Tag: short stories

Writer Interview, Writers Chat, Writers Read, Writing Life

Writers Chat 56: Tara Masih on “How We Disappear” (Press 53: North Carolina, 2022)

Tara, How lovely to feature your work again on my Writers Chat series. We last chatted in 2020, about The Bitter Kind, a flash novelette and today we’re talking about your latest publication, How We Disappear (Press 53: North Carolina, 2022), a novella and stories – a Millions Most Anticipated book!

Cover of How We Disappear showing a painting of a woman disappearing or emerging against a light turquoise background

SG: I had the sense that How We Disappear is as much about appearance, judgement and expectation as it is about how we disappear and are disappeared. I was particularly moved by the last story in the collection, “Notes to the World” where the protagonist, Grigori finds that the notes he is reading speak not just of the woman’s life but also of his own. I loved the effect of the stories mirroring – literally timeless – but also how you show the repetition of human behaviour in relationships, who lives/survives, who hunts/is hunted and that haunting last line, “let me hear your voice”. Can you explain your intentions with the collection and the title (and the beautiful cover)?

TM: The stories were written over a period of time (“Those Who Have Gone” was actually written decades ago), and there was no intent in any of them to link up. It wasn’t until I realized I had enough for a collection and started looking at the stories to order them that I saw the connection of disappearance.

I think the various ways disappearance can be examined or experienced is only partially shown in this collection, but I do think my personal relationship history together with my upbringing in the sixties as a mixed child in a very white community allows me to understand both the feeling of having been left and the feeling of not being seen. Of disappearing into the background. What most allows us to be seen? I don’t think it’s all through the visual (though there is visual judgment) as much as through auditory (I include sign language as “auditory”). I think we have a greater need to be “heard” than seen, though both are powerful, often interchangeable needs. I want readers who have always had the benefit of being seen and heard to understand what it’s like to fight to be recognized, and I want those who can relate to the themes to find themselves or find ways to make better decisions so they can function at their best. We’ve also been collectively traumatized by the covid pandemic and many have lost loved ones. I hope some of the stories allow readers to work through the grief process.

The cover image is gorgeous and designer Claire V. Foxx did a beautiful job of making the type reflect the theme. She is the one who noted that the woman could be viewed as either disappearing or emerging.

SG: I love how you bring in the senses and all types of language and communication here, Tara. In “Fleeing Gravity” you tell a story that feels like an epic fairytale, yet it is grounded in history and colonisation. Ghosts flit in and out of reality – physically and psychologically – and it seemed to me that it was their story as much as Brandy’s story of displacement, creation and destruction. He says of the female ghost Miz Annabelle Fourier, “It’s easy to love a ghost who asks nothing of you”. I also found that this story had echoes – in terms of the relationships – of “In A Sulfate Mist”. What was your thinking behind these two stories?

TM: There is no conscious connection between those two stories outside of the fact that I’m drawn to stories set in the natural world. I love placing characters into landscapes and allowing those exterior settings to influence story and behavior. “Fleeing Gravity” began with my wanting to set a character in a ghost town. What would it be like to live among ghosts on a daily basis? To be a caretaker and be the only one left there at the end of the day? I also wanted to highlight the plight of the Montana “Landless Indians,” as they called themselves, who fought for recognition from our government for decades. They were basically told they were not worthy to exist and should disappear into the landscape. I’m thrilled to report that before this book got published the Little Shell Tribe members finally achieved their goal and are now federally recognized. They have essentially become “visible.”

Which brings up other issues such as power. Who holds it, and how it’s wielded to make others powerless by making them invisible.

SG: I think you’ve done a great job of highlighting the plight of the Little Shell Tribe members and here is hoping that in now being officially “visible”, the needs and rights are upheld and the Tribe treasured. A number of the stories in the collection explore connections between environment, emotion and story. I’m thinking here, for example, of “Delight” and “Billy Said This Really Happened to Lucy.” Desire is by the sea, Lucy is by the marsh and they both have ambiguous relationships with their surrounds. I really enjoyed the characters’ realisation about themselves and the land/sea around them and the powerful role that parental stories play in forming impressions, teaching social norms, particularly in relation to gender, the body and control. Can you talk about this?

TM: While I love the natural world, I recognize its disinterest in us. And its destructive power. Nature is beautiful and restorative. Nature is full of fury and can obliterate anything in its path in seconds. There are many writers now exploring the genre of cli-fi fiction. My writing doesn’t go that far into what we are facing now, but perhaps as someone who is bicultural, I try to present the reality of both sides. The same for people. In “Delight,” we first see the father as a typical abusive parent. In the last scene, I hope readers catch something else. In the Lucy story, her mother returns in the guise of a poisonous snake. Lucy both welcomes this new interaction but is also wary of it.

We rarely see women in wilderness stories, though that is changing as well. But I still can’t tell you there is a large list of women who write about nature and place, especially in short stories. Men have long had that domain almost exclusively to themselves. My female characters are either learning to be comfortable in that male-dominated wilderness, sometimes with the help of men, or have found their own ways into the wilderness and are leading the way for the men who are following.

SG: I loved how you channelled the writing process – and formation of a writer – in the cleverly constructed “Agatha: A Life in Unauthorised Fragments”. In some ways this story feels like the spine of the collection; it is almost like a reflection on the story telling process. “Every story is an escape story.”

In a way this book helps the readers escape. Did the writing help you escape and do you think this is one of the roles of writing/reading in our lives – and in Agatha’s?  

TM: Thank you. I just loved writing that story. I had studied Christie’s disappearance decades ago in high school. Besides loving her mysteries, I was obsessed with trying to find out what happened when she disappeared. When I realized I needed another story to flesh out this collection I recalled that long ago research and took to it again with great glee. As someone who has a minor in sociology, human behavior totally intrigues me and I have my own theory about what happened. It’s not anything ground-breaking, but I did channel my own experiences as a female writer, as a crisis counsellor, and as a woman who has been cheated on.

The epigram is just something that came to me when I was writing the story. Kind of a voice over, if you will. I think that all stories we tell are either escape hatches from our own lives or attempts to escape from someone or something or even ourselves. I was thinking of all that rather than of readers escaping into the stories, but yes, that is happening as well on the other end of listening or reading a story.

SG: Yes, I think we are touching on the very powerful invisible connection and dialogue between writer and reader! In the novella An Aura Surrounds That Night, a family views the news of the assignation of JFK on the TV, a child who captures slugs that escape and leave silvery trails on the bedroom ceiling comes of age and she begins to notice the inside/outside-ness of life:

“But there was Grammy below me, now trapped inside herself, while outside Japanese beetles, lightning bugs, moths, mosquitoes, gnats were flying into the window screens, banging and buzzing.”

Like other characters in the stories, she has the gift of second sight (hence the title) yet the gift cannot stop what is going to happen to her sister. I loved this novella and I think the placement in the book worked very well – the narrative carried much of the sensibility of the early stories and was one which I found really poignant. Have you any plans to write more of this story…?

TM: Ha! You are not the first to want more. I’m afraid at this point that story is as fully told as I can make it. It did begin as a novel and I just could not take it where it needed to go. But I kept tinkering with it, not wanting to lose the sisters entirely. When I finally recast it as a flash novella, it all fell into place. The writing flowed, the scenes congealed, and so I have to say it’s in the form it’s meant to be in, no more, no less. But never say never, right?

Thanks again for noticing and appreciating what I was trying to do not only with the story but the full collection. It warms my heart and helps keep me writing!

SG: Oh so wonderful to chat with you, Tara, and your writing warms many hearts. Now lastly, some fun questions:

  • Beach or mountains? Beach for sure. Love the ocean and all things watery.
  • Silence or noise when writing? Silence. Noise stresses me out.
  • Kindle, paperback or hardback? Hardback or paperback. Nothing beats the tactile feeling of a book in hand.
  • Dogs or cats? Love cats.
  • I love cats, too! So, what is the most surprising read you’ve had this year? I found a book in a remainder bin and loved it. The Australia Stories by Todd James Pierce. I don’t know why I never heard of it. A hybrid novel that was likely ahead of its time.
Tara Masih, Photograph courtesy of Tara Masih

Connect with Tara via her website.

Thank you to Press 53 and Tara for the advance copy of How We Disappear.

Writer Interview, Writers Chat, Writing Life

Writers Chat 51: Bernie McGill on “This Train is For”(No Alibis Press: Belfast, 2022)

Bernie, You are very welcome to my WRITERS CHAT series. Congratulations on This Train is For (No Alibis Press: Belfast, 2022) – a fantastic short story collection with, as Jan Carson has said, “not a word wasted or misplaced.”

Cover of “This Train is For” by Bernie McGill showing interior of a train carriage with a suitcase by a window. Light slants on the floor in front of the suitcase. The train seat is empty. (Photograph provided by author)

SG: Before we get into the details of the stories in this collection – your first since 2013 – could you tell us about how you put it together in terms of themes and order.  A number of the stories have been previously published in award winning anthologies such as The Long Gaze Back and The Glass Shore and other stories debut in This Train is For.

BMcG: I was aiming for a mix of stories in the collection that reflected what I had been writing over the last few years. Some of the stories were written in response to a commission, some were not. I don’t tend to think about theme when I’m in the process of writing, but looking at the stories together, I can see that certain themes do emerge. There are concerns about the ways in which women and girls have been treated in Ireland, north and south, over the course of the last seventy years or so; stories that touch on Troubles-related violence and on the particular identity of being Northern Irish, and stories of lives that are fractured by aspects of loss. When we were ordering the stories for the collection, we tried to alternate between work that had appeared in previous publications and work that was unpublished. It seemed a good idea to open and close with new stories so we placed ‘This Train is For’ at the beginning since the collection takes its title from that story, and ‘In the Interests of Wonder’ at the end. The last line of the last story contains an allusion to mischievous intent that we liked as an ending to the collection.

SG: I love that connection. Brilliantly done! I’m particularly interested in how many of the stories explore how we inhabit places and how they inhabit us, too – from seats and windows on public transport in the opening “This Train is For” to spaces in houses that are familiar and also strange in “The House of the Quartered Door” and “The Escapologist.” Places offer opportunity for healing and hiding. Can you talk a little about this?

BMcG: I wrote the notes for ‘This Train is For’ while I was working as Writing Fellow for the Royal Literary Fund at Queen’s and I was travelling, two days a week, on the train from Coleraine to Belfast and back. I wasn’t getting much time to write so I started note-taking on the train journey, watching out the window, and it struck me how untethered an experience a train journey can be. I got interested in the idea of being transported: I could see other passengers reading or sleeping, listening to music on headphones or watching video on their devices, apparently unaware for the most part of the places we were passing through. There are no road signs when you travel by train: the only named markers are the stations. We were passing through the places in between stops without any real sense of where we’d been. So I started to trace the rail route by map, and to research the names of the townlands the train passed through, their etymologies and histories. I spent a great deal of time poring over the online maps at PRONI (the Public Records Office for Northern Ireland), and on the website for the Northern Ireland Place-Names Project at Queen’s. From that research came the voice of the main character who has worked all his life in maps, in the planning departments of local councils. That character is carrying a sense of dislocation. I was curious as to why place, or the loss of a place, might be playing on his mind.

Other stories are set abroad, in houses we’ve stayed in as a family when we’ve holidayed over the years. I’m fascinated by the clues that householders leave around. As a writer, you can’t help but begin to try and piece the lives of those absent people together, construct personalities and life stories, daily routines for the houseowners out of the paraphernalia that’s there. That’s an act of storytelling in itself, the decisions that an individual makes about what they choose to leave in their house for strangers to see or use. Some people may be consciously curating, creating an impression of a particular lifestyle by leaving a coffee grinder or a particular set of books; others may be accidentally giving something away that they’d prefer not to have divulged. ‘The Snagging List’ was inspired by a house we rented in Majorca; ‘The House of the Quartered Door’ by a friend’s house in Sardinia. It can feel quite investigative, staying in another person’s home. As soon as you have questions about the owners, stories begin to form. And I’m always curious about the reasons why a character might have gone to a particular place, so that’s where the healing and hiding comes in. Looking at the stories together, they feature quite a few people who could be said to be in transit: some are temporarily, others more permanently displaced.

SG: I think that’s what I particularly loved about the collection – it feels like stories for writers in the best possible way – and I totally pictured myself in those places and indeed, felt like in other (transient) homes too. You’re wonderful at understatement and this comes from, in part, your lyrical, poetic language – we are so lost in the descriptions and details of what surrounds the character that we almost miss the emotional heft of a moment yet we still feel it. I’m thinking about “The House of the Quartered Door” where Gina is in Sardinia mourning the passing of a relationship which didn’t happen (her biological mother) and one which did (Annie):

“The door handle from the bedroom above has left a purple bruise on her upper arm the shape of a comma, or an apostrophe: a pause, or a sign of something missing, or of something belonging, perhaps. She keeps forgetting that the door handle is there, keeps catching herself on the same spot.”

Similarly, in “A Fuss”, grief is explored without fuss where Rosa is returning home for a funeral, where “they are all practiced in the theatre of mourning” and all of her emotion is captured thus:

“The sky is a strange green hue. From behind a barn, something rises, like a handful of soil thrown high into the air, then just at the point at which it should fall, it takes shape into a flock of starlings, turns, rises higher, dissolves into the darkening sky.”

Can you talk about how you use poetic language as part of the narrative?  

BMcG: Those images are born out of observation, often out of moments of quiet contemplation. If something catches my attention, I’ll note it down and squirrel it away. The story and the character are built from those small observations. They start with me and I don’t know to begin with what characters I will give them to, or how they will fit into a story. I think the act of recording them helps to commit them to memory, so they rattle about in my head for a while until they find a place. It’s no accident that many of the stories began life when I was away from home, away from the daily concerns that keep us so distracted from noticing and appreciating those small moments that can hold such significance for a character.

SG: It’s so often the small moments that turn into something significant, and they keep the story with us long after we’ve finished reading. Many of the stories here evoke in the reader a sense of the wonder – capturing a lost childhood, an open trust, a naivety that perhaps has been “grown” out of us as adults in a society where trust costs and we are taught to “other” those with perceived differences. I loved how you played with this in “The Interests of Wonder”, by inviting the reader to partake in the writing of the story by questioning –starting with the opening line “What kind of day is it, the day the magician knocks on the schoolroom door?”

BMcG: I experimented with a few narrative approaches in different drafts of that story. They didn’t all work but I did like the energy of that opening question and decided to keep it. The importance of cultivating a sense of wonder is something we often discuss in writing workshops. How do we retain or regain that impulse for exploration, the joy of discovery that we had as children, that is trained out of so many of us as adults? We seem to have lost the ability to play. We have a tendency, as adults, to think that anything worth doing has to be undertaken with great seriousness and focus and with the outcome always at the forefront of our minds. And of course you do need focus and discipline to finish a piece of writing, but it’s not what you need to start it. I often quote the writer Anne Lamott, from her book Bird by Bird where she writes about the importance of silencing the inner critical voice when setting out to write. There’s a time to listen to the editorial voice, but if that’s all you can hear when you’re beginning a piece,  then you’ll never give yourself permission to write with the kind of abandon and experimentation that is required. You need to write initially like no-one need ever see or hear this but you. You can decide later what you want to do with the work, but if you don’t allow yourself to write it in the first place, you’ll never have the choice. The magician in ‘In the Interests of Wonder’ is a sort of antidote to adulting. He offers the audience at his shows – and in particular, the schoolteacher who is the focus of the story – an opportunity to escape the everyday.

SG: As well as the beauty of the writing in this collection, there is also an invitation to the reader to consider meta language and linguistical meanings behind and within what is said and unsaid. I really enjoyed how language is explored in “There is More Than One Word” where Jaynie is returning home to Belfast and struggles to remember phrases and words from her childhood, finds herself a linguistic stranger in her own home town, her language “thirty years out of date, fossilised in the 1980s.” In a way, you’re exploring not so much the multiple meanings of the English language in places and to people but the failure of language and words to capture the real, true human experience. In the end “There is more than one word for the heart but the word for her heart is sore.” Is this a theme that is important to you?

BMcG: I’ve always been interested in language and its many uses and interpretations. I’m the youngest of ten children. I grew up in a household full of talk. I can remember hearing a new word and turning it over on my tongue, trying it out for size, curious as to what it might look like on the page. My mother was once talking about a woman she knew called Celine and she pronounced the name the same way that we said ‘ceiling’ – we didn’t used to bother much with -ing endings in rural South Derry. When I asked if the woman was tall, if that’s why she had been named that, because her head scraped the ceiling, I discovered that not only was the name spelled differently but that there were people in other places who pronounced that name differently too – with the stress on the second syllable – and it sort of blew my mind. I learned that spelling and pronunciation and, I suppose, context as well, can alter meaning. In ‘There is More than One Word’, Jaynie remembers that, growing up, she had a different word for ‘kerb’. We often had words or phrases for things that were outside of standard English, expressions that were derived from Irish or Elizabethan English or Ulster Scots that we never found in books or heard repeated on the radio or television, but that were rich and layered and evocative and exact to our purposes. And yet there are times when language does fail us. When Jaynie’s sister phones her with the news that the family has been anticipating but dreading, she puts the phone down without speaking.

SG: Thank you for such a full answer – I love that story about Celine/ceiling. So, to finish up, Bernie, some fun questions:

  • Tea or Coffee? Coffee in the morning; tea in the afternoon.
  • Train or car? Train, all the way.
  • I should have guessed that answer! Music or quiet when writing? I can’t listen to anything with lyrics – I find it too distracting, but I listen to soundscapes on headphones to block out background noise: café sounds or rain on windows or (I do know this is sad, but it works for me) the coughy, book shuffly sounds of a library.
  • What’s next on your reading pile? Trespasses by Louise Kennedy. I’m saving it for a time of complete immersion.
  • It’s on my pile too! What’s next on your writing list? I’m working on a short story commission and there’s a longer story brewing, an historical piece, something to do with letters. I can’t talk about it, though,  for fear of scaring it off.
  • I know what you mean about scaring story away…
Photograph of Bernie McGill in a wood wearing a blue shirt and black trousers. (Provided by author, used with permission and with thanks)

With thanks to Bernie McGill for a great conversation, and thanks to No Alibis Press and Peter O’Connell Media for the advance copy of This Train is For.

On Reading, Writers Read, Writing Life

After Writing – Reading

As always, after an intense spell of writing, I like to return to reading.

Reading for leisure, for pleasure, for the act of reading itself.

Reading to no agenda other than to follow word after word, sentence after sentence so that I might be surprised by a discovery, a nudge, a startling fact, a sense of sadness – or that in some way wonder might pass through me.

And so, my current reading:

  • This is Ear Hustle by Nigel Poor and Earlonne Woods. I’ve been listening to the Podcast. The book is even more thought-provoking.
  • A Slanting of the Sun by Donal Ryan. I’m late to these stories but am taking my time with them.
  • Wunderland by Caitríona Lally. With thanks to New Island books. Looking forward to diving in.
  • Bewilderment by Richard Powers. On the 2021 Booker Short List. I’d love if it won! (Results out next week). This is a slow and wonderful read with philosophical questioning throughout. One of the most tender evocations of father-son relationship I’ve ever read. I’m almost finished this beauty.

Photograph of four books: This is Ear Hustle (non-fiction)/ A Slanting of the Sun (short stories)/ Wunderland (novel)/ Bewilderment (novel)