PROLOGUE
STOP PRESS! Play due to be performed at 2010 Edinburgh International Fringe Festival. See Breaking News for details.
Hello there, and welcome to my website. Hope you enjoy.
I'm a full time writer based in the Scottish Borders. I write plays, stories and and poems. My plays have been performed and read at various venues in the UK. My stories and poems have been widely published in the
I'm currently Writer in Residence to Clackmannanshire Council. www.clackswrite.org
I'm available for workshops, readings and talks on poetry, prose and drama. Experienced with all types of groups. I've worked with writers groups; Family Centres; Mental Health Organisations; Schools. I was Galashiels Academy's first Writer in Residence in 2005-2006. Also Writer in Resididence to Peebles High School in 2006-2007. Also worked with sixth year studies pupils at Hawick High School each year for the last four years. I'm happy to travel.
Events can be arranged through the Scottish Book Trust Live Literature Fund. www.scottishbooktrust.com/contacts/tom-murray
Please email me if you want to discuss an event, or if you want to chat about the work you see on the webpage: Tmurraytg@aol.com
Here is a story to say hello.
POSTCARD FROM NEW YORK
Woke up this morning to something you never get in this city.
Silence.
Not a car horn, siren, or murmur of voices reaching up to the 14th floor.
The street below was empty or so I thought. In the flats opposite the hotel folk were also looking down from windows to the street below.
Then I saw what they saw.
A road block of police cars and then a figure like an extra out of a B Movie moving slowly up the street. He or she was dressed in what looked like a deep sea diving suit. He or she walked slowly, very slowly.
I followed his, or hers every slow step until they stopped and I saw it. Directly across from my hotel was a briefcase, an everyday briefcase, sitting upright, and so alone looking, on the sidewalk.
And I was on the 14th floor with a lift I had already found out never arrived when you wanted it.
I watched.
The deep sea diver with what looked like a metal rod ever so slowly edged open the case (I don’t know how that suit would have protected him) and out flew…paper. Paper that drifted higher and higher down the street, to God knows where else.
Minutes later the car horns, sirens, murmur of voices returned and folk streamed, almost bored looking, out of flats and hotels like water released from a dam.
And I walked down the fourteen flights of stairs and joined them.
Love to the boys.
( The above story won the Fish One Page short story competition.)
