Thursday, January 2, 2014

Ni hao

 It was only two months ago...
 ...that I flew back to England....
 ...to read my Short Fiction competition winning story...
 ...at the Plymouth International Literary Festival...
 ...where I met Catherine McNamara, Tom Vowler, Anthony Caleshu, Jamie Edgecombe...
 ...and so many other writers and interesting people...
...and it was the first time I had been back...
...since moving to New Zealand...
 ...over six years ago...
...but the strange thing is...
...I feel like I only moved here yesterday...
...whereas Shanghai...
...seems so very long ago...
...and now all my memories are packaged up, and some are already in stories, waiting to travel somewhere. Maybe these pictures will inspire you...your story could end up in Plymouth and carry you to Shanghai, too. Give it a try, the Short Fiction Competition is open for entries now.

4 comments:

Dominic Rivron said...

You're right. Perceptions of time and memory are weird.

I was convinced I'd watched a TV series where I used to live - and then discovered it only came out several years later when I'd moved up here. It's a bit unnerving - isn't what has happened to us in the past a large part of what makes us what we are? And if our record of that "past" is (as it undoubtedly is) unreliable? Obvious but interesting.

Rachel Fenton said...

It makes for an unreliable narrator, Dominic. Diaries and photographs would be one record improvement, but how to remember where one put them....

Also, I wonder how much mood affects memory storage - do we add bias at the storage point?

Anonymous said...

I agree, Rachel. This is our 7th year in Australia and we have done so much and yet it seems like no time at all.

Rachel Fenton said...

I think that tardis behind you may have something to do with your perception, Donna ;)