Advice re Elephants

Inspiration

Advice re Elephants was originally written for was originally written for Round Nine of the 2010 Whittaker Prize, albeit in the poetry section. No prompt was used. It was given a score of 86/100 by the judge, Catherine Edmunds, putting it 11th out of 19 entrants. The judge commented that it "was hugely entertaining, if somewhat lacking in poetic devices", and that it "would work just as well as a prose piece." I took her advice.

Placings

Duly reworked as a short story, Advice re Elephants was shortlisted for the 2010 Seán Ó Faoláin Competition, judged by Tania Hershman.

Publications

After a small amount of editing to overcome a minor ambiguity, Advice re Elephants was published in Metazen on March 14th, 2011.

Performances

I've read this piece on many occasions, as it seems to work well as a live piece. The first time was at Sparks in Brighton on November 2nd, 2011.

Notes

This is another of those pieces, like Frogs, where I've taken a metaphor and treated it as if it was real, to see where the logic of that took me. It can be quite a fruitful line of enquiry.