An interview with J.Rosina Harlow

J. Rosina Harlow is a frequest contributor to our anthologies.  Her story, Of the Woods, will appear in the forthcoming Dark Lane Anthology Vol.14.

Q: What are your working methods? Do you sit down every day to write? Do you have a designated place to work?

A: After an appropriate period of dancing and fasting, I’ll cover all the windows with black lace and light the inspiration candles in my den of prolixity. Then, whilst in a carefully poised shoulder-stand (I can’t do handstands) I’ll take my 16 th Century quill and scratch out the first words of my latest opus preferably with a tawny owl positioned on my right foot.

There, now that I’ve got the reader’s attention...

In reality...I usually have something ‘on the go’; an idea for a story or even a couple, and I’ll devote some time to it whenever I can, usually at weekends. I’ll sit either in our music room at home, outside on a tool box at the allotment or on a fallen tree at the little ‘nature reserve’ down the road, where I can face my favourite tree and scribble! I usually write longhand in a notebook as it flows better and feels more organic. My husband buys me beautiful hardback patterned notebooks for birthdays and Christmas.

I also like to be away from people when I write...I have a friend who always writes in a busy coffee shop but I like seclusion and silence, or a carefully chosen piece of music, usually on headphones so I can be in my own world. Sometimes I’ll have one particular song on loop continually because it captures the ‘vibe’ I’m going for or puts me in the right frame of mind for a particular story, so it’s probably a good job it’s on headphones!

Q: Tell us about one of your favourite short stories and why you like it (not one of your own).

A: This was the hardest question to answer! I knew straight away that it had to be one from my ‘favourite four’ writers; Edgar Allan Poe, Angela Carter, Jorge Luís Borges or Daphne DuMaurier. I then re-read a few of the stories I enjoyed the most (thanks for giving me the impetus to do that!)

Several stories by these writers have been burned into my subconscious as seminal works; Ligeia and The Pit and the Pendulum by Poe, The Erl-King and The Company of Wolves by Carter, El Libro De Arena/The Book of Sand and El Disco/The Disk by Borges.

However, I finally settled on what is probably the least well known of the bunch (because I like being unconventional), and also because, when I started reading it, I was struck by how influential it has been on my writing style.

I picked, (no pun intended) ‘The Apple Tree’ by Daphne Du Maurier. It has a strong slant towards nature, sensuality, and the turning of the seasons, and carries a sense of foreboding and surrealism. It hints at, rather than specifies, the central horrors. I’d recommend it to everyone to read, but in a nutshell, it’s about a widower who has recently lost his wife of some years. Rather than being grief-stricken, it comes to him as a release from living under the shadow of a punitive nag with a martyr-complex. As the story develops though, the central character reveals himself to be a less-than-likeable man and possibly an unreliable narrator. He shamelessly revels in his freedom for a while. Then, however, an apple tree in his garden starts to take on the reproachful and haggard appearance of his dead wife, and it slowly starts to ruin his life. My own short story ‘One Rotten Apple’ (published in Dark Lane Anthology 12) picks up most obviously on this influence. I wrote the first draft when I was living near Chichester, right next door to an apple orchard with a very other-worldly atmosphere...

Q: Tell us about one of your favourite short stories (done by you).

This would have been a different answer before the phenomenon of ‘Fox Mabel’ (published in Dark Lane Anthology 11 and then Dark Lane Omnibus…...among others). That story has been so popular and really seems to have made an impact on people. At the risk of sounding ‘yuk’, I’m very grateful for that. I liked the story when I wrote it- (in fact it’s the only story of my own that made me feel a bit tearful as I finished it) but I have a different appreciation of it now. It’s very different to a lot of my other stuff, despite being dark and based around the natural world. The tone is more reflective and philosophical, and there’s hope, forgiveness and redemption in there, too, which I think are missing from so many of our stories and films nowadays. The title was an intentional homage to Angela Carter’s ‘Wolf-Alice’. Fox Mabel’ has now found a special place in my heart, and the cherry on the cake is the beautiful illustration that Vikki Yeates drew to accompany it. The original now hangs proudly on my wall!

Q: Where do your ideas come from? Do you go looking for ideas – for example by brainstorming, or do you wait for inspiration?

A: Nope! No brainstorming or anything like that. It’s too much like hard work and I can’t ‘force’ myself to write, or it’ll end up as clichéd rubbish. I get ideas from everywhere; conversations I’ve had, podcasts I’ve listened to, books I’ve read, sketches a friend does, music I’ve listened to or clever things my nieces say. I sometimes get ‘fixated’ on a word or an idea that will marinate in my mind for days or weeks before I start writing. Once I feel I’ve got enough ‘impetus’ behind a cohesive plot or even an atmosphere that feels like ‘me’, I scribble like mad until I get it all down on paper (in one of the afore-mentioned notebooks).

Q: Are you a full-time writer? If you have another job, what is it and would you like to become a full-time writer if you could?

A: No. I’m a full-time instrumental tutor/guitarist and singer. I teach guitar and bass one-to-one, run band rehearsals and workshops and help to run a busy music department. That takes up all of my weekdays (and usually the evenings too). Sometimes I do dream of being a full-time writer, but only of fiction. I’ve never wanted a ‘functional’ writing job like editing or journalism; writing for me is wholly creative (although, arguably, journalists are amongst the most creative of all writers...but we won’t go there…) I always say that my main job is so full on that when writing becomes prescriptive or a chore, I stop and redirect my energy into something I enjoy more. Writing is my escape from the day-to-day. I also don’t think that writing full-time would suit my temperament- I’d quickly become morose! I’m an ambivert, so after a quiet and introspective day, I crave being around people, whether it’s friends,colleagues or children, to keep me feeling ‘alive’.

Q: What is the most difficult part of your creative process?

There are so many difficult parts! Getting a story published is probably the most difficult part, but it’snot creative...I also find ruthless editing and re-drafting very tricky, and getting the cats off the keyboard for long enough to type is a challenge in itself. But I’d have to say that it’s always a nerve-wracking process when I first send a story to someone else for a critique or comments. I have two amazing friends who proof-read and critique for me and they always find interesting angles in the stories that I haven’t seen (or ways to make it better). Sometimes I pass it to my lovely husband to read and, particularly if it’s slightly historical in nature, he’ll quickly point out the faults! I once heard a brilliant quotation that showing your work to someone else for the first time is a bit like showing them a ‘naked selfie of your brain’….I’m sure I’ve scarred a lot of people for life!

Q: If you could go back in time, what would you say to your younger self about becoming a writer? 

A: If I could (and if I felt it was right to dwell on the past), I would definitely say ‘START SOONER!’ Also; Get over your fear of rejection or of not being good enough and start submitting stuff and learning’. I left it too long to start really, but thank God I did start, (my first published item as an adult was a tiny piece of flash fiction at the age of 26). Honestly, I’ve learnt so much over the intervening fifteen plus years. I’ve had great fun, grown in confidence, and my style has developed and been refined (drafting my first novel has helped with that too...it might take another fifteen years to get that out!) My old Primary School Headmistress said she knew I’d be a published author one day. She also told me to take the caterpillars out of my pocket. But that’s a different story….

An interview with Ashley Stokes

Ashley Stokes story, 'Under the Tower That Fell', appears in forthcoming Dark Lane Digest #2. He is the author of Gigantic (Unsung Stories, 2021) and The Syllabus of Errors (Unthank Books, 2013). He lives in the East of England where he’s a ghost and ghostwriter.

What are your working methods?  Do you sit down every day to write?  Do you have a designated place to work?

Nowadays I write every day from around 7am to 10am. I have an office in my flat and I do nearly all my writing at a desk facing the wall with the window behind me. I am very much a creature of habit and have a process I go through before I start writing creatively: complete a language exercise (I am learning Swedish at the moment); post a picture to Insta; keep a journal and plan what I am going to do later in the day; read my Tarot and photograph the spread; then plan my creative writing or write about the story I am currently writing. Then write 250 – 1000 words. I do sometimes write in cafes or might walk out to somewhere to sit in the quiet, but I’ll be writing notes or plot-frameworks, or just busk and play. I am either very organised or have severe mental health problems.

Tell us about one of your favourite short stories and why you like it (not one of your own).

Of course, whatever I choose, I reserve the right to unchoose, revise, swap or recant in an hour or so. I suppose if I think about a story that stands out above others – and I read a lot of short stories – I think about those shorts that open up imaginative space and possibilities for the story, esp the weird story, that I had not explored before, where I might like to go. One such inspiring story that had a great effect on me was Nathan Ballingrud’s Wild Acre, which you can find  in North American Lake Monsters. I already understood from the earlier stories in the collection that Ballingrud was writing horror stories in a pained, melancholy, dirty-realist type of voice, with echoes of Carver and Yates and intimations of Faulkner and Steinbeck. Wild Acre pairs this vivid and plaintive vocal style with a compellingly centred plot structure, the horror front-loaded, most of the story dedicated to its real-life ramifications. A cast of building contractors up against it, on the brink of bankruptcy because tree-hugging environmentalists are trashing a site they are developing half way up a wooded mountain has a bloody encounter with what the wider world can only explain as a wolf. A steadfast, armed man should have been able to ward off a wolf, right? I loved this story, with its long consequential tail of grief, silence and PTSD. It’s certainly a different take on the werewolf story. Undoubtedly for me it was an example of the special effects the weird story can deploy and the depth charges it can lay. Other stories I really love, off the top of my head, are: The Colour Out of Space by Lovecraft, Where the Summer Ends by Karl Edward Wagner, Dr. Locrian’s Asylum by Thomas Ligotti, and Kuobiko by Georgina Bruce. I also like the stories of Linda Rucker.

Tell us about one of your favourite short stories (done by you).

I have a bad mental habit of thinking that only the last two things I’ve written are any good and everything before it dogmuck. Sometimes I think writing is like boredom in that you never quite remember doing it, hence the disconnect I can experience with my work once it’s been out of the fridge a while. At the moment, the story I most like is called How Beautiful You Are. It will appear in the latest in Steve Shaw’s Great British Horror anthologies from Black Shuck. It’s about a dilapidated sixties-concrete housing block that’s being overwhelmed by a strange mould. It’s kind of trippy. If I go back, I have stories that marked some sort of milestone or gear-change for me, so Hardrada (Shadow Booth 4), Things Break Down (Phantasmagoria 23) and The Hinwick Effigy (Cloister Fox 2).

 

Where do your ideas come from?  Do you go looking for ideas – for example by brainstorming, or do you wait for inspiration?

They come from all over, in stabs, glimmerings, mental pictures, a hanker, a flash. I get them reading other stories. I have them daydreaming in the shower or out walking with my headphones on, or when I’m working out. I usually have some sort of primary glimpse that I title and add to an Ideas List I have on my desktop. Over time, I’ll add other ideas and developments to the title on the List as they strike me and record the notebook page reference so I can access all the references later. Eventually the story floats to the surface, becomes urgent, or fits with a call for submission, and I’ll spend some time planning it in detail before writing a couple of drafts. I doubt I’ll live long enough to write all the stories left on my list.

 

Are you a full-time writer? If you have another job, what is it and would you like to become a full-time writer if you could?

Sort of. I am a ghostwriter, so write books for other people. I also run online and face-to-face workshops as the Unthank School of Writing. I would love to work full-time on my own stuff but that gig is tough.

What is the most difficult part of your creative process?

Quite possibly the overstretching of my bandwidth, the balancing act that has me often writing a novel, shorts, ghosts and collaborations all at the same time. Constantly waiting patiently is also difficult.

 If you could go back in time, what would you say to your younger self about becoming a writer?

Please look after yourself better. Don’t listen to commissars. Don’t pretend to be a realist or a theorist. Write what no one else could write. Be hip to your jag. Accept wilderness forever.

Dark Lane Digest #1

As the name might suggest, we at Dark Lane Books have launched a new more compact anthology series, Dark Lane Digest.

Issue 1 contains stories by Charles, Wilkinson, Laura Brooks, J. Rosina Harlow, Alisha Vayette, Matthew G. Rees, and David Rose.  Read their fresh takes on hauntings, witches, vampires, cursed objects and..um...talking rabbits.  These six stellar tales are beautifully illustrated by Martin Stubbington and Vikki Yeates (who also provides the cover art).  Grab a copy of kindle from Amazon, or pick up the paperback from Lulu.

An Interview with Matthew G. Rees

Matthew G. Rees kicks off Dark Lane Anthology Volume 12 with his story 'The Boat'.  He has published a number of short story collections, most recently The Snow Leopard of Moscow and Other Stories.

Q: What are your working methods?  Do you sit down every day to write?  Do you have a designated place to work?

A: I’ll come to your question in just a moment if I may. First (sounding suspiciously like a politician playing for time and dodging the issue) I’d like to express my thanks to all at Dark Lane for inviting me here, for taking an interest in my fiction, and, finally, for the important contribution you’ve made and continue to make in terms of providing a platform for writers, particularly new writers, who wander the wild woods of ‘the literary strange’.

Now, and at the risk of sounding as if I’m still prevaricating, may I answer your question with a question? Which is this: is the writing that we bring to websites and presses such as Dark Lane ‘work’… or is it something else?

I was a newspaper reporter for ten years. The writing I did then was ‘work’ (in my view at least). There were some long shifts (and weeks) at times; night duties; Sunday shifts; call-outs; deadlines… Nature of the beast, perhaps.

Short story fiction is, I submit, a very different beast. For me (and, I imagine, most of us), writing a story isn’t a 9 till 5, Monday to Friday occupation. For one thing, a story, or at least the seed of it, will ‘come’ when it wants to. The likes of Vladimir Nabokov, Stephen King, Mavis Gallant and others have touched on this: how the starting point can be a mental image and, perhaps with it, a physical shiver – a small epiphany, of a sort. To simply open my laptop and expect something to happen is – for me – a road to nowhere. I have to have something already ‘alive’ in my mind (half-captured, if you will) to take to the screen (wherever that screen might be).

More often than not, my opening lines / scenes will have been written longhand – and rather roughly – in a small notebook or on scraps of paper or a serviette or such space as might have been available in the margins of a newspaper. ‘Openings’ sometimes come when I’m on a walk or perhaps swimming lengths in a public pool. I ‘riff’ those initial words and sentences, mentally. The rhythm of movement helps, I think. But, as much as anything, it’s a process of mental immersion. Someone once told me of their fondness for walking (long-distance) towards a kind of mental calmness and clarity. I know what the speaker meant.

I’m not sure I’ve ever been able to shoehorn the writing of a story into a fixed routine. Ideas can arrive at inconvenient hours: perhaps at the end of an evening (requiring the making of some notes). On the other hand, I’ve heard it said that the human brain is at its best mid to late morning. In some respects, I envy writers who – rain or shine – crank out 2,000 words a day… particularly if those words are good. Graham Greene, I think I’ve read, settled (possibly later in his career) for 400 words – which seems a lot more do-able! At times, I’m happy to settle for three or four lines in a notebook, jotted down wherever I may be. With luck, they’ll have the ‘voltage’ – as I think John Mullan has called it – to attract and fire the rest of the story.

Tell us about one of your favourite short stories and why you like it (not one of your own).

It isn’t easy making a pick. But I’m going to go for a lesser-known writer, partly to spread the word and partly because I think his best writing is very good indeed. Glyn Jones (1905-1995), an author from Wales, wrote a wonderfully scary story called ‘Jordan’.  It ought to be in every definitive anthology of classic British horror. Indeed, it could – in my view – comfortably book a place in any similar world collection. Bafflingly, it’s invariably neglected (sometimes in favour of very inferior fare). Dark Lane’s famously discerning readers may well know the tale. Therefore, the story by Jones that I’m actually going to pick is ‘Wat Pantathro’: a coming-of-age story set in rural Wales concerning a boy and his father (who’s a horse-trainer-come-trader). It’s just a lovely distillation of the story writer’s craft: an engaging tale, well told. A line from it appears as an epigraph in my story collection Keyhole (Three Impostors press, 2019): ‘I saw a star shining over our valley, a keyholeful of light, telling me I was home.’ On the subject of horses, I can’t help but mention Ted Hughes’s story ‘The Rain Horse’. That’s three stories rather than the single pick you were seeking. I seem to be breaking a lot of rules here. Sorry about that!

Q: Tell us about one of your favourite short stories (done by you).

A: Should I admit to a favourite? How will the other stories react?

If it’s okay, I’d like to answer your question this way…

A story where I think I took on something technically challenging – in terms of the writing – was ‘Bluecoat’ in my collection Keyhole. The story is set in rural, upland Wales on a farm called ‘Moonlight’. The writing of it was a little tricky because the story has two narratives. One about a soldier from the First World War who’s treated at a hospital (that’s situated rather remotely) for wounded servicemen. The other narrative concerns a young couple (present-day) who’ve been living in London and who move back to Wales to the farm where the husband grew up. The challenge for me lay in gradually marrying these two narratives in a manner that could be followed by, and make sense to, readers. Fortunately, I had a strong mental image of the ending, long before I came to write it. This image acted, in a way, as my lodestar. The collection received some very positive reviews, which I was grateful for, and which encouraged me. I was particularly pleased for the publishers. Their special interest is the writing of Arthur Machen. I was their first living author of a full-length book.

Where do your ideas come from?  Do you go looking for ideas – for example by brainstorming, or do you wait for inspiration?

Anyone who’s studied the short story or is a fan of it as a literary form will be aware of the ‘outsider’ nature of some of the best short stories: their preoccupation with people and places that, for whatever reason, stand beyond the mainstream. I suppose that, in some ways, my life has been one in which I’ve encountered such people and been to such places. I’ve listened to them, I think. Flannery O’Connor spoke about the importance of the unconscious in the writing process, and I agree with her. There’s a theory called ‘unbidden perception’: the process whereby we assimilate marginal things from the world around us while unaware that we’re doing so. I suspect that these snatches, of this and that, tend, in time, to need their voice. I suspect that images (particularly things glimpsed momentarily) haunt us, perhaps a little cloudily, in the same way that dreams sometimes do. Childhood is important: the impressions on the senses that we remember from those times. I suspect that all of these things spur us. I have my doubts that a writer can go looking for a story. The tendency, I think, is to encounter the seed unexpectedly while engaged in something mundane: walking a lane or a pavement; riding a bus or a train and seeing something through the window: a figure disappearing down an alley or closing a door… maybe a tree that has been struck by lightning and which now stands grey and ruined in a field. This may sound slightly contradictory, but I also think that a landscape that is empty (a sandbank, for example) can at times be more helpful than one that is full. Keep an eye on the tides though.

Q: Are you a full-time writer? If you have another job, what is it and would you like to become a full-time writer if you could?

A: I think, to some extent, I’m still ‘searching’ – in the way of perhaps all writers. I seem to have done a fair number of things in my life: journalism, teaching, cab driving, shop work, various other ‘stuff’. I’ve travelled a bit (there’s more on that at my website: www.matthewgrees.com). I was in Moscow – under Putin – for a while (it’s the backdrop for my most recent book: The Snow Leopard of Moscow & Other Stories). Because I trained as a journalist and worked on newspapers full-time for ten years, I suppose I still see myself as a journalist (albeit I no longer knock doors or file stories to ‘copytakers’ from phone boxes). I’m glad I’ve earned a living (sometimes for quite long periods of my life) doing what tend to get called ‘blue-collar’ jobs: cabbing on the nightshift, for example. What I think / hope this means is that I’m aware – and part of – worlds other than the middle-class / upper-class ones that can sometimes seem (in terms of subject) to dominate contemporary fiction, including short stories (horror, too, for that matter).

Q: What is the most difficult part of your creative process?

A: I’m not sure this is the answer you’re looking for, but the gruelling part is the repeated proofreading. It’s a grind but it has to be done (out of respect for your editors, publishers and readers). I think it can count as part of the creative process because it can prove productive. Sometimes you notice a pattern or a certain symbolism or code in what you’ve written that you weren’t wholly aware of – or indeed aware of at all – when writing the piece (maybe an example of the unconscious having been in play). You can then go back and explore that. The best thing about this stage is that it can be done on, say, a bench in a churchyard or a park, or on a pier (if you have one), or at the library, or on the train (if conditions in the carriage are conducive).

Q: If you could go back in time, what would you say to your younger self about becoming a writer?

A: I need to think about this.

Here goes:

I suspect that the matter of becoming / being a writer isn’t something that can be coached or even foreseen. Yes, when I was young, I had a reasonable sense that I might enter journalism (having been a contributor of bits and pieces to my local newspaper since my teens). There’s a natural progression from writing journalism to becoming engaged in other forms of writing. But writing, largely, is, I think, an unpredictable, evolutionary thing. So, I would say this to the younger me: live your life and see what happens. If you feel, along the way, that there are things that you want to write because you find it somehow necessary or rewarding, then do so. And if, over time, other people find what you’ve written to be interesting in some way, then so much the better. You might receive some money, now and again. But don’t bank on it. And anyway, if you’re somehow able to survive, it’s probably better that money isn’t your motive.

I’d also try to make the point that on the way to becoming, or indeed while being, a writer, there will be value in almost everything you do. Whatever your job, you will always glean something about humanity. This will be the case whether you’re sitting on a checkout, teaching a class, brewing coffee as a barista, fitting widgets on a factory line, picking fruit on a farm, pulling pints in a pub (or teeth in a surgery), waiting on tables, sweeping halls, cutting hair, toenails, lawns… whatever. (The young me will – I think I can safely say – by now be thinking or even yelling: ‘I’ve got the picture! Get on with it!!’).

For the plain and simple truth is this: writing, even of the wildest, weirdest and most fantastic kind, is about life, after all.

Interview Ⓒ Matthew G. Rees, 2022 

Table of Contents for Dark Lane Anthology Vol.12

Thanks you to everyone who submitted a story.

We are excited to announce the line-up for Volume 12.

1. The Boat by Matthew G. Rees.

2. One Rotten Apple by J. Rosina Harlow

3. The Broken Man by Vincent Valkier

4. Wallace Flint's Shadow by Aria Braswell

5. Champflower Hall by Tim Jeffreys & Robert Pope

6. The Man and the Hand by Meera Rohit Kumbhani

7. Noble Rot by George Aitch

8. How Danny Rodeo Became the Crown Prince of the Penguins by Pete Barnstrom

9. The Telling by Charles Wilkinson

10. A Game For Charlotte by Ariel Dodson

11. Turbine Tim by James Fable

12. Obituary Man by J.D. Kotzman

13. Catherine by Karl Miller

14.The Offering by Andrea McLaughlin

15. Beak, Feather, and Eye by James Pate

16. Under Shude Hill by Tim Newton Anderson

17. The Best View in the House by Jess Doyle

Honorable Mention in Best Horror of the Year

 Congratulations to Charles Wilkinson whose story 'The Festival of Conformity' from Dark Lane Anthology 8 got an honorable mention in Ellen Datlow's Best Horror of the Year Vol.12.  See the full list here.

Also congrats to Mark Keane, whose story 'The Exhibit' - also from Dark Lane 8 - was chosen to appear in Vol.4 of Best Indie Speculative Fiction from Bards and Sages.

An Interview with Virginia Watts.

 Virginia Watts' story, 'Emily', will open Dark Lane Anthology Vol.11.  Her stories and poetry can be found in Illuminations, The Florida Review, CRAFT, Sunspot Literary Journal, and others.  Her poetry chapbook, The Werewolves of Elk Creek, is published by Moonstone Press.

Q: What are your working methods?  Do you sit down every day to write?  Do you have a designated place to work?

A: I have no specific schedule or location for writing and I don’t think about writing in terms of process or method. I am a bit superstitious that way. I try not to think about writing at all if you want the whole truth. Writing is something that happens to me more than anything else. What I do is when an idea arrives for a story or a poem, I sit down somewhere quiet and start in with immense gratitude and hope. I love every minute of the process from rough draft to critique editing to letting go of something knowing I have done the best I could for the idea that came to me. I have taken plenty of writing classes, workshops, and getaways but there is something about learning too much about the “craft” of writing that I battle against. It’s important for me to stay close to my gut and my heart as a writer.

 Q: Tell us about one of your favourite short stories and why you like it (not one of your own).

A: This answer will surely elicit some groans from memories of dreaded middle school summer reading assignments, but I have to chose Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” I read this story when I was young too and the thing is I have never forgotten it. I am sure it was required school reading but there’s a reason the greats are the greats. Hemingway is so direct and crystal clear in his characters and story that you can’t look away from the courage of it all even when you long to. In Francis Macomber we face our own human weakness and cowardice. What reader hasn’t wondered. Maybe I would have run away from the lion too! And Margot his wife so cruel and greedy and domineering. And of course, Wilson. The ultimate user. We may not be any of these characters overall, but we have all been these people at times and we have the capacity to be like them again. This story is upsetting and troubling and true. It is you and me and everyone whether we like it or not. If the characters in a story never leave you, then it was very simply a damn good story.

Q: Tell us about one of your favourite short stories (written by you).

A: It is difficult to choose a favourite, but I am proud of a short story entitled “The Bitterest Winter” which will appear in a collection of short stories of mine that will be published by The Devil’s Party Press in the spring of 2023. In this story, the narrator is a young woman with a new baby girl. She lives in a high-rise apartment in the city of Chicago. She comes from a rural background and living in a big city is akin to living on the surface of the moon. And all these strange balconies. Little spaces floating in the air all around her that begin to haunt her as she becomes more and more isolated, alone most of the time with the baby while her husband pursues a high-profile legal career and one of his attractive and smartly dressed assistants. In the final scene of the story the young mother is outside walking on her balcony with the baby in her arms getting closer and closer to the railing. My critique group all had different ideas about what happened next and that became the success of that story to me. The ending depends on the reader and just how much they are willing to imagine and feel.

Q: Where do your ideas come from?  Do you go looking for ideas – for example by brainstorming, or do you wait for inspiration?

My ideas come from all sorts of things and sometimes I am not sure where they came from. I never brainstorm or use any technique to drum up ideas to write about because that seems like it wouldn’t be a “real idea” to me. Ideas that inspire my writing have come from past experiences, news articles, tv shows, songs, things I see walking, things people say that I overhear, thoughts I have in silent rooms. The story I mention above was written after I visited my daughter in Chicago. She was attending the University of Chicago as a graduate student at the time and while there was no husband or baby, there was a balcony and a city all around us so big it felt like it might swallow us up.

 Q: Are you a full-time writer? If you have another job, what is it and would you like to become a full-time writer if you could?

A: I do consider myself a full-time writer of almost ten years and I feel very lucky to be able to say that. I am a lawyer by education. I have learned a lot in ten years mostly from the company of other writers who have read my work for me and given me theirs to read. You cannot be your best if you don’t have a critique group of some kind. At least, that is what I believe.

 Q: What is the most difficult part of your creative process?

A: The tensest part for me is the rough draft because I am always hoping, just hoping, that I can take an idea all the way to the end. I never have an outline or a destination. I never know where I am going so, I just hope I find my way somewhere that matters. The other challenge is endings. I don’t want someone to read one of my stories or poems and get to the end and be let down or frustrated. That’s your last chance as a writer so you have to try very hard to get the ending as right as it can be.

Q: If you could go back in time, what would you say to your younger self about becoming a writer?

A: I have been asked this before and the answer always makes me sad. I always loved to write. From the sixth grade. I wrote here and there throughout my life but not like I have recently where I have finally let myself become dedicated to this. So I would tell her to not wait for the future. Write whenever you can now no matter what else you have going on in your life.

Thank you for inviting me to be interviewed here. I am honoured and thrilled to have my story appear with those of the other authors in Dark Lane Anthology Volume 11!