Skin Job. A Self-Narrative Assignment.

Just last week I was astonished to learn a fiction of mine from my ‘Fugitive Pieces’ file had surfaced at my publishers (Salt).

Its title? Skin Job. A Self-Narrative Assignment. 

https://www.saltpublishing.com/blogs/house-magazine/skin-job

Yet I was all the more astonished when I opened the page to note a name familiar to me from my distant past. The publishers’ announcement states: ‘Erica Wagner joins the Salt list → ’

https://www.saltpublishing.com/products/wash-9781784634018 

Yes. Curiously, I look back and find my fiction, The Cheated Eye, alongside Erica’s (Pyramid) in The Catch collection of prize-winning Asham Award stories. The competition, the very first  when launched in 1996, attracted over six hundred entries of which the judges selected thirteen which were published together with commissioned stories by Kate Atkinson, Rachel Cusk, Louise Doughty, Candia McWilliam and Deborah Moggach.

See here the story behind the Asham Literary Endowment Trust in memory of Virginia Woolf:

https://www.thresholdsarchive.org.uk/the-story-behind-the-asham-trust/ 

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Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 

see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 

and A Bad Case (2014)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html