ENDORSEMENTS

First stage.

It has been an extraordinarily moving thing to muster the courage to ask some excellent well-known writers if they will endorse Words From A Glass Bubble, and to find that they will.

Endorsements start the process of differentiating the work. Calling attention to it in a good way. Underlining that these writers have weighed it and found it not wanting, if you like. Giving it a stamp of approval that says 'if you like literary short fiction you will not be disappointed...'


MAGGIE GEE, Chair of The Royal Society of Literature:

Original, compassionate and illuminated by humour, these stories by a prodigally gifted new writer dare to mine the fault-line between rage and love.



JACOB ROSS, FRSLit

Vanessa Gebbie explores with extraordinary lyricism and beauty the human lives that connect, interweave and turn around often tragic incidents.
These narratives unfold before us with the deftness and assurance of the truly gifted writer. A remarkable book.



PETER JAMES

A srikingly fresh voice, sharp, shocking and original, a natural, gifted writer.




JOCK HOWSON, FISH PUBLISHING

There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
Julius Caesar

There is a tide in the affairs of men, and therefore postmen, and therefore, in our not so modern world, postwomen too. Words From a Glass Bubble is about a non-post-modern postwoman, a talking Virgin Mary in a snow-globe, and an illiterate bachelor farmer who’s party piece is imitating bird calls. It is light and airy, funny and quirky. But Vanessa Gebbie’s short story is also about severe psychological trauma, and the disruption of normal relationships with family, society, religion and self, in the face of insurmountable grief, which yet, must every day be surmounted. And it is about, perhaps, a turn in the tide; an opportunity, a chance to leave behind the Shallows and Miseries of regret and remorse, a chance to take on the flood of life’s ebb and flow and to move-on, renewed. Not forgetting, but, at last, forgiving and accepting and cherishing.

Words from a Glass Bubble is very finely crafted. The story was placed second in the Fish Short Story Prize 2007, and is without a doubt, one of the subtlest and strongest pieces in the Fish Anthology, with a depth of meaning and symbolism, and a richness of language and word-craft which one only slowly appreciates as the airyness and humour of the story becomes ever more poignantly over-written by the depths of a mother’s despair. The character of Finn ‘Birdman’ Piper, his bird calls - “the thin cry of the buzzard rising from the old chimneys into the night sky.”- only slowly becomes the centre point of the reader’s understanding of how our postwoman might come to a new understanding and a new acceptance, And how her husband might too. And how time and life can eventually heal any wound, even an amputation, though that which is severed can never be replaced.

As Michael Collins says in his foreword to the 2007 Fish Anthology, “Words From a Glass Bubble “is very, very Irish”: and it is, but is it not also very, very universal?

Jock Howson
Editor – The Fish Anthology 2007