Fictionable

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.

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.

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.

The leaves are swirling, there's a nip in the air, so it's time for a whole new bunch of Fictionable podcasts. Over the next few weeks we'll be hearing from Judith Vanistendael, Esther Karin Mngodo, Scott Jacobs and Hannah Webb, but we're launching into Autumn with Daisy Johnson and her short story Conference.Conference appears in Johnson's forthcoming collection, The Hotel, and she explains that throughout the collection she set out to write about "what it means to live in unsafe spaces"."We feel like we should be safe at work and protected," she says, "and increasingly it's becoming clear that we're not."Johnson may never have worked in an office, but the dangers that beset the narrator of Conference are all too familiar."I have worked in places where there does seem to be an awkward dynamic."The conflict in Gaza has made it all too clear how "our safety is really fractured", she continues. "We're all vulnerable, and the people who are supposed to look after us – the police, local authorities, our government – they don't have our best interests at heart."The narrator first glimpses the "half-things" who whisper through doorways and gather around the coffee cups in the mirror-filled lifts of her shiny offices – a reflection that mirrors the doubling of the two young girls at the heart of Johnson's latest novel, Sisters.The author admits she's "always trying to write about the double"."The line of interest for me in horror is somewhere between it being something within us and it being something without in the world," Johnson says. "And I think for me it's most exciting as a reader when we're uncertain of those lines."Families are always a little uncanny, she adds. "There's something so strange about knowing people for that long and the power those relationships have and the hold they have on us."Johnson is also writing more and more about the climate crisis and our relationship with the land."Often the land is answering back," she says.We may be faced with global heating, populism and misinformation, but Johnson says she isn't giving up hope in writing. "There is a kind of truth in fiction."Next time we'll be examining the truths of fiction with Judith Vanistendael.

This Summer podcast series has brought us Samantha Harvey, Patrick Cash, Carolina Bruck – translated by Ellen Jones – and Jack Klausner. We bring it to a close with Susan Muaddi Darraj and her mighty story May You Wake Up to a Homeland.Darraj tells us that she started with an image, an old man in his kitchen "looking at this bizarre package of frozen food". That and the thought of him sitting there "surrounded by his children and almost none of them actually can sympathise with him" was enough to set her on her way.May You Wake Up to a Homeland is the first piece of fiction Darraj has been able to write since the Israeli invasion began last year."The first six months I think I was just in shock," she says, "and I couldn't believe it was still going on. But now it's been ten months."After ten months, she explains, it's time for it to "seep into the creative work"."Everything is hard," she continues, but "witnessing what's happening is the least we can do."Every writer from a marginalised community feels the burden to represent that community, Darraj says, but she's not so sure it's a burden any more."I'm just trying to portray the experiences of Palestinians in a way that's authentic, because the media seems unable to get it right."And while fiction isn't journalism, it can do something "really remarkable", she adds. "It asks you to pretend you are living someone else's life for a little while. And you do it. You all obey the author, don't you?"

Already this summer we've heard from Samantha Harvey, Patrick Cash, Carolina Bruck and her translator Ellen Jones. This time we're getting under the surface of Jack Klausner's short story The Coalface.Klausner tells us how this story emerged from a memory – his partner's mother remembering her own father eating a block of melted cheese for his tea. "It sort of spun out from there," he says.While Wales is no monolith, Klausner explains, in South Wales mining still looms large. But over the last thirty years its meaning has changed."Now it seems it's almost like a ghost that hangs over families, or hangs over towns," he says.Coal once represented "hope and potential", Klausner continues, driving industry forward to progress and prosperity. But as the climate crisis accelerates the black stuff has taken on a more menacing shade."It might end up being in someone's fireplace, keeping them warm," he says. "But you've got to get it there, and it's a dark and dangerous journey to that point."

Last time Samantha Harvey let the cat out of the bag, diving straight into the heart of her story Bona Fide Nihon-kitsch. This time Patrick Cash is a little less spoiler heavy as he talks about and reads from his story Trish Malone.Cash tells us how the cabaret artist who takes a leading role came to his rescue a few years back and has been "wandering around" ever since.He recalls work as a journalist reporting on the Albert Kennedy Trust, a charity specialising in young LGBTQ+ homelessness, which "fed into this story"."I'm interested in how some queer people can feel that distance from their family," Cash explains. "And then having to come back and reconnect with her brother was something I found fictively intriguing."As someone who grew up in the southwest, he understands the claustrophobia of small-town life and how some queer people "dream of leaving and going to the big city… But, of course, you never leave your past."Cash made his name as a spoken word poet and playwright, a training which he says stood him in good stead when writing for the page."What writing for performance really gave me is the understanding of what keeps an audience's attention," he says.

The weather may be up the spout but it's still summer, so it's time for another batch of Fictionable podcasts. We'll be hearing from Susan Muaddi Darraj, Carolina Bruck, Patrick Cash and Jack Klausner in this summer season. But Summer opens with Samantha Harvey and her mighty short story Bona Fide Nihon-kitsch.If you haven't read it already, you might want to head over there before you hit play, because Harvey got straight to the nub of things as soon as we started talking.She told us how she got started on a story that looks death square in the face. Sitting beside someone in their last days, "You know that you should be feeling something splendidly profound," Harvey says, "but you can't quite find what it is."Time grinds to a halt, with normal life suspended – just as it is for the astronauts in her latest novel, Orbital. Set across a fractured day on the International Space Station, Harvey says she relished the challenge of translating that "extremely rich visual world to the world of black marks on a white page", but struggled to feel "it was all right for me to write it in this age of great veracity"."I wonder why this would be interesting to anybody," she asked herself, "that some woman in Wiltshire has made up some stuff about being in space."In the end she decided to give herself permission, Harvey adds, "and it just has to be good enough"."This is what fiction can do," she says. "I believe in fiction."