GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS SHORT STORY PRIZE 2022/23
An interview with GBP Short Story Prize author Timna Fibert
Hi, Timna. Congratulations on being longlisted for the GBP Short Story Prize. Your story, ‘Signs and Wonders’, is really quite uncategorizable – and we’d love to hear how the idea came to you, what you see it as being about, how you set about the writing… (you know, just a few small questions…).
I had a big break-up on the tail end of the pandemic, and the story grew out of some of the various attempts that I made to plug myself back into the world in the aftermath of that crisis. I remember feeling like I could go days or even weeks without really seeing or being seen by anybody, or having a conversation where it felt like there was anything to be gained or lost. And I felt like if I didn’t do something, present myself to the world, I was going to vanish completely.
When people talk about hook-ups, they often say they’re soulless – but I think there’s more to them than the purely physical. I think there’s something about that outsideness that gives you just a tiny bit of hope – that you might actually have a genuine encounter with another person. After you’ve done what you went there for, and all there is left to do is talk.
I feel like the story ended up being about the paradoxes involved in those attempted meetings. The fact that you’re sublimating yourself to someone else, but only in order to boost your own ego. Feeling as though an encounter is An Event, but also that nothing ever seems to change after it. And then the terrifying realisation, when you peel back all the layers of your personas, that what you’re genuinely revealing – the real nakedness that the superficial nudity of the hook-up can hide from you – is that there isn’t actually anything inside you to reveal at all.
It was written very quickly, over a couple of days, and then I spent about a month editing. Before, I’d subscribed to the Wordsworth school of literary composition, where poetry is ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’, but this story was pretty much the exact opposite. It came about after the ending of a brief fling, which at the time I experienced, very melodramatically, as a refutation of my entire mode of being. Afterwards, I locked myself away to weep for a couple of days and when I emerged the story just sort of spilt out of me.
‘Signs and Wonders’ is often very funny: the story is littered with wonderfully savage, seemingly throwaway asides and descriptions. But there is also something deeply melancholy about it too. (It reminded me a little of Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves, particularly the combination of sex, ritual, and dogma.) Can you say a bit more about that?
Breaking the Waves is one of my absolute favourites. I was also thinking of the Mystics whilst I was writing – particularly Julian of Norwich. There’s a bit in the story about blood looking like fish that was inspired by a line from ‘Revelations of Divine Love’, about Christ’s blood looking like the scales of a herring. I’ve been carrying around that image since undergrad so it was nice to finally deposit it somewhere.
I never write with humour in mind, so when people tell me that what I’ve written is funny, it takes me a while to realise what they’re talking about. I suppose I find it generally quite embarrassing and difficult being embodied in the world – I always want to be everything to everyone all the time and that’s made impossible by the fact that you have to choose to wear certain kinds of clothes and to put certain kinds of things in your house. So I’m always hyper-aware of the indignity inherent in presenting yourself, and I notice that indignity in myself and in others. I think maybe that’s where the humour comes from, as well as a lot of the sadness.
I saw on Twitter that you asked members of your family not to read the story. Did it feel like you were pushing against taboos when you wrote 'Signs and Wonders'? (And if so, was that at all nerve-wracking?)
I didn’t feel like that at all when I was writing it. I didn’t see it as a story about ‘sex’ – the sex was more like a medium to smuggle in the intensity of experience that I wanted to get at. It wasn’t until after I’d finished editing it that I realised that it was quite a lot. The first person I sent it to was my sister, and she was just horrified. Not so much by the sex but by how sad it was, how much self-loathing the protagonist had. So I decided I would rather not upset my mum!
Tell us some more about ambiguity, too. ‘Signs and Wonders’ steadfastly resists spelling itself out; it feels like a story that wriggles. Was this important to you – and how difficult was this to sustain? Ambiguity requires a lot of faith in yourself, and also the reader. (The urge to say, ‘This is what I’m trying to do’, ‘This is what this is about’ must be strong.)
I love stories that give you a sense that there’s a meaning to them that’s always just out of reach. When you read something and you get this inkling that there’s a huge secret to it, that’s also the secret of the entire universe. And you can maybe get closer to the secret, but you can never know it all at once. I think my reason for wanting to write is to try to get closer towards that secret that I know I can’t know (and maybe I actually don’t really want to know?). I think that might be where a lot of the ambiguity comes from.
More specifically to this story, there’s a lot of moralising that goes on around ‘hook-up culture’, not just in right wing discourse around ‘traditional family values’, but on the left as well. There’s the sex-positive ‘look at this empowered woman taking charge of her sexuality’ and then, on the other side, ‘this is sexual commodification, it dissolves community ties etc etc’. It’s not that I think writing can ever totally avoid morality – I don’t, ultimately – but I also didn’t want to participate in any kind of discussion on those terms. I suppose I wanted more to look at these encounters as a series of attempts, and to try to understand what was actually being attempted, and why they so often seemed to fail.
Other writers – name some favourites.
I like to read things that have a sense of being ever so slightly removed from the world – like they’re happening in a very specifically ‘literary’ reality. A lot of my favourites are in translation, which I think creates a sense of that distance even if it isn’t there in the original. Clarice Lispector is my number one – I find her unbearably, heart-rendingly profound. Also the big boys – Borges, Kafka, Dostoevsky. I’m about to start a PhD on Blanchot and I love reading his theory as well as his fiction.
In terms of contemporary writers – I’m a fan of J.M. Coetzee, Ottessa Moshfegh, Sheila Heti, Paul Auster, and – I’m not just saying this because it’s Galley Beggar – Eimear McBride.
Tell us more about your general writing routine, and whether/what you’re working on at the moment.
I’m a morning person, so in general I roll out of bed and sit in my pyjamas on the sofa to crank out as many words as I can muster. It has to feel informal and unsexy – in a café or even at my desk, I’m always thinking about how much I look like I’m writing. Then immediately I’m performing my writerliness, even if it’s just to myself, and not actually thinking about what’s going on the page. If I’m feeling stuck or uninspired, I’ll read a bit of poetry, to remind me of the fact that sentences can be arranged in infinite weird ways.
I’m just finishing up the final round of edits on a novel narrated by a copse of lecherous trees. It’s about a girl who (wrongly) believes that she can assassinate the Prime Minister using witchcraft – inspired by the covens of witches hexing Trump when he was in power.
And any good advice you’ve been given. (Any bad advice, too?)
I think it’s from John Gardner: vivid detail is the lifeblood of fiction, but it’s never about detail for detail’s sake. It’s about finding those details that can hold the weight of what needs to be said.
In terms of bad advice – when I was on my MA, my fellow writers gave me a lot of fantastic suggestions, but they weren’t necessarily good for me. Or more accurately, I didn’t know how to incorporate and still hold onto what I wanted to do. In trying to follow their advice, I lost the excitement I felt about the book that I was trying to write and spent years attempting to find it again before scrapping it to move onto something else.
Finally, let’s have a fantasy literary dinner. Who would you invite, where would it be, what would you eat – and who of your guests has the most potential to start a quarrel?
My personal dinner party sweet spot is when you’re talking big ideas, but there’s an irreverent twinkle to it all. So I think I’ll get together Derrida, Elif Batuman, Byron, and Angela Carter – a good spread of people who feel like they’d be up for a bit of a challenge. Derrida and Byron might do some intellectual dick measuring but I don’t think anyone would get overly earnest, which is the big danger. I’d hold it in a low-lit Spoons and everyone would eat gammon and eggs (jacket potato for the vegans).
TIMNA FIBERT writes novels and short stories. Her previous work has appeared in The Oxonian Review, ISIS Magazine, and The Bedford Square Anthology, and she runs a creative writing group for carers. In her day job, she works as an audio-describer across theatre, film, museums, and galleries. She studied English at St Anne’s College, Oxford, and has a Creative Writing MA from Royal Holloway. This year, she’s starting a Literary and Critical Theory PhD at Goldsmiths, researching negated vocality and Blanchot. She’s currently putting the finishing touches on a novel narrated by a copse of lecherous trees.