Dalton and Deller in Waltham Forest

Pen Dalton's printed wall installation 'Matrilineal Descent' at Tokarska Gallery uses Dalton's own family history to raise issues identity, gender, migration and motherhood. Originally designed for an academic conference on identity in Northern Ireland and informed by writings on identity from Michel Foucault and Stuart Hall that regard ‘the self’ as formed within specific historic, cultural and social contexts, 'Matrilineal Descent' is a powerful, personal piece where the personal informs the wider work and the issues it raises. This installation is complemented by a series of text-based prints - copies of which are in the V&A - that draw on feminist psychoanalytic/linguistic theory – notably that of Julia Kristeva - in exploring understandings of motherhood.

Through her work in art education Dalton has argued "that modernist art education has been and continues to be a complex of gendered discursive practices: saturated through with masculine and feminine divisions and hierarchies which in turn produce gendered identities as hierarchical and working class girls as subordinate, ready to assume subordinate positions in the wider social and
economic culture."

Identity is also the theme at the William Morris Gallery which hosts Jeremy Deller's English Magic. English Magic reflects "the roots of much of Deller’s work, focusing on British society - its people, icons, myths, folklore and its cultural and political history." He has addressed events from the past, present and an imagined future and worked with a varied range of collaborators including archeologists, musicians, bird sanctuaries, prisoners and painters.

His film, also entitled English Magic, forms a major part of the exhibition, bringing together many of the ideas behind the works and featuring the visual and thematic elements that reflect Deller's interest in the diverse nature of British society and its broad cultural, socio-political and economic history. The music is performed by the Melodians Steel Orchestra from South London and was recorded in Studio 2 of Abbey Road Studios in London:

The William Morris Gallery, the place of Morris birth, has recently been transformed to create a new world-class destination and international centre of excellence for the study of Morris, where visitors can enjoy the most intense and personal encounter with one of the foremost creative artists and original thinkers of the nineteenth century.

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Jeremy Deller - English Magic.

The strong meat of short stories

In the light of Alice Munro's Nobel Prize for Literature there has not only been analysis of her skill as a writer of short stories but also much reflection on the nature of short stories themselves.

Colm Tóibín writes of Alice Munro that her "genius is in the construction of the story. She has a way of suggesting, both in the cadences and the circumstances, that nothing much is going to happen, that her world is ordinary and her scope is small. And then in a story such as "Runaway", she manages to suggest a fierce loneliness, and begins to dramatise the most unusual motives and actions. Slowly, there is nothing ordinary at all. I would love to see her drafts, or the inside of her mind as she works, because my feeling is that this takes a great deal of erasing, adding, taking risks, pulling back, taking time."

Sarah Hall, who won a £15,000 prize for a short story in the same week Alice Munro won the Nobel, writes that "They are excruciatingly difficult to produce and make effective. The best provoke potent sensations in the reader – discomfort, arousal, exhilaration, fear. They are as powerful and memorable, in some cases more so, than novels."

She continues by saying that "Short stories are often strong meat. Reading them, even listening to them, can be challenging, by which I do not mean hard work, simply that a certain amount of nerve and maturity is required. Often the experience is exquisitely unsettling; one might feel like a voyeur suddenly looming at the window of an intimate scene. At first glance normal-seeming events are taking place, but mundanity gives way to the peculiar, the perilous, the capricious. Short stories are manifestations, their own literary phenomena. Mostly there is no explanatory narrative ramp or roof, there are no stabilisers giving support over scary subject matter – sex and death, classically – and there are no solvent, tonic or consoling endings. The reader is left to decide what everything might mean, and in this way the form is inordinately respectful. Some might want such a reading experience infrequently, some every day, many never."

flavorwire has links to ten short stories which can be read online, starting with the "pitch-perfect short stories and razor-sharp wit" of my favourite short story writer, Flannery O'Connor. They state, "This is not meant to be a definitive list of the best short stories in the world, but merely a celebration of the form and a collection of ten of our many favorites, limited to those that we could track down online." Nikolai Gogol is another of my favourite short story writers; here is his entry in The Guardian's Brief Survey of the Short Story.

I have posted several of my own short stories on this blog. They can be found at:

• A Disappearance - Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4;
• Interrogation;
• The Black Rain (see also here, here, here and here);
• The Clean-up King - Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6;
• The Curious Glasses; and
• The New Dark Ages - Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

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The Band - The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.