Fictionable

Last year we heard from Daisy Johnson, Judith Vanistendael, Scott Jacobs and Hannah Webb. We bring our Autumn series to a close – just in time for Winter – with Esther Karin Mngodo and the translator Jay Boss Rubin, who join us to talk about First Date.Mngodo tells us how this story ate another of her short stories, Without Sun."It came from the idea of how things are within other things," she says, "how everything is interconnected."In First Date, the links stretch across an entire millennium. Mngodo feels that we still have much in common with each other, even across vast distances of time and space."The human experience, whether you're in Tanzania, or you're in London, or in America, it's still the same," she explains. "We still feel fear, we still have hope. We still want to love and be loved."Our experiences may be the same, but there are still tensions in the ways we reflect them in language, even when it is our mother tongue."We tend to believe that Swahili is this very beautiful language that is locked with the great writers like Shaaban Roberts," Mngodo says. "The rest of us are just aspiring to get there. And so for most of my life I felt that I wasn't good enough in the Swahili that I spoke or wrote."It was when she first went to the US and Canada to study that she began to embrace writing in Swahili, a decision that affected her on the deepest levels."It was during that time that I realised I started dreaming in Swahili," she recalls.With a language like Swahili, these complications are rooted in the complexities of a contested history."For people who like to argue," Rubin says, "you can argue that Swahili is detrimental to local indigenous languages. They're being wiped out because Swahili is used as a national and regional language. Now you could also say the same thing about what English is doing to Swahili."But it's also very possible for languages "to enrich one another", he continues. "There's not like a net sum, where when more English comes in Swahili gets pushed out, or vice versa."For Mngodo the question of what language to write in goes beyond "who owns the language"."The language belongs to me," she insists, "if I can express through it. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We opened this Autumn season with Daisy Johnson and followed up with Judith Vanistendael and Scott Jacobs. We'll be sitting down with Esther Karin Mngodo over the next week or so, but this episode is devoted to Hannah Webb and her short story Titanic.While Jacobs told us Be Careful Who Your Friends Are was drawn from his own life, Webb insists that her story is definitely not autobiographical."I have been on one of those holidays," she says, "but it didn't end up like that. There was much less cruelty."Under the surface, she explains, Titanic is driven by technology."Teenagers have been struggling with their mental health for a long, long time. But I suppose phones do bring this new aspect into it of never being able to turn off. And the internet is this vast space where there's endless things you could be looking at. Sometimes it's very difficult to know when to stop looking."In our connected world, you're never far from the extremes, Webb continues, extremes that are often rewarded by the algorithm. But that unreality doesn't make the experience any less important."The emotions that you feel from it are happening in the same body," she says, "and you're going to have the same mind. It's good to retain perspective, but at the same time it can be dismissed too easily as not real."The world always feels like it's breaking, she adds, but Webb hasn't given up hope. "While there's maybe a lot of uncertainty, part of that uncertainty is also possibility."We'll be exploring possible futures with Esther Karin Mngodo next time. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This season we've already heard from Daisy Johnson and Judith Vanistendael. Over the next few weeks we'll be sitting down with Esther Karin Mngodo and Hannah Webb, but this time we welcome Scott Jacobs and his short story Be Careful Who Your Friends Are.According to Jacobs, this curious tale was a "real-life experience"."I changed the names, to protect the innocent," he says, "including the name of the restaurant."But the last-minute invitation, the bottle of Primitivo, the bowler hat and that curious note were all drawn from life.The story gave Jacobs a chance to examine the sharp divisions of social class in New York City during the 1990s, and to offer a glimpse into the rarefied world of Manhattan's Upper East Side."You really had a sense of the dichotomy in society," he explains, "the haves, the have-nots."After time as a marketing executive and as a lawyer, writing is Jacobs' third career. And it's one that combines the skills he learned in marketing with the linguistic precision he honed in the legal profession – that and his own "creative juices".We'll be talking with Hannah Webb next time. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the first of our Autumn podcasts, Daisy Johnson told us how she was living on the edge when she was writing her collection The Hotel, and read from her short story Conference. Over the course of this season we'll be ranging all round the world to hear from Esther Karin Mngodo, Scott Jacobs and Hannah Webb, but this time Judith Vanistendael explains why The Small Story is very close to home.This graphic short started when she began thinking about her own family, and how the funny story her grandfather Jef told about his bike trip to France in 1940 was actually "part of big historical events"."I never thought of my grandparents in a political way," Vanistendael says. "But they were involved, without even wanting to be."The writer explains how she didn't know much about the history that lies under her story, with millions of people on the move as the Germans advanced and hundreds of thousands of young Belgian men sent to the south of France to train. And beyond these bare facts, she admits it's difficult to tell whether the story Jef told was really true: "My grandfather was a good storyteller."The second world war still looms large in Belgium, Vanistendael continues, because it was so tough."We're a small country, we're quite new," she explains. "We were made in the 1830s by everybody around us. We do not trust power, or big stories."One of the large stories that runs through Vanistendael's work is the experience of refugees. Her first graphic novel, Dance by the Light of the Moon, is an autobiographical story about her first relationship."I was in love with a Togolese, Muslim refugee," she says, "and it seems as if this first love has defined my storytelling."Human beings have always been restless, she continues, but the arbitrary boundaries of the nation state have changed everything. "Being on the move in this world, the way it is organised, is very difficult."Over recent years, Vanistendael has started using digital techniques alongside more traditional ways of making images and she doesn't rule out the possibility that comic artists will be replaced by AI. But she's confident that artists will always find ways to use their skills."I don't know the future," she says, "but I'm not that afraid."Next time we'll be looking ahead with Scott Jacobs. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.