Carys Bray
1. Please can you give us a brief synopsis of each of your short stories in your new collection Sweet Home?
There are seventeen stories in all:
‘Everything a Parent Needs to Know’ - the mother of a melancholy little girl eschews parenting books and finds comfort in T.S Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’
‘Just in Case’ - a bereaved woman borrows her next door neighbour’s baby.
‘Sweet Home’ – a foreigner builds a gingerbread house at the edge of an English village.
‘The Rescue’ - a father is reminded of his son as he watches the rescue of a group of Chilean miners.
‘Wooden Mum’ - a mum with an autistic son remembers a day when she was the happiest the woman in the world.
‘Dancing in the Kitchen’ – an exercise in scripting happiness.
‘Scaling Never’ - a little boy attempts to engineer a happily-ever-after following the death of his sister.
‘The Baby Aisle’ – a woman buys special offer babies at the supermarket.
‘My Burglar’ – valuable things are stolen from a pensioner during the night.
‘The Countdown’ – a father counts in an attempt to squelch his unmanageable imagination.
‘Bed Rest’ – the fabric map on some hospital curtains reminds a woman of a summer day a long time ago.
‘Under Covers’ – Carol’s bra is spread-eagled in the hedge like a monstrous albino bat and two teenage girls watch as she struggles to retrieve it.
‘Love: Terms and Conditions’ – the children have grown up in a family where love doesn’t track a base rate of obedience, and this has left them utterly unprepared for the measured, auditing love of their grandparents.
‘The Ice Baby’ – a carpenter carves a baby out of ice.
‘Bodies’ – a little girl practises being dead and is exposed to an unexpected slice of life in the process.
‘I Will Never Disappoint My Children’ – a story about disappointment and lost ice cream.
‘On the Way Home’ – five bruised strangers are soothed by brief interactions on a street at the end of a school day.
2. What is the appeal of the short story for you?
I love the economy of short stories. I love the way they can capture a moment or in the case of experts like Alice Munro, a whole life in very few words.
3. What made you want to write about the everyday lives of your characters?
I used to worry that I didn’t have anything interesting to say because I’d been at home with my children for so long. Then I realised that I knew a lot about family, so I decided to write about family and everyday life things – hopefully it’s interesting!
4. You are an associate tutor of creative writing at Edge Hill, so tell us about how this aids your own writing?
I think reading is the best preparation for writing, so I’ve always got my nose in a book. We look at a lot of fiction on the Creative Writing BA and I’m forever thinking about how and why particular stories work. Hopefully that helps me as a writer.
5. You are currently studying a PhD, so can you tell us how you are getting on?
It’s a Creative Writing PhD which, in my case, involves writing a novel. I’ve almost finished the first draft of the novel and once the novel is finished I will write about the creative process. It’s going pretty well so far. I’ve just started my second year and I’m still enjoying it!
6. Who are your favourite short story reads?
I love short stories by Ali Smith, Helen Simpson, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Robert Shearman and Adam Marek, to name a few.
7. Which writers can you identify in your own work?
Oh, that’s a really hard question. Carol Shields once said that her stories include ‘wallpaper… cereal bowls, cupboards, cousins, buses, local elections, head colds, cramps, newspapers.’ Reading her work made me see that domestic details humanise rather than trivialise fiction and I started to feel comfortable about including things like supermarkets and laundry in my stories.
8. Where did the inspiration come from for each of the stories?
Oh, lots of different places. The first story, ‘Everything a Parent Needs to Know’ is perhaps the most ‘real’ in that it includes my hatred of parenting books and my love of T.S Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’
Other stories were written with all sorts of things in mind. I remember staying up all night to watch the rescue of the Chilean miners and that experience led me to write ‘The Rescue.’ I wrote ‘The Ice Baby’ for an on line magazine called New Fairy Tales, hoping they would like it enough to publish it (they did, phew!). One of my children inspired a story called ‘The Baby Aisle’ because occasionally, if there was a space, he would squeeze himself onto an empty bottom shelf at the supermarket and call, ‘Buy me, buy me!’ It made me wonder what it would be like to buy children.
9. With four children, how do you balance family life and your work life?
My husband and I share the domestic things. He’s brilliant at ironing (he does it while he watches sport on the television) and I’m a much better cook than him, so I do all the cooking. By sharing the boring, everyday things we both have time to do the things that we enjoy – in my case writing, in his case coaching two junior football teams.
It also helps that I now see my writing as work. For a long time it seemed presumptuous to view writing as work, but it’s much easier to see it that way now. I write on the days when I’m not teaching and, if I’m not too tired, in the evenings.
10. What is next for you?
I need to finish the novel and the PhD. After that, I’m not sure.
11. How important do you think the short story is in the current world, given that lifestyles are so busy?
The short story is very important to me, but I’m reluctant to make any pronouncements about its importance to the world at large. Occasionally it’s said that the digital age is brilliant for the short story because people have less time to read. I’m not entirely convinced by this argument. I think people still like to immerse themselves in novels and I think it will always be the case that fewer readers opt for short stories. Having said that, there are some great new ways to digest short stories, for example, the Ether App is a free App which allows people to read short stories on mobile phones.
Female First Lucy Walton