The Story:

‘Underskirts’ won third place in the 2010 Bridport Prize and is published online at PANK.

An extract:

She found me with my hands around chickens, fingers stretched wide, thumbs over beaks. My skirt, mud-weighed, tugged at my ankles as I dipped low. Silly to curtsey while armed with birds, I knew, but it had to be done. If I’d let go they’d’ve flown at her, chuttering through her red hair. And what a sight that would’ve been! The lady, still horsed, with her legs one on either side and her skirt hitching up to show a handspan of stocking. And her horse as white as cuckoo-flowers, with its little red haunch-spot not quite hidden by the bridle. I kept my thumbs tight over those dangerous beaks.

The Inspiration:

In March 2010 I went to Amsterdam with my girlfriend Susie. This is us, looking like the professional creative people we are:

We went to the Van Gogh Museum and it was incredible and inspiring and enlightening and all that other good stuff, and I went on to read The Yellow House by Martin Gayford (which I highly recommend). But then, at the end of the museum, there was an exhibition of paintings by Van Gogh’s contemporaries. And that’s where I saw this painting, ‘Portrait of Guus Preitinger’ by Kees van Dongen:

And my brain said DING DING DING in the manner of a winning slot machine. Well, okay, it wasn’t that dramatic. It was more like ’she looks interesting, I would enjoy writing a story about her’.

When I got home, I flipped through my writing notebook and found a note I’d written to myself months ago – lady lifts servants’ skirts. I have no idea what I meant, but I thought it fit nicely with the painting.

But a story can’t be about one character – what the lady needed was a love interest. I searched through online archives of paintings and found this one of a farmer-girl gazing dreamily into the distance. Aha!, I thought, this is the sort of girl who would run away on adventures.

So I wrote a story about a lady who lifts her servants’ skirts, and about the sorts of girl who ran away on adventures. The ending, you might notice, comes back again to my fascination with anchoresses, because as much as I wanted the lady to have a happy ending I knew that she could not.

(Note: My first thought on seeing ‘Portrait of Guus Preitinger’ was ‘hey, she reminds me of PJ Harvey.’ And when I went down to Bridport to collect my prize, who was there at the ceremony but… PJ Harvey.)

The Story:

‘How I Learned To Love A Real Man’, first published online at BURST.

Reprinted in Eve’s Harvest (Odyssey Books).

An extract:

Thirteen heralded my Goth phase. I had brief affairs with Heathcliff (too obsessive), Mr. Darcy (too pouty), and Jonathan Harker (too wussy). I went through a brief but decidedly creepy phase of swithering between Edgar Allen Poe and Humbert Humbert. I soon realised that a lust for thirteen year old girls is not necessarily a good thing in a prospective lover.

The Inspiration:

The short version is that I wrote this story because when I was a teenager I had a crush on Rasputin. Just process that for a moment before we continue.

A crush.

On Rasputin.

I’ve always had unusual crushes. Some may say ‘odd’, but I think they all make perfect sense. Right now, for example, my secret boyfriend is Danny Trejo.

PHWOOOOAAAARRRR.

I think it goes without saying that if Danny Trejo was an actual, real, non-famous man who came up to me in a bar and was all “hey baby, wanna get dirty?” (because I imagine that is what he would say), then I would say “no thank-you” and move to another seat. Or perhaps throw my drink in his face and run away before he could wipe the vodka out of his eyes, depending on how scary he looked at the time.

The point is that while the face of Danny Trejo is not attractive, the general persona of Danny Trejo is very sexy indeed. I can’t really explain this, because if you’re not nodding in agreement as you read this then I can never convince you. And that brings me to Rasputin.

Similarly, Rasputin is not attractive. I mean, check this shit out:

He’s obviously a total creep. And yet, and yet! My teenage brain considered him to be the ideal boyfriend. Clearly, a beardy dead Russian mystic is the perfect partner for a queer bookish goth teenager in Glasgow. The rom-com script practically writes itself. Again, I can’t explain this, because if you’re not nodding then I’ve already lost you.

I should add that I had some slightly more normal crushes, like King Charles II and Dante Gabriel Rossetti (they’re normal guys for teenage girls to fancy, right?). Then again, I’m pretty sure I genuinely had a crush on Humbert Humbert and Edgar Allen Poe too. Maybe I just needed to get out more.

Obviously I’m not the only person who can see Rasputin’s appeal, because the illustration that goes along with my story in Eve’s Harvest makes him fit for the cover of a romance novel:

How about you? Who are your unusual crushes?

I’m super-excited to say that my story, ‘In Our House By the Sea’, is now available at Found Press! I’m joined by the madly talented Cynthia Flood, Danny Goodman, and Lana Storey (seriously, go and check out Lana’s work – she’s too cute for words).

Here’s an extract of my story:

The radio crackles its way along chart hits whose lyrics I didn’t even know I knew. You dance around the kitchen, your bare toes sliding on the blue linoleum squares. I sit at the table, the backs of my thighs sticking to the wooden chair, my feet sweating a little in my wool socks. The cat winds between my ankles, then retreats to the warmth of our empty bed when I fail to scratch behind his ears.

Outside the morning sun is struggling through patchy clouds, flashing on and off like a faulty light bulb. The kitchen smells of clean laundry and hot butter. You reach up to get the eggs out of the fridge, and I see that you’re wearing that underwear I used to love: the hot-pink leopard-print ones, cut like little shorts so that the cheek of your bottom peeps out. When we first started seeing each other, you’d wear those when you thought I was going to see them. I know that because you told me.

You’ve put on a bit of weight since then, and they’re tighter than they were. This only serves to reveal more of the peach-round curve, and all I want to do is cup my palms around that perfect sphere so that the tips of my fingers press into your heat. The oversized t-shirt you’re wearing barely skims the tops of your thighs, and every time you move I get a little flash of hot-pink leopard-print. I slouch down in my chair: a lower vantage point might reveal another inch.

You glance over at me and I realise how strange I must look: lolling at the kitchen table in my fluffy socks, my pyjama top unevenly buttoned. You dance over to me, the pan of scrambled eggs still in your hand, and kiss me like I’m the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen.

Also, check out the Found Press site for an extract and some extremely kind blurbs from the beautiful Ms. Amber Sparks, the eternally charming Mr. Ewan Morrison, and the sultry Mme. Shanna Germain.

Mega-thanks to Jacqueline and Bryan for putting together such a shit-hot website.

Don’t forget to pop back and let me know what you think of the story!

The Story:

‘The Rental Heart’, first published in PANK #4.

Reprinted online at Expanded Horizons and in print in By Invitation Only (Unbound Press).

Soon to be reprinted in Best British Short Stories 2011 (Salt).

An extract:

The problems came when the hearts got old and scratched: shreds of the past got caught in the dents, and they’re tricky to rinse out. Even a wire brush won’t do it.

But the man in the rental place had assured me that this one was factory-fresh, clean as a kitten’s tongue. Those heart rental guys always lied, but I could tell by the heart’s coppery sheen that hadn’t been broken yet.

I remembered perfectly well how to fit the heart, but I still read the leaflet to the end as a distraction. A way to not think about how Grace looked when she bit her lip, when she wrote the curls of her number. How she would look later tonight, when she. When we.

It was very important that I fit the heart before that happened.

The Inspiration:

I’ve been with my girlfriend, the adorable and talented Susie McConnell, for over two years now. But before I met her, I dated. I dated a lot. I lined up dates like items on a To Do list, and I was ruthless about it. Boring date? She hasn’t called? Caught some girl’s eye in a bar? On to the next one!

But before that – before I became a mercenary girl-heart-shredder, that is – there was this one girl. Let’s call her Girl A. We only went on about four dates and we were never a couple, but she was the first person I’d been interested in since coming out of a four-year relationship. I can’t even explain what it was about her; she was self-absorbed and boring, but something about the shape of her mouth and the way she held her shoulders made me want to stare at her all day. She talked too fast and she collected fruit stickers in a little notebook because her uncle and grandpa did. She was an apologetic smoker. She teased me for being a lightweight drunk, for being obsessed about time, for drinking black coffee and red wine, for being terrible at pool.

She worked at a club, and if I said I was going to a bar nearby she’d hang around in the rain on the pavement outside just in case I came by. Then she’d ignore my text messages for a week. Then she’d call me to say we were still super-casual and not in a relationship, but we weren’t allowed to see anyone else. And then she’d spend all night sending me dirty text messages, and then I wouldn’t hear from her for a week again.

My head span, and not in a good way. I told myself that no-one ever died of a broken heart. I thought if I kept saying it, over and over, then maybe it would be true. But it hurt, it fucking hurt. It felt like my heart was too big and it was crushing my lungs; it felt like there was a chunk of wood in my chest, a chunk of wood still smouldering, filling my chest with smoke so I couldn’t breathe.

Anyway, one night after I’d spent an entire evening staring at my phone and willing it to ring, I thought fuck this shit. I deleted her number, and I went out and met other girls.

I pretended that I had a rental heart. I pretended that I could use it to be with someone and then return it afterwards, that it would be like nothing ever happened. I made sure that no-one I went out with left a scratch on me.

And then I met Susie. She was a cute nerdy tomboy musician with cropped bleached hair and very soft skin. She had strong opinions on fonts and was going to be a rock star. I didn’t expect to fall for her but she played grandmother’s footsteps with my brain, tiptoeing in when I wasn’t looking. Every night I would go round to her tiny tidy flat and she made me dinner and we drank wine and listened to riot grrrl and fucked. The next morning she would get dressed in the dark and kiss my sleepy cheek and go to work, then I lounged around and drank her coffee and watched daytime TV. It was love, love, love.

By the time I had gained enough distance to write ‘The Rental Heart’, I’d dug my heels into my life with Susie. We are still together, and I have learned to trust in my internal tick instead of fearing it. I have learned that hearts do not shatter after all. There is no need to return them; the one you have will do just fine.

The Story:

‘Anchor of the Suburbs’, published in Weave #4.

An extract:

It was halfway through the spring of ’84 when Sandra decided that she was going to become an anchoress.

‘I am going to live,’ she announced one evening during the advert break of our nightly TV soaps, ‘in the crawlspace beside the laundry room.’ She warned us that being an anchoress included refusing all contact except food in the morning, removal of her bucket in the evening, and the weekly updates on the TV soaps.

Our mother was displeased: ‘I did not buy a house at this address, complete with jacuzzi and wide driveway, to spend my time emptying slop buckets. Oh no, little miss anchoress; it’s a long time since I stopped cleaning up your do-do, and you won’t catch me starting now.’ The row was postponed when Sandra realised that she was missing Eastenders, the most vital of the soaps.

The Inspiration:

When I learned about OuLiPo at university, I thought that it was useless and pretentious. But like most other things I learned at university, when I started to put my own voice into it, I realised I liked it after all. My favourite OuLiPo technique was the prose sestina, which is where the writer chooses six words and repeats them as in a sestina, but in a prose form. The key is to not make it obvious that the words are being repeated – the most effective prose sestinas are the ones that don’t read like prose sestinas. (All-Night Cartoon Party is also a prose sestina).

For my writing exercise one night I asked my girlfriend to choose six words, preferably ones that could have multiple uses (eg. ‘jumper’ can mean a pullover, or a suicide, or any person jumping up and down). She chose: spring, live, refuse, address, catch, row. She wrote the words on a yellow post-it note and stuck in in my journal.

I’d been obsessed with the idea of anchoresses for a few weeks, after I read about them in a footnote in a book I’ve now forgotten. An anchoress is a woman (a man would be an anchorite) who chooses to live in total seclusion, usually for religious reasons. But there’s more to it than that: the anchoress is bricked up in a tiny cell, with only a few small windows for her meals and chamber pot to be passed through. The cell contains only a bed, altar and crucifix, and she never leaves it. There’s a ceremony and ritual burial on the day of her enclosure, during which she is asked to contemplate the grave in her cell; she then lives the rest of her life in the cell and is buried there when she dies.

The cell was often on the side of a church, and the people of the town could sometimes come to the anchoress for advice – the constant contemplation of religious matters meant that they were seen as wise, almost mystical. The anchoress is so-called because she ‘anchors’ the church and its people, ensuring that metaphorical storms (of sin, presumably) can’t capsize it.

Anchoresses fascinate me because the practice seems so violent and yet so peaceful. It’s a terrible loss of autonomy to be bricked up, but it might also represent freedom: to not have to conform to the world’s rules, to not have to be what a woman is ’supposed’ to be. Is it the ultimate anti-women act, or the ultimate feminist act? I’ve now written three different stories about anchoresses, and they continue to fascinate me.

(Note: I have made myself bored of writing prose sestinas. I need a new writing game to play. Suggestions?)

The Story:

‘Peach Cigarettes in Tokyo’, published in Pear Noir! #4.

An extract:

“The first time I ever smoked a peach cigarette, I was wearing a dinosaur suit and sitting on my friend’s balcony in a Tokyo suburb. My friend had a dinosaur suit because he’d gone to a fancy dress party the week before, and I was wearing it because I was cold and it was made of fleece. I’d never been much of a smoker, but the vending machine sold dozens of different flavours and what was the point of traveling halfway around the world if I wasn’t going to try new things?”

The Inspiration:

The Story:

‘All-Night Cartoon Party’, published at Wigleaf.

The Inspiration:

I spent two years on an MLitt in Creative Writing at Glasgow University. About 90% of what I learned appeared to be a complete waste of time. One class was about OuLiPo, a French movement that seeks to constrain writing in order to be more creative. OuLiPo practitioners use exercises like prose sestinas (using the word repetition of the sestina form in a prose piece), writing a story without using the letter E, or the “snowball” technique (the first line is one word long, the second line has two words, etc.)

In class, we all produced ‘opposite’ stories – write a story, then for each word write the opposite. ‘Some people are grumpy’ would become ‘none ghosts aren’t cheerful’. The interest in the exercise was that most words don’t have a clear opposite. What is the opposite of ‘people’? I chose ghosts but it could be angels, or corpses, or monsters. It was a fun exercise, but I really couldn’t see the point. The things we produced were nonsensical, pointless; who’d ever want to read these?

It’s only now, a year after I graduated, that I see the point of these things. They force you to not be yourself for a while, to not fall into the same themes and tropes and word-patterns that you always do. When I first started the MLitt there was nothing that I ‘always did’, because I hadn’t written much. Now that I’ve cranked out some more words, I often need to stop and think: have I said this before? And that is where OuLiPo comes in.

‘All-Night Cartoon Party’ is a prose sestina (if you want to figure out the word pattern, please feel free!). I love writing prose sestinas. I love that I start out trying to write one story, and then realise that the words won’t allow me to, and so it has to turn into a different story. I like that I’m guided by the words. I like the sense of losing control, of being forced to make unexpected decisions. When I’m finished, I sometimes don’t recognise the story I’ve written. It seems so un-me. But sometimes it’s good for us to wear a mask for a while.

(Note: I really did go to a Halloween party dressed as Betty Boop.)

The Story:

‘Imaginary Birds’, first published at Scapegoat Review, reprinted at BluePrintReview.

The Inspiration:

For several years, I wrote an online journal. I had journal friends whose lives I followed with interest, and we discussed our lives and our art through comments.

One girl – whose name I have now forgotten – posted many photos of her social circle; she called them her adopted family. She lived in a big house out in the country somewhere, full of God’s-eyes and old bicycle parts and copper saucepans. They smoked dope on the porch and played weird string instruments and everything they did was a ‘collective’. And there was a baby there too. It was not my journal-friend’s baby and she was not in a relationship with either of the child’s biological parents, but she was a parent. Everyone in the house was a parent. The baby was called Antigone, or Voltaire, or Leonardine, or something equally baroque. I thought to myself: THAT CANNOT WORK.

But perhaps it did. Perhaps they all lived and loved together and they were the happiest family ever and that baby has grown into a creative, questioning, sensible toddler, and everyone still lives in that house and it’s the most inspiring thing.

This girl was so lovely and fascinating and I envied her life, because although I wouldn’t want it for myself it seemed that it was exactly the life she wanted. And everyone should have exactly the life they want to have.

In the story, I wanted to talk about this sense of ownership. A mother owns a baby because she makes a baby, but of course a child is a small person and people are owned by no-one. So who really has rights over a child? Who has responsibility? Does biology mean anything? Does it matter who incubates you, who feeds you with their body, who gives half of their own self to you? What does matter?

(Note: I tried to find the girl’s journal so that I could post one of her photos here, but it’s gone. Deleted. And because I don’t know her name, I can’t track her down. So thanks for the inspiration, stranger.)

The Story:

‘Storytelling’, published in Seven Letter Words.

The Inspiration:

I am a nerd for fairy tales. I wrote my undergrad dissertation on fairy tales. I teach a class in writing fiction based on fairy tales. I’ve written handfuls of fairy tale and mythology-inspired poems. But I hadn’t retold a fairy tale.

This is because I have studied retold fairy tales, and I know how tricky it is to subvert them effectively. Cultural myths are ingrained in us from childhood and stepping outside them is no easy task, but there would be no point in me just retelling a story in pretty language. It’s been done before, and better.

So I started thinking about Snow White.

When I tried to sum up Snow White’s character, it seemed that the most important thing about her was her youth. Sure, she was beautiful and innocent and pure, but all that was intrinsic to her youth. So I decided to subvert the fairy tale by changing the most vital part of little Snow: I made her old.

Once upon a time there was a beautiful girl with lips blood-red, hair ebony-black, skin snow-white. She had a child, a soft blonde angel. When the child was raised, the beautiful girl’s work was done: she had fulfilled her role as a woman. Her breasts emptied, her hands softened, her insides shrivelled like dead leaves. She moved slowly, thoughtfully. There was nothing to hurry for now. She was above the dirty business of men, of sex, of children. Her body did not bleed; it did not sweat or scream or cry.

Snow White is an object. She’s a doll, a statue: a thing to be looked at and fought over. It seemed to me that an old woman – a woman past childbearing, past sex, past everything that we’re told it means to be a woman – could be even more objectified. She could be even more of a china doll: fragile, slow, quiet. She could be owned and controlled.

I also wanted to look at the themes of female competition in the fairy tale. My favourite Snow White retellings subvert this (for example, Emma Donoghue’s The Tale of the Apple), but I wanted to highlight it. It seems to me that feminism in 2010 is not about women’s relationships with men; it’s about women’s relationships with women.

Feminism is about not using words like ’slut’ and ‘bitch’.
It’s about not seeing other women as competition.
It’s about not commenting negatively on the way other women look.

We’re taught from childhood – in stories like Snow White – that women compete. We’re taught that a woman’s value is in how attractive she is to men and how much they want to fight over her. We’re taught that being beautiful is the most important thing there is, and if another woman is more beautiful then she is more powerful, and you must tear that slutty bitch’s hair out and steal her man, and then you too will have power.

In this story, I wanted to highlight that. I wanted to show what happens when women compete instead of working together. And it’s not a happy ending.

The Story:

‘Bibliophagy’, published in elimae.

The Inspiration:

My father.

The man in the story is not my father, and the mother is not my mother, and the brother is not my brother. But they are the inspiration.

I spent years avoiding certain subjects in my writing, but then one day I thought FUCK THIS SHIT. I was sick of lying. Then I wrote about being a teenage nude model, about my pre-adolescent cybersex, about what that boy did to me when he thought I was asleep. And nothing changed. The girls I’d dissected in my stories did not call me at midnight to curse my name. The police didn’t come knocking and I was not blackmailed with my naked photos in a brown paper package. Life tripped along as it always had.

I knew then that I could write about anything, anything at all, and I would not immediately be crumpled in the gutter with smashed bottles in my feet. But I still could not write about my father. I could not write about the way his hands shake. It was like the horizon: always there, but too vast to see all at once, too much to fit onto a page.

Perhaps it’s because I realised it was fine for me to reveal myself right down to the marrow because that was my decision to make, but it was different for me to write about my family. Sure, I could write about girls I fucked and fictionalised, because I’d never see them again and if I did then I’d be pleased if they were annoyed at me. I’d feel justified. But I love my family and I don’t want to hurt them, and I didn’t know how to write about them in a way that would not hurt them. What’s the point of writing if it’s not the aching and awful truth? So I just didn’t write about them.

Then, finally, I did. I wrote poems and essays and stories about my father, and the world did not implode. So I carried on. I wrote more and more and more and I found out that he still loved me and he still wanted to know me. So I dug right down to the toughest, messiest, most raw and blinding things.

Writing about addiction is hard, so I approached it obliquely by substituting alcohol with words. As a writer I suppose it’s an obvious choice, but language is deeply linked with the changes in my father. When I was a child, my father had a wall of books and spoke in poems. He did crosswords in pen. He always knew the meanings of things. When he started to get ill, he would spent all day sitting at the kitchen table and reading one page of the newspaper. Now he does not read at all. My father, who brought me up in a house with thousands of novels, reads no books at all. I’m not sure I can explain how profound a loss this feels to me.

I know I am not the only person who loves their father despite his shaking hands. I don’t usually try to make grandiose statements with my stories, but I hope that this one hit a nerve.