With
this collection of short stories set in the south of England and beyond,
Rebecca Lloyd explores relationships and the brave or foolish things they can
make people do. These stories about murder and ghosts, delusion and
desperation, obsession and arson, show readers a sometimes sweet, sometimes
macabre vision of humanity. Rebecca Lloyd channels Roald Dahl’s wit and flair
for the unexpected in this collection that will appeal to the quirky side of
the literary reader.
We are proud to feature Rebecca
Lloyd who published two collections of exquisite and disturbing
stories simultaneously this year: Mercy and Other Stories, Tartarus Press, and The View From Endless Street, WiDo Publishing.
Rebecca's association with Out of Print
is multi-fold. The View From Endless Street includes Rebecca’s story,
Finger Buffet that appeared in our second issue. Out of Print editor Indira
Chandrasekhar and she put together Pangea, An Anthology of Stories from Around the World, Thames River Press, 2012. While visiting India, Rebecca participated in 'An afternoon of Short Fiction with Out of Print Magazine' as well as ran The Out of Print short fiction workshop on dialogue at Lekhana 2013.
Rebecca joins us today on her blog tour to talk
about The View From Endless Street.
This is an extraordinary collection of
stories, Rebecca. I know it is your second to be published in the last few
months. Congratulations, and thank you for joining us.
You have the ability
to draw in and compel the reader’s attention through the strongly detailed,
almost tactile way in which you describe the strangeness of your characters or
the circumstances in which they find themselves. In The Snow Room, for example: ‘… his fingers,
sweaty in the summer and clammy in the winter, were always questing outwards as
if they didn’t belong to him.’ And then, there is this sentence in The Egyptian
Boat: ‘Abbie was shocked that streets
he’d once roamed through as easily as slipping his fingers into a glove, now
menaced him, pulsing with gross noises and shapes.’
Would you be able to
share something about the process by which these details become part of the
story, how deliberate, or visceral the choices are?
Well, first of all, thank you
Indira for having me as your guest, it’s a real pleasure for me, particularly
as I am a fan of your ezine Out of Print. In answer to your question, I think
it’s simply that I notice that kind of detail in my everyday life outside my
writing room. It’s not uncommon for boys of a certain age, maybe around nine,
to compulsively touch everything, so the idea is that Bernie in The Snow Room
has never grown out of that finger-questing habit, and you can tell by other
things he does and says that his development and engagement with the world is
quite stunted. So yes, I do deliberately
look for those characteristics or behaviours in my characters that mark them
apart from others and say a lot about them at the same time. But your other
example, the streets pulsing with gross noises and shapes was an experience of
my own when I returned to live in London from Africa where I had been working.
I remember walking into my first English supermarket when I came back and
feeling truly repulsed by the huge number of different kinds of bread on sale;
the choice was grotesque.
We are so proud that Finger Buffet that first appeared in Out of Print is part of The View from Endless Street. I know
that the story is based on a real-life episode, a terrifying one that you were witness
to. Do any of your other stories come from real life?
To some extent they all do, in that
something I read, experienced or witnessed would have triggered the stories,
but apart from Finger Buffet, the closest stories to me and my life are Now You
Can Live – the frightening mother character being based on one of my sisters,
and The Women which comes very largely from real life as I was able to watch
the goings on between Charlie and his terrifying mother over a matter of some
weeks as they were part of a community project I managed at the time.
You’ve set the
complexity of fear and love and family life against the silver capes and
fire-blower acts of a circus in The Oil
Drum. The viewpoint is one of the circus insider. Did you have to do a
lot of research on circus life in order to write the story?
No, I lived and worked on a
circus when I was young and my children were little, and I also wrote my
Anthropology thesis on circus life later, so I knew the life very well indeed.
The main character in that story is based really very closely on the man I
worked with as a sign-writer on the show. And the incident inside the lorry
with the bear and the man really happened, and we really did lay bets on who
would walk out of there.
A question about your
routine as a writer – do you write at a fixed time in the day? Do you think
it’s important to have a writing schedule?
I think it’s
vital to have a writing schedule. These days, I quite often can’t honour mine
properly and that’s partly because I no longer work, so there is no urgency
involved, but my working habit is to be at my desk and writing by around 8am
and to stop around 12. When I was working, I used to get up at 5am and work
until 8am, and then go off to what I called my ‘other work’ as opposed to
writing which I considered to be my ‘proper work.’
I don’t think
you get very far as a writer without a routine, if nothing else, you need to
train your brain Pavlovian style to know when it must start getting ready to
write, if you can do that, you can pick up from where you left off the day
before without any hesitation. But if you just write intermittently when the
fancy takes you, you almost have to re-invent your writing self each time.
We have found that getting short story collections published can be hard. You have just published
two in quick succession. Do you think the statement is warranted?
Yes, the statement is still
warranted; it is ridiculously hard to get a collection published, and it would
be hard to find an agent to represent you if you only wrote short stories as
well. That both my collections were picked up by different publishers at the
same time is co-incidental at one level, but also due to my dogged – and I mean
I’m no pussy – work at keeping my writing submitted to various publishing
houses. However, I do think I sense a bit more interest from publishers in the
short story form these days, although it’s important to keep in mind the fact
that publishers are not a writer’s mentor or friend, but they are businesses
that have to make profits and novels are always a preferred writing form
amongst the general public.
Well, it is clear we need champions for the short story. Thank you for being one. We are grateful
that your beautiful pieces of fiction are accessible to the
reader in these two fine collections.
Thank you, once again, Rebecca, for talking to us.
To read more about Rebecca's thoughts on the differences between writing a novel and a short story, and on putting together a collection, read the previous post on the blog tour at Paul Anthony's blog.
