Fictionable

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."

This summer series has already brought us Samantha Harvey and Patrick Cash. Now it's time for Carolina Bruck and her translator Ellen Jones, with Bruck's short story China.We start with questions of vocabulary, as Bruck clears up exactly what a china is and fills us in on the cultural significance of the gaucho.The author says she was writing against Esteban Echeverría's poem The Captive, inverting the traditional Argentine dichotomy between civilisation and barbarity."Civilisation has always been associated with everything that comes from Europe," she says, "and la barbarie – this savageness – has always been associated with the indigenous, with what was original to America."In China, Bruck upends Echeverría's scheme. "Civilisation is associated with Constanza the Mapuche woman," Bruck explains, "who rebels against the savagery of Eugenia and her family, who aspire to be as European as possible."The myth that Argentina is a European nation is still a powerful force – all the more so after Javier Milei's victory in last year's elections. Life for Argentine writers is "bad, in a word", Bruck admits. "Those who work in the culture industry are suffering, the government is attacking them."But fiction can still make a difference. "The impact it has is neither direct nor mechanical," Bruck says, "but it represents hope."

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.

In this Spring series of podcasts we've heard from Jenny Erpenbeck, Grahame Williams, Lauren Caroline Smith and Rose Rahtz. We bring it to a close with Jakub Żulczyk and his story Many Years of Hardships, translated by John and Małgorzata Markoff.Żulczyk became a bestseller with hard-hitting thrillers such as The Institute and Blinded by the Lights, a semi-autobiographical novel which the author turned into a hit show for HBO. But Many Years of Hardships draws on deeper roots."One of my first memories from childhood is my grandmother telling me stories about little dwarfs," Żulczyk explains. His hero, Big Barrel, is one of the characters from the Polish imaginary, a krasnoludek only two inches tall.A lot of Żulczyk's writing comes from "dark places", he continues, but in Many Years of Hardships he gives his twisted sense of humour free rein. "At the heart of it all, it’s a funny story."But there's a serious side to Big Barrel's struggles with food, doggos and a shadowy figure pulling all the strings. Surrounded by war, powerful corporations and the climate crisis, the dwarf's predicament feels all too familiar. "We live in a world now where everyone feels like this," Żulczyk says.The challenges we face may be acute, but the author remains an optimist."Totalitarian structures, or power structures, or violent structures ultimately fail in confrontation with powers that are open-minded, that have freedom of thought, open channels of communication and so on."

This spring we've already heard from Jenny Erpenbeck, Grahame Williams and Lauren Caroline Smith. This time we welcome Rose Rahtz and her short story Where Hast Thou Been, Sister?Rahtz tells us how the story started as a response to the opening of Macbeth, where there is a roll of thunder and Shakespeare's First Witch asks, "Where hast thou been, sister?""I've always really liked the witch's response, because she's so perfunctory about it," she says. "She just goes 'I've been killing swine, obviously, I'm a witch'."Thinking about female power and powerful children, Rahtz transported Shakespeare's blasted heath to a farm park and turned his witch into a toddler. There's something mighty about a small child, she explains, "It's that tug between huge power of emotion and complete impotence within the world."Channelling her eldest daughter, who was a "force of nature" when she was young, Rahtz sets her uncanny toddler loose – though she insists that no animals were harmed in the making of this story.Witches are outlaw figures who disrupt the patriarchy, Rahtz continues, and writing is a kind of disruption to her job as an English teacher. While the GCSE English language paper is a "horrorshow" where children are being asked to dance a grammatical jig, "the joy of being an English teacher is you teach around the edges of the curriculum".

In this Spring series of podcasts we've already heard from Jenny Erpenbeck and Grahame Williams. Now it's time for Lauren Caroline Smith and her short story The Placing of Hands.Smith looks back on her teenage years, when being a committed Christian made her something of an oddity, and reflects on what it’s like to be a person of faith within a predominantly secular culture.Our culture is very individualistic, Smith says, so if you're following Christ, "you’re not following the culture… to be so fully part of it is kind of rebellious."We're being persuaded all the time, she continues, in politics, fashion or wider society – "primarily to buy things". But when churches put the focus on converting young people at large-scale events, religious persuasion can tip over into manipulation."They make you kind of vulnerable," Smith says. "There's all this music playing, there's people praying for you, there's people telling you how you should feel… That can become spiritual abuse."She's still not sure where she is in her journey of faith, but Smith says that books can often play a similar role: "For me it's often the same thing."