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Spotlight PhD/ECR Interview Series: Emma Kittle-Pey

1. Can you remember the first short story you ever read?

I remember thinking Kafka’s The Metamorphosis was ridiculous. Later I fell in love with short fiction and thought differently about Kafka’s work, considering story but also themes related to society, working life and family. Ideas or moments in reading often inspire my writing. For example, when they can’t rely on him Gregor’s family must become active, so they become active. In my book the single mother must do everything, so she learns to do everything.

2. What can people gain by reading more short stories?

When students join my creative writing classes, they often say they have difficulty finishing stories. Oral story-telling and reading short fiction means that you are thinking about stories as a whole. It’s a great way to learn about writing or the ideas you’re interested in. I’m currently reading and thinking about Kate Atkinson’s story The Void in her linked collection Normal Rules Don’t Apply and Katy Wimhurst’s An Orchid in My Belly Button.

3. You bring a researcher-author perspective to short fiction. How do your creative and academic writing relate to each other?

I wanted to write a new story for the mother sacrificed to the plot in the film Muriel’s Wedding. This negative treatment of middle-aged women is shown in the story Lentils and Lilies by Helen Simpson. I explored Bakhtin’s dialogism, invitational rhetoric and polyvocality, contemporary novel composition and short story cycles which value and include the older mother’s perspective e.g. Girl, Woman, Other or The Wren, The Wren. This influenced the structure of my novel.

Dr Emma Kittle-Pey has recently completed her PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Essex. Her thesis is a creative/critical exploration of place and gender in contemporary fiction. The novel is a (grand)mother-daughter relationship set in coastal Essex. The reflective commentary focuses on place, specifically local coastal communities, the evolution of the mother-daughter plot, working women and women who write, writing short fiction and using short stories in longer form fiction.

Emma has had two collections published by Patrician Press and has read her short fiction nationally and internationally. She teaches at the University of Essex, ACL Essex, at a primary school, and works on projects for Essex Book Festival. She is the founder and curator of Colchester WriteNight, a popular monthly community writing event.

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Short fiction in a flash: a bite-size interview with Vesna Main, by Sonya Moor

What can short stories expect from readers?
I expect you to remember that I am not a novel. If I say, ‘the queen died, then the king died of grief’, don’t ask what happened before or after. I shine a light on the particular, an event, a character, a time. The rest remains in the dark. I experiment with words and use them sparingly. Less is more. The last request: let me be a chameleon and turn into colours as yet unseen.

How do short stories relate, if at all, to borderless fiction?
I studied Comparative Literature because I believe that the best literature surpasses national divisions and political borders. Literature is too important to be restricted by what are often arbitrary partitions. Short stories can be universal because they are focused and can exist outside period and location. That makes it easier than any other form for the short story to move between languages and cultures. Write short story, can translate, will travel.

Which short story last made you jealous and why?
I am jealous of the writers who succeed in what I am trying to do, which is to have a recognisable style while making each text formally different. Lydia Davis always impresses, as does Gabriel Josipovici. His collection Heart’s Wings (2010) offers a range of forms, each story a world of its own. If you force me to name just one, then it is ‘Mobius the Stripper’. It is profound, funny and clever.

Vesna Main has published several novels – each stylistically different – and a collection of short stories, Temptation: A User’s Guide (Salt, 2017). Two of her stories have been selected for Best British Short Stories (Salt 2017, 2019).
Her latest novel, Waiting for A Party (Salt 2024) is a narrative told by a ninety-two-year-old woman longing for affection and sexual intimacy.

[References: ‘Mobius the Stripper’ is collected in Josipovici, Gabriel, Mobius the Stripper: Stories and Short Plays (London: Victor Gollancz, 1974) and Heart’s Wings and Other Stories (Manchester: Carcanet, 2010).]

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Spotlight PhD/ECR Interview Series: Maddie Sinclair, by Ines Gstrein

  1. Why did you choose to work on short fiction in your PhD thesis?

During an MA at Durham University, I became interested in the genre’s marginality in the context of literary production.  I encountered an interesting quote from J.G. Ballard which got me thinking about the hierarchy of genres and the unevenness of literary space. In an introduction to a collection, he describes short stories as the “loose change in the treasury of fiction, easily ignored beside the wealth of novels available, an over-valued currency that often turns out to be counterfeit” (Ballard 2023: 80). My PhD research was inspired by this conceptualization of the short story as a kind of literary loose change in the “treasury of fiction” – a treasury largely dominated by the privileged genre of the novel. It worked to highlight the distinct political affordances of short fictional forms emerging in the twenty-first century.

  1. In your opinion, what is an essential quality for a short story?

I’m certainly not the first person to suggest this, but for me, the best short stories work to defamiliarize reality as we know it. I’m thinking, for example, about Julio Cortázar’s description of the “peculiar” atmosphere of the short form in “Aspects of the Short Story”. For Cortázar, while the novel “progressively accumulates effects upon the reader”, the short story paradoxically illuminates – through its inherent brevity – something “beyond itself” (Cortázar 1980: 8-12). I’m interested in writers who experiment with the short story as a distinct site of surrealist disruption, which potentially illuminates human experience, or catalyzes political thought.

  1. Could you tell me about something you found particularly striking when analysing the twenty-first century short story?

During my PhD research at University of Warwick, I was really struck by the efflorescence of short forms emerging in the twenty-first century which push the aesthetics of brevity to its literary extreme, such as digital fiction and flash fiction. I’m excited to read future research which unpacks the possibilities offered by these experimental subgenres, as they respond to our fragmentary yet hyper-connected modern world.

References

Ballard, J. G. (2023). Selected Nonfiction, 1962-2007. United Kingdom: MIT Press.

Cortázar, Julio. (1980).  ‘Some Aspects of the Short Story’, trans. By Aden Hayes, Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature Culture and Theory, 38:1, p. 8-18.

Maddie is an Early Career Teaching Fellow in the Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning at the University of Warwick, UK. She has recently completed her Wolfson Foundation funded doctoral research in English and Comparative Literary Studies, which focused on world literature, feminist studies, and the politics of the short story in the twenty-first century.

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Short fiction in a flash: a bite-size interview with Nicholas Royle, by Sonya Moor

Which short-story last made you cry – for good reasons?

Good question, because I thought I would be able to answer it easily. I thought about anthologies and collections and favourite writers and came up blank. I reread Jamaica Kincaid’s ‘Blackness’ and remained dry eyed. The short story is my favourite form, and I cry a lot, but not, it seemed, at short stories. But then I reread Robert Coover’s ‘Going For a Beer’ – ‘life is short and brutal’ – and here they came. Actual tears.

You have a nine-hour train journey and can take one short story to read, several times over – which do you choose?

Maybe that very short Kafka story – is it ‘Before the Law’? – that everyone rather annoyingly says is better than all the longer, more obvious Kafka stories, to see if I can work out what they’re on about. Or Alison Moore’s ‘When the Door Closed, It Was Dark’, to try to work out exactly how she creates that sense of dread. Or Robert Coover’s ‘Going For a Beer’ – it’s good to cry on a long journey.

Describe your writing space, and your ideal writing space?

Seat 48, coach A, the so-called Quiet Zone, on the Manchester–London train. Seats 47 and 48 are reserved for cyclists, but few turn up. The Quiet Zone ‘rules’ are often broken, but I use earphones and listen to carefully chosen music that blocks other people’s noise without disturbing anyone and I write. My ideal writing space could be recreated if the café on the corner of Belgrade Road in Stoke Newington were to reopen.

 

Nicholas Royle is the author of five short story collections – Mortality, Ornithology, The Dummy and Other Uncanny Stories, London Gothic and Manchester Uncanny – and seven novels, most recently First Novel. He has edited more than two dozen anthologies and is series editor of Best British Short Stories for Salt, who also published his books-about-books, White Spines: Confessions of a Book Collector and Shadow Lines: Searching For the Book Beyond the Shelf. In 2009 he founded Nightjar Press.