Sunday 10 February 2013

A Slice of Tongue



Now here's a strange thing - today I received requests from two English undergraduates in the US for more information about my story, 'A Slice of Tongue'. It appeared in Paraxis in 2011, and it seems they're writing dissertations on it.

I'm honoured and rather fascinated to know what they make of it.

They asked for links to reviews of the story but of course there aren't any, so I can't help there. They also wanted a bit of biographical information and some 'tips' as one of them put it. So I sat down to think about what made me write the story, and though I've no idea if this is helpful, here's what I came up with - simpler to put it here, I thought when the second request came in, than to email people individually.


I live in East Sussex, which is a rural county in south east England, and it's where I grew up - the landscape and places around me often play an important role in my stories.

I wrote my first short story, 'The Swimmer' in the summer of 2010. It was published in The Warwick Review, a UK literary print journal, and spotted there by Nicholas Royle, who picked it for Salt's Best British Short Stories 2011.  'A Slice of Tongue' was one of four stories I wrote in the summer after this (the others being 'All Fall Down', 'The Flotsam Cafe', and 'A Job Worth Doing').

'The Swimmer' was essentially realistic: it's highly descriptive and the river is recognisable to anyone who lives near me; its plot is grounded in reality too. In the stories that followed it, by contrast, I allowed myself to write almost by instinct, and all four have some degree of fantasy in their plots.

I wrote 'A Slice of Tongue' for an issue of Paraxis that had libraries as a theme. (Libraries are a political issue here, as many are threatened with closure through government cuts.) As with almost all my writing, the location was important in the genesis of the story. It began for me with a mental image of the inside of my local library, into which someone introduces an item of food - a forbidden thing in a place where everything is dry and organically dead - but in fact full of life in the stories on the shelves. Both the library and the butcher's are real places - I worked in a butcher's shop at weekends as a teenager, and spent hours in the library directly opposite it, but I gave myself the freedom to follow my gut feelings about both places, rather than the more prosaic reality, and the story is the result.

It feels rather strange to be writing about my own work - I don't think I'll make a habit of it. I'd prefer readers to make up their own minds, to have a personal response to the words on the page. But I'm rather thrilled that people are studying the story, so I hope this has helped a little.

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