Fictionable: Recent Episodes
Fictionable
Interviews, book chat and everything about the short stories and graphic fiction from all around the world appearing in Fictionable
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In this Spring series of podcasts we've heard from Jenny Erpenbeck, Grahame Williams, Lauren Caroline Smith and Rose Rahtz. We bring it to a close with Jakub Żulczyk and his story Many Years of Hardships, translated by John and Małgorzata Markoff.
Żulczyk became a bestseller with hard-hitting thrillers such as The Institute and Blinded by the Lights, a semi-autobiographical novel which the author turned into a hit show for HBO. But Many Years of Hardships draws on deeper roots.
"One of my first memories from childhood is my grandmother telling me stories about little dwarfs," Żulczyk explains. His hero, Big Barrel, is one of the characters from the Polish imaginary, a krasnoludek only two inches tall.
A lot of Żulczyk's writing comes from "dark places", he continues, but in Many Years of Hardships he gives his twisted sense of humour free rein. "At the heart of it all, it’s a funny story."
But there's a serious side to Big Barrel's struggles with food, doggos and a shadowy figure pulling all the strings. Surrounded by war, powerful corporations and the climate crisis, the dwarf's predicament feels all too familiar. "We live in a world now where everyone feels like this," Żulczyk says.
The challenges we face may be acute, but the author remains an optimist.
"Totalitarian structures, or power structures, or violent structures ultimately fail in confrontation with powers that are open-minded, that have freedom of thought, open channels of communication and so on."
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This spring we've already heard from Jenny Erpenbeck, Grahame Williams and Lauren Caroline Smith. This time we welcome Rose Rahtz and her short story Where Hast Thou Been, Sister?
Rahtz tells us how the story started as a response to the opening of Macbeth, where there is a roll of thunder and Shakespeare's First Witch asks, "Where hast thou been, sister?"
"I've always really liked the witch's response, because she's so perfunctory about it," she says. "She just goes 'I've been killing swine, obviously, I'm a witch'."
Thinking about female power and powerful children, Rahtz transported Shakespeare's blasted heath to a farm park and turned his witch into a toddler. There's something mighty about a small child, she explains, "It's that tug between huge power of emotion and complete impotence within the world."
Channelling her eldest daughter, who was a "force of nature" when she was young, Rahtz sets her uncanny toddler loose – though she insists that no animals were harmed in the making of this story.
Witches are outlaw figures who disrupt the patriarchy, Rahtz continues, and writing is a kind of disruption to her job as an English teacher. While the GCSE English language paper is a "horrorshow" where children are being asked to dance a grammatical jig, "the joy of being an English teacher is you teach around the edges of the curriculum".
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In this Spring series of podcasts we've already heard from Jenny Erpenbeck and Grahame Williams. Now it's time for Lauren Caroline Smith and her short story The Placing of Hands.
Smith looks back on her teenage years, when being a committed Christian made her something of an oddity, and reflects on what it’s like to be a person of faith within a predominantly secular culture.
Our culture is very individualistic, Smith says, so if you're following Christ, "you’re not following the culture… to be so fully part of it is kind of rebellious."
We're being persuaded all the time, she continues, in politics, fashion or wider society – "primarily to buy things". But when churches put the focus on converting young people at large-scale events, religious persuasion can tip over into manipulation.
"They make you kind of vulnerable," Smith says. "There's all this music playing, there's people praying for you, there's people telling you how you should feel… That can become spiritual abuse."
She's still not sure where she is in her journey of faith, but Smith says that books can often play a similar role: "For me it's often the same thing."
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Last time we heard from Jenny Erpenbeck, who told us that before her latest novel Kairos she'd "never written a love story". This time we welcome Grahame Williams and his short story Making It Happen.
Like the industrialist Sir John Harvey-Jones, an inspirational figure in Making It Happen, Williams says he's not much of a planner: "If there's a spark, then let's just start writing and see where it goes."
He didn't set out to tell the story of the Troubles, but – as in his own childhood – they loom over Quinton McCandless's life as an "ever-present threat".
"Stuff was going on, heinous things happening," Williams says, "that constant reminder that we live in quite a difficult and strange place."
Growing up, he didn't have "a very sophisticated understanding of the Troubles", Williams adds, and there was always an expectation that he would leave.
"My story was, I left Northern Ireland and the narrative was fulfilled," he says. "But what happens if you don't leave, if you have to stay?"
Living with a young family in England, Williams says he really feels "that distance from home… There's an ache, there's a pain that comes from having left."
Despite this sense of loss and the many troubles that beset Quinton in Making It Happen, Williams says he maintains a sunny outlook on life: "I'm definitely an optimist."
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Spring has finally sprung and with it another series of Fictionable podcasts. Over the next few weeks we'll be hearing from Jakub Żulczyk, Grahame Williams, Lauren Caroline Smith and Rose Rahtz. But we launch into Spring with Jenny Erpenbeck and her haunting short story Sloughing Off One Skin.
When we spoke down the line from Berlin, Erpenbeck began by reading from the opening of the story in German as well as in Michael Hofmann's supple translation. Sloughing Off One Skin is set in motion by a piece of paper – a false passport – and Erpenbeck admits she's always been "suspicious of documents".
"Paper is not just paper," she says, adding that it's "a surface, and under the surface things can happen. They are shifting, they are moving. The surface stays unmoved."
Erpenbeck explains how Sloughing Off One Skin ends with a spooky coincidence drawn from life – "in a way this is a ghost story" – and confesses she struggled with the ending for her novel of the refugee crisis, Go, Went, Gone.
"I couldn’t see any kind of end to the story," she says, "and so I thought I’ll write down a solution that obviously is no solution, so that readers can understand there is something left to do."
Borders loom over Erpenbeck's latest novel Kairos as well, which charts the dissolution of the border between East and West Germany in 1989. The author recalls the strange dislocations of changing countries while remaining in one place. "Outside became inside, or our outside wasn’t there any more."
Erpenbeck adds that she has a "strong connection" with questions of memory and "how times are interwoven with each other".
"I wanted to become an archaeologist when I was young," she says, "so I’m still digging."
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We've already heard from Linda Mannheim, Richard Smyth, Ariel Marken Jack. and Robert Neuwirth in this Winter series of podcasts. Now we bring it to a close with Liam Hogan and his short story Backstory.
Hogan tells us how it all came from his suspicion of heroes. "They often have it far too easy," he explains. "If you have someone with supreme skills then… what's the challenge?"
There's a dark thread running through his collection of short stories, Happy Ending Not Guaranteed, but Hogan says "there has to be an element of humour".
Literary fiction may have a problem with comedy, but Hogan is unabashed: "It's the puncturing of pomposity, which is just fun."
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In this Winter series of podcasts we've heard from Linda Mannheim, Richard Smyth and Ariel Marken Jack. This time we welcome Robert Neuwirth and his short story The Disambiguation.
Neuwirth tells us how his story started from a couple of one-liners that were driving him crazy and wound up stuffed full of computer code.
We anthropomorphise the machines that surround us, he says, so we keep expecting "artificial intelligences to be human. But they're not. They're inhuman."
While he tries to keep his fiction separate from his career as a journalist, where he's been reporting on informal economies and shanty towns for more than twenty years, there's obviously some "bleed through".
"The world is a non-narrative place," he explains. "There are stories we can tell and those stories have a kind of narrative, but there are always fractures in the narrative and places where your complacent narrative blows up."
Next time we'll be talking heroes and villains with Liam Hogan.
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We've already heard from Linda Mannheim and Richard Smyth in this Winter series, and now it's time for Ariel Marken Jack and their story The Bread Boy.
Marken Jack tells us how their writing began in isolation, flat on their back with chronic fatigue syndrome. This debilitating illness is giving rise to writing they call "the most 21st-century form of literature that I can imagine… Who among us doesn't have that feeling that almost everything in life is completely outside of our control?"
They reflect on the second guessing common to all those marginalised by the patriarchy: "This thing happened. This was bad. Was it really that bad?" And they pay tribute to the value of connecting with those who have had similar experiences.
They also wax lyrical about the alchemy of making bread and the joys of making pickles – a "vote of confidence in the future".
"It takes about three weeks to make a good jar of sauerkraut," Marken Jack explains. "So you're slicing the cabbage and you’re going, 'I'm going to be here in three weeks. And this cabbage is going to be amazing'."
Over the next three weeks at Fictionable we’ll be hearing from Robert Neuwirth and Liam Hogan.
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Last week we heard from Linda Mannheim, who told us that the only way she can go back to the neighbourhood where she grew up is in fiction. This time we welcome Richard Smyth and his short story Karóly Bálint's Metaphor.
Smyth explains how his story isn’t exactly set in Budapest and reflects on how the bleakness of the steppe echoes the stereotypical grimness of the north of England.
Writing in the third person can feel "restrictive", he continues, because he wants "to see inside", while the first person is "just more fun".
"Talking in a new voice is such an absolute delight," he says. "I think it’s one of the reasons why I write."
That and perhaps love – a subject Smyth says he returns to "again and again". Not that he has a rose-tinted vision of humanity, he adds. "My basic position is: people are all right."
Next time we’ll be talking baking with Ariel Marken Jack.
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In this Winter series of podcasts, we'll be hearing from Richard Smyth, Ariel Marken Jack, Robert Neuwirth and Liam Hogan. We start off with Linda Mannheim, who joined us down the line from Berlin.
Mannheim explains how the central character in her story Those Last Days appeared to her "out of the blue" and how she found her fiction inexorably drawn back to her childhood in Washington Heights.
Things were a little different back then to Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical – there was certainly less singing and dancing – but what is writing for, she asks, if not to explore the difficult subjects that are part of life?
Growing up in "a refugee neighbourhood", the sense that there are places you can never go back to was "really, really big", Mannheim adds. "The only way I could go back there was by writing about it."
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We've already heard from M John Harrison, Irena Karpa, Seán Padraic Birnie and Shauna Mackay on the Fictionable podcast. Now we bring this autumn series to a close with Catriona Bolt and her mycological short story Bloom.
Bolt tells us how she fell in love with mushrooms despite, or perhaps because of, their double nature. These mysterious organisms were the perfect lens through which to explore the expectations surrounding young women at the beginning of the 19th century, she explains, an issue that still has resonance in the 21st. With historical fiction, "you can step into another land", she continues, but it's always connected to the present day.
Fairy-Land hovers at the edges of Bloom. Bolt reveals how she had to resist its pull and how she found the model for her sparring sisters closer to home.
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In this autumn series of podcasts we've heard from M John Harrison, Irena Karpa and Seán Padraic Birnie. This week we welcome Shauna Mackay to discuss her short story Matching up the Pattern at the Join.
Mackay tells us how her short stories are driven by voice, by characters she conjures up and then follows on the page: "I sound like a witch now." The characters come from mixing and banging words together, she explains, so she enjoys spending time with them, even if they're sometimes a little awkward.
According to Mackay, the northern texture of these voices emerges from the rhythms and tones of her everyday life, but it's hard to say exactly where they come from. Perhaps she's drawing on the time she spent working as a nurse, she continues, where you "see humanity in all its messy glory".
Next week we'll be joined by Catriona Bolt, who'll be talking mushrooms and reading from her short story Bloom.
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This autumn we've already heard from M John Harrison, Irena Karpa and her band, Qarpa. This week we have an appointment with Seán Padraic Birnie and his story The Medical Room.
Birnie tells us how he was fuelled by frustration at work and struggles with chronic fatigue syndrome. "It made me laugh, I think," he says, "but I wasn't sure it would make anyone else laugh."
Elements of the gruesome office mechanics in The Medical Room are drawn from life, Birnie explains, but the pull of horror fiction lays bare the power structures that are always at play.
Next time we welcome Shauna Mackay, with Catriona Bolt joining us the following week.
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After hearing last week from M John Harrison, who discussed how he makes fiction from fragments of reality, this week we turn it up to eleven as we welcome Irena Karpa. Fuelled by the latest track from her band, Qarpa, she reads from Kate Tsurkan's translation of her short story, Fellow Traveler, and gives us the inside track on that journey.
Karpa explains why the language from the streets that she used in her early novels came as such a shock to Ukrainian literary culture, and how her pride in her country is "like being proud that you have kidneys or heart or lungs – you're just born like this". Her fiction and her music are part of the same artistic project, she adds, even though sometimes her fans don't even know she does both.
Looking back to 2014, Karpa remembers playing to crowds of thousands in Maidan square. She explores what life is like as the war grinds on, and looks forward to a day when Ukrainians can build a new society.
Next time we'll be focusing on Seán Padraic Birnie, with Shauna Mackay and Catriona Bolt joining us over the weeks to come. In the meantime, you can read Kate Tsurkan's report on how Ukrainian writers have been responding to Russian aggression since 2014.
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Over the next few weeks, we'll be hearing from Irena Karpa, Seán Padraic Birnie, Shauna Mackay and Catriona Bolt. But we launch this autumn podcast series with M John Harrison and his haunting short story, I Can't Tell.
Harrison tells us how he constructs his stories from fragments of real life, filed in notebooks and then reassembled into uncanny structures on the page. At one stage, this process was "consciously not very fictiony" he says, but by the time you’ve spent ten years exploring the boundary between fiction and nonfiction, "it's stopped being conscious any more, and it's just a thing that you do".
Fiction should be "read like nonfiction", he continues. "It's not there for you to put on like clothes and re-enact."
The past looms large over both I Can't Tell and his recent anti-memoir, Wish I Was Here, but according to Harrison writing has always been a struggle with things that have gone before. That and his "very, very unrelatable" characters, who are uniformly tricky to get on with – tricky, that is, apart from the cats.
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This summer we've been hearing a little more from our amazing authors in an expanded series of podcasts. Joyce Carol Oates confessed she feels "like a fourteen-year-old girl" while Fiona Mozley admitted to an "awkward personality". José Falero – voiced by Maria Jacqueline Evans – argued that the 21st century's obscene inequalities can only be addressed through "diversity in the spaces of power" and Donal McLaughlin declared that he does "expect the reader to keep up".
We bring this series to a close with Sabba Khan, who joins us to talk about At the Door. She tells us how she started working on this graphic short story at a difficult time in her own life, and how the move from memoir into fiction gave her a sense of freedom. She reveals her obsession with London's Victorian terraced housing and a fascination with the spirit realm of black magic, djinns and demons. Khan also examines the barriers that divide comics from writing in prose, and reflects on the mystery of her mother tongue.
We talk fiction, autobiography and colourful language with an author who insists he is not his character
In this summer's new, expanded podcast we've already heard from Joyce Carol Oates, Fiona Mozley and José Falero – translated and interpreted by Maria Jacqueline Evans. This time we're heading north to catch up with Donal McLaughlin and his story runaway.
McLaughlin has been writing short stories about his main character, Liam O'Donnell, for thirty years. Both author and protagonist grew up in the heart of a large, Catholic family and moved from Northern Ireland to Scotland in the 1970s. And McLaughlin admits that runaway was sparked by a childhood memory of running away from home. But he denies his story is autobiographical, citing the title of Janice Galloway's 2008 memoir, This Is Not About Me.
He explains how adopting Liam's narrow perspective allows him to widen the story's reach, and how the voice he hears in his head needs more than standard spellings to sing on the page. Going back to Derry as a teenager, McLaughlin says he would marvel at the humour, colour and warmth of the conversations around him. And it's that energy he captures in his prose.
Next time we welcome Sabba Khan to talk about her story, At the Door.
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We've heard already this summer from Joyce Carol Oates and Fiona Mozley, but now the translator Maria Jacqueline Evans turns interpreter as we talk – via the magic of email – to José Falero.
He tells us why he wanted to look at the violence of a flash kidnapping from the inside in his short story Flash of Dignity, and what drives his characters to attack a woman at gunpoint and throw her in the boot of her own car. According to Falero, capitalism is to blame: "Guarantee that people have access to consumption and they won’t rob from anyone."
Even though he wrote the story in a Porto Alegre dialect, he continues, it has struck a chord with people all over Brazil because people all over Brazil are struggling with the same problems. And how do you fix the outrageous inequalities which are at the heart of all this? Falero’s answer is simple: diversity.
Next time we'll joined by Donal McLaughlin with Sabba Khan following after.
After hearing last week how Joyce Carol Oates is firmly focused on the future, this week we’re focusing on Fiona Mozley and her mighty story Cadair Idris.
She tells us how this trip up the mountain began on a family holiday and explores how characters suffering from mental illness pose a particular challenge for writers of fiction. As the kind of author who has always tried to put herself in other people's shoes, Mozley says she's convinced writers can tell stories that are not their own – provided they do the work.
Next time we'll be hearing from José Falero and his translator Maria Jacqueline Evans, with Donal McLaughlin and Sabba Khan joining us over the coming weeks.
It's revolution on the Fictionable podcast, where we've evolved again to hear more from our fabulous contributors.
We're devoting an entire programme to Joyce Carol Oates and her fantastic story Small Veins, with Fiona Mozley, José Falero and his translator Maria Jacqueline Evans, Donal McLaughlin and Sabba Khan all joining us over the coming weeks.
In this programme, Oates tells us how she paid for Small Veins with her own blood, and how she works out if something is a "Story" or a "Tale of Suspense". She talks typography as she explains how she captures the rhythm of thought on the page, and examines the very Oatesian notion that "the unimaginable improbable will become, within a surprisingly short period of time, the imagined probable".
"In my heart I'm sort of like a fourteen-year-old girl," Oates confesses, and perhaps this focus on the new and the wonderful is the secret of the unquenchable creativity this eighty-five-year-old master of fiction in all its forms still shows in all her work.
The Fictionable podcast heads for Tel Aviv, where Etgar Keret talks about the mystery of translation, the surrealism of technology and surprising himself with his own fiction. The sudden reverses in stories like Point of No Return are rarely planned in from the start, Keret explains, but emerge as he writes – an impulse towards instability he attributes to his upbringing as the child of two Holocaust survivors.
Lucy Caldwell tells us how she built her story Katherine Mansfield's Cat by weaving the New Zealander’s words with her own, and how the mystical connection she feels with the pioneering Modernist makes the hairs stand up on the back of her neck. Michael Donkor says he didn't set out to épater les bourgeois with his strikingly intimate story of a three-way relationship, Invitation, while Adaora Raji reflects on how the Biafran war she returns to in her story The Proper Way to Cook Oha still feels like a "continuous present tense" more than fifty years later. And Serena Katt explains how her graphic story Submerged rose up from something that happened to her – an experience that is all the more shocking because it is so everyday.
On this edition of the Fictionable podcast, Diana Evans tells us how she started cooking up her short story Broth. She talks about minimalism in fiction, female friendship and how the category “black writing” doesn’t make any sense. She also gives us a heads up about her forthcoming novel, A House for Alice, which finds the characters from Ordinary People struggling with questions of family and home.
Carlos Rojas turns simultaneous interpreter as we hear from Yan Lianke, and get a taste of all the other stories in our Winter edition – stories from Ali Smith, Ross Raisin and Lizzy Stewart, who tries to work out the going rate when it comes to pictures and thousands of words.
Evie Wyld joins us for the second edition of the Fictionable podcast to spill the beans about the inspiration for her short story The Land. She tells us about childhood holidays in a rat-infested caravan on the Isle of Wight and how she's fascinated by the twists and folds of time. She also keeps us up to the minute, confessing that she can go wild when she writes in the present tense.
We also welcome Amy Sackville, Yasmine Seale, Arinze Ifeakandu and Julian Hanshaw, who introduce all the stories in this Autumn issue – that is, when they can remember what they've written. And we also hear from our advisory panel: the composer Iain Chambers steps off the bench to provide the surging soundtrack to Fictionable’s audio output.
For the first edition of the Fictionable podcast, we welcome Sarah Hall, who reveals the inspirations for her story Be Good. She also explains why she chose to tell this haunting story in the second person, and why authors outside of the capital sometimes find themselves written out of the national conversation.
We hear about all the stories in Summer 2022, with short readings from Hall, Alain Mabanckou, Ladee Hubbard, Owen Booth and Isabel Greenberg. And we also hear a little about how the magazine was funded, with a great, big Fictionable thank you to all our Kickstarter backers.