Interview by Katy Wimhurst
KW: When did you start writing stories and why do you think they are important?
AW: My first complete story was written during A level History classes. My main character was called Jo and she was feisty and independent and it was highly derivative. I loved how secretive and private the writing felt. I was getting all my info on the Tudors & Stuarts from novels by Jean Plaidy and Georgette Heyer anyway, so I guess I’ve always felt story creates a direct hit when it comes to learning about anything.
On a more serious note, I believe the importance of story cannot be stressed enough. We live in a world of almost unlimited superfast access to information, which can create and curate superficial responses. Time spent deep diving into other ways of seeing and feeling strips away the insularity (often driven by fear) that stops us connecting with each other. That’s the hope, anyway.
KW: Which writers do you like to read or which have influenced your development as a writer?
AW: That’s a huge question and there are so many answers I could give about the person the books built! I’ll opt for a very truncated, potted history! As a child I read anything and everything I could lay my hands on although there wasn’t a lot of literature at home. We moved all the time so acquiring stuff wasn’t top of my parent’s list. My granny had a stash of Harold Robbins and Jackie Collins and some terrifying horror about fog and werewolves which I still remember far too clearly. I would re-visit Narnia and Lord of the Rings at least once a year. I was Hazel in Watership Down, Tom in the Midnight Garden, I lived in Mallory Towers and up the Far Away Tree. In my early teens I moved onto my dad’s burgeoning collection of Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, John Wyndham and Nevil Shute. I practised building the brick wall inside my head just in case the Midwich Cuckoos ever arrived. Reading was pure escapism back then. I didn’t encounter world literature and I was very ignorant about writing that wasn’t coming from the pens of mostly male, white, western centric voices, which is a great shame when it’s such a formative period.
Educationally, I was raised in the shadow of F.R. Leavis’s Great Tradition and I think the ghosts still linger, like a stern disapproving grandparent. I have to work hard to push away that ‘voice’ when I write, because it isn’t ‘me’ but it sounds deceptively authoritative. From my late teens onwards, I imbibed vast reading lists of ‘good’ literature. That separation in my head between what was perceived to be ‘proper’ or not was challenging when I came to write. I reviewed fiction for some of the big literary journals in my twenties—The TLS, New Statesman, Literary Review—and I was very self-conscious and, I think now, sometimes too deferential. I also reviewed for something called The Good Book Guide and would be sent all sorts of novels, which was much more freeing.
But to answer the second part of your question as best I can, I did a Masters in Modernism in my early 30s and I think it had a big influence on my thinking about how to write as much as what to write about. I’m always thrilled by writing that tries to capture the essence of just being alive, experiencing this world, the commonality and the unique differences between people. So Virginia Woolf would have to be up there. I could mention so many more but it’s writers who stay with the seemingly ordinary to find the extraordinary who have influenced me most. I think there’s a magic in that.
KW: You have said in another interview that ‘family’ is an important subject within your stories. Can you say a little about why this interests you as a writer?
AW: I can! I guess I think everything is contained within the concept of ‘family’: power, love, fragility, jealousy, revenge, suspicion, etc. All the elemental human emotions. Look at Greek Tragedies! There are so many different ways to be ‘in a family too’. All those roles for one person to play sometimes simultaneously (mother, sister, daughter, granny). And the idea of ‘family’ is also a construct of stories, myths almost, that get told down the generations or even within one generation. An adult ‘child’ is often reminded about ‘who they really are’ by family members! This can be positive but also destructive, just as ‘family’ can be nurturing and poisonous. Family can be prison, purpose, pleasure. There’s a constant push and pull between being part of a family and being an individual. Societal and cultural expectations around ‘family’ make it even more complicated, depending on where (and when) in the world you are. So, for me, it’s an inexhaustibly fascinating subject, the cradle we learn in and from.
KW: Your first book published was the moving, understated novella, The House on the Corner (Ad Hoc Press). It is the story of a family in a house in London in the 1980s, told from multiple points of view—the estate agent who sells them the house, the wife, husband, the two children, the grandmother. Can you talk a bit about why you chose this structure and how you think it affects the emotional currents of the story?
AW: Thank you for reading! I’d been trying to write a sprawling historical novel covering post WW2 up to the end of the century and lost my way. I wanted to use multiple pov’s to show the shifting relationships (and power) within this family and decided the shorter timespan worked better. The house ‘holds’ them in place even while they and the world around them change. It becomes both structurally and thematically important. I introduced the estate agent at the beginning and end almost like a prologue and epilogue, the narrative voice pulling back from the close 3rd person perspectives of each member of the family. I placed the Granny chapter in the centre of the book as everything shifts after that. I’ve lived in so many different houses over my life (seven as a child and currently nine as an adult) and I’ve always been interested in the way we turn a house into a ‘home’ with all the multiple connotations of that word (usually safety but also an institution). We only occupy them for a short space of time, they’re never (unless you’re landed gentry and even then, come the revolution …) actually ours. And that fits with the emotional current (thank you for that phrase) of the novella, which is one of forward movement, tracking changes whilst showing the cumulative effect of the missed moments and missed conversations, the loss. I’m also a big fan of multiple points of view, turning a story around and around so every time a different facet catches the light. I love a mosaic or patchwork fiction that asks the reader to work perhaps a little bit harder.
KW: You write a lot of flash fiction. What in your opinion makes an excellent flash and could you give an example of a flash you particularly like (it could be one of yours you are proud of or one from another writer)?
AW: Great question. For me, flash fiction needs a character and a sense of wanting or losing or missing something and it takes place in time. Flash is compressed stories, but importantly, although not everything a story needs has to be in your limited wordcount, it does have to surround the page, existing between the lines and in the margins. The reader needs to ‘feel’ the bigger picture, the surround sound if you like so that the flash fiction resonates long after the final word. Anthologies are a good place to start if you want to widen your reading. Tania Hershman recently edited Fuel: An Anthology of prize-winning stories – it’s a great resource and also raises funds for fuel poverty. A story I find endlessly rewarding to read and teach is 19 Owls, first published by Forge.
KW: Your second book, Family Frames (2021),is a well-crafted, touching collection of flash fiction. It includes stories written in the first, second and third person; traditional arcs and more experimental pieces; and meditations on relationships and family. Can you say something about putting this collection together and what was in your mind when selecting and ordering the pieces?
AW: V Press put out a call for submissions of flash collections and I realised I had enough, both previously published individual flashes (mostly online, although some in anthologies) and others in a file. I put them all into one document before ordering them and read through. There were some I dropped straight away, either because I’d written them to a specific prompt or I just didn’t like them anymore. Some of the stories ended up being heavily cut or edited, such as ‘Slipstream’ which was originally a 1500-word story but, I think, works as both. I was looking for what connected them thematically, and of course, it was family, even if for some of the stories it was only distantly. I decided to order them in loose groups of age or stages of life, then bookended them with my National Flash Fiction Day Micro winner ‘For You I Am’, in two slightly different versions. That flash is all about the fear of becoming a parent, the narrator wondering if she can love her unborn child, given her own memories about childhood. In the first version she’s still unsure. In the second the story finishes with the line, there’s no way of not loving you now. I wanted to have that shift towards unconditional love. The title Family Frames is borrowed from a non-fiction book by Marianne Hirsch, recommended to me by my youngest daughter, a fascinating examination of the way we make memories that feel like truth, based on photographs of the past. I had written a flash (before reading this book) called ‘Bad Blood’which uses this idea of a series of photos of the narrator as a girl and the dissonance between the image and the memory. I knew it was the perfect title for this collection, given all the possible connotations contained in the word ‘frame’.
KW: Your writing often focuses on the inner thoughts or feelings of the characters and you bring them to life with telling details. How do you go about developing your characters, especially in the limited word count of flash fiction?
AW: One of the best pieces of advice I received (from Nikesh Shukla) was to slow my writing down and stay in the moment longer than feels comfortable. Notice what the character would notice. And that’s what I try and do.
KW: I have noticed you are great at (emotional) endings, something writers can struggle with, especially in flash. In ‘Our Father’s Favourite Poet was WB Yeats’, for instance, a story about two sisters sprinkling their father’s ashes, the last sentence is resonant, referencing a Yeats poem, ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’ (which speaks of how life runs an irreversible course—people can’t go back). How do you approach endings when writing a piece? Is it something you consider carefully before you start and do you have any advice for other flash writers here?
AW: Thank you for saying so. Poems and song lyrics often contain images that flash writers can incorporate ‘slant’, so if you know what your story is about (it helps!) then you can use other creative work to add an extra dimension to your own, an interplay between the story you’ve written and a whole other creative world. Given limited wordcounts, that’s really useful. If I’m lucky, the ending is there pretty early on in the process and my re-writing is to make everything else fit. The final line in ‘Bad Blood’, for instance, was in my head almost before I’d finished the first draft. ‘I don’t cry, oh no, not until my mum’s thin arms lasso me, and then I’m gasping’. That one still gives me goosebumps! If I can’t hear or feel that last line when I’m writing a draft, it usually means I’m not on the right track and I have to go back, start all over from a different angle or perspective. In terms of advice, I think the ending is almost the most important part of a flash. It needs to resonate and hold everything that precedes it, so don’t rush it. If you can’t see it straight away, try taking sentences or phrases from the opening couple of paragraphs. Move things around like a jigsaw until it falls into place or you start to sense the missing pieces.
KW: You are doing a PhD in creative writing, which entails producing a full-length novel, I think, as well as a theoretical dissertation. In what ways do you hope being in a university environment will help your progress as a writer (practically and/or in terms of craft)?
AW: I’m coming to the end of my second year and incredibly grateful to the SWWDTP for funding. I’m really enjoying it. As part of a cohort of students across the Humanities, I get to meet so many interesting people doing incredibly niche and wonderful things! I appreciate the access to libraries, supervisors, workshops, forums, training and conferences and I’m slightly strange in that I love reading and writing essays, so I’m not daunted by my critical thesis. In fact, I’m looking forward to it! I think it’s also given me an injection of confidence in my own work. I think having this long period of time to devote to developing my novel and thinking about an aspect of craft (I’m examine polyphonic voices in fiction) is really beneficial across all my writing.
KW: As well as the PhD, are you doing anything else in the writing world at the moment? I think you teach sometimes and are involved in running the Bath short story prize.
AW: I’m still teaching some workshops, offering critiques and I also mentor a writer. I am one of a team who run the Bath Short Story Award and I’ll be at the Flash Fiction Festival in Bristol in July, a wonderful gathering of writers, most of whom seem to be really good at karaoke! But mainly, I’m focusing on my own reading and writing.
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Alison Woodhouse is a writer, tutor and mentor based in the Southwest, currently in the second year of a funded PhD in Creative Writing, exploring polyphony. Her short fiction has won a number of competitions and many other pieces have been placed or shortlisted and are widely published both in print and online. Her debut Novella in Flash, The House on the Corner, was published in 2020 by Ad Hoc Fiction and her flash fiction collection, Family Frames, was published in 2021 by V Press. www.alisonwoodhouse.com @AJWoodhouse