Author: Aoife

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Our readers for issue 11 are awesome folk!

In a new, sporadic and entirely irregular addition to our blogging behaviour, we’ve decided to introduce to you our readers for issue 11 (published 26 March 2015). Handpicked from in and outside of the book world, they brought personality, honesty and humour to the process of picking the five stories we eventually decided to publish. We may never do this again.

John Tierney :: reader for issue 11

John Tierney is an Islander currently living in Brussels. Childhood library trips led to a degree in literature and a life long love of books. From classics to contemporary novels hot off the press, he’s always delighted to discover new stories. When he’s not reading, he’s plotting new things to try out in the kitchen or the garden. He had this to say about our magazine:

The South Circular is a fantastic window into the great new writing talent out there and offers the perfect modern solution for the busy reader.

@nohj83

 

 

Kathryn Toolan :: reader for issue 11Kathryn Toolan lives in New York, where she works promoting literature in translation. Formerly of Dalkey Archive (Dublin), she is currently working with Archipelago Books.

@kathryntoolan

 

 

 

 

Melanie Tutino :: reader for issue 11Melanie Tutino is a freelance editor with an interest in literary and upmarket fiction. She is a recent graduate of New York University’s Master’s in Publishing program, where she was the recipient of the Oscar Dystel Fellowship. She has worked with Random House in London and New York, and recently joined Doubleday Canada.

@melatuti

 

 

 

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Editor’s note issue 11

Editor's note

What I’m striving for is authenticity; none of it is real.
– WG Sebald

I mean that the self-referentiality of my novel is a way of exploring how fiction functions in our real lives—for good and for ill—not a way of mocking fiction’s inability to make contact with anything outside of itself. My concern is how we live fictions, how fictions have real effects, become facts in that sense, and how our experience of the world changes depending on its arrangement into one narrative or another.

– Ben Lerner, in conversation with Tao Lin for The Believer

THE SOUTH CIRCULAR celebrates its third birthday with the publication of this, our eleventh issue. I don’t lie or exaggerate when I tell you that at the outset, when all I had was an idea and convictions, I could absolutely imagine and not imagine this anniversary ever happening: it would always just be me, we would grow to a staff of twenty-five; the stories would speak for themselves, the stories would win prizes; we’d find an office in an old shop-front in Dublin 8, we’d open a second office in Toronto; we’d always only publish four stories, we’d sometimes publish five; and so on. The narrative that is THE SOUTH CIRCULAR has been moved, by and large, by the writers who have offered their work to us for publication, the very act of which causes them not to imagine a different future, but to live it.

And time and time again, during this year in Toronto, something which has emerged as an unplanned residency of the mind, I imagine multiple and fluid narratives, as I navigate our new home, the consolations of what I have over what I have left behind, the creation of new touchstones. We are bombarded by opportunities here (choosing is the hard part), a place of diversity and equality where, apparently, no one culture prevails, where youth as well as age are relevant to ability, where you are what you say you are and you must leave your beloved idioms at the door. In the space of one day, the narratives alternate along the lines of ‘What’s for ya won’t pass ya’ (our comparable future) and the kind of leanness we might be ill-equipped to endure (because of our past). The fictions, as Ben Lerner says and Sebald alludes, become our facts, our authenticity.

In the spirit of, or as a result of, this change, this new normal, this new fiction of our own making, we bring you five (not four, see?) stories engaged with moments of diversion, in places their characters might rather not be. After Michael Garvey’s captured protagonist’s pen runs out, do you already know what happens in the white space that follows? Christopher Ringrose’s young man rethinks his brief ‘friendship’ with the mysterious Vincent. Vicki Thornton’s child character sees something she can never unsee while Bethany William’s Fi seems to have prepared for her pregnancy since the death of her mother when she was just thirteen. And Siobhán Harte’s care worker will do it all again tomorrow – the same only different. But this is not to divert, either, away from the powerful fictions happening within the actual limits of these little stories; they are familiar and strange and entertaining.

Accompanying her image with text, in the publication in which it first appeared, Laurie Kang said this of 33 Circles: ‘An exercise is repeated an arbitrary thirty-three times over wherein light-sensitive, photographic paper is exposed and torn to make collages and photograms. Circles: various compositions.’ There were several, if not actually thirty-three, images we could have chosen to detail on the cover of this issue of THE SOUTH CIRCULAR. The one you see is the one we wanted you to see. It could have been so different.

 

Aoife Walsh

 

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We’ve been nominated!

‘Five Days to Polling Day’, a story by Danielle McLaughlin, originally published in issue 8 of THE SOUTH CIRCULAR in December 2013, has been shortlisted for the 2014 Writing.ie Short Story of the Year Award. The winner will be announced at the Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards on 26 November.

Danielle joins award-winning Irish writers John Boyne, Christine Dwyer Hickey, Ciarán Folan, Frank McGuinness and Donal Ryan on the shortlist. Her debut collection of stories will be published in 2015 by The Stinging Fly Press, of which John Murray (UK) and Random House (US) have bought the rights, along with her first novel. She was nominated for this prize last year too and was recently published in the New Yorker.

Meanwhile, we at THE SOUTH CIRCULAR find ourselves in the company of the Irish Times, New Island Books, the O’Brien Press and the London Magazine as publications included in the shortlist which the founder of Writing.ie, Vanessa O’Loughlin, says features ‘both stellar names in the world of Irish Fiction as well as new and exciting emerging voices. Just like last year, this is a shortlist to watch.’

 

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Editor’s note issue 10

The South Circular issue 10 July 2014 cover © Aleana Egan

Sing with the voice your god gave you. But know your song before you take to the stage.

In 1997, I auditioned for my secondary school’s annual musical show. I was in transition year, a time of academic, creative and legal experimentation. Or, as it is often called, a doss year. Lacking any friendships that would last into adulthood, I was a good student of English and technical drawing and a poor student of nearly every other subject I thought I had to take. During the course of this year, I took modules in Italian, music, art, Celtic Studies and, I think, archaeology. However, with my sights set on a life designing buildings, I opted for physics, chemistry and higher-level maths to get me there. By the time of sitting my pre-Leaving Certificate, I had dropped chemistry in favour of technical drawing; I had moved to ordinary-level maths and my knowledge of the physical world was limited to the first portions of a few theories and the simplicity of displacement. It’s fair to say that I was pretty lost for those six years and sometimes the hardest thing was to speak my mind. I listened in on conversations but I didn’t really hear. Later, at home, I’d think of a response or an idea and I’d practise it, for a next time that never came. I looked but I did not see what was around me. I spent a lot of time in my own head, reciting what I would say, and what I would do, if given half the chance. Those who know me now may find that hard to believe, as I am a foaming, conversation-hogging, arm-waving motor-mouth even at the worst of times. Those who know me now also know that I do not sing.

And so I auditioned for the school show not because I was musical, or knew the songs and wanted to sing them myself. Nor did I do it to perform or be seen. I did it because everyone else was doing it. And I sang the worst, least Vaudeville song around: something by Alanis Morissette. Well, I didn’t get in and instead I worked in ‘costume’, a job for which there was no precedent. Not having a voice that day meant, officially, I became one of the silent ones, the crew the audience is not supposed to see or hear. I wasn’t even one of the crew; many of them skipped outside during scenes to mix Coca-Cola with Paracetemol and wait and see and hope that something would happen. But when the tuck-shop man told me, looking me straight in the eye, that I was ‘the only one around here doing their job properly’, I smiled, inside, quietly, so no one could see.

My point in sharing this familiar story is to say that ‘voice’ arrives when you least expect it. Sometimes it is not yet perfectly formed when it gets here. And sometimes you have to momentarily bury one voice for another to be heard. THE SOUTH CIRCULAR is still, at this moment in time, the best expression of my abilities and my interests and that expression or new found ‘voice’ could not have been realized without the support of all of those who have graced these pages or swiped them. Since moving to Toronto, it’s been my calling-card and has given me access I could only have dreamed about before coming here. And yet, there are other voices, private, domestic, familial and social, which have become marginally muted while this process of introduction and adjustment runs its course.

The theme I am choosing to assign to issue 10 of THE SOUTH CIRCULAR then, is a theme of voice/lessness. All of the muted characters in these stories find ways to lay their mark on their environments and the wrongs they wish to right, some with tragic results. Along with the four stories picked from this quarter’s submissions, by Australians John Bartlett and Mark Brandi and Canadians Laurie Myers-Bishop and John Christensen, we are delighted to welcome special guest writer John Connell to our ejournal. John, though raised in Ireland, has lived in Australia for the last five years and moved to Toronto late last year. He is a producer, curator and investigative journalist and his debut novel, The Ghost Estate, will be published by Picador Australia in 2015.

We chose the cover image, of a work by Irish artist Aleana Egan, because it carries an insistent hush. Her work, ‘on the one hand . . . draws our attention to the way things look, how they settle, sag, curve, or hang; on the other, her forms and shapes act as traces or memories, and as a tentative articulation of shifting responses to remembered places or everyday moments . . . Similarly, her frequent literary and historical allusions, which are never explained, are reticent and elliptic.’ We hope you enjoy these stories of doing, not saying.

 

Aoife Walsh

 

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Editor’s note issue 9

The South Circular issue 9 March 2014 cover Dave Comiskey web detail

When I was just a child, a lonely boy
I held onto my dreams, like they could run from me
The hopes I harboured fled, as they often do
But I still dreamed of you
And now my dreams come true

– ‘Little Dreamer’, Future Islands*

THE SOUTH CIRCULAR and I will relocate to Toronto, Canada, in April this year. Know that this is a positive move, one of expectation, desire and, I think, courage. I am not throwing away, giving away or running away from any of what my home country and my adopted city of Dublin have provided me with.

Rather, know that I am taking it all with me. Whatever I’ve seen, heard or been told now travels to Toronto. Call me an envoy because I certainly consider myself a messenger of sorts. How could I resist telling Toronto everything of what I know in Ireland, when that is so good? And how can Toronto fail to impress upon me some of what I hope to find, and more of what I never knew possible? The transaction will go both ways.

Dublin has risen above its boom and has met its bust face-on, like the heroine it surely knows itself to be. Dublin is self-involved and dying to please. She is now the same and unrecognizable, still checking herself out in shop windows, and still spotting something inside and going right in, to see what all the craic is about. This culture of canny competition and coaxing has forced me to positively realize a potential for expression I have always assumed would give me a life less ordinary.

So, in these final weeks, while preparing issue 9 of THE SOUTH CIRCULAR, dilatorily packing boxes, pinning lists to lists, ‘reaching out’ to strangers and gathering ever closer my people, I am distracted by the effect that belonging has on one’s sense of self. And the stories we have chosen for issue 9, by Gila Green, Mary McGill, Mary O’Donoghue and Warwick Sprawson, address this universal concern: what happens when you drop out, resist the new order or just can’t connect any longer?

Dave Comiskey‘s cover has a gorgeous delicacy while at the same time being robust and utterly present. Of it he has said: ‘I started this cover by drawing objects that I thought might potentially play an important part in an imagined story, things that a plot could hinge on.’

These separate elements then, belong in the ninth issue of THE SOUTH CIRCULAR, for as many reasons as there are people reading this. Somehow, our quarterly digital journal of short stories is still one of a kind but it also belongs here, for the time being. Just where here is exactly, is happily, necessarily in a state of flux.

 

Aoife Walsh

 

 

*future-islands.com

 

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When Ira Glass came to Dublin

‘Reinventing Broadcast Journalism’

It’s no secret my love for radio these days, having spent most of the last twelve months plugged into on-demand podcasts like You Made it Weird, Here’s the Thing and the New Yorker fiction podcast. And such is the effect of This American Life (from here on referred to as TAL) on a generation of listeners, that most lists of really good audio documentaries begin with it. True that TAL is just one type of audio programme, a sort of news show which lays out its public service duty (many contributors are ordinary citizens) at the beginning, and endeavours to go wherever any self-respecting news reporter would like to go to tell you the story. The risk of sentimentality and maudlin wallowing in the injustices and coincidences of this funny life are high in this field and yet TAL never misses an opportunity to expose the humour in a situation, the frailty of an argument or the ridiculousness of a fine mess. This is what Mr Glass called the ‘Oh yeah, I’m an ass’ moment when he spoke to the Philosophical Society in Trinity College, Dublin on 30 September last. Every TAL story has that bit when the plot is paused (and I stop what I’m doing and stare off into the middle distance) and the idea is exposed. By alternating the two, Mr Glass says, the point of the story is revealed.

The thrust of Mr Glass’ talk was how to give good story. But he touched on many things that appeared relevant and interesting to the gathered student body. Refreshingly, he laid into the student publications he had come across in the previous two days. He said most of the articles he had read lacked personality. And they bore no resemblance to the people he had met on campus who he found engaging and replete with ‘winning’  temperaments. He was impressed by the Dublin Burrito correspondent, who, alas, was not in the room (or didn’t admit to being).

Nor had the age-old template of the RTÉ broadcast failed to catch his attention. It was all the same, formulaic and forgettable. RTÉ, he said, had managed to make a Sunday night television show about circus boring. Every question asked was boring, every answer received was boring, every shot was boring. The aesthetic of broadcasting has become tired and, by way of example, he spoke of a CNN war programme that uses theme music akin to Battlestar Galactica. In this jaded landscape, TAL tries to answer the question: ‘What would be surprising or engaging that would make you want to listen?’

For Mr Glass, to build a story in such a way as to keep people listening, but more importantly, to be cunning so that listeners don’t have time to think in a way they’ve thought before, humour is very important in achieving this. So TAL began by trying to change the tone of broadcast journalism and this is rooted in the human voice sounding like a human voice. Mr Glass then played a clip of himself, at the beginning of his career, reporting on corn production and sounding like an android. He admitted that in the beginning, we all want to sound like the establishment but his advice for the audience gathered was to ‘burn through being crap’ and to begin that without delay. He acknowledged that we now live in a world where we simply can’t wait to be given opportunities to produce a lot of work. Once the precious route of the very talented and often confined to the spheres of artistic endeavour (music, acting), now it is never too soon to begin moving towards the thing you are most interested in. Now, with the aid of the internet, we embark on self-assigned apprenticeships all the time.

While Mr Glass worked his way through the thesis of Barthes’ S/Z, he played clips from past shows to illustrate the points of most import in the philosopher’s analysis. These clips did to me what TAL and any good audio documentary always does: made me sit a little taller in my seat, made me strain my neck a little forward and to the left, so that my right ear may hear just a little better. I felt the familiar pull of the story and rather than listen to semiotics applied to broadcast journalism, I wanted to go home and hit play and sit back and learn some. Barthes’ work asks ‘How does this story get its hooks into us?’ Oh, how indeed.

Directing our attention then to the ways in which TAL draws interviewees out, Mr Glass recommends getting them to tell anecdotes. This seems to me to be most effective when the interviewer is prepared to listen and to find the magic in what people give away about themselves.

At the same time as Barthes may guide a journalist or storyteller to enlighten or enthrall, TAL believes that all the listener really needs is to know that Mr Glass can be trusted. This, I think, is the key to contemporary documentary-making and when a reporter or narrator is unreliable in this context, we expect that to be signposted. If you think I’m wrong, try watching Ultrasuede: in search of Halston and tell me you don’t feel confused, betrayed and annoyed by director Whitney Smith’s multiple costume changes and general ignorance of the most important persons of the fashion industry.

Exchange, whether it is spoken or sung, written down or enacted, is an attempt to tell a story. Mr Glass recommended one use the same techniques for reporting hard news, to find conflict and character.  This is why we return to This American Life time and time again. TAL and the stories it tells make us feel better about the stories we want to tell, however small or personal they may be. Taking care of character, plot and idea are all the dedicated editor or curator needs to consistently do a good job.

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Editor’s note issue 8

The South Circular issue 8 cover © Meg Turner detail

The short story is dead. Long live the short story.

Rather, the short story as you or I have known it. No, that’s not entirely correct either. What I mean to say is the reputation of the short story as you or I have known it is dead. As Kevin Barry described the recent state of it in his introduction to the Faber collection of Irish short stories, Town and Country:

There was a time when the short story looked – to use a great and morbidly descriptive Irish phrase – as if it might turn in to face the wall, and the expectation was of a low-key funeral with a smallish turn-out.

But, writing short stories has always been a respectable way of finding one’s voice and a publisher before getting on with the real work of writing novels (and signing contracts). And yet, in October, Alice Munro was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Mrs Munro is the first writer whose oeuvre is restricted to short stories to be awarded the Nobel. Her singular scrutiny of the lives of girls and women made hers the first real books I read after I grew out of June Considine and Ramona Quimby. Still, after all this time, I can’t claim to have fully grasped her contribution to the form but I feel that Mrs Munro’s achievement is a significant part of my exquisitely slow digestion of the short story.

There was a time. The short story was neither born nor faces a certain death. It is the means by which most of us make sense of our everyday lives. And as long we have been around, the short story has too. None of us survive a daring trek across the city in a snowstorm in the wrong footwear, carrying all the Christmas shopping and the first born, and decide to write a novel about it. No, we describe it and enact it in bullet points. For effect, we might sprinkle the early narrative with asides whose relevance will become clear later and we may return to minor occurrences when pestered for clarification. Some of us, quietly, will begin wording the whole cluster-bang of hurdles and bawling and sweat (‘Oh, I was glowing like a swamp donkey’) while we are still seated on the 123, somewhere between Dame Street and Thomas Street.

Amidst the clatter about the value of the short story, came the quiet and significant (for THE SOUTH CIRCULAR at least) inclusion of a story by issue 2 contributor Andrew Meehan in the Faber collection. This makes us want to strut around for a bit, glancing back only to note the spectacle of our silly rear. But only for a bit; for the publisher’s appetite is never sated and our achievements should be privately acknowledged. So each issue of THE SOUTH CIRCULAR is an ever-so-narrow sliver of the work produced by emerging and young writers. It doesn’t come often enough; such is the restless march of that busy parade.

Like the Market Street Power Station of New Orleans in Meg Turner‘s photograph for the cover of this issue, the short story is now in ‘open space’, where its ‘use and intent can be projected by any passerby or intruder’. We prescribe no theme to the stories by Víctor Balcells Matas (translated by Keith Payne), Ronan Flaherty, Danielle McLaughlin and ER Murray published here in issue 8 of THE SOUTH CIRCULAR. All we want is for you to hold them out in front of you, to let ‘the bawl of life’ out of them and into your life. It’s our continued privilege to bring good stories to you in a way you might not have considered before but which is becoming increasingly relevant and valuable in our age.

 

Aoife Walsh

 

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Editor’s note issue 7

It’s that time of year again: school’s back. Little people are taking one of their many steps towards becoming hopeful, positive contributors to this world. For the healthy and watched-over, theirs is a compact world, punctured only occasionally by unfamiliar adults, places or impulses. For the neglected, it’s a constant confusion of adults, places and impulses. Most will make it. Somewhere along the line, the difference between success and failure will be marked by a simple choice between doing and not. For the others: the dim, the doughy, the unheard and the unseen, that choice will never present itself.

I will admit that this was not on my mind when I began to read the submissions for issue 7. But it’s true the stories that slid out of the pile and were labelled ‘promising’ are tales of children and adults who know that something is up. These are not stories of humdrum innocence ruined by epiphany. Jonathan Gibbs‘, Krishan Coupland‘s, Shane Mac an Bhaird‘s and Hila Shachar‘s characters know they have the choice to seek another way of being in their world. Innocence has no room here. Rather, their natural irreverence for the sham of a ‘real world’ they encounter might allow them to move through it protected. These stories beckon the reader to imagine their fates after the last line.

While choosing these stories I came upon a story by Sylvia Townsend Warner: ‘The Children’s Grandmother ‘. It is a story in which the sub-narrative (the terrible deaths of six of the grandmother’s seven own children) distracts the reader in their summation of her present handling of her grandchildren. Colm Tóibín says that by the time this gothic tale begins, these deaths have happened so long ago that there is the assumption that the grandmother is ‘out of character’ for much of the story. In her mind though, the grandmother has chosen to deal with grief in a way so spectacularly robust that in her final words, she can pity her daughter-in-law who, she believes, has the worse fate of seeing her children grow up and leave her.

They say life is all about how you choose to meet it.

When it came to deciding the medium of the cover of issue 7, I knew I wanted to commission a photograph. When I thought of bright and promising photographers on my radar, Philip White‘s name had been on my long-list for some time, having been introduced to me nearly two years ago by Richard Gilligan. And then I saw Philip’s photographs of Irish musicians Mmoths and Orquesta for Thread magazine’s fifth issue and my hunch became a hunt. The starkness, nay bare-facedness, of his portrait of Clare reveals the kind of confidence, conviction and haunting vulnerability exquisite in the very young and the very brave.

For me, Philip’s photograph is a near-perfect calling card for the kind of written work we at THE SOUTH CIRCULAR strive to bring you every quarter.

 

Aoife Walsh

 

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Your Biggest Mistake, Totally Dublin, September 2013

Totally Dublin, September 2013, illustrated by Michelle Eismann

The complete article I wrote for the feature, ‘Your Biggest Mistake’ in the September 2013 issue of Totally Dublin. Other editors and writers who contributed to this feature are Conor Creighton, Darragh McCausland, Jean Sutton, Kevin Breathnach, Sarah Davis-Goff and Dan Bolger. I am grateful to Laura Gozzi for the opportunity to put these ideas in print.

Liz Calder, founding director of Bloomsbury, has said ‘if you’re a publisher you can’t also be a best friend, only a very good friend. You have to toughen up’.

To be an editor you must develop a system to help you see the thing you’re looking for, first time round. So, my definition of a second chance is more like a last chance. But following the rules of grammar and learning a house style are nothing compared to handling the hopes and dreams of an author.

My biggest mistake occurred late in my first job in publishing with an academic press here in Dublin. Spending eight hours a day poring over scholarly manuscripts gives sincere weight to the ‘attention to detail’ part of your CV. I had got to a stage where I was allowed to meet with authors and discuss alterations to their texts. One author was particularly keen that his PhD thesis be published just as he had written it. The subject of the book was of a North American persuasion (he hoped it would sell well over there too), and he had taken the liberty of using an American style, for example, putting the month before the date. Being the last one in, it was my gorgeous job to tell him that we would be changing many of these elements to the British style, to which he had strong objections.

It is amazing how bringing a manuscript within a press’ house style can be considered by some writers as the correction of an error in their work. That’s why it’s called style; it’s unique to each publishing house. I think my older, wiser colleagues were tickled by how seriously I was entertaining this author’s concerns about the tiniest details of his text, when they wouldn’t have even mentioned them to an author if it were their job. Anyway, we got through the style debacle and the book went to print. This press often received advance copies (galleys) just days before publication and sometimes even afterwards, such was their willingness to stand over their decisions and trust that nothing horrendous had happened. Well, the galleys for this book arrived over morning coffee and I decided, unusually, to scan them.

Inexplicably, somewhere during typesetting, a whole section of footnotes had been swapped from one end of the book to the other. I was flummoxed, because for the whole of the preparation of the book, the footnotes had been the least of my worries. I got one of the few bawlings of my career from the publisher that day (all the others came from him too). I had to literally ‘stop press’, while I hauled out the last proofs again to discover at what point the mix-up had occurred.

I know now that the mistake I made was not to misplace the footnotes. That really was a spook in the machine moment. My mistake was to be overwhelmed by the presence of this author in the preparation of his book for publication. What I learned was not to let an author’s opinion of me conflict with my job to carry their work to their audience. The author-editor relationship is a professional friendship, which is under threat because it is based on trust, confidence and responsibility. Now, as editor and publisher of THE SOUTH CIRCULAR, while I agree to take care of someone’s story, I’m also agreeing to not take them for granted. Writers write, editors edit. And if I must leave a writer to write, she must leave me to edit. When I do my job well, the authors’ words will appear luminous to the reader.

I have a few personal rules. There’s a time and place for celebrating your achievements. It’s important to know when something is ready and to let it go. You hold your breath until the book lands on your desk, bound, trimmed, covered and price-tagged. You know that if you look hard enough, you’ll find something silly and annoying. But that’s the agony and ecstasy of publishing: pride in doing your best and humility in knowing there’s more to do.

I approach each manuscript like it is an equation that needs to be solved by being published. And editing means to weigh up everything systematically and to make my mark once, coolly, and to move on immediately, not daring to look back. Publishing is to not second guess my best training, my best ideas, my best instincts. Editing and publishing THE SOUTH CIRCULAR is using all of these things to become the person I want to be.

I’m willing to be corrected on everything I’ve just said, and this is why I love publishing. It is still a creative business which requires a lengthy and intense and sometimes mortifying apprenticeship. What’s more humbling than correcting your own mother tongue? I believe we are only as good as the last issue of THE SOUTH CIRCULAR we put out and we can still get it wrong with the next one. But something drives that reach for perfection and the risk taken with each new story. I’m going to say something that might be controversial here: I don’t consider a story complete until it is published. That’s something I look for in choosing work for THE SOUTH CIRCULAR: something that will survive publication, something that might even be better for having been published.

 

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Changes to our Shop

Around the time issue 6 was published in June, we noticed (and you probably did too) that many readers who tried to purchase THE SOUTH CIRCULAR had some major headaches receiving the correct links to download it. We were just as frustrated by these glitches as you were so we set about fixing them as soon as we could.

We moved digital distributor to Easy Digital Downloads. Now when you purchase an issue or issues of THE SOUTH CIRCULAR, you will automatically receive both the ePub and the PDF version of those issues (for the same €3.00). No matter what device you are using to read THE SOUTH CIRCULAR, you can pick the format most suitable to your own device, after you’ve received the link.

This change also means you can focus on which writers you want to read, rather than trying to decide in which version you should read it.

So, if you purchased an issue of THE SOUTH CIRCULAR that never turned up or never really worked, please let us know and we’ll send you an updated version for your reading pleasure.