Four Times EightyOne

These eighty-one stories were arbitrarily fashioned during a single year. Michelene Wandor, a playwright, poet, fiction writer and cultural critic, invited family members, friends - and some passing acquaintances - to give her four random words. These quartets signal each story as a kind of riddle: the solution in the title, the clues, Marple and Poirot-like, embedded in each brief narrative. Punning, witty, scholarly, off the wall, each with its unique punchline, the pieces go beyond flash fiction and poetry, into freed association, with unpredicted and unpredictable motifs. The language becomes and is becoming: transformative and serendipitous in the writing and the reading.

Michelene Wandor is a playwright, poet, fiction writer and cultural critic. She has taught creative writing for more than three decades, currently as tutor for the MA at Lancaster University.