Sarah Schofield interviewed by Katy Wimhurst via email.
3:AM: When did you start writing stories and why do you think they matter?
Sarah Schofield: I started writing stories as soon as I could write words. Reflecting back, I think it was the autonomy of the process of threading words together, mark-making, sense-making, that I loved so much. I spent a lot of time in my dad’s office before and after school and he would take paper out of the photocopier, fold it and bind it together with pink legal tape. It was only after he died, a few years ago now, that I discovered he had kept all of these little books that I wrote.
I think stories matter because they are the way we make sense of things, explore ideas, piece together the messy chaos of being a human. We all tell stories, don’t we? Whether it’s with friends in the pub or with the family around the dinner table. We thread the beads of our daily lives together in ways that make sense, or that fit an aesthetic, or to help us process trauma. We crave the shape, the rise and fall, the drama and the resolution. It’s in the ways we recount funny or annoying or unusual incidents in our day, or how we curate and edit our experiences – this, then this, then that, we say. I am hugely intrigued by how our brains make these connections to form narratives to enable us to carry our lives with us – in overlapping stories drawn from often disparate moments, incidents and encounters.
3:AM: Which other writers have influenced or inspired your work?
SS: So many! I think I’m influenced and inspired every time I read. I’m a slow reader so I try not to lose time on anything that I don’t find interesting, inspiring, pleasurable, nourishing or challenging in some way. Recent influences are too great to list or name, but I have been thinking a lot recently about early influential writers, often put into my hands by adults who noticed and nurtured my interest in story. One such person was my wonderful primary school teacher Christine who gave me a copy of Jane Eyre (we still exchange Christmas cards – this year I also sent a copy of Safely Gathered In, feeling nervous like it was long-overdue homework). And it was my mum who introduced me to Angela Carter via The Magic Toyshop and writers such as Alice Walker, Toni Morrison and Penelope Lively. I went through a phase of reading 1960s SF short story collections that my dad passed to me and Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon. Kafka’s Metamorphosis has always been a story I return to time and again. And Roald Dahl – Kiss Kiss and Someone Like You. Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes was, still is, important to me. I was also a little obsessed as a teenager about The Mersey Sound, particularly Adrian Henri’s poetry and artwork. The collaging, the layering, in poems such as ‘New Automatic Daffodils’. It’s a big, complex melting pot. I could keep delving in and pulling out offerings but this is already becoming nostalgic and meandering so I’ll leave that one there!
3:AM: Congratulations on your first collection of short fiction, Safely Gathered In, being published by Comma Press. How long did it take to put the book together and what was the hardest part?
SS: Thank you so much! It has been ten years, exactly. Way before this, I first heard about Comma Press as an undergrad and knew I loved what Comma did and it was my absolute aspiration to one day be published by Comma. It has taken me a long time to develop my voice and style and to get to the point where I feel my writing is good enough to be collected. Comma Press has been amazing at nurturing, encouraging and developing my writing over the last ten years. I am immensely grateful for their faith and support and more widely for the way they champion the short story.
There were three particular challenges to putting the collection together. Firstly, selection – which pieces should make the cut and in what order? My absolutely brilliant editors Zoe Turner and early on, Becca Parkinson, were sharp and insightful and really understood the work and how to curate it. Secondly, acknowledgments – I was so terrified of mistakenly leaving someone vital out (I still get cold sweats thinking about that!). Thirdly, most difficult was ignoring the nagging feeling that I wasn’t a good enough writer yet or mightn’t ever be. I don’t think I’m alone in experiencing those sorts of feelings. But having the work out there now does help to dull them a little.
3:AM: The collection shows a rich repertoire of kinds of stories. There are formally experimental ones and those with more orthodox forms. There is literary, speculative and sci-fi fiction. There are first, second and third person stories. Present and past tense is used. Do you get frustrated sticking to one kind of storytelling technique? What do you enjoy about experimenting or changing it up?
SS: I always feel different stories require different approaches, so the variety isn’t a deliberate act, as such, more that each time I come to write a piece, I want to find the best way to approach it. In my reading habits, I do tend to gravitate towards short story collections where the stories are all quite distinctive – varied in form, point of view, tense etc, a bit like enjoying a selection of cakes in a bakery window. I prefer this to the kind of collection where the stories all feel like they’re cut from the same batch of dough – you know that feeling where you are not sure where one story ends and another starts because the style, aesthetic and shape of each is so similar. I often admire those cookie-cutter collections a great deal, but I don’t quite enjoy them in the same way as the baker’s selection ones.
3:AM: The title story, ‘Safely Gathered In’, is only seven pages long yet extraordinary. It begins with lists of items in a storage facility. These have a revealing poignancy but I wondered how you would create an arc. Without giving away spoilers, the perspective shifts and the story acquires an unexpected, masterful momentum. Can you say something about how you wrote this story and where the idea came from?
SS: I wanted to see if I could write a story where the characters were all off stage, their shape, their silhouette held simply by the belongings they keep in self-storage. I also wanted to experiment with drawing together different modes or voices. So in this piece, there is the marketing voice of the self-storage unit, the inventory listings of items in each unit and also lyrics, somewhat twisted, from the harvest hymn Come, ye Thankful People. I also wanted to leave room for the reader – what do they see or sense in the subtext? What thoughts, experiences and perspectives do they have about possessions, nostalgia and memory? It’s about commercialism but it’s also about how the things we own can become resonant with such potent meaning to us.
3:AM: There is striking detail in the stories and a careful observation of lives. A theme of the book is how loss, grief and memory are encoded in ordinary things. In ‘Dead Man’s Switch’, knitted items, birdfeed and Fisherman’s Friend tablets remind Emmy of her dead husband; in ‘Automata’, the metal birds Lila creates have their roots in her memories of playing as a child with her long-dead sister; in ‘Rejoice’, the narrator’s daughter April becomes obsessed with Margaret Thatcher, with her black handbag and headscarves, after the death of the father from coronavirus. How important is ‘detail’ for bringing short stories to life? Does this offer you a way to subtly explore difficult emotions?
SS: Yes! Very much so. You’ve put your finger on it with such precision. Objects so often stand in place or as a shorthand for complex suites of emotions. The best objects, I’ve found, are the ones that don’t have lots of predictable or well-worn associations. Objects such as keys or teddys or jewellery (that kind of thing) don’t work so well for me because they have so much baggage already. I like objects that are as ambiguous or multi-textured as our own feelings. We very rarely feel one emotion, in isolation, at a time and so the objects I gather in my stories work to hint at these feeling combinations. Perhaps a bit like a still-life drawing? I love examining our connectedness to stuff. I’m somewhat against the current trend towards decluttering. I detest the sound of that word. Declutter. It makes me shudder. I have small children and would dearly love a tidy streamlined home. However, I worry sometimes that this trend to throw away, get rid, undermines our very human association with stuff.
3:AM: ‘The Bactogarden’ is set in a sci-fi future where biotechnology is used to create exotic dishes as well as to mend the fissures in buildings. Kay, who works injecting buildings with spores that grow to support the structures, reconnects with an old school friend Georgie, now a ‘culinary artist and scientist’ who creates dishes for her cafe like edible oyster pearls and alphabet soup (which spells out words in green broth, with pink neon bacteria). Ursula Le Guin has said that sci-fi is descriptive rather than predictive, it examines the present through a particular lens rather than extrapolating a future. Would you agree with that sentiment in relation to ‘The Bactogarden’? There are questions about class and the ethics of technology here.
SS: This is a wonderful observation and I admire and agree with Ursula Le Guin’s astuteness. Although a part of this was indeed extrapolating a potential future, as I worked in collaboration with Professor Martyn Amos on this project looking at synthetic biology, ensuring the science in the story is all verified and authenticated, Martyn and I did really want to think about more universal ideas or truths. We thought a lot about how no matter what technology or innovation comes our way, the thing itself is inert. It is what we as humans do with it, how we reply to it that is intriguing. And it will be positive, negative, divisive, and altruistic. Ultimately, I hope the story explores that no matter where or when we are, the thing we strive most for is connection to those we love.
3:AM: Messy relationships and complex emotions feature in many stories. In ‘Dead Man’s Switch’, Emmy’s marriage to David, who is now dead, was far from perfect, and he is even sending her (preplanned) emails after his death to advise her about house insurance and car MOTs. In ‘Under the Foil’, Greg, who has spent months planning to leave his wife, rings her voicemail repeatedly at the end to hear her voice over and over. In ‘The Bactogarden’, Kay’s friendship with Georgie is mediated by unspoken tensions. Can you say a bit about why messy feelings and relationships appeal to you as a theme?
SS: I have a theory that short stories blossom from a place, feeling, or situation that otherwise eschews easy explanation. A short story gives the complexities space to breathe, stretch out a little and take shape. You know that amazing moment when you are reading a short story and something in it, some emotional truth or reality that had been flying a little out-of-reach under your own radar suddenly takes shape? That, for me, is what a short story can do that other forms cannot do. A novel or play or drama may have too wide a lens, a poem perhaps too narrow. The short story is perfectly placed to capture the evasive emotional truths we all feel nudging below the surface. And so messy relationships, with all their complexities and intricacies, are the perfect sample for this. In our connections with friends, acquaintances, family members, lovers, I’d argue we rarely feel singular emotional truth. It is a complex stew of contradictions, different things bubbling to the top at any given moment. And within a breath, we can feel love and hate simultaneously. We can feel fear and thrill, disgust and attraction. We think we know what we want when really we don’t.
Relationships are complex because humans are brilliantly complicated and I find stories that try to dodge or negotiate with this truth inauthentic.
3:AM: Is there any short story you wish you had written yourself? What do you admire about it?
SS: This is a superb and impossible question. There are so many writers and individual stories that I adore but do not feel that pang of longing because they are doing their thing wonderfully and uniquely and it is so different from my thing. The exception to this, perhaps, is when a writer is writing into a territory that you felt you could have, or should have, explored. Daisy Johnson does this wonderfully regarding place. Especially in her collection Fen. Her connectedness to the land is so exquisitely drawn that it can be felt on a bodily level. And it makes me yearn to write more towards my Lancashire roots.
3:AM: What are you working on at present? Any projects that you would like to share with our readers?
SS: I am thinking about my next collection of short stories. I want to experiment with found texts, collaging and playing with words that I find in unlikely places – abandoned shopping lists, the flyers that get shoved through the letterbox for stairlifts and airport taxi services, Facebook community forum posts – and everything in between. My first project will be working with a MA thesis from 1967 about the science of trampolining that I found in the Edge Hill University archive. I began leaning towards this idea of found text in the collection with my title story, ‘Safely Gathered In’ and the end story ‘Nostalgia4Beginners’. I want to explore the different ways I can creatively respond to these words and try to offer up something new and interesting.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWEE
Sarah Schofield‘s stories have been published in several Comma Press anthologies including Lemistry, Spindles, Conradology and The New Abject, and also Wall: Nine Stories from Edge Hill Writers (EHUP), Best British Short Stories 2020 (Salt), Visual Verse, Synaesthesia Magazine, Lakeview International Journal, Woman’s Weekly, The Morning Star and others. She has been shortlisted in the Bridport and the Guardian Travel Writing Competition and won the Orange New Voices Prize, Writer’s Inc and The Calderdale Fiction Prize. Sarah is a Lecturer of Creative Writing at Edge Hill University and runs writing workshops in community settings. Her debut short story collection Safely Gathered In came out in 2021 with Comma Press.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Katy Wimhurst’s first collection of short stories is Snapshots of the Apocalypse (Fly on the Wall Press). Her fiction has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies including The Guardian, Writers’ Forum, Cafe Irreal, Magic Oxygen Literary Prize, Ouen Press, and ShooterLit. Her visual poems have appeared in magazines like Ric Journal, Steel Incisors, 3:AM, The Babel Tower, Trickhouse Press, and Streetcake Magazine.
