Story of the Month, October 2023

"I often think of Larkin’s poem, Afternoons, and the young mothers and how ‘something is pushing them/to the side of their own lives’. This feeling informs Living a Little. That and my memories of growing up on a Birmingham Council Estate and the sense of having escaped a ‘life less lived’ when I left home." (Jackie Morris)

The Willesden Herald Story of the Month

October 2023: Living a Little by Jackie Morris

‘Seems like only yesterday me and your Daddy were coming over on the ferry. Love’s young dream. You should have seen your Daddy then,’ Mam exhaled her cigarette. Smoke drifted over the children’s heads. ‘Your Nana had him down to be a priest, but I couldn’t have him going to waste like that.’

Jackie Morris’s stories are online at Brilliant Flash Fiction, Free Flash Fiction, Micro Fiction Monday, Retreat West the National Flash Fiction Day 2022 anthology and the National Flash Fiction Flashflood 23. She came third in the Willesden Herald Short Story Prize, 2022. She can be found on Twitter @JackieMMorris and on Bluesky @jackiemmorris.bsky.social.

Author: Stephen Moran

I was born in Dublin and made my way to London on a bike in my mid-twenties. It’s where I can still be found though ever further out, most recently as far as Harrow. I no longer own a bicycle.