the vast majority of the past 20 years.

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