Andrew M Hurley, author of two short story collections, talks to Diane Becker (short story writer and deputy editor of The Short Review) about short stories and lonely northern landscapes.
Andrew Michael Hurley (www.amhurley.com ) is author of Cages and other stories (Lime Tree Press, 2006) and The Unusual Death of Julie Christie and other stories (Lime Tree Press, 2008). Diane Becker blogs here (http://notdesignedtojuggle.wordpress.com).
Excerpt:
I like the gloom and the wildness of the North. I like its Gothicism and its strangeness; its place names and its folklore. For all its urban compaction and sprawl there are still huge, empty places that it’s possible to get lost in and I like that too. The stories are almost all about people reviewing their lives and finding them wanting. Just as the landscapes are empty, inhospitable, and unresponsive.
Diane Becker: Andrew, I really enjoyed reading and reviewing The Unusual Death of Julie Christie & other stories . Describe one of the stories in your collection:
Andrew M Hurley: It’s hard to choose one story which is representative of the collection as a whole. There are several in which I feel I’ve moved up a notch as a writer, ones that were difficult and challenging to get right, The Unusual Death of Julie Christie, Spire, Muscle for example. There are a few that I would probably still take a red pen to and tweak a bit more, but I know that I’m just being picky. One of my favourite stories in the collection, though, is Spark Guns I think because it’s a story in which I feel that all those disparate elements of the short story come together in a more personally satisfying way. I like the simplicity of the story, the economy, the pace of it, the tone, the movement between the present and the past. These things seemed to fall into place very naturally.
It tells the story of two brothers revisiting an old house in the wilds of the Lancashire countryside where they played as children. The narrator recalls a particular autumn thirty years earlier where they befriended the eccentric girl and boy living at the house. The girl plays the piano badly; the boy grins a lot; they both believe there is a ghost of an electrocuted gardener in the garden. It transpires that the children are neglected, but to the two young brothers the children represent a simple freedom that they both long for and despise them having. Like many of the stories in the collection it’s about an ending and the start of a transition into something new. In this case, childhood ends and a new, brutal adult world begins.
The story began with the title and was probably the quickest to write of all the ones in the collection, though I’m not sure why. Some stories – thankfully – are like that. It seems as though they have always been there. Looking back on Spark Guns a couple of years after I wrote it, I can see now why it stands out for me in the collection. It is perhaps the first story I wrote which is set in the rural landscape of my childhood and so there’s perhaps more personal meaning to it for me because of that, but I have a feeling that it is the most honest in terms of the sentiments it expresses. The narrator’s frustrations both as a child and as an adult are my own frustrations, I suppose, with how outside forces make life inevitably complex no matter how simple you endeavour to make it. I don’t often re-read things I’ve published (probably for fear that I will want to uncap the red pen) but Spark Guns I’ve gone back to a few times. It haunts me a bit to be honest.
DB: Spark Guns haunted me too, it took me right back to my own (strange) Lancashire childhood. Your writing is very rooted in place. How does psychogeography of location affect the way you write?
AMH: It’s interesting to see just how many of the stories are set in fairly bleak, lonely landscapes. Even Bricks, which is, I think, the only story with an urban setting, has a feeling of emptiness about it. On the rainy night during which the story takes place, the streets are almost deserted and Lek, the main character, moves like a ghost through the city.
I don’t think, however, that ‘place’ necessarily comes first when I write, nor do I choose a location out of a simple literary need to create atmosphere (though of course it can help). It’s more complex than that. If I really think about it, writing about these lonely, bleak, rural places is a kind of comfort for me in that it is a route back to my childhood. I grew up surrounded by the countryside; a ten minute bike ride from my house took me out to miles of fields, woods, hills and stretches of moorland. We couldn’t afford to go anywhere hot and foreign so family holidays were taken in Yorkshire or Cumbria. Wind, rain, peat bogs, pine woods, lakes and mountains all seem to have some connection with my identity that I suppose I try to explore by writing about them.
I like the gloom and the wildness of the North. I like its Gothicism and its strangeness; its place names and its folklore. For all its urban compaction and sprawl there are still huge, empty places that it’s possible to get lost in and I like that too. And I suppose that’s one of the reasons that these sorts of landscapes are so prevalent in the collection. The stories are almost all about people reviewing their lives in some way and finding them wanting. Just as the landscapes are empty, inhospitable, and unresponsive.
DB: What are you working on at the moment? Where will your stories take us to next?
AMH: I’ve decided to take a break from writing short stories and at the moment I’m about two thirds through a novel called Mistletoe, set, predominantly, in the north west. I wanted to explore the fraternal relationship touched on in Spark Guns and the strangeness of The Unusual Death of Julie Christie. Without giving too much away the novel is about a middle-aged man being treated for cancer, a girl with healing powers, a ghost cat and a body in a cave. It’s also about the relationship between humans and nature. Our manipulation of Nature. Nature’s overpowering of us. The way we ignore it. The way it creeps back.
DB: I found your writing very visual, almost cinematic. Creativity can be expressed in many ways. Apart from writing are there any other ways you express your creativity? (If so, how does this feed back in your writing?)
AMH: I’ve always been interested in the relationship between words and pictures and my first attempts at creative writing when I was a child were comic books. I don’t have the time to draw and paint as much as I’d like to nowadays so I take photographs instead – some of which appeared in The Unusual Death of Julie Christie.
DB: I love the immediacy of photography, and sometimes I find it’s so much quicker to capture an idea or concept in a photograph than to write about it. What’s your writing process like?
AMH: Long! I’m not a quick writer at all. It takes me a long time to be satisfied with what I’ve written. With short stories I think I have a general writing process which consists of a sketchy first draft based on an idea, followed by a much longer process of editing and re-writing that can takes weeks and months. Of course a lot of stories don’t seem to get beyond the initial drafting stage despite trying very hard to develop them! Often, things that don’t go anywhere initially come into their own in later stories. So I don’t think any writing is wasted or useless. I don’t tend to throw anything away or delete things.
Writing a novel has been a completely different experience, however. I think I have had to rewire the synapses in my brain to hold all the chapters and the big story together. Lots of large sheets of paper and post-it notes have helped. I have had to become much more organised and patient than I am used to being, though it has meant that I’ve got much further with this novel than I have with any other previous attempts. I find that deciding exactly what to work on in any one session and sticking to it has been very useful, as has following Haruki Murakami’s maxim that if you feel like you can write some more – stop, which seems an odd bit of advice at first and is hard to follow if you’re impatient to get the word count up, but it ensures that next time you sit down you don’t sit there staring at the screen for ages. You can get started straight away.
I find as well that I am always writing even when I’m not physically sitting at the keyboard typing. The story becomes an obsession. It’s pretty much all I can think about sometimes. But it’s a good thing. It makes me more alert to the world – to what people say, to the little details that might find their way into the novel.
DB: You mention Murakami – one of my favourites, any other writers who’ve particularly influenced or motivated you?
AMH: There are writers that I will always go back to because I simply enjoy reading them and immersing myself in the worlds they create. I’m thinking of people like Susan Hill, Thomas Hardy, Daphne Du Maurier, Forster – classic authors if you like. Recently I’ve been reading a fair bit of classic horror too – MR James, HP Lovecraft, Edgar Allen Poe and so on. I’m toying with the idea of writing a collection of horror stories set in the north once I’ve finished the novel.
I also read a lot of short stories to let my jaw drop at writers like John Updike, Raymond Carver, Alice Munro. As well as those writers who can spin a good yarn, I am influenced by those, like Updike, who operate in a totally different league and have the ability to nail a particular human experience or feeling in a single, simple phrase so that when you read it, you say – yes, that’s exactly how it is. The best writers are able to articulate the feelings you can’t find the words for yourself. They can pull the world into focus, or a world at least.
Having said all that I find that I haven’t read many novels as I’ve been writing my own – I’m not sure why – but I suspect it is to do with the fact that my brain can only hold onto one thing at a time and I wouldn’t want to drift into writing an imitation of someone else. I’ve found myself immersed in non-fiction, namely books by Robert MacFarlane and Roger Deakin, who write in detail about nature and its effects on the mind. Just beautifully honest, beautifully written books.
DB: Any other writers we should be reading?
AMH: Again, these are great short story writers (though some are great novelists too) but I would highly recommend reading anything by Haruki Murakami; the collection called Last Night by James Salter (the title story is one of the best stories I’ve read for a long time); Amy Hempel; Harold Brodkey and John McGahern, who I’ve only discovered recently and wish I’d been reading for years.
DB: That’s brilliant, Andrew. Thank you so much for taking time out to do this. I’m looking forward to reading the novel.
AMH: Thank you. Glad you enjoyed the collection.
Bios:
Andrew Michael Hurley (www.amhurley.com ) is author of Cages and other stories (Lime Tree Press, 2006) and The Unusual Death of Julie Christie and other stories (Lime Tree Press, 2008). Diane Becker blogs here (http://notdesignedtojuggle.wordpress.com). Diane’s review of The Unusual Death of Julie Christie and other stories for the Lancashire Writing Hub is also being published by The Short Review.