Happy Friday Scribblers, as it is our LAST DAY for short story collection submissions, I thought I would share with you a bubbly interview with our satirical Brummie author, Charlie Hill! I hope you enjoy…
WAYNE DEAN-RICHARDS: I finished reading The State Of Us only last week and I’d like to sort of creep up on THE STATE OF US if that’s alright with you. By which I mean I’d like to first hit you with an array of questions – like a flurry of punches thrown by Ali in his prime - about the form itself… Here goes:
What are some of your favourite short story collections? Why are they special to you? Why would you, why should anyone, choose to read a collection of short stories instead of a novel – which is traditionally the more popular form? What are you looking for in a short story – be it your own or a story by somebody else?
CHARLIE HILL: I think I’m going to answer these questions with the same sense of urgency as they were thrown at me. By which I mean impulsively, and without recourse to Wikipedia or my bookshelf. Which means, of course, that I’ll forget a lot and get a lot more wrong…
I love Katherine Mansfield; I think she was a lot more subversive than she is given credit for and certainly more self-aware – in relation to her social/economic class, than the Bloomsbury bunch. I suppose that might have had something to do with the way she was treated, at least at first, by the incorrigibly snobbish Woolf. I can’t think of a particular collection though – the one with At the Beach? And that one with the woman with the pram, in the park? Though I also like the one that was serialised in the magazine Rhythm. In a German Pension, I think it was called.
I also love Anna Kavan – I recently read some of her stories in a collection of her short fiction and non-fiction called Machines in the Head. They’re deeply unnerving, and a little bit uncanny, and what I imagine Kafka to be like (not that I’ve read much that’s ‘uncanny’. Except that fella. Whatshisname. 1950’s and 1960’s. Robert? Edric? No, it’s no good, I’ll have to Google it. Aickman!! Robert Aickman, that’s him! Or any Kafka…)
When it comes to writers who aren’t dead I also like, in no particular order and for completely different reasons, Ruby Cowling, Neil Campbell and Joanna Walsh. Ruby is a mate of mine but that doesn’t mean I read her uncritically, and her first collection, This Paradise, was superb, a pitch-perfect mix of formal experimentation and near-dystopian anxiety. Joanna Walsh’s Vertigo was better known and equally terrific, an exploration of various iterations of interiority that managed to strike a balance between the personal and the universal. And Neil Campbell is one-of-a-kind, a poet whose deadpan prose is like the dark still water on the surface of a particularly deep pothole.
Wayne: If you’re leading a short story workshop, what will you be saying to your students to help them produce work that’s of interest and quality?
Charlie: I think it’s all down to focus. I’ve delivered a few workshops, and my favourite is one I devised on the sentence. Even in a longer story, you have to know precisely what each sentence is doing and how. Pay each sentence the same sort of attention as you would a line of poetry; even those that aren’t, on the surface, doing very much, need to doing it with the right rhythm, the right nouns and verbs, the right punctuation, the right sound, the right feel.
Wayne: What was the first short story that you ever published? Where was it published? Do you still have a copy of it? When did you last read it? What did you feel about it when you did?
Charlie: The first short story I had published was in the first anthology from Tindal Street Press. It came out in 1999. I don’t read it very often because I don’t think it’s very good. Or at least, I think my writing has improved out of sight since then. I mean I’d be in the wrong business if I didn’t think that but there are some early stories I love and would happily re-read. Not that one.
Though I am still proud of the central character’s subsequent re-appearance (in my first novel, The Space Between Things, that came out 10 years later…)
Wayne Okay, now to the collection itself – THE STATE OF US. As I said I finished it very recently, and thought it was absolutely terrific! It opens with a marvellous story called WORK, which brought Beckett to mind. Was that conscious? Do you count him as an influence? With this story was it your intention to examine some of the absurdities inherent in the workplace?
Charlie: Thank you! I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have favourites, and this one of them, not least because it was first published by the late and much lamented Ambit. I don’t think it was written consciously to read like Beckett, though. Although I do love Molloy I haven’t read much else by him, so I think it’s probably more accurate to say it was written to read like my idea of what Beckett is like.
And yes, it was certainly my intention to satirise work. I’ve recently become a part-time Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund, working with students on their academic English, but before this I’d had 30 plus years of menial near-minimum-waged work. And I hated it. I hated being woken up by an alarm, and being reprimanded for being late by people who did half as much in a day as I did before lunch, and I hated being told what to do by people who made no effort to earn my respect, and had no interest in doing so, and I’ve never understood the ‘work ethic’, or people who never take a day off work, or people who win the lottery and go back to work. I mean what a way to spend your life! It’s insane! Can’t you find yourself a park and sit in it, for Christ’s sake?
Wayne: When I read this story, and several of the others, it made me laugh out loud, which I think is wonderful - does your own work make you laugh? (I think it’d be brilliant if it did – I read that Kafka used to laugh uncontrollably when reading his work to friends.) Do you ever find yourself laughing at the absurdities you encounter in the real-life workplace?
Charlie: I used to laugh at the absurdities I encountered in the workplace, but then I stopped. I mean it’s only funny for so long, isn’t it? My writing though, that’s a different matter. It doesn’t happen often – more often than not I just snigger – but I do remember coming up with a line that made me laugh out loud in the Waterstone’s canteen. It was from my second novel – Books! – that was about books written by dull 30-something blokes that were so mediocre that they shut down the electrical impulses in the brain. The line ended with: ‘...was killed after becoming cognitively becalmed during the course of a particularly laborious pun on page 32.’ I vacillate about the rest of the book, but I still think it’s a corker.
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