David Hartley interviewed by Katy Wimhurst.
David Hartley is a writer and researcher based in Manchester, UK. He holds a PhD in Creative Writing from The University of Manchester, and is the author of the short story collections Spiderseed (Sleepy House Press), Incorcisms (Arachne Press), and Fauna (Fly on the Wall). His work has been published in Ambit, Black Static, The Shadow Booth, and Structo, and he’s often found haunting the various spoken word events of Manchester and beyond. He is co-host on the Autism Through Cinema podcast and co-founder of the Narratives of Neurodiversity Network. He tweets at @DHartleyWriter and blogs on davidhartleywriter.com. This interview was conducted via email.
Katy Wimhurst: When did you start telling stories and why do you think they are important?
David Hartley: Stories were always part of my life, as they are with any life, but they always had a certain sharpness and aura for me. My Dad would read Danny the Champion of the World by Roald Dahl to me when I was young, and then he took me to see a theatre adaptation of Alan Garner’s Elidor at the Contact Theatre in Manchester. I remember very little of the play, but there was a moment when the actors disappeared behind a trick wall that I can still picture quite vividly. My Mum was responsible for my reading habits, making sure I was always stocked up with Goosebumps books and Redwall books, then giving me an Iain Banks novel when I was old enough. Soon after, I started to give serious thought to penning my own tales. Miniature epics, and fragments of strange ideas at first, and some Legend of Zelda fan fiction, I believe.
I see stories as human lifeblood. It is storytelling, not intelligence, that separates us from other animals. In a way, all animals tell stories – where is the food, where is the predator, how shall we stalk this prey? – but we humans made it our main thing… and now look at us. Our every waking moment is suffused with a million micro-stories that we tell to ourselves and each other. And then when we fall asleep, our brains can’t help but tell a few more.
KW: You have done a Ph.D. in Creative Writing which involved writing a 97,000-word novel on autism and the afterlife and a shorter critical thesis to accompany it. What conclusions (in brief) did you reach about the links between fantastical narratives and autism?
DH: I came to the topic via my sister, who is autistic. The research was fascinating, and the writing of the novel nearly tore me into pieces, but I’ve come out the other side with my mind reshaped for the better. I learned that we need a collective overhaul in the way we think about autism and other neurodivergences. The neurodiversity movement (if it can actually be called a ‘movement’) is making some brilliant strides in changing the narrative around autism, mostly because it’s led by the ‘actually autistic’ who are seizing the opportunity to re-shape their own stories. My thesis and novel tried to demonstrate that science-fiction and fantasy are particularly powerful tools for this process of re-shaping. While we have to be careful, because autistic people are often disparagingly referred to as ‘aliens’ or as ‘emotionless robots,’ the tendency of good sci-fi to meaningfully explore what it means to be divergent, and how that difference can be transformative, makes it an absolutely vital genre for the expression and aesthetics of neurodivergence. The YA novel Show Us Who You Are by autistic author Elle McNicol is a really good recent example of this in action.
KW: You write mainly weird fiction like the short stories in your most recent collection Fauna (Fly on the Wall Press, 2021). You describe these as ‘strange stories about strange things for strange people.’ What does this weird speculative approach offer you that, say, realism or even more conventional fantasy don’t?
DH: I find ‘the weird’ really freeing, and there is something about its particular energy that chimes strongly with the present moment. With the rapid onset of the digital age and all its various maddening whims, we find ourselves caught in the midst of a science-fictional cyberpunk present that is still weighed down by the baggage of mythologies both ancient and modern. We’re trying to think of ourselves as so-called ‘posthuman,’ but we’re still utterly beholden to our nature and the natural environment and, in particular, to our beloved-yet-ravaged planet. Outer space no longer seems as viable an answer as it once did, and we can’t seem to make a scintilla of difference about the climate crisis, despite our rampant anxieties. We’re global but still local, hyperconnected but still distant, and we still can’t agree on our myriad identities.
The weird, for me, feels like the only relevant response. The weird never quite has the nihilistic attitude of postmodernism because it often anchors itself back to ancient, mythic, monstrous roots. But nor does it have the earnest yearning for sincerity that lurks at the core of realism like some smug, all-knowing goblin. The weird invites the absurd and the abstract to be its bedfellows, but never fully denies the need to unfold a legible story. And while I love conventional fantasy, sci-fi and horror as much as the next nerd, they all conform to a catalogue of neat edges that the weird tends to treat with more suspicion.
I don’t really know. I may be talking rubbish here. I just know that when I write, I lean forwards to the weird because it feels fresh, daring, flirty, and present. I want to write things that no one has written before. Given the enormous mountain of material we’ve vomited out over the millennia, that task is impossible. But the weird makes it still feel fun.
KW: Animals feature heavily in your short fiction such as in Fauna. Why is this subject important to you?
DH: Animals are at the heart of Fauna – it is very much a bestiary of short fiction. I’ve always found myself fascinated and intrigued by animals, but not to the extent that I ended up becoming a vet or a zoologist or safari park attendant. It wasn’t until I started doing some voluntary work with the Manchester & Salford RSPCA, and then subsequently became a trustee, that I began to seriously interrogate the animal-human relationship. Around the same time, I was starting to take my writing more seriously, moving from a hobby to an ambition, and the two things soon came together. Fauna is the result of that meeting.
The voluntary work opened my eyes to the psychology humans employ when considering animals, both wild and domestic. On the one hand, we intensely love and adore them, especially the ones we name and bring into our homes, but on the other, we casually slaughter and consume them, while feeling actively repulsed by the ones we don’t name but also end up in our homes (hello slugs and spiders). But then our feelings morph and change depending on circumstances, and once-beloved pets are abandoned, while rare rhinos and frogs disappear into extinction at unimaginable rates. Writing the tales of Fauna was a way of trying to explore the labyrinth of these contradictions. I expect it’s something I’ll always come back to.
KW: ‘Pigskin’ (Fly on the Wall Press, 2021), a long short story, is a ‘howl of vegan awareness’ against the industrial factory farming of animals, told through a speculative lens. You have described it as a rewriting of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. It’s an excellent, if unsettling, read, which prods at the conscience without the polemic ever eclipsing the story. Can you talk a bit about writing from vegan awareness and how you sought to balance the polemic and narrative aspects of the story?
DH: I wrote ‘Pigskin’ soon after deciding to go fully vegan. I had been vegetarian for a few years and spent a good while having imaginary conversations in my head with belligerent meat-eaters. Fortunately, I’ve never had to defend my life choices, but when you shift towards veganism you can’t help but go down these mental pathways. One age-old adage is the question: don’t you miss bacon? As if these strips of pig flesh are somehow the pinnacle of human achievement and to live without them is tantamount to self-torture. No, I said to my imaginary sparring partner, I don’t miss it at all. Nor cheese, or ‘real’ milk chocolate. The smug self-satisfaction of veganism soon helps to blow all those cravings away.
But I never wanted to be a preachy vegan, and I don’t think I am. I advocate for it, gently encourage others to give it a go, and make it feel easy-breezy (which it increasingly is) so that it doesn’t seem like this massive deal. But I had to pour my vegan passions into at least one of the animal stories, and so I turned my attentions to the true source of disgust: the hellscape of industrial farming. Throw in a bit of Orwell and ‘Pigskin’ was born.
As I put the tale together, I actually started to realise that I didn’t have to be polemical. I believe that deep down, we all know industrial farming is horrendous and, on an even deeper level, we’re all a little uncomfortable about eating animals. I think we all have that odd moment as children when we suddenly make that connection between the smiling cartoon chicken in our story books, and the breaded nugget on our plates. It’s maybe one of our very first WTF moments, and we deal with it by clinging onto the self-evident normality of the situation. Mum and Dad are doing it, so it must be fine. But an unbreaded nugget of really? is buried in most of us, I think, so a story like ‘Pigskin’ will always connect and doesn’t have to scream and shout its politics. It knows, you know, and the nugget deep down inside you also knows. Maybe by prodding it, I can help it step forward for a moment and at least suggest a bit of meat reduction…
KW: In ‘Pigskin’, the setting is arid and what is happening to the animals is brutal, but the language of the story is starkly poetic: ‘The farm is rashed. The farm is a glut of rot, a curse of coughs, frayed and peeling. A gate clatters in the gale and no-one will stop it; Crows mock from the rooftops, plan their next move. The sty clouds with an epiphany of Flies, bulbous and smug’. The prose in other stories, such as ‘The Broadcast of the Foxes’ (in Fauna) is also rich and vivid – ‘The fox, still hungry, lifts his wings, spreads his crackling feathers through a ripple of red and green’. Can you talk a bit about the importance of the prose itself in your fiction and how much work you put into it?
DH: I realised quite early on in my time as a writer that I tend towards the florid and the excessive – dare I say it: the purple prose… A lot of this comes from my writer Dad, who has similar tendencies, but I think it also arises from being absorbed in theatrical writings from a young age. Dad’s main job was as a sixth-form Drama teacher and he often took me to productions and rehearsals. When I joined the college myself, I was involved in a lot of the shows as either an actor or as tech crew. He favoured the old tragedies and comedies of Shakespeare, the ancient Greeks, and Spanish writers like Federico Garcia Lorca. I think I absorbed a lot of these poetic stylings without really realising it, and when I began to write my own tales it all came pouring out. Not always successfully, it has to be said, but sometimes it works. I also found this being useful when I started doing spoken word. Taking to the stage again made me realise the theatricality that is inherent in all writing. Nowadays, I’m always half thinking about the performance of the prose, as well as its place on the page. And therefore things like rhythm, repetition, and the wildness of words are very important to me. I get thrilled by the mixing of metaphors, wordplay and punning, wonky grammar, and lexical invention. Our language is a playground, so why not play?
KW: Several stories involve some reckoning for humans in the context of their harmful relationship to animals: in ‘Pigskin’ it is the animals themselves who revolt against the farmers that are modifying them grotesquely into forms of food; in ‘A Place to Dump Guinea Pigs,’ Charon the boatman manages cleverly to get the guinea-pig abuser back (without him realising it); in ‘The Broadcast of the Foxes’, as if the normal tables are turned, it is the human who lives in fear of invasion by foxes; in ‘Bug-Eyed’ it isn’t the humans who are saved by a mothership. Can you say something about why reckoning of this kind may be important or satisfying at a fantasy level?
DH: Bear with me while I talk about one of my all-time favourite films: Jurassic Park. Now, I love Jurassic Park because I was obsessed with it for a while as a kid, but as an adult I still think it’s a masterpiece. Spielberg understood that the dinosaurs were not monsters, they were animals. The velociraptors hunt like lions, the T-Rex gives up chasing the jeep when it speeds away and instead wanders off to look for easier prey. The triceratops gets sick, the gallimimus flock like birds. It is a film suffused with the essence of nature, and the reckoning falls upon the humans who had the gall to try to grip hold of nature and master it. That film is not the ‘revenge of nature’ like, say, Spielberg’s earlier masterpiece Jaws. Instead, it is nature rebalancing itself after it has been overreached.
In the present moment, it is not difficult to look at animals and feel a certain amount of guilt. We are the generation who have grown up under the gathering cloud of climate change and the looming threat of mass extinction. The fantasy of ‘nature’s revenge’ is now a cathartic outlet for that level of guilt. Indeed, it no longer feels like ‘revenge,’ it is something more like redemption, or reclamation. This happens at the end of ‘Pigskin’ and is ever-present throughout the tales of Fauna. I’m trying to highlight the entirely false hierarchy we’ve imposed on the animal kingdom. We’ve got ourselves at the top like overlords, and our favoured courtiers just underneath – the dogs, dolphins, tigers, cats, eagles – and then everyone else in descending order down to the flies, worms, and slugs. The inversions of Fauna are an attempt to topple this imaginary structure of animal importance.
KW: I’m impressed by the rich and unusual imaginative worlds you conjure in which the relationship between humans and animals is reflected in different ways. I love how ‘Flock’, a story wherein different types of birds come together to facilitate the abduction of a human, is told from the point of view of a particular bird. And in ‘A Time Before Horses’, we see from the perspective of time-traveling horses who offer three different interpretations of a scary creature stalking a man. Is this one value of being a writer, to conjure new imaginative spaces into being, to see things from unusual points of view, including that of animals?
DH: Thank you! And yes, absolutely. Part of the precious magic of writing is being able to play around with alternative perspectives and unusual points of view. To a certain extent, we have to be trespassers; we have to move into cultures and identities that are not our own, and we have to be careful and sensitive when doing that. This is where research is absolutely crucial, and it was particularly key for my Ph.D. novel where many of the narrators were autistic.
It was a little easier with the animals of Fauna, but even there I was continually conscious of the problems of anthropomorphisation. The whole point of the collection was to interrogate the human-animal relationship, so I couldn’t make my animals too human – but they also had to have voices, language, and the ability to tell or relate stories. This is where the fantastical, imaginative spaces really helped, because they always lend a certain air of absurdity. That way the anthropomorphism can be emphasised as ridiculous and faulty, like the moment in ‘Hutched’ when we finally hear from the trapped rabbit, or the ‘voice’ of the cockroach in ‘Betamorphosis’, who is just a carbon copy of Gregor Samsa from Metamorphosis. The combination of the playfulness of the fantastical with the impossibility of representing an animal’s inner thoughts hopefully allows for something meaningful to take place.
KW: Your short fiction shows quite a diversity of voice; you are versatile in terms of creating distinct characters with unique kinds of language, from Charon the boatman with his down to earth Northern brogue in ‘A Place to Dump Guinea Pigs’, to Tyson, the fractured, robotic dog, to the confident public speaker in ‘Come and See the Whale’. How tricky is it to create such distinct voices and are there any craft tips here?
DH: Again, I think it’s the theatre that’s helped here. Being in and around performance helps to lodge different accents, tones, characters, and styles into your writing reservoir. So, my only real tip here is: be a culture vulture! Be voracious in your appetite for different types of media across different genres, from fiction to non-fiction, the printed word and screen-based stories and audio dramas. And if you’re a sociable creative, go to spoken word events and open mic nights and scratch theatre events and so on. Absorb people’s voices and their characterisations and fill up that reservoir of styles. Then go home and just experiment! It doesn’t matter if it goes wrong, just get it on the page. That’s always the best advice.
KW: How long does it take to complete a short story? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or do you have to edit and rewrite a lot?
DH: Confession: I hate editing. Urgh, there, I said it. I love to sit down and splurge out a tale, and I’ll edit as I go to keep the rhythm and the pace flowing, but I’m often reluctant to go back and re-draft. I do, and it always makes the tales better, but I always strive to make the first draft as close to being the final thing as possible. Probably unwise, but sometimes it works. And sometimes I do think a story can be ruined or robbed of some of its original essence if it is subject to too much editing. Writers are, by necessity, over-thinkers. Sometimes we need to put trust in our wilder instincts and stop second-guessing our own work. But I should emphasise the word ‘sometimes’ there. Most of the time, redrafting is crucial. The trick is to hone that skill that knows where to draw the final line. It’s a hard thing to master, and something that most writers probably never achieve. But we should always keep an eye out for it, and sometimes we need to be a little more cavalier and a little less precious.
KW: What are you working on at the moment? Any projects in the pipeline you would like to tell me about?
DH: I’ve made a very slow and gentle and careful start on something new recently. It’s about ghosts, again. I’m forever coming back to ghosts. But this one is much more focused on people, than on animals. I also have a few new short stories drafted up where I’m having fun playing around with form. I’ve just written a horror crime tale in the style of an instruction manual for a board game, which was a delightful exercise. After the seriousness of the PhD, and the personal intensity of the stories in Fauna, I’m just trying to spend some time enjoying my writing at the moment. There’s not much point if it isn’t fun, at least some of the time.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Katy Wimhurst is a writer and visual poet. Her first book, Snapshots of the Apocalypse, is to be published by Fly on the Wall Press in January 2022. Her short fiction – mainly magical realist, surrealist and dystopian – has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies including The Guardian, Shooterlit, Cafe Irreal, Ouen Press, Fabula Press, Magic Oxygen Literary Prize, and To Hull and Back. Her visual poetry has been published in magazines such as The Babel Tower Notice Board, 3am, Ric Journal, AngelHouse Press, Steel Incisors, and Talking All The Time About Strawberries.
