A Small, Good Thing

Wales has an ancient tradition of storytelling. Listen to Rhiannon Marks discuss the Welsh short story, from the oldest tales of the British Isles to Wales’s contemporary short story writers. Rhiannon Marks is Senior Lecturer at the School of Welsh at the University of Cardiff where she specialises in 20th-21st century Welsh literature, creative literary criticism and literary theory.

Works cited
Mihangel Morgan Te Gyda’r Frenhines (Gomer, 1994)
Menna Elfyn Parch (Bloodaxe Books, 2025)
Rhiannon Marks, Y dychymyg ôl-fodern: agweddau ar ffuglen fer Mihangel Morgan. (Caerdydd: University of Wales Press, 2020)
The Mabinogion, trans. by Sioned Davies (Oxford University Press, 2008)
Manon Steffan Ros (ed.), Dadeni (Sebra 2026)
Alun Richards (ed), The Penguin Book of Welsh Short Stories (Penguin, 1976)
Kate Roberts, The World of Kate Roberts: Selected Stories, 1925-1981, trans. by Joseph P. Clancy (Temple University Press, 1991)
Kate Roberts, ‘The Quilt’, in The World of Kate Roberts: Selected Stories, 1925-1981, pp. 76-80 Rhiannon Marks, Crefft y Stori Fer Heddiw [The Art of the Short Story Today]. Caerdydd: Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol (2019)
Rachel Trezise, Fresh Apples (Parthian Books, 2006)
Thomas Morris, We Don’t Know What We’re Doing (Faber and Faber, 2015)
Caryl Lewis, Bitter Honey (Penguin, 2025)
Fflur Dafydd, House of Water (Hodder & Stoughton, 2025)
Nici Beech (ed), A New Welsh Tapestry: Six Short Stories by Contemporary Welsh Women Writers (Sampark Publications, 2026)
Tu Chwith Magazine < https://archives.library.wales/index.php/tu-chwith >
Y Stamp Magazine – see < https://www.ystamp.cymru >
Meic Stephens, A White Afternoon: New Welsh Short Fiction (Parthian Books, 1999)
Kristi Bohata et al. (eds), Queer Square Mile: Queer short stories from Wales (Parthian Books, 2022)

Podcast intro and outro credits: Shield, Leroy, Taylor Holmes, and Robert W Service. The shooting of Dan McGrew. 1923. Audio. Retrieved from the Library of Congress.

In this episode, I get to chat with Elizabeth Baines about her career as a writer, from the first short story she ever published to her upcoming projects, passing through the times when she worked as a writer of radio plays and the co-editor of the short story magazine Metropolitan. 

Works cited: 
Elizabeth Baines, Five Different Stories about One Thing (Confingo, 2026). 
Elizabeth Baines, The Mountain and Other Stories, a speculative novella and stories (GoldSF, Forthcoming).
Lucy Caldwell, Intimacies (Faber and Faber, 2021).

Podcast intro and outro credits: Shield, Leroy, Taylor Holmes, and Robert W Service. The shooting of Dan McGrew. 1923. Audio. Retrieved from the Library of Congress.

Vicky Grut is a short story writer and an essayist. In this episode, Vicky discusses what it means to be a short story writer in the heyday of the digital revolution, and at a time of hyper-connectivity. Listen as she reflects on how much of the contemporary world can be integrated into fiction without risking obsolescence in just a few years. 
 
Works cited: 
Vicky Grut, 'My Own True Name', in Best British Short Stories 2026, ed. by Nicholas Royle (Salt, 2026). 
Vicky Grut, Live Show, Drink Included: Collected Stories (Holland Park Press, 2018). 
Vicky Grut, 'The Eid Dinner', Manchester Review, no. 29 (2026). 
Annie Ernaux, The Years (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2022).
Isle McElory, ‘Writing Social Media Into Fiction’. Catapult (26 April, 2022), https://magazine.catapult.co/dont-write-alone/stories/writing-social-media-into-fiction-craft-essay-isle-mcelroy  
David Foster Wallace, ‘E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction’, in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (Little, Brown, 1997), pp. 21-82.  
Liadan Ní Chuinn, Everyone Still Here (The Stinging Fly, 2025). 
 
Organisations mentioned: 
European Network for Short Fiction Research (ENSFR), https://ensfr.univ-angers.fr/ 
CityLit, https://www.citylit.ac.uk/ 

Podcast intro and outro credits: Shield, Leroy, Taylor Holmes, and Robert W Service. The shooting of Dan McGrew. 1923. Audio. Retrieved from the Library of Congress.

David Hartley is a short story writer, creative writing teacher, and the author of the collection of short stories Fauna (2021). In this episode we discuss the importance of voice in short story writing. What is voice? What does it mean for a writer to work on voice? How many voices can a short story writer have? How far can one trespass into alien territories when seeking for a character’s voice? 
 
Works cited: 
David Hartley, Fauna (Fly On The Wall Press, 2021). 
David Hartley, ‘Voice of the Gods, Voice of the People: Authority and Authenticity in the Modern Short Story’, in The Subtle Art of Short Fiction, ed. by Isabelle Kenyon (Fly On The Wall Press, 2026), pp. 85-92. 
George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (Bloomsbury, 2021). 
Flannery O’Connor, ‘The Nature and Aim of Fiction’, in Mystery and Manners (Faber and Faber, 2014), pp. 63-86. 
Flannery O’Connor, ‘Writing Short Stories’, in Mystery and Manners (Faber and Faber, 2014), pp. 87-106. 
Sandra Cisneros, ‘Barbie-Q’, in Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (Random House, 1991), pp. 14-16. 
Kit de Waal, ‘The Art of Trespass’, keynote at the National Creative Writing Conference, 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_N10wSo4ZA 
Shirley Jackson, ‘The Summer People’, in Dark Tales (Penguin Classics, 2016).

Podcast intro and outro credits: Shield, Leroy, Taylor Holmes, and Robert W Service. The shooting of Dan McGrew. 1923. Audio. Retrieved from the Library of Congress.

Lauren Groff’s second collection of short stories, Florida (2018), is a powerful reflection on nature and climate. In this episode, Valentina Lopez Liendo takes a closer look at Groff’s representation of the relationship between humans and the environment and how this relationship reflects the inequalities that plague contemporary society. Valentina Lopez Liendo is a postdoctoral researcher at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies. She is the author of the upcoming monograph Colson Whitehead Beyond the Novel (Routledge, 2026). 
 
Works cited: 
Valentina Lopez Liendo, Colson Whitehead Beyond the Novel (Routledge, 2026). 
Lauren Groff, Florida (Penguin, 2018). 
Nicholas M. Kelly, Nicole White, and Loren Glass. 'Squatter Regionalism: Postwar Fiction, Geography, and the Program Era.' Journal of Cultural Analytics, vol. 6, no. 2, Apr. 2021. https://doi.org/10.22148/001c.22332.  
Lucie Shelley, ‘My Own Boundaries Seem to Be Fading: An Interview with Lauren Groff’. Paris Review of Books, 5 June 2018. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/06/05/my-own-boundaries-seem-to-be-fading-an-interview-with-lauren-groff/ 
Matthew Wynn Sivils. 'Introduction: The Proliferation of the Ecogothic.' Studies in American Fiction, vol. 50, nos. 1–2, Mar. 2023, pp. 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1353/saf.2023.a923091. 
Simon C. Estok, 'Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia,'  ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 16, no. 2 (2009): 203–225. 
Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (Routledge, 2003). 
Val Plumwood, 'Gender, Eco-Feminism and the Environment.' Controversies in Environmental Sociology, ed. by Robert White (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 43–60. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511804434.004. 
Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock. 'Introduction: The American Gothic.' The Cambridge Companion to American Gothic, ed. by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 1–12.  https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316337998.001. 
Lauren Groff, ‘The Midnight Zone’, in Florida (Penguin, 2018), pp. 68-83. 
Lauren Groff, ‘Ghosts and Empties’, in Florida (Penguin, 2018), pp. 1-14. 
Teresa A. Goddu 'Homelessness in Lauren Groff’s Florida Fiction: Climate Change and Displacement.' Cli-Fi and Class: Socioeconomic Justice in Contemporary American Climate Fiction, by Lisa Ottum et al., ed. by Debra J. Rosenthal and Jason de Lara Molesky (University of Virginia Press, 2023) pp. 221–34. 
Lauren Groff, ‘Flower Hunters’, in Florida (Penguin, 2018), pp. 155-69. 
Lauren Groff, 'Eyewall', in Florida (Penguin, 2018), pp. 84-100. 
Lauren Groff. 'Under the Wave.' The New Yorker, 2 July 2018. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/07/09/under-the-wave. 
W. E. B. Dubois, 'The Comet', in Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (Harcourt, 1920), pp. 253-74. 

Podcast intro and outro credits: Shield, Leroy, Taylor Holmes, and Robert W Service. The shooting of Dan McGrew. 1923. Audio. Retrieved from the Library of Congress.