Fictionable

Spring is here and so is Fictionable, with another set of exclusive short stories and another series of podcasts where we meet our fantastic authors. During the next few weeks we'll be hearing from Takiguchi Yūshō and the translator Jesse Kirkwood, Bruna Martini, Holly Edwards and Joel Cox. But this Spring series marks a return to Fictionable for Diana Evans, who joined us on the Fictionable podcast way back in 2022 to talk about her short story Broth.This time she brings dessert, with Ice Cream, which catches a young woman in that awkward gap between graduation and real life.Evans says she was thinking back to her own past and comparing it with the ongoing crisis in youth unemployment."It's such a long stretch," she says. "It seems almost like climbing a mountain to actually manifest your talents and give what you have to offer to the world, and for it to be accepted."Evans takes us back to the 1990s, when she fell into a job as culture editor at Pride magazine."There was this huge Black music scene," she recalls, "that was just proliferating and I was interviewing these rappers and R&B singers. Rap music was becoming pop music and reggae was really popular. It was just a really exciting time."Our current moment feels urgent too, Evans continues, but it's still part of the same continuum."We're dealing with the same issues, the same injustices," she says. "There's just this global escalation of possible catastrophe… but it's the same energy."It can feel like capitalism is propelling us towards some kind of Armageddon, Evans continues, but writers mustn't be discouraged."I think artists are really important in this moment," she insists. "I think we have a real call now to reflect on things that are happening and to just make people feel that there is hope."We'll be considering the miracle of new life next time with Bruna Martini and her graphic short story One Day at a Time.

In this Winter series we've already welcomed Cynthia Zarin, Rodrigo Urquiola Flores and the translator Shaina Brassard, Tim Conley and Samuel Rigg. We bring down the curtain with Cynthia Banham and her short story Swimming With Crocodiles.Banham confesses that she shares her protagonist's passion for rewilding, but insists that her short story both is and isn't about the author: "You don't really control what finds its way into your story."After losing her legs following a plane crash in 2007, Banham says that one of the few things that gave her some measure of control was writing. "My only way to avoid the grief overwhelming me was to retreat to my computer and my notebook and to write."It took Banham seven years before she could start writing about the accident, and then another three before publishing her memoir, A Certain Light. She delves further back into her family history in Mother Shadow, due in April 2026, but says that fiction is a liberation."Writing memoir I've found to be really tricky morally, ethically," Banham explains. "There's a freedom in writing fiction."But that freedom is not without risk, she adds. "This is a whole new level of danger, where you're in constant danger of offending. And I think about that quite a lot."That's it for this Winter season. We'll be back in Spring.

After hearing from Cynthia Zarin, Rodrigo Urquiola Flores and the translator Shaina Brassard, and Tim Conley, this Winter series of podcasts enters the final stretch. We'll be rounding off with Cynthia Banham next time, but stepping out on to the ice this week is Samuel Rigg and his short story, At the Rink.Although a short story that explores parenthood and loss is far from his own life, Rigg tells us his short fiction rarely starts close to home."Often I find I'm writing about people who are not me," he says, "or are relatively far from my own experience. You obviously need to find a way in that connects."This connection with an issue that might seem remote can sometimes be fairly abstract, Rigg continues. "If the form comes to you with that subject, then you don't really question it, you just think, 'OK, I know what I'm going to do,' and you go with it."At the Rink took the author all the way to Scarsdale, a suburb north of New York City where Rigg – like his protagonist – has spent some time."Maybe there was a sense in which I wanted to write a character who was an outsider," he says, "because that's how I came to that place myself."The nuclear family and the picket fence may never have been a dream for every American, but it still holds some power."I'm not sure that the suburbs in Britain have the same significance," Rigg suggests, "or quite the same cultural resonance."We'll be listening out for echoes with Cynthia Banham next time, as we dip our toes carefully into her short story Swimming With Crocodiles. 

We've already heard from Cynthia Zarin, Rodrigo Urquiola Flores and the translator Shaina Brassard in this Winter series – we'll be welcoming Cynthia Banham and Samuel Rigg on to the podcast over the next few weeks. But this time we're putting Tim Conley on the turntable with his short story Records.While Conley does confess to owning a few vinyls, he's fascinated by the idea that a record can also be "something that we regret". If you look at where the word comes from, he continues, "to record something is to have it by heart, again. That intrigues me, because there are things that we want to forget and things that we want to remember."In Records, the author explains, "Anna's trying to forget and the ghost is trying to remember, or reclaim a past that he once had".As a literature professor who writes on Joyce, Nabokov and Beckett, Conley admits that his own fiction can be a little highbrow, but insists that it's "not without a great deal of feeling"."Thinking and feeling are not opposed to each other," he says. "As AI debates show us, people seem to think that thinking is somehow greater than feeling, and that's not true. They're both a very humane human activities."Conley's fiction is also shot through with humour, but that's only part of the picture."It has to be fluid," he says. "Funny is part of a strategy, but it's not exactly a goal in itself."This kind of variety is what draws Conley to short form fiction."The novel can be swallowed up a lot more by convention," he argues. "In some ways it's more compromised."If the novel is "a little more tyrannical", Conley adds, the short story "is a lot more liberating in a weird, weird way. It also can linger."We'll be hanging around with Samuel Rigg next time and his short story At the Rink.

We began this Winter series of podcasts with Cynthia Zarin, who suggested that every single one of us is torn in different ways. We'll be examining those cracks with Tim Conley, Cynthia Banham and Samuel Rigg over the next few weeks, but this time we welcome Rodrigo Urquiola Flores and the translator Shaina Brassard.According to Urquiola, his short story DYSNEYWORLD is all true. The author says that – just like his character – he grew up in a couple of small rooms on the edge of La Paz and sometimes stayed in the big house where his grandma worked, a childhood he says was like "living in two worlds".The gap between one world and another was hard he continues, but he's "not complaining. When I was a child, that arduous path exhausted me too much. But everything I experienced, when it wasn't sad or painful, seemed fun, full of adventures and discoveries."Other writers might have explored these memories in autobiography, but when Urquiola started writing about a football match it came out as fiction. He compares memory to a bolt of lightning, which suddenly "illuminates everything"."The short story is the genre where this magical feeling can be achieved and left to linger in the mind," he says.While there are always losses when you translate from Spanish to English, Brassard argues that it's worth the heartache to get a flavour of La Paz."Rodrigo's writing captures the rhythms, the poetry, the way that people talk," she says.This reportage is central to Urquiola's project."A writer is simply an observer who reads," he explains. "Writing is a way of reading."But there's still a lot of freedom in the way an author can make these observations."Any genre is useful to say the truth," Urquiola insists, "not just realism. When I read great sci-fi, for example Philip K Dick, he is telling me the truth. He's showing me the world in a way that's possible to see it and I don't think he's lying to me."

It's cold, it's wet, it's January. Time for another series of exclusive short stories and another series of podcasts. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be hearing from Rodrigo Urquiola Flores and his translator Shaina Brassard, as well as Tim Conley, Cynthia Banham and Samuel Rigg. But we kick off this winter series with Cynthia Zarin and Housekeeping.Zarin reveals that both the houses in her short story are taken from life, but with a certain amount of embroidery."Everything is drawn from life," she says, "because what else is there?"Her protagonist is torn between New York City and Cape Cod, her heart "in two places at once", the author continues, but that's hardly unusual. "Very few of us live lives that are not full of complication and conflict."After five books of poetry and a glittering career as a journalist, Zarin says she fell into prose fiction almost by accident."I'd started writing, actually, a letter," she explains, "and then that letter just became something I wrote all the time. It started out as a letter to a specific person, but it became absolutely something else."Zarin's novels Inverno and Estate are constructed in layers, with significant moments tolling through them like bells – a natural form for a writer who believes that "everything is about memory".But it's a form that took some time to emerge. When she showed the work in progress to her friends they would say, "OK sweetheart, it's very beautiful, but what is it?"Zarin says that she began to find out what her letter might be when the artist and writer Leanne Shapton told her to "Stop trying to put it together, take it apart." And she identifies a meeting with her agent, Luke Ingram, as another turning point."We started to talk about the structure," she recalls, "and we drew it on a napkin."As a poet and journalist, Zarin says she finds prose fiction something of a liberation."The idea that you can have a character and you can decide that she has red hair – it's fun."We'll be having more fun next time with Rodrigo Urquiola Flores and the translator Shaina Brassard.