First Line Fridays: part 4/5
Behind the scenes of a short story collection: would you like those feelings with a side of dystopian fiction and/or time travel?
Here we go again - welcome to the latest (and penultimate) instalment of First Line Fridays, delving behind the scenes of my new short story collection, In The Movie Of Her Life.
Knitting
“She should knit a blanket, she thinks.”
This is the story of a situationship in 100 words. The knitting is, you know, a metaphor.
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At The Still Point
“It’s always 2019 in the kitchen, so if Liz and I are in there at the same time she often suggests a movie night.”
Do you know how sometimes you accidentally write a story about time travel? “It’s always 2019” in that particular room but different parts of the shared house are in different years, the place fragmented in a sort of magical-realist way that owes a lot to - I want to list an important literary work here but actually, it’s an episode of Star Trek: Voyager. (The titular starship gets fractured into different time zones and different eras of the characters need to team up and fix it!)
This story appeared in the final issue of The Moth, which was a delightful treat - it’s such a gorgeous magazine.
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Colony
“The colonies acknowledge the difficulty of procreation on our planets and reaffirm the importance of our Sacred Vessels.”
This document/scrapbook-style story was originally written for Autonomy (ed. Kathy D’Arcy), an anthology to raise funds for Repeal the 8th in 2018. I’d had the vague idea for the story for a while (controlling women’s bodies, but in space!) and this served as the kick needed to actually write it.
I’d written about the topic before and it felt like I needed to do something different with it beyond ‘Irish girl needs abortion’ - not that it’s not a story that even now keeps happening, but from a creative perspective I wanted a new slant. This is a dystopia but it’s also - I hope - entertainingly satirical, with Sacred Vessels presented with life hacks (“Practice vesselhood with these Simulacrababes!”) to empower them.
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Naked
“Do you really think that was the first time he’d got his knob out in public?”
Jumping right into it with this one, aren’t we. This is another fairytale retelling, and I trust the source text is obvious.
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Domesticated
“‘So, will we make a list for the housework and stuff?’ Joe says to me the first evening we’re in the flat.”
This is a piece of flash fiction exploring differing attitudes to household duties and maybe a little bit of ‘be careful what you wish for’. Poor Joe. He is trying very hard here. He tells his girlfriend he does not want her to carry the ‘mental load’. He is a good guy, genuinely, and it still makes the narrator itchy. The wagon.
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Voice
“You act it out for your audience, the whole story: that he stole your voice, that he ripped it from your throat in the dead of night.”
Most (not all) of the fairytale-ish stories in this collection go into a different register to the more contemporary ones - longer sentences, a bit more formality, an attempt at getting that fairytale ‘tone’. I don’t know if it always works, but the vibes, as they say, do feel a bit different depending on the kind of story it is. A more straightforward and perhaps more logical version of this collection would be just ‘contemporary women being sad’, but from the early days of working with Doire they were on board with the fact that some of them messed about with genre, but still felt like they clicked with the overall book. (Not every story made it in, which feels pretty standard as far as these things go.)
Next (and final) instalment: witchcraft and hauntings in the Dublin rental market. In The Movie Of Her Life is published by Doire Press and is out now. Recent reviews have described it as “a gritty collection of imaginative writing and devastating observation” (Irish Examiner) and “short story writing with teeth. Elegant but unsparing and laced with dark humour - the kind that makes you laugh before making you wince” (Irish Independent).