© Bindweed Anthologies
My writing career has seen some unexpected pseudonymous comebacks in late 2023. Last month, I revived the pseudonym Steve Cashel for a Scottish-set crime story entitled The Folkie, which was published in the online magazine Close 2 the Bone. Steve Cashel was a penname I’d used a couple of times in the past, most recently in 2011, for short stories that were set in Scotland and had non-horrific and non-fantastical plots.
Now Winter Wonderland 2023, the latest in a series of biannual anthologies from Belfast’s Bindweed Magazine, features a short story of mine called The Magician’s Assistant and the name on it is another pseudonym I used in the past and didn’t expect to use again: Paul McAllister.
In fact, I only used Paul McAllister once and that was a long time ago indeed. In the mid-1990s I had a short story called The Darkness Under the Earth published in issue 97 of the venerable Northern Irish literary magazine The Honest Ulsterman, or HU as it was sometimes abbreviated to. I’d heard that the magazine folded in 2003, but apparently it’s been revived and is on the go again as an online publication.
© The Honest Ulsterman
I suspected that my real name, Ian Smith, was too boring and non-descript to stick at the top of a story. Besides, the well-known Scottish writer Iain Crichton Smith, who wrote in both English and Gaelic, was still alive then. I’d known Iain Crichton Smith slightly, as he’d been the writer-in-residence at Aberdeen University during the last two years I’d studied there, and wanted to spare him the embarrassment of having my work confused with his… As The Darkness Under the Earth was set in Northern Ireland and was being submitted to a Northern Irish publication, I figured I should stick a vaguely Northern-Irish-sounding name on it and decided on Paul McAllister.
In fact, The Darkness Under the Earth was only the second piece of fiction I had published, and it was the first piece to appear in a magazine that paid its writers. Not that The Honest Ulsterman paid them lavishly. I received a cheque for five pounds. Also, I was a bit put-out to discover that the editor had sneakily made the cheque payable to ‘Paul McAllister’, not ‘Ian Smith’, which made it impossible for me to cash. That cheque now resides in a box somewhere as a historic artefact.
Seeing as The Magician’s Assistant was set in Northern Ireland, was a straightforward story based on a couple of incidents I remembered from my childhood there, and had none of the usual horror or fantasy shenanigans I normally write about, I thought when I submitted it to Bindweed Magazine it would be fun to dust down the name of Paul McAllister and attribute it to him. And hey presto. Paul McAllister is suddenly back in print.
Containing 163 pages of fiction and poetry described as ‘experimental, offbeat and one of a kind’, Winter Wonderland 2023: Bindweed Anthology can now be purchased as a paperback at Amazon US, UK and Canada. For details of how to read it on Kindle, click here.