'Cut Loose' wins First Prize, The Bridport Prize 2016 https://www.bridportprize.org.uk/content/2016-winners
Tessa Hadley, who judged the short story category, had to this to say: ‘And ‘Cut Loose’! It seems to be written in a single perfect breath, so apparently artless yet perfectly controlled. There’s simply nothing out of place in this hushed, tensed imagining of the twisted history of violence between a man and a woman, all wrapped up as austerely as a Greek drama inside one lonely room, in a few short weeks of waiting.’
Excerpt from 'Cut Loose'
I drove all night not even stopping to eat till I reached Denver. Because when he figured I was really gone, not just hiding, he’d know where I was heading. I called Sharon when I hit town. I said if Richard comes you never heard.
She said why d’you go out there with him? You knew.
I had to find a hideaway life before he came searching. He would find me, he would not, would. Why I took that flat hidden behind a trailer house. A man in a wheelchair and his wife showed me out back to a dirt yard where it stood all alone: a two storey wooden cabin, outside steps leading up to the apartment. Single bed, square wooden table. They’d put a candle on the table and the curtains I could see were hand sewn. They were trying, oh so desperate.
He Runs the Moon: Tales from the Cities
A collection of short stories set in Denver, New York and Boston
Holland Park Press
http://www.hollandparkpress.co.uk/book_detail.php?book_id=48
-Longlisted for the Edgehill Short Fiction Prize 2017-
Interview in Lilith Magazine: http://lilith.org/blog/2016/07/wendy-brandmark-on-how-cities-have-become-characters-in-her-fiction/
Blog in North American Review: http://northamericanreview.org/short-story-endings-wendy-brandmark/
Ophelia appears in the window of a second hand dress shop in Denver. A child visits a witch in the basement of her Bronx apartment building. A literacy teacher searches for messages in the shreds of cut up newspapers.These tales of thieves and outsiders, lost children and refugees, are set in Denver, New York and Boston. The Denver stories emerge from the rundown Capitol Hill of the City in the 1970s, not a realistic portrait, but a state of mind, a narrative of a Gothic city with characters who feel they don't quite belong. Figures from the ‘old world’ haunt the children in stories of New York City in the 1950s and 1960s. In the Boston tales characters piece together dreams from the fragments of their lives.
Excerpts from new stories:
THE BUILDING OF THE HALF SHUT EYES by Wendy Brandmark©
She comes every morning. It’s one of those gated Bloomsbury squares with a brief spread of grass, tended flowers and trees obedient in their plots. There’s a little café, really a stall selling tea and coffee, muffins and pastries. A few tables set out. The man who serves greets her with formal friendliness. She doesn’t know why she has settled into that square, that stall, as the necessary start to her day. At that early hour there are few people, those on their way to the nearby universities who might stop to grab a cappuccino but never stay to be watched over by Fabre. She knows his name and that he is French and also Tunisian because once his friend came and they spoke in Arabic and then she asked.
Her waking is slow. The bed holds her tells her she mustn’t leave the room. Then she thinks of the square with its tended flowers and the pillar with the stone head of a woman whose inscription she’s never read, and Fabre handing her a cup in a ruffled holder to protect her fingers from the heat of the coffee. She puts on her trousers and sweatshirt, even swirls a scarf around her neck.
The metal chairs and table are still wet from the early morning rain. Fabre gives her a paper serviette to dry the seat. She thinks he is kind not pitying. One morning she could not lift herself out of bed to come. The next day he did not say anything but looked at her with a question in his face. Her steady gaze was her answer. You are not to worry because today I am sound.
first published in Westerly
THE PERSISTENT SOUL by Wendy Brandmark©
Profound things happen to me in department stores. Once a woman of pale face and black encircled eyes came slowly down the escalator in Debenhams calling my name. Should I know you I whispered. When she reached me she asked, ‘Not one gentlemen caller?’
Then I remembered. She had been my mother in The Glass Menagerie, both of us Americans in London, both Southerners, but she had acted here for years, while I was just getting started. She was old for the part then, and I hadn’t heard of her since. I thought she couldn’t still be alive.
So I was only mildly disconcerted when a girl turned to me as I sampled goat cheeses in Selfridges food hall and asked if I knew the golden prayer. I shook my head and plucked another morsel from the array of pepper, rosemary and charcoal goat. She too was sampling, shutting her eyes when she chewed.
I wondered at her words, whether it was my hair which drew her, newly coloured, even though I knew how ridiculous it was for a woman of my age to be a burnished blonde. And especially now when my acting was all voice overs, and I spent my time teaching young actors. I was their golden haired mentor.
first published in Riptide Journal
A selection of published short stories:
‘The Sister’ - Stand Magazine, 2023
‘Fabulation Day’ – Prism International, University of British Columbia 2022
'Rooms' Rupture 2022
https://www.therupturemag.com/rupture/rooms
'The Building of the Half Shut Eyes' Westerly 2021
‘The Storyteller’ Pomegranate 2021
'The Mime Artist' Jewish fiction.net, 2020
'The Persistent Soul', Riptide Journal, November 2019
http://www.riptidejournal.co.uk/shop/riptide-volume-12/
'The Return', Stand Magazine, November - December 2018
http://www.standmagazine.org/current-issue
'I Am Also You', Tears in the Fence, Autumn 2018
'Man With a Newspaper' North American Review, Spring 2016
'Where Have You Been?' Jewish fiction.com, September 2015
http://www.jewishfiction.net/index.php/publisher/articleview/frmArticleID/430
‘He Runs the Moon’ in The Warwick Review, March 2013
‘My Red Mustang’ in Lilith Magazine, Autumn, 2012
‘The Blessing’ in Stand, December 2011
‘The Book Thief’ in The Massachusetts Review, October, 2009
‘The Denver Ophelia’ in Riptide Journal, December 2008
Tessa Hadley, who judged the short story category, had to this to say: ‘And ‘Cut Loose’! It seems to be written in a single perfect breath, so apparently artless yet perfectly controlled. There’s simply nothing out of place in this hushed, tensed imagining of the twisted history of violence between a man and a woman, all wrapped up as austerely as a Greek drama inside one lonely room, in a few short weeks of waiting.’
Excerpt from 'Cut Loose'
I drove all night not even stopping to eat till I reached Denver. Because when he figured I was really gone, not just hiding, he’d know where I was heading. I called Sharon when I hit town. I said if Richard comes you never heard.
She said why d’you go out there with him? You knew.
I had to find a hideaway life before he came searching. He would find me, he would not, would. Why I took that flat hidden behind a trailer house. A man in a wheelchair and his wife showed me out back to a dirt yard where it stood all alone: a two storey wooden cabin, outside steps leading up to the apartment. Single bed, square wooden table. They’d put a candle on the table and the curtains I could see were hand sewn. They were trying, oh so desperate.
He Runs the Moon: Tales from the Cities
A collection of short stories set in Denver, New York and Boston
Holland Park Press
http://www.hollandparkpress.co.uk/book_detail.php?book_id=48
-Longlisted for the Edgehill Short Fiction Prize 2017-
Interview in Lilith Magazine: http://lilith.org/blog/2016/07/wendy-brandmark-on-how-cities-have-become-characters-in-her-fiction/
Blog in North American Review: http://northamericanreview.org/short-story-endings-wendy-brandmark/
Ophelia appears in the window of a second hand dress shop in Denver. A child visits a witch in the basement of her Bronx apartment building. A literacy teacher searches for messages in the shreds of cut up newspapers.These tales of thieves and outsiders, lost children and refugees, are set in Denver, New York and Boston. The Denver stories emerge from the rundown Capitol Hill of the City in the 1970s, not a realistic portrait, but a state of mind, a narrative of a Gothic city with characters who feel they don't quite belong. Figures from the ‘old world’ haunt the children in stories of New York City in the 1950s and 1960s. In the Boston tales characters piece together dreams from the fragments of their lives.
Excerpts from new stories:
THE BUILDING OF THE HALF SHUT EYES by Wendy Brandmark©
She comes every morning. It’s one of those gated Bloomsbury squares with a brief spread of grass, tended flowers and trees obedient in their plots. There’s a little café, really a stall selling tea and coffee, muffins and pastries. A few tables set out. The man who serves greets her with formal friendliness. She doesn’t know why she has settled into that square, that stall, as the necessary start to her day. At that early hour there are few people, those on their way to the nearby universities who might stop to grab a cappuccino but never stay to be watched over by Fabre. She knows his name and that he is French and also Tunisian because once his friend came and they spoke in Arabic and then she asked.
Her waking is slow. The bed holds her tells her she mustn’t leave the room. Then she thinks of the square with its tended flowers and the pillar with the stone head of a woman whose inscription she’s never read, and Fabre handing her a cup in a ruffled holder to protect her fingers from the heat of the coffee. She puts on her trousers and sweatshirt, even swirls a scarf around her neck.
The metal chairs and table are still wet from the early morning rain. Fabre gives her a paper serviette to dry the seat. She thinks he is kind not pitying. One morning she could not lift herself out of bed to come. The next day he did not say anything but looked at her with a question in his face. Her steady gaze was her answer. You are not to worry because today I am sound.
first published in Westerly
THE PERSISTENT SOUL by Wendy Brandmark©
Profound things happen to me in department stores. Once a woman of pale face and black encircled eyes came slowly down the escalator in Debenhams calling my name. Should I know you I whispered. When she reached me she asked, ‘Not one gentlemen caller?’
Then I remembered. She had been my mother in The Glass Menagerie, both of us Americans in London, both Southerners, but she had acted here for years, while I was just getting started. She was old for the part then, and I hadn’t heard of her since. I thought she couldn’t still be alive.
So I was only mildly disconcerted when a girl turned to me as I sampled goat cheeses in Selfridges food hall and asked if I knew the golden prayer. I shook my head and plucked another morsel from the array of pepper, rosemary and charcoal goat. She too was sampling, shutting her eyes when she chewed.
I wondered at her words, whether it was my hair which drew her, newly coloured, even though I knew how ridiculous it was for a woman of my age to be a burnished blonde. And especially now when my acting was all voice overs, and I spent my time teaching young actors. I was their golden haired mentor.
first published in Riptide Journal
A selection of published short stories:
‘The Sister’ - Stand Magazine, 2023
‘Fabulation Day’ – Prism International, University of British Columbia 2022
'Rooms' Rupture 2022
https://www.therupturemag.com/rupture/rooms
'The Building of the Half Shut Eyes' Westerly 2021
‘The Storyteller’ Pomegranate 2021
'The Mime Artist' Jewish fiction.net, 2020
'The Persistent Soul', Riptide Journal, November 2019
http://www.riptidejournal.co.uk/shop/riptide-volume-12/
'The Return', Stand Magazine, November - December 2018
http://www.standmagazine.org/current-issue
'I Am Also You', Tears in the Fence, Autumn 2018
'Man With a Newspaper' North American Review, Spring 2016
'Where Have You Been?' Jewish fiction.com, September 2015
http://www.jewishfiction.net/index.php/publisher/articleview/frmArticleID/430
‘He Runs the Moon’ in The Warwick Review, March 2013
‘My Red Mustang’ in Lilith Magazine, Autumn, 2012
‘The Blessing’ in Stand, December 2011
‘The Book Thief’ in The Massachusetts Review, October, 2009
‘The Denver Ophelia’ in Riptide Journal, December 2008