Author Lucy Durneen

On Tuesday, July 9, 2019, Lucy Durneen, author of several short stories, poems and nonfiction essays, was invited to speak to students on AUP’s Summer Creative Writing Institute and to give a reading from her latest work, the short story collection Wild Gestures, as well as several poems.

The Summer Creative Writing Institute is a three-week summer program at AUP that gives students the opportunity to write and share fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction under the guidance of literary practitioners. As well as having an intensive class schedule four days a week, students attend weekly readings by published writers to enhance their understanding of the creative process. The first of these sessions – on Thursday, July 4 – saw AUP alumna and French-to-English translator Emma Ramadan G’15 discuss the practice of translating poetry with French poet and translator Frédéric Forte.

Durneen, who is British, was the second guest speaker in the series. Her work has been shortlisted for the Bridgport Prize, nominated for a Pushcart Prize and highly commended in the Manchester Fiction Prize. Her first collection of short stories, Wild Gestures, was published in 2018 by the Australian publishing house MidnightSun Publishing and won Best Short Story Collection at the 2017 Saboteur Awards in London.

Durneen started writing early – publishing her first story when she was just three years old – but her turning point as a writer came during her graduate study. She explained how university taught her to pare back her writing, to drop the extra adjectives and focus on maximizing the impact of the text with fewer words. She cited Mary Borden’s The Forbidden Zone as a particular inspiration: “It’s about finding the right word, and picking one word, and having faith in it,” she explained.

Before opening with an extract from Wild Gestures, Durneen commented on the significance of reading this particular story in Paris. She explained that, despite loving the city, when she wrote about Paris the story had been ambivalent, even sad: “as if it was Paris’s fault,” she said. The piece, entitled “In response to your call,” took the form of a letter to an unnamed former lover written while sipping hot chocolate on the Rue de Rivoli. The poems she selected included an ode to The Odyssey’s female characters and a response to her own admission that she hadn’t read Jane Eyre. Between readings, Durneen commented on her writing process and explained the inspiration behind several of her stories.

Students’ questions covered topics such as how the tone of an individual’s writing influences the kinds of publications to which budding writers should submit their work and where, for Durneen, the lines between fiction and nonfiction begin to blur. She believes these lines to be more blurred than most would realize; she argued that short story writers tend to be particularly upfront with the personal connections they use in their work. “The ways versions of ourselves appear are coded, forming a fossilized record of ourselves,” she argued. Reading back through her stories as a collection, she was struck by how many recurring motifs had been subconsciously brought to the surface when writing.

Following the Q&A, the conversation between Durneen and students continued informally during an after-event reception.