Halifax Author releases her debut collection of short stories

“A grieving woman tells her counsellor increasingly elaborate and contradictory accounts of the night her partner died...

A solitary pensioner, cut off from the world in the depths of lockdown, resorts to sitting in his apartment block's meter room to watch the electricity gauges surge with life...

A travelling vending machine operator takes his goldfish with him on his long-haul journeys to alleviate its separation anxiety...

The characters in Gaia Holmes' debut fiction collection adopt complex and ingenious mechanisms for processing a world that is at once too close and too far removed, needing to feel the presence of others, whilst also being overwhelmed by it. Whether it's the trauma of the pandemic and its many isolations, or the chaotic, draining lives of loved ones or neighbours, these stories explore the ingenuity of people striving to rebuild themselves, fortify their defences and, most courageously, connect.

Bringing with her the open-hearted lyricism, intense textures and inherent strangeness that set her poetry apart, Holmes arrives at the short story as the finished article: a master chronicler of 21st century Britain.”

I’m delighted to announce the publication of ‘He Used To Do Dangerous Things’, my debut collection of short fiction, from Comma Press.

“This collection deals with themes of environmental campaigning, homelessness and the cost-of-living crisis, told through brittle and precarious relationships and threaded together with magic realism and the haunting power of landscapes.”

As well as the topics described above, this collection features a multitude of birds, several nuns, 3 power cuts, 1 (possible) murder, lots of eggs, lots of batteries, tortoises, octopuses, black dogs, morphine, gin, lemon cake, wine, blood, beautiful weeds, coercive control, liberation, caravans, kintsugi, origami, lies, Halifax, the Highlands, the ‘good dark’, and 40 references to potatoes in various forms.

And though they are fiction, most of these stories have blossomed from a seed of truth.