Emma, your debut short
fiction collection, In The Lost of Syros, was recently published by Cultured
Llama. How did you go about putting the collection together?
In
all, the writing of the stories (sixteen in all) took seven or eight years. My
first short story was published in 2010; a year later, The Glasshouse Mountains won the Society of Women Writers and Journalists Short Story Award and the judge, Vanessa Gebbie, suggested I work
towards a first collection.
I looked at the finished stories I had (around six
completed and another four or so in progress) to see if they shared any common
themes and found that the characters were all, in some sense, lost and trying
to find their way; another link was the work and life on the New Zealand short
story writer Katherine Mansfield which ran in and out of the collection like a
dark thread. Towards the end of 2012 I started submitting and was accepted by
Cultured Llama fifteen months later. The Lost of Syros was published eighteen
months after that.
Do you keep a collection
of ideas, or do you approach each short story with a blank page and see what
develops organically?
My
story ideas arise organically, most often from a memory, an event, a feeling,
something odd and fleeting; if I get a glimpse or scent a story I try and note
it down before it disappears.
Sometimes themed calls for submissions will prompt an idea, for example
the ‘Time’ theme for Arachne Press’s Solstice Shorts Competition or Cinnamon Press’s current competition ‘The Lies We Tell Ourselves.’
Congratulations on Flowers making the short list for the 2015 Bristol Short Story Prize. How did
you choose that particular piece?
I come from a
family of florists and flower-growers and have been (sometimes reluctantly) a
florist and flower-grower myself. I wanted to write about the role flowers have
played in my life; the fact that Flowers
has been shortlisted for the Bristol Short Story prize has encouraged me to
explore this idea further.
What is it that draws you to the short
story form over longer works of fiction?
The first short
stories I encountered as a schoolgirl, by New Zealand writers Katherine Mansfield, Patricia Grace and Owen Marshall, made me fall in love with the
form. I’ve never thought of short stories as less powerful or important than
the novel or novella. I’m also intrigued by the idea that short stories are, by
their nature, a subversive, experimental, marginal form. I like that the fact
that I can complete a story in months rather than years, as is the case when
I’m writing a novel.
Which short fiction authors inspire you and why?
There are so
many short fiction writers I admire: Claire Keegan, David Constantine, Paula
Morris, Jane Gardam, Kirsty Gunn, Jhumpa Lahiri, James Baldwin, Patricia Grace,
Katherine Mansfield, Ernest Hemingway, John Cheever, Lucy Wood, Alice Munro,
Jacob Ross, Jennifer Egan, Julie Orringer, Mavis Gallant, Deborah Eisenberg,
Patrick Holland, Raymond Carver, Tim Winton – and that’s just for starters. They
all inspire me because they write, or have written, great short stories.
What are you working on at the moment?
At the moment
I’m working on the longer piece of flower-themed fiction (as mentioned above)
and slowly putting together a second collection of short stories. In the coming
months I’ll also be editing my novel, Travelling
in the Dark.
What are the great challenges in
creating short fiction?
The greatest
challenges are creating complex characters and their worlds in a few thousand
words. For me, the best short stories are, to quote Alison MacLeod, ‘quiet,
radical, human and delicious.’
What
fascinates me about writing is how it gathers every aspect of living into
itself. There’s something mysterious and hard to define about the creation of a
story that I find captivating; the gift it offers is a rare kind of freedom.
Do you have a blog or use social media?
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