Fictionable

We began this Autumn series of podcasts with Mark Haddon, who spoke about the tension at the heart of fiction. Over the next few weeks we'll be hearing from tony lashden, Rolli and James Young, but this time we welcome Laura O'Meara and her short story, Monolith/Stone Teal/240×340cm.The monolithic rug is "an off-white oblong that covers half the room", a lush, woollen accessory that forms the centrepiece of this unsettling story. But according to O'Meara it doesn't actually exist."The rug is a fictional construct," she says. "I've never had a rug that nice in any of my houses."But despite her plush furnishings, O'Meara's main character doesn't really feel at home."Eleanor is doing everything that modern life says you should do," the author explains. "You should be going to pilates, you should be doing your skincare, you should be buying your organic veg. And she's still, like, my life is awful and my boyfriend's on the floor fingering a rug and I don't know what's happening."Even though both Eleanor and her partner know there's something wrong in their relationship, they can't do anything about it, she continues. "Chris is trying to fix something, but he's fixing the wrong thing."For O'Meara, stories are a way of "exploring possibilities"."If you want to explore an emotion or a reaction to something that you can't do in your own life," she says, "you can explore it through fiction. You can make a character do it." Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The storms are barrelling across the Atlantic, the nights are drawing in, so it's time for some more exclusive short stories and another set of podcasts. We'll be hearing from tony lashden, Rolli, Laura O'Meara and James Young in this Autumn set, but we start with Mark Haddon and his short story The Vickers House.Haddon explains that this story came from "a fascination with houses"."My father was an architect," he says, "and houses are a way of thinking about the world for me."As a boy, the author remembers spending time alone in his room."Because that room was very much mine," he recalls, "the thinking seemed to happen within the room, rather than in my head. Rooms now are not just physical spaces, they are ways of thinking."The Vickers House returns to a time when friends were "almost given to you on a geographical basis," he continues. "If someone lived a few doors away and you went to the same school and you were in the same year, you had to be friends. It was a curse. Or a blessing, depending on who that person was."For Haddon, the constraints of village life make it the perfect setting for fiction."Being painted into a corner is a very good way of generating stories," he says. "If you can say at any point during a story 'And with one bound, I was free,' then you don't really have a story."Tension and paradox are at the heart of fiction, Haddon argues, from the state of mind he falls into just before sleep which is "both very loose and very precise" to the combination of "grandiose self confidence" and "savage self criticism" which the creative project demands.Writers must be as specific as they can, he continues, but they still "have to tap into something mysterious and strange, and make connections which are weird and unexpected, but nevertheless right". Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This Summer series we've already heard from Will Boast, EC Osondu, Robin Munby and Zhenya Oliinyk. But we bring it to a close with Elaine Vilar Madruga and her short story Wild, translated from Spanish by Samantha Luna.Wild is not only a story about vengeance, Vilar Madruga says, it's also "a story about hope"."It's about sisterhood and it's about resilience," she continues. "It's about the possibility of survivors telling their own stories. Having their own agenda, Having our own words."Women have always spoken about male violence, Vilar Madruga explains, but it's always been behind closed doors."Now we don't have any whisper of fear," she says, "we have a screaming voice. And that screaming voice allows us to share with the world what we are thinking and what our great-grandmothers and our grandmothers thought in their own lives."Vilar Madruga cites the Cuban saying "pueblo pequeño, infierno grande" – a small town is a large hell. Even though her stories are fantastical, unmoored in time and place, she's still exploring the shared experience of "the woman in the street"."My reality, my space, my spiritual biography, the territories where I live are not only mine," she says. "It's a human experience. It's not a Caribbean experience, or a Cuban experience or a Latin American experience, it's a human experience."The themes that run through Wild – male violence, motherhood, sisterhood – echo through her latest novel, La piel hembra (The Female Skin). And Vilar Madruga also returns to the idea of metamorphosis, with Kafka's story of a man who becomes an insect always at the back of her mind."I'm always thinking in all my novels how men and women – the fictional characters – become monsters." Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We've heard from Will Boast, EC Osondu and Robin Munby already in this Summer series of podcasts, and Elaine Vilar Madruga is lined up next. But this week we welcome Zhenya Oliinyk and her graphic short story A Night in Kyiv.This story is short and made up of unsettling images, but Oliinyk tells us it's "not exactly fiction"."It is a documentation of one particular night," she says, "in terms of the numbers, because the numbers are real."Oliinyk charts the night in a series of alerts as the ballistic missiles come down, the hits are confirmed and the death toll rises. And through it all runs the struggle to get some sleep."This is pretty much how it is happening," the author explains. "It happens on a regular basis now, in Kyiv and in other big cities as well."Making art under Russian bombardment may be something of a challenge, but Oliinyk is resolutely practical."It is my occupation," she says. "It is what brings food to the table. So I would be insincere if I'd say that it's just my way of copying with the situation, it's just how my artistic spirit needs to manifest itself. But no, it's just what I do for a living."Of course it's still meaningful and inspiring to share her work, she continues, but the brute realities of life remain. "Surprisingly, when the war starts you still have to pay rent and buy food. This is probably one of the biggest disappointments of the full-scale invasion."With the news full of long-range strikes on oil refineries deep in Russian territory, it's tempting to imagine the war is at some sort of turning point. Retaking Crimea may feel like a distant dream, but "it still feels empowering to know that we're not helpless," Oliinyk says, "that we're not weak, that we can actually make some impact." Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This summer we've already heard from Will Boast and EC Osondu, and we'll be welcoming Elaine Vilar Madruga and Zhenya Oliinyk on to the podcast over the next few weeks. But this time we're heading north with Robin Munby and his short story Of All Who Sorrow, Joy.Munby's narrator is adrift in language, an experience the author says is drawn from his own life."This is especially about that early phase of learning a language or living in a new place," he explains, "when you have some proficiency, but things are still a struggle."At this stage, Munby continues, comprehension is often a matter of guesswork, but it's only a more extreme version of something that happens in your mother tongue. "You're half hearing what the other person is saying and filling in the gaps, which is often something we naturally do in conversation."The narrator's blanks and missing pieces are echoed in the construction of a story built from fragments that cuts between a discussion about a journey and the journey itself. But it's no accident."I, as a reader, do very much enjoy writing that is ambiguous in that way," the author says.As a translator from Spanish, Russian and Asturian, Munby's day-to-day tussles with language are very different from his narrator's. But translation itself is still something of a mystery."A lot of people invest a lot of time in explaining how to do it and analysing how it's done," he says, "and I find all of that fascinating. But I still find myself lost for words in terms of trying to describe how I do it." Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Will Boast kicked off this Summer series of podcasts, discussing the bureaucracy and hostility that immigrants face all around the world. We'll be hearing from Elaine Vilar Madruga, Zhenya Oliinyk and Robin Munby over the next few weeks. But this time we welcome EC Osondu and his short story Uber Chat.Osondu explains that he didn't start using Ubers because they were convenient. As a Black man in New York City, he was struggling to hail a cab until a passer-by told him about Uber."In less than five minutes," he says, "I got a ride."He discovered that Uber drivers were often more interested in conversation than people driving cabs, and started to enjoy the strange intimacy of an app throwing you together with a stranger."It's highly unlikely that you'll meet that person again," Osondu explains. "There is some kind of freedom that comes with that, a certain lack of constraint. You don't censor yourself."Even though he's been living in the US for more than a decade, the author still doesn't feel at home."The longer you live in America," he says, "the more conscious you are of your foreignness."It's no surprise that American life is appearing in his fiction, Osondu continues. "Every writer who finds himself in any environment, you're like a sponge."But an author isn't bound by their immediate surroundings. No writer "has ever been to Mars," he adds, but they've been "writing about Mars since the beginning of science fiction". Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The heat is on in London, so it's time for another set of exclusive short stories and another series of podcasts. Over the next few weeks we'll be hearing from Elaine Vilar Madruga, EC Osondu, Zhenya Oliinyk and Robin Munby, but we launch into Summer with Will Boast and his story The Line.Boast explains that this story came out of his own family's struggles with the US immigration system in the 1990s, after they moved from the UK when he was a child."We would get to the Federal Building in downtown," he says, "and literally if you didn't get in line by a certain hour you were not getting in the building."The Line started off with a family much like his own, Boast continues, but as he thought about the "hierarchy of immigrants" he started making his characters "less comfortable in the English language"."Polish immigrants are not thought about as much, I guess," he says, "and they are often more politically conservative than some groups. So I thought it would be interesting to take a character who has more conservative, right-leaning views on migration than I do and put that character in this scenario."The long line stretching around the Federal Building is just the visible end of a figurative line stretching all around the world, Boast adds. "Behind the line of people actually there physically waiting to get their papers, their green cards, eventually their citizenship, of course, there's a huge line of people applying for visas, hoping and dreaming to get that chance to be in that physical line."Even if his characters find a way through the bureaucratic nightmare, the west's ever-increasing hostility towards migrants is sure to exact some cost. But according to Boast, there's something about short fiction that makes them doomed from the start."Because of its formal rigour and its un-open-endedness as opposed to novels, which can stretch," he says, "a short story really won't work unless its ending is satisfying and feels fated in some way,"We'll be tempting fate next time with EC Osondu and his short story Uber Chat.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We've already heard from Diana Evans, Bruna Martini, Joel Cox and Holly Edwards in this Spring series of podcasts. Now we bring it to a close with Takiguchi Yūshō and the translator Jesse Kirkwood.Takiguchi tells us that the wandering narrator in Peppermint is following the same method as his author."It's when things start heading somewhere unexpected and when unexpected things begin to happen that it really starts to feel like the novel is working properly," he says.Just as in life, Takiguchi continues, "even if you don't want to go off track, you end up doing so. Things never quite unfold the way you intended, and you still have to keep moving forward in some way."And it's no good looking back. Memory may be "always with us", he explains, but it's also "profoundly unstable". So whether we reach for prose or images, it's impossible to capture the past."No matter how many photographs we have, no matter how much we try to preserve something in words, it's never the same as the thing itself."That gap between words and the things they represent is familiar territory for the translator, Kirkwood adds. But you can start to solve the puzzle when you focus on the voice."Once you have that voice," Kirkwood says, "a lot of your other decisions become very easy, because you just listen to the voice."It's an echo of the way Takiguchi writes his fiction. Instead of coming up with his stories, it's a question of paying attention to what his characters are telling him."What matters more," he says, "is whether I'm able to listen well to someone's story."That's the last of these Spring podcasts. We'll be back with another season of stories for Summer. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Diana Evans, Bruna Martini and Joel Cox have already joined us on this Spring series of podcasts, and next time we'll be hearing from Takiguchi Yūshō and the translator Jesse Kirkwood. But this time we welcome Holly Edwards.The country comes calling in her short story Little Lamb, Who Made Thee? But Edwards has always lived in the city, so she doesn't have a store of memories to draw on."What I have is – from very much an urbanite's perspective – an obsession with what it must be like to live in the countryside," she says, "ever since I was a child. And as part of that I have watched hours of shows like This Farming Life and River Cottage."The story follows Rose as she reconnects with her roots, the author continues, with much of the detail taken from those sessions. "I'm often eating my dinner while watching people lambing on telly."For Edwards, the comfortable rural life portrayed in TV documentaries is altered by viewing it through the queer lens."I don't consciously set out to queer a story," she says, "but that's how I perceive the world and so I'll often have queer characters or queer perspectives in my stories."Queerness is inherent in Little Lamb, Who Made Thee? with the tension between Rose and her father coming from his discomfort with her transition, Edwards explains, but she didn't want to write a "battle cry"."There's obviously something political about presenting trans characters and trans lives," she says, "I think that's inescapable." There's something inherently political about presenting all sorts of queer lives, she adds, "but it wasn't my intention when writing it".Rose's father may have started out as the bad guy, Edwards says, but she knew from the start that it wasn't that simple."As a queer writer, I do feel a responsibility to portray the complexities and the intricacies and the beauty of queer lives. Fiction definitely has an important role in helping people across the spectrum understand each other."We'll be exploring the convolutions of memory next time with Takiguchi Yūshō and the translator Jesse Kirkwood. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We've heard from Diana Evans and Bruna Martini already in this Spring series of podcasts, and we'll be welcoming Takiguchi Yūshō and the translator Jesse Kirkwood, and Holly Edwards over the next couple of weeks. But this podcast is devoted to Joel Cox and Variable Rewards.Cox explains that this short story came out of his own move to the suburbs and his love for Richard Yates's novel Revolutionary Road."A few months into living in the suburbs," he recalls, "I was thinking this story sounds really familiar."But while Yates's characters were all members of the Rotary club and hanging out at cocktail parties, in the 21st century the suburbs have become far more fragmented."I couldn't tell you the name of our neighbours, probably for the last ten years," Cox admits. "So you're living in this strange world where you're in a village, or the simulation of a New York village, that's in the middle of nowhere, where you don't know anyone."This sense of disconnection is amplified by social media, he continues, which allows people to "project the image of the life you want to live, even if you're not really living it". And it's intensified by the wave of redundancies, as companies pivot to AI."There's a lot of scrambling right now for everyone to figure out what their role will be in this new AI world," Cox explains, "and how they can leverage AI to survive, to hide out while this transition takes place."When people are jostling for position on a sinking ship, there's always room for fiction, he adds, but even if your characters are behaving like jerks you have to keep your sense of humour."I like to have fun while I write," Cox says. "If my characters are having a laugh at themselves, I think it balances out their jerkiness."We'll be striking a balance with Holly Edwards next time, and her short story Little Lamb, Who Made Thee?  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.