RD: It’s so great to have this chance to speak with you, Gaynor. I wonder if you’d be happy to give us a bit of context behind your short story ‘The Magician’s Assistant’? What inspired the pieces and what drew you to the themes the work explores?
GJ: I would describe this as classic Gaynor story, it’s about a strange central character and a group of girls who fixate on her but really it’s about the blurred lines between childhood and adulthood and how incredibly fast that happens. My own teen years were simultaneously some of the most joyous and traumatic of my life and my stories do tend to frequently land in that era. Of course now that I’m nearing 50 I look back at it all through a different lens again, but coming of age stories have always been my favourite to read and write. The Magician’s Assistant is actually a sister story to another in my collection (Baptism was published in New Nottingham Journal Issue 1). They were written about 6 years apart and there’s one line that ties them together. I didn’t realise that these characters inhabited the same place until I re-read the whole book and thought … wait a minute, but I do like to leave little Easter eggs in my work along the way, so it fits.
RD: What’s your writing process like? Do you have a particular place you like to write? Any quirky little traditions or rituals you carry out? Paper or laptop? Mornings or evenings, or whenever you have the time? And are you a planner or pantser, or a bit of both?
GJ: For the past few years, I’ve been very lucky to have a small dedicated writing room at home. It’s plastered with horror memorabilia and pop culture nonsense which basically sums me up.
My writing quirks are my emotional support memes that watch over me while I write, currently it’s Olivia Colman in Heartstopper as Nick’s mum just after he comes out to her. She has a soft smile on her face and the text ‘Olivia Colman believes you can write this novel’. And then, this is incredibly specific, but I also have the text printed out from the argument between Armand and Louis in the new TV adaptation of Interview With The Vampire, it’s the most incredible writing and it’s famous in the fandom – I’ve watched that scene maybe a hundred times and I never get tired of it. There’s also post it notes of writing wisdom that people have sent me, usually in insta DMs where all my lovely writing cheerleaders live.
For short stories, I don’t often plan – image is first, I have a notebook full of single sentences that are just ideas and I let them sit there, sometimes for years. It might be a line from a news report that caught my eye, or a thought I had on the bus. I have a very visual mind – it’s leftover from my anxiety disorder and the intrusive thoughts that came with it – and often a snapshot will land in there and I’ll eventually work a story around it. Sometimes I artificially create a story by jamming a weird object into the narrative, or melding two pieces together. I did this with a story that was then longlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award – it’s a fairly chilling tale that veers off into a weird erotic scene, which was taken from a sex writing workshop I took with Leone Ross, but obviously it worked for someone! I also do have a cheat sheet which came from me breaking down this story to see why it was successful, I call it my formula for writers block and I have shared it with a few people who have said it helped them.
Time to write is a bit of luxury, I’m a carer for most of the year, so writing happens when my child is happy in an online school class – maybe for one hour a day with multiple interruptions within that hour, but it is what it is.
RD: You’ve been writing for some time – with a string of publications and awards over the years – I wonder how your approach to writing, and the publishing industry as a whole, has changed over this time? What would you have liked the young Gaynor to know that she might not have done when starting out on the long journey that’s the writer’s road?
GJ: This is a hard question, because I’m unsure where I fit in the writing world right now. But I also think that’s okay. I’m so so proud of what I’ve achieved, I have photos of everything – including the gorgeous friends I’ve made along the way – stuck to my door, and when I’m disappointed in myself and my career I look over at them and remind myself how young Gaynor wouldn’t believe any of it. What do you mean I’ve performed at Edinburgh Fringe? What do you mean I won a grant for exploring immersive tech when I can’t even change the ink in my printer? What do you mean I flew alone to Belfast to read a prize winning story about vaginas to a room full of strangers? When I first started I was a stay at home Mum from Oldham with no connections yet somehow along the way I ended up being named Northern Writer of the Year – honestly, what’s that all about? Unfortunately I forget all of this when I see the book deals and announcements online and it can be very very hard, but I am working on changing my thinking around this and recalibrating what success looks and feels like for me.
My approach to writing at the moment is I need to learn to love my work again and I need to push outside voices away and stop being so envious (it’s not a great quality, but it’s a tough one when you’re friends with so many successful writers!) and just write. I honestly think I’ve forgotten that I can write well, because I’m not having much published so there’s no external feedback the way there was when I first started in flash fiction.
People might not know that I started writing after a dreadful period of years of poor mental health and writing was meant to be something to fight against that – do you know how scary it is for someone with anxiety to put words out into the world where people can see them? It terrifies me every time. So I would tell young Gaynor, stop being so bloody hard on yourself and remember why you’re doing this – it was never about a book deal, it was about being brave.
RD: Which writers and works inspire you? What is it about their lives and work that draws you back again and again?
GJ: I was just talking to a friend about AM Homes recently. The short story collection The Safety Of Objects is one of the first times a book made me sit up straight in awe and discomfort at the same time. From the age of 18, I mostly read short stories but they were all of the same era – Cheever, Carver, Oates, Pynchon – all brilliant, obviously. But The Safety Of Objects was the first contemporary collection that hit me hard, especially A Real Doll, which is incredibly explicit – I remember thinking, I didn’t know you could write about that. I met her twice, the first time she was in Manchester Waterstones and after her talk she came over to a group of writers I was with and she thought I was one of them (I had only just stared out). It was one of the best moments of my life. She’s incredibly witty and unafraid.
I would say 90% of my bookshelves are short story collections by women or trans or genderqueer authors, but a few novels, and a few men have snuck in nowadays! Ben Pester, Matt Hill, Robert Shearman, Niall Bourke … all good surreal stuff. Otherwise I don’t think anyone would be surprised to find Mariana Enríquez, María Fernanda Ampuero, Carmen Maria Machado, Eliza Clark, Alison Rumfitt and Kirsty Logan on my regular reading lists. I like to read confronting stories, violent stories, pieces that are going to disturb and challenge me.
RD: Relatedly, I wonder if you had any views on this being the National Year of Reading here in the UK? Has the initiative raised particular thoughts about reading among young people and the future of literature?
I have worked with young people all my life and at times I’ve felt disappointed at the lack of change in the English curriculum, but then as a home educator I have been really excited to introduce my child to the ‘classics’ – they’re classics for a reason. But I also think you should meet children where they are, and let them read what they want to read. My child is autistic and can’t tolerate the feel of most book paper, so they read graphic novels because the paper has that smooth, glossy quality to them. So we don’t judge a book by its cover, but we do judge a book by the feel of its paper, which probably wouldn’t occur to a lot of people! The graphic novels they read vary from zany comics to LGBTQ+ interests to re-tellings of classics such as Anne of Green Gables.
I think we need to understand that literature isn’t accessible to every young person which I know some people don’t believe. Okay, books are free from libraries, but you have to have an adult in your life willing to help you with that, you have to have an address to register for a card, you have to have the means and space to keep a library book safe in your home (from damp, from siblings, from all sorts) and you have to know to return it again (my child has executive function difficulties and this would be a huge barrier for them). You have to have the confidence to walk into a library and believe that you belong there and it’s okay for you to borrow the books. These are things that certain adults can take for granted. My local library is great at all of this by the way – there’s a huge holistic community feel to it.
I also think we shouldn’t treat books as precious objects and let children dog-ear them and annotate them and fall asleep in bed with them and crease them and stain them. Lots of children already have barriers in their lives, don’t let snobbery around books be another one.
RD: Given the rise of AI, the impact of things like social media, changes in how stories are conveyed, do you have a hunch about what the world of writing and publishing will look like ten years from now?
GJ: I’m choosing optimism in my reply today! I think that the AI bubble will burst in creativity. People will get fed up of errors, mistakes, repetition, they’ll miss real artists. I also think there are plenty of people within the industry that are hugely against it. And of course there are people rebelling against the industry as it is, never mind the extra blandification that AI will bring to writing. I think – or hope – that more people will look to indie presses, and I mean super small presses, collectives, underground artists, the punks of the writing world, fanfiction and zines and spoken word nights. For me, that’s where I feel most at home, and that’s where the real joy and community is in writing. I think as society fractures more (that’s not very optimistic, sorry) these rebel artists will be so so important to us. Art is where it all starts.
GJ: Lastly, anything you’d like to share with readers of TSS? It could be a book or film rec, or something you’d like to get off your chest. Something that surprised or had you laughing recently. Maybe a rousing defence of the humble apple. The floor is yours.
Honestly, I would die happy if my only writing legacy was to make as many people as possible in the world read Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova, it is the most beautiful horror novel, in fact I’ve just this week bought a copy for somebody. It is a brilliant example of what horror fiction can do. It’s about family and love and acceptance all wrapped up in the story of a grieving mother and the new child she creates out of her dead child’s lung, which I know sounds grim but trust me, it’s more life-affirming than any self-help book could hope to be.
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Read Gaynor Jones’s short story ‘The Magician’s Assistant’ here.
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Gaynor Jones is a writer, carer and horror fan based in Oldham, UK. She won a Northern Writer’s Award for her (unpublished) short story collection, Girls Who Get Taken. She has won first prize in several writing competitions, including Bath Flash Fiction and the Mairtín Crawford Short Story Award, and has placed or been listed in others including the Bridport Prize, Aesthetica and Mslexia. In 2024 she was a virtual writer-in-residence for Melbourne UNESCO City Of Literature, and is currently the recipient of an Explore grant from Immersive Arts.
Rupert Dastur is founding editor of TSS Publishing. His debut novel Cloudless was published by Penguin in 2025.