author – Vee Walker writes…

Review: Olive Leaves – stories of islands, memories and return

I am writing this as Storm Boelo rocks my Scottish Highland home on its foundations. Outside my salt-caked windows, autumn is being brutally displaced by winter, all the bright leaves and any fruit I missed gathering in now dashed to the ground.

Escapism is therefore the order of the day!

Short stories are something I love to write myself and it is a surprisingly fragmented and nuanced genre, ranging from microfiction (which I cannot get the hang of, however much I try!) which can be as little as 50 words, to novella, virtual mini-novels at 15,000 – 40,000 words or more.

Sometimes short stories can be humorous, sometimes saccharin, sometimes dark and deeply unsettling. They are often (wrongly) considered to be a lesser genre than the novel. Writing a good short story is just as challenging – and writing a collection of them as good as this even more so.

I prefer longer forms of short story to microfiction and so, clearly, does Stuart R. Fleming, author of this unusual collection of witty, at times gritty and poignant tales. Fleming is a true wordsmith. His polished style reveals previous experience as a writer, even if this is his debut short story collection.

Yes, these short stories are set in Greece, and often in the exquisite and unspoiled Ionian island of Kythira (which has more spellings that you can shake a stick at…) but please don’t expect to find Mamma Mia type holiday froth within these pages.

Fleming’s short stories are deeply respectful of local people and culture and their characters are believable and well rounded. Even the individual story titles are clever and inviting: Bagno describes the ancient healing ritual of sea bathing (not ‘wild swimming’!) among women of a certain age; Helene and Paris offers a witty nod towards Homer’s Odyssey; and who would not want to enjoy the hilarious company of The Sisters of Lemon Street?

I am a great believer in sugar for peace myself.

To me, though, one story stands out from the rest: Faith. The story of Tasos, Eleni (there are many, many Elenis in these stories) and Matina made me weep (and I am a hard-boiled old bat who reads manuscripts for a living). Its themes spoke to me: themes of devoted love and heartbreaking loss; of evolving belief and of the discovery of an ability to move through, if never truly moving beyond, tragedy.

This tale would make a superb film – it has sufficient depth and heart. Perhaps a script treatment would be something to think about in the future?

Printed by the hybrid press Noble Legacy Publishing, this is a beautifully presented collection of short stories. In my view, however, something this good should have been picked up by an agent and published commercially by a short story specialist such as Comma Press in London. The publishing industry misses far too many good things at present.

I have reason to believe that a second collection of short stories is already in the offing. Lucky us to have some more of Stuart R. Fleming’s heartfelt stories to look forward to when the next storm hits…

Olive Leaves – stories of islands, memory and return by Stuart R. Fleming is available online here 👇 https://ebay.io/m/XqF1XX

Photography by Matilda Walker

Vee Walker is an author and editor who loves islands, based between the Scottish Highlands and the Cote d’Azur.

Roses all the way to the New World

When you think of a rose, do you think of this?

Or of this?

My latest work, The Glen Nevis Rose, is an unusual collaboration with Lochaber author Ewen A. Cameron, who lives at Glen Nevis House. It began with Ewen’s fascination for a little-known local story, grew into an idea for a pamphlet (which is when I became involved) and since then has snowballed into something rather remarkable: a full colour, 90 page book which explores the life of one family in the years after Culloden, both through fiction and well-researched non-fiction.

Just over 250 years ago, Lady Mary Cameron of Glen Nevis turned her back on the self- same house where Ewen now lives, to board a mysterious vessel named the Pearl at Fort William. Former staunch Jacobite families like Mary’s had suffered badly at the hands of the victors after Culloden and many set their faces towards the New World. The Pearl was already almost filled to the gunwales with MacDonells of Glengarry. They must have offered some of the few remaining berths to their friends and neighbours, among them Mary’s family.

Mary had young children. Her old father was dying. The preparations for departure must have been emotional, complex and protracted.

Why, then, dig up a rose to take with her, of all things?

We could so easily have got it all wrong and just seen the rose – an ancient variety named Great Maiden’s Blush – as a perfumed, romantic, nostalgic gesture.

That would be to ignore its vicious thorns, and once we found out the role it is said to have played in the family’s past, we understood.

The story of the journey of the Camerons, their brood of children and the rose to America and beyond is one of love, tenacity, courage and adventure.

Our understanding of the Jacobite Rising tends to end in April 1746 at Culloden, but the aftermath of civil war echoed through the glens for decades after that, triggering the start of an epic migration of wealth and youth and talent from our shores which would later evolve into the Highland Clearances.

If you want to understand what it was like to survive Culloden and then choose to emigrate, please consider reading this book.

It is not available on Amazon and never will be. We are distributing it through smaller bookshops and outlets only at present. Feel free to get in touch and I will let you know your nearest outlet.

Signed copies can be sent by mail order worldwide, too.

The story of a story – for World Book Day 2025

This World Book Day, here is a shout-out for the humble short story and the BBC Short Story Awards!

December 2023. My family and I arrive in Nice for our first ever visit. We arrive late and blunder through Old Nice looking for our apartment in darkness. By night its narrow alleys are sinister, and I think what on earth have I done. There is a grim old lavoir, which I can just see contains only a couple of empty beer cans and a pizza box.

Then we turn a corner and a sliver of moonlight catches the motionless fronds of a vast urban jungle. No 13, our destination, lies within it, and after navigating a flight of ancient and uneven steps, we are soon tucked up in comfortable beds.

As we explore in the coming days, we realise that this extraordinary forest of green plants is limited to our own little narrow street. The air is sweeter there, and it feels somehow safer. I often see a man out there with a chihuahua at his heels. We say a polite bonjour, but nothing more. To the permanent residents, AirBnB guests feel like phantoms.

At the épicerie they tell me that this man is trying, solo, to displace the local drug dealers with green plants. And it is working. From that point onwards, the story takes root in my subconscious.

I return home and should be editing my unwieldy novel but the green shoots of Nice Dog have taken invasive root in my subconscious. What if the chihuahua told his master’s story? What if a young dealer were in trouble?

I write the whole story out in a couple of nights but then polish it almost daily for months, treating it as an exercise in paring back unnecessary adjectives and adverbs. I add a little love interest as a twist. I also decide to fill the old stone lavoir near the (now fictionalised) alley with green plants as part of the dénouement.

Shortlistees of the BBC Short Story competition are generally established novelists with other day jobs to support their writing habit: one has to have published to enter at all (a filter for both quality and quantity perhaps). I submit mine on a whim off the back of my one commercially-published novel, Major Tom’s War. 1000 writers enter, but just five were selected for prizes, broadcast and publication, among them Nice Dog.

Hearing the brilliantly-abridged version of Nice Dog, read by the actor Paterson Joseph, and broadcast on BBC Sounds (where you can still hear it, see listing at end of blog) has been a high point of my life.

This competition was my first foray into an alien land of BBC non-disclosure agreements. Scared to blot my copybook, I told almost no-one. I was then interviewed by Kirsty Wark, among others. Mostly the people who interviewed me or discussed the story picked up on a small, witty neologism in Nice Dog, the messagerie-pisse, a non-verbal means of canine communication so convincing that no-one wanted to believe it came from my imagination. No-one at all asked me about its more serious underlying theme, cannabis legalisation.

That’s what you get for making your narrator a chihuahua 😊!

I then travelled to London from the Highlands (over 600 miles) for the live awards evening on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row,

Exciting to meet famous names of course, but a bit of an ordeal too. In a huge room where people were constantly recognising and greeting each other by name, no-one really knew or cared who I was – no name tag, no well-connected agent to introduce me and no introductions from the stage, other than for the overall winner.

The best bit of the whole BBCNSSA experience for me was not the awards bash itself but publication within the beautiful BBC/Comma Press 2024 anthology. Anthologies are curious publishing models. Unless by a single author, contributors do not usually derive royalties from an anthology, instead receiving a fee for participation up front. The Comma Press editorial team were just marvellous, helping me to polish Nice Dog until it gleamed. A beautiful wee book.

The shortlisting has made a big difference to my life as a writer, especially in terms of confidence. About 9 million people listen to BBC Radio 4. This kind of exposure and recognition doesn’t come every day. It has also inspired me to translate Nice Dog into French. I am now in touch with the charming Jean-Jacques Wanner and his exquisite chihuahua Pépette, the original dual inspiration for Papa Rémy and Duby, and they have their copy, too. I should point out however that Jean-Jacques is a great deal better-looking and younger than my fictional Papa Rémy! His green-figured magic in Old Nice continues.

I think Nice Dog could work well as a bande dessinée in France. It’s a story on a journey. Watch this space.

On my last visit to the Old Town in Nice to see Jean-Jacques I was overjoyed to find that the ancient lavoir washing trough is now filled with Jean Jacques’ green plants and camelias, not with beer cans and rubbish as it was on that first visit.