Fictionable

• Susanna Clarke: 'You’ve got to play with things being very fantastical and also slightly humdrum'

  This spring we've heard from Fríða Ísberg, Bronia Flett, Jeremy Wikeley and PR Woods already. But we bring this series to a close with Susanna Clarke and her short story The Bishop of Durham Attempts to Surrender the City.Clarke tells us that it's a story she's been thinking about for some time."I have never really stopped thinking about Strange and Norrell," she says. "It's a world that keeps summoning me back."In the novel, The Raven King was very young when he first arrived in England, Clarke explains, "and I had an idea that he wasn't too happy. And also that he would be surrounded by politicians."Even though The King of the North is not a fairy himself, she continues, "his fairy upbringing has had a massive influence on him, and he's never really quite at home with human beings. He ends up in this middle space, not quite one thing and not quite another. And that's kind of useful to him, but it's also quite lonely."Clarke remembers learning at school that the Norman conquest was a wonderful thing, but it was actually a massive upheaval."Nobody quite realised that of course it's being conquered by the French," she says. "And that, particularly for the north, was an absolutely traumatic thing."Just as in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Clarke found that exploring the differences between her human characters "made a little space to put the fairies in"."In a fantastical story, you've got to play with things being very fantastical and alien, and also try to make them slightly humdrum, so that they become believable."The Bishop of Durham Attempts to Surrender the City is full of Clarkean weather, the "thick mist" around Durham, the rain falling across the New Castle on the Tyne in "grey, slanting lines", and the author confesses she feels at home in the rain."If you look at Strange and Norrell," she says, "most of it is set in winter. I think, grudgingly, there are a few chapters set in summer."The rain and wind even seep inside the house in Piranesi, another novel poised like its author between Classicism and the Romantics."I like the formality of 19th-century prose," she says, "but I always want to push it out of a 19th-century shape and do something different with it."Clarke found she was pushed to do something different herself, when her long struggle with chronic fatigue syndrome made her put aside the sequel to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and focus on "things that felt feasible". But she hasn't left it behind."I'm still moving towards it," she says, "and I do hope to have the energy and just the brains to write it. It's far from abandoned. It's absolutely what I want to do with my life."Fatigue and brain fog may make it harder to write, Clarke admits, but they don't bring the creative process to a halt."Stories and fiction don't really come from that place," she declares, "at least they don't in me. They come from my imagination, from my unconscious, and those things aren't ill. They're fine." Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• Jeremy Wikeley: 'I would always defend the notion of being able to write about a place called England'

  We've already welcomed Fríða Ísberg, Bronia Flett and PR Woods in this Spring series, and Susanna Clarke will be joining us next time. But now we're hearing from Jeremy Wikeley with his short story Kent's Oak.According to Wikeley, his main character's disconnected connection with his neighbours on the estate is just how it felt when he was growing up in the suburbs of a small town."You were very familiar with a lot of places and a lot of things," he says, "and you were at home. But you didn't have many opportunities to express that with other people and therefore were you really at home?"As someone who has "always felt very English and sort of not English," Wikeley explains, Englishness is "a big hobbyhorse of mine – what it is, how it feels".There's an element of disconnection buried in the heart of Englishness, he continues. "Nature writing, which is tied up with Englishness, is often a response to the destruction of the countryside and the destruction of nature. And so the time element of it is always loaded with loss, but also with nostalgia."But for Wikeley these losses are an inevitable part of being human."I don't have a problem with cutting down trees," he says, "which is maybe not what you were expecting from this story… as long as you're doing it for a reason." Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• PR Woods: 'I would never write anything against Wolf Hall'

  We've already heard from Fríða Ísberg and Bronia Flett in this Spring series, and we'll be welcoming Susanna Clarke and Jeremy Wikeley on to the Fictionable podcast over the next few weeks. But this time we're going back in time with PR Woods and her short story Our Lady of Sorrows.Woods tells us how Sister Avis came to her after someone wrote to the Guardian about Hilary Mantel's novel Wolf Hall arguing "It's a great story, but it didn't happen like that."In the 16th century, the dissolution of the monasteries was a great upheaval, Woods says, so she asked herself "how did it actually happen? You've got this massive, fundamental change in the landscape of England, the literal landscape – houses and buildings being demolished – but also the religious landscape. I was just interested in the logistics of of it.""An awful lot of the monks and the friars could become what we would essentially think of as parish priests now," she continues. "But that obviously wasn't an option for the women. So where did they all go?"While Woods confesses a fascination with the Tudors, she's no fan of Henry VIII."He was a tyrant," she says, "he was dreadful to women, to all his wives in one way and another."But Woods imagines that Sister Avis would have seen this awful king for what he was."I like to think that she tutted whenever she heard rumours about what Henry VIII was doing, that she was disappointed by him again and again." Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• Bronia Flett: 'This is obviously all fiction'

  Fríða Ísberg got this Spring series of podcasts started, with a dialogue on monologues and a reading from her short story Fingers, translated by Larissa Kyzer. We'll be welcoming Susanna Clarke, Jeremy Wikeley and PR Woods on to the podcast over the next few weeks, but right here and right now we're talking transformation with Bronia Flett.Flett tells us how her short story Leopard, Spots fell into her lap, and explains why she wanted to put female friendship under the lens."We do form these close bonds," she says, "and more often than not they're our defining relationships in our lives."Women who are very close to each other may tell each other a lot, Flett continues, but "it might not necessarily be positive conversation all the time. And we are still keeping things from each other, and we are still inventing ourselves in the presence of other people."This constant negotiation of the self with others begins at a very early age, she argues, confessing that the argument between two children in Leopard, Spots was plucked from life."We're always telling other people who we think they are and should be," Flett says, "and insisting on who we are and being told, 'No, you're not'."Maybe some of us are predisposed to "brooding on these issues", she admits, but – for the writer – "looking back for those moments where you think 'Oh, why did I behave like that? Who was that person who behaved like that?' That's where you start to get these universal truths." Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• Fríða Ísberg: 'We are always just looking for simple stories'

  Everything is changing, but one thing you can rely on is a new set of stories and a new series of podcasts from Fictionable. Spring 2025 brings us stories from Susanna Clarke, Bronia Flett, Jeremy Wikeley and PR Woods – we'll be hearing from them all over the next few weeks. But we begin with Fríða Ísberg and her short story Fingers, translated by Larissa Kyzer.Like much of her work, Ísberg explains, Fingers began with the cadence of a character's thought."You don't need to know what the mother's name is," she says, "or the job description, or where they live. You don't need to know that at the beginning, you just really need the rhythm of that person. It's like knitting a sweater. You just need to know what kind of pattern you are doing and then you can just do the whole thing."The narrator in Fingers is woven from the anxious expectations that surround relationships in the 21st century."It's really hard to meet the standards that we have towards the love match these days," Ísberg says.In western societies, women are shaking off the constraints imposed on them and refusing to "sacrifice their standards"."Power is shifting, absolutely," Ísberg says, noting that "The Icelandic word for marriage is brúðkaup, which is 'bridal buy'."The glass may be half full for gender equality in Iceland – a country currently governed by a coalition led entirely by women – but violence against women is still a reality Ísberg can't ignore."I have three close friends who have had their former boyfriends just completely lose it," she says, "breaking into their apartments or staying outside their house or their car. It's really threatening and they don't see it as a threat, because they see it as a romantic gesture."In a world where people are increasingly demanding simple narratives from their political leaders, fiction can help us navigate the messy complications of real life."For me," Ísberg says, "it's always more trying to understand the two different views." Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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