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Guest Editor STELLA DUFFY introduces her pick of poetry and prose on the theme of Gloves. For me, gloves mean many things. They are points studded through my life: the itchy white net gloves I wore as my sister’s bridesmaid when I was four, the glove my mother would invariably drop while getting ready to leave the house in winter – bad luck for her to pick it up, but she guaranteed a surprise for me when I picked it up for her. School gloves of boring fawn. The pink lace and diamanté gloves I bought myself in the late 70s, long before Madonna was desperately seeking Susan. Fingerless gloves for my first freezing visit to a New York January. The gloves the chemo nurse wore when she gave me the drug, too brutal to touch her skin, yet pumped into my veins anyway. A stunning pair of deep purple, butter-soft leather gloves I bought my wife from a terrifyingly posh shop last year in Milan. Each one, for me, with story, place, time, and people associations. Your glove pieces too, were enormously evocative. The best of them though, rarely made the work about the gloves, but rather used the gloves as a spark, a place from which to begin writing. Personally I am always much more excited – both as a writer and a reader – with a story that approaches the matter indirectly, surprising me with its handling of the theme, rather than placing the subject centre stage. I far prefer a piece to which the gloves are intrinsic, which could not work fully without the necessary gloves, and yet is not about those gloves. This is absolutely not an argument for artifice for its own sake, or style over content (without a story on which to hang the words, no amount of beautiful style will ever work for me over a good story, cleanly told) but it is to suggest that perhaps there are other ways into a theme, and that the ones that didn’t hit me squarely in the face with their subject matter were more likely to interest me than those that did For the complete essay, and for Stella's full selection of poetry and prose on the theme of Gloves, read issue 36• Subscribe! |
 Read a story & poem chosen by Stella Duffy Glove by Alison Key Your dead mother by Lynne Shapiro  |
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