A process diary about the material shaping my collection-in-progress

For some time now, I’ve been slowly working on my first full-length short story collection. Over the past few months, I’ve made space to focus on it in a more dedicated way, and that’s meant I’ve been consciously seeking out more reference points of ambitious, imaginative short stories by other writers that might get me excited, give me ideas, help me solve the problems I’ve been banging my head against, and remind me of the power and possibilities of writing in this form. And as part of documenting this process for myself and anyone else who might be curious, I’m sharing a few of the highlights so far…

STORIES

The Wrong Grave – Kelly Link (from Pretty Monsters)
“All of this happened because a boy I once knew named Miles Sperry decided to go into the resurrectionist business and dig up the grave of his girlfriend, Bethany Baldwin, who had been dead for not quite a year.” Miles gets more than he bargained for when he undertakes a full-moon graveyard mission to retrieve the poems he left in his dead girlfriend’s casket in this darkly wry story told by a mysterious unknown narrator. Made me think about: whether we need to reveal who our narrators are and the agendas they have, if any.

Inventory – Carmen Maria Machado (from Her Body & Other Parties / read it online)
A twenty-part list of un-named lovers from a narrator surviving a global pandemic, predating C-19 by several years. A seductively simple structure charting the narrator’s chronological memories of past encounters while slow-dripping anxiety, uncertainty and moments of violence and tenderness in the face of infinite fear and loss. Brilliantly done (like everything CMM does), and led to me restructuring a draft I was working on into list format (in my case, ten step-by-step instructions to staging a revenge ritual).

Rise Up Singing – Anna Wood (from Yes Yes More More)
The first story in this debut collection features two 90s Bolton schoolgirls doing acid before English, going on a night out to Fifth Ave then somehow making the trek across town to get home. Which: hard relate. I was never into hallucinogens then, but I was a teenage wreckhead who went to school in Bolton, and Wood vividly captures that balance of innocence and recklessness, with a sweet,tangible bond between the characters. Made me think about: capturing place, age and memory. (And lived experience, since although the collection is categorised as fiction, interviews with the author I read online suggest it started as memoir. Which I love, because there’s deffo a shit-ton of real-life material finding its way into the stories I’m currently writing).

The Aquarium for Lost Souls – Natasha King (read online at Strange Horizons)
“The aquarium is different every time I die. Exhibits reshuffling like a deck of cards. The blood loss, though, that’s reliable.”
Unexpected, haunting, imaginative and immersive, this futuristic story describes a woman finding herself in an on-repeat death sequence in a seemingly abandoned aquarium spaceship, alternative between her perspective and that of the ship’s other occupant. Fantastically creative, deftly done, and made me think about: unreliable narrators, voices for non-human characters, and how human hurts and hopes transcend time, place and planetary confines (very useful for someone like me who can get stuck in obsessively writing about specific geographic and cultural contexts, and challenged me to think more expansively).

BOOKS

Things to Do When You’re Goth in the Country & Other Stories – Chavisa Woods
Think of Woods as a literary exorcist, calling out certain entities that possess rural America, said The Rumpus, and that’s a perfect description for this short but brilliant collection featuring aliens and acid trips in settings from dive bars to graveyards that I devoured during my recent trip to Spain. Dark, distinctive, fantastical and totally queer, it made me want to push myself to be more imaginative in my work. The first two stories in the collection were clear standouts for me (here’s an excerpt from one of them, Zombie)

FOLK – Zoe Gilbert
Set in the fictional coastal village of Neverness, in a world far from our own, FOLK tells the interweaving stories of the island’s close-knit community; their superstitions, rituals, griefs, obsessions and desires. By turns sensual and savage, it’s deftly-done and delicious to read. The uncanny elements are fully-realised and shaped by the wild relentlessness of the landscape they’re set in. Although the collection I’m developing is set somewhere seemingly much more mundane — a fictional version of the Salford council estate I grew up on — FOLK really got me thinking about how a location’s identity seeps into its inhabitants’ consciousness, and vice versa.

The Hotel – Daisy Johnson
This is what we know about The Hotel. The Hotel is bigger on the inside than the outside. Doors and windows do not stay in the same places. The Hotel listens. The Hotel watches. We’ll be at The Hotel soon.
I’m still only partway through this collection lent to me by author Gemma Fairclough (whose debut novel Bear Season is also weird, atmospheric, experimental and brilliant, by the way), but I’m including it here anyway because so far I’m obsessed. Daisy Johnson has been described by The Observer as ‘the demon offspring of Shirley Jackson and Stephen King,’ (tombstone-worthy accolade imo), and the stories I’ve read are giving me tons to think about when it comes to setting a collection in and around a certain place, like the details that get repeated, distorted or become more invisible or important depending on whose perspective you get. Unsettling and sinister, and I can’t wait to read the rest.

Queer Little Nightmares: An Anthology of Monstrous Fiction & Poetry – ed. David Ly & Daniel Zomparelli
“I made the deal and woke transformed. I have wandered the city by night since then, slipping into new bodies at will, snapping the necks of men who realize too late they are not the only predators stalking the riverbank for soft and easy prey. I make madness and mischief and feed on the dead. I mine the dreams of children for moments of joy, and they wake howling at the horror of the monster in their heads.” — The Vetala’s Song, Anuja Varghese
Wanted to love this anthology so badly, because the concept is incredibly up my street. For me the fiction was hit and miss, but a standout was Varghese’s story told from the perspective of a queer vetala, a ghoulish trickster from Hindu mythology with the power to possess dead bodies. I appreciated the editors’ attention to including a range of perspectives and voices, and the stories’ embracing of gore and gruesomeness (Gruesome My Love by Levi Cain was another highlight of the collection). Made me think about: how we write the desires and vulnerabilities of non-human characters, and what we need as readers to relate to and get invested in monsters.

Next on the shelf: Paradise Block by Alice Ash, She’s Always Hungry by Eliza Clark, and Trash & Other Stories by Dorothy Allison (one of my favourite collections of all time when it comes to writing about queerness and class, and I’m well overdue a re-read). Wanna send me a short story or recommend a collection that should be on my list? Get in touch.