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Just by chance, I stumbled across one of my short stories quoted in an article in the The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 2004. A very august literary tome, I have no doubt!

It is a 23 page treatise entitled "Emulative Versus Revisionist Occidentalism: Monetary and Other Values in Recent Singaporean Fiction" by Tamara S. Wagner

As if the title wasn't incomprehensible enough...

"Not all the stories published in the ``Western Women Write in Singapore'' series are as entrenched in Orientalist discourses and the most apparent effects of their inversions. In the different engagements with cliche´ s, however, they constitute a good point of
introduction to two-way flow of influences in the production of the region's fictions. Alison [Stuart's] ``Lost Souls'', for example, has a certain charm in its focus on a young boy's embarrassment over his parents'eager consumption of the ``exotic''at the start of their
expatriate lives:...etc"

This follows quite closely on another academic look at one of my romantic short stories on the Teach me Tonight blog http://teachmetonight.blogspot.com/search/label/Alison%20Stuart on which Laura Vivanco wrote

"Alison Stuart's Romance and the Single Girl has a meta-romance angle to it. It begins with the heroine, Sarah, reading a romance novel (though she denies her interest when her friend Julie scornfully refers to it as 'this rubbish'). Sarah wants to find romance; Julie thinks men are 'only after one thing'. Researchers for Harlequin's 2007 Romance Report found that 'The vast majority of men (92%) and women (94%) consider themselves at least somewhat romantic' but, all the same,

Sometimes the motivation behind a romantic gesture is less noble than we might hope: those tickets to your favorite ballet or that limited edition baseball card come with an unsaid expectation or a not-so subtle desire for… (surprise, surprise)… SEX. According to our survey results, nearly two out of three men (62%) and more than two in five women (44%) have done something special for someone they were dating because they hoped it would lead to sex.

That's not exactly what happens in this story, but nonetheless, events will perhaps cause both of them to have something of a change of attitude."

I'm often asked where the ideas for stories come from and most of my short stories are drawn from snippets of life. My short stories are, oddly, never (except with the exception of "The Promise") historicals. Even "The Promise" came about after a visit to the wonderful plantations along the Mississipi near New Orleans.

"Lost Souls" (which appears in Not All Pink Gins - the second of the Merlion anthologies) was written to give the children of expatriates a voice and is very much based on my youngest son's early experiences as a twelve year old exile. It appears, I hasten to add, with his consent!

Romance and the Single Girl is a look at the myths of romance and how true love can be found in unlikely people. Apparently this is "meta-romance"

Thank you to both Tamara and Laura for their look at my work. It's strange, but I thought I just wrote stories!