GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS SHORT STORY PRIZE 2023/24

An interview with GBP Short Story Prize author

Your longlisted story, ‘i was a girl runner’, takes place over decades, and unfolds as a series of snapshots – jumping backwards and forwards in time – in the life of a competitive runner, from her childhood right through to her mid-30s. Can you tell us how the story first came to you, a bit about the inspiration, its gestation – all those things!

It’s funny, for pretty much anything else I’ve written, I would struggle to pin down a single inspiration, but for this story I can give you an exact date: 7 November 2019.

On that day, an American middle distance runner by the name of Mary Cain featured in an incredibly powerful New York Times article and video exposing what she described as “emotional and physical abuse” at a Nike training camp. My piece is clearly not a fictionalisation of Cain’s experience but her story was very much the spark for it. I’d hope that if she was somehow to read it one day it would do justice to her bravery in speaking out.

More generally, I have a very inefficient writing method: I get inspired by a story or a concept or a character, write as much as I can, then leave it alone for years. Literally years. When it comes back out of the (metaphorical) drawer maybe 3 or 5 or 10 years later, I usually have the distance to critique my own work, but more importantly I find that the original story – which I’ll have carried on thinking about throughout – has absorbed extra layers of meaning.

In this instance, I came back to a story that was probably no more than 1000 words at the time, but I had so much more to bring to it: my own experiences of training, competition, and serious injuries; considering the process of ageing as one of growing alienation from our physical form; reading through a box of old school reports that I thought had been lost forever and being surprised and saddened by how different they were to my memories of the time; a bout of Covid which lit up old scar tissue all over my body like a Christmas tree; and having children, seeing the way that their bodies exist in the world, with all of its obstacles, dangers and contradictions, how that changes as they grow – and how different that is for boys and girls.

‘i was a girl runner’ is simultaneously accessible – it’s never less than easy to follow – and also boasts some oddities in its style. For example, the use of punctuation, and the unusual use of lower-case for pronouns like ‘i’ or nouns like ‘daddy’. What’s going on there?!

I have very strong feelings about punctuation! In particular, I never use speech marks in any of my work – which is extremely unpopular and has almost certainly cost me opportunities to publish pieces – but I just find them very clumsy as a tool. 

In this case, I wanted the main character’s relative immaturity and vulnerability to have a visible expression on the page – the recurring lower case ‘i’ in particular seemed right for that in a way that’s difficult to explain. But anyone reading the story really carefully might notice there are occasional exceptions which signify… something.

One of the things that we all took away from ‘i was a girl runner’ was just how ruthless – brutal – the world of professional sports is. You offer a blistering, and often quite merciless, portrayal (not just of the managers and sports bodies, but the kind of burning hunger that is needed from the runners themselves). … Do you have personal experience of this, and is it an important part of the story?

Yes, definitely. I couldn’t claim to have experience at an elite level, but I’ve played competitive sport of one kind or another since I was 6 or 7 years old and seen the good/bad/ugly of it all throughout. I think, at its best, sport is a lot like art – an intense rehearsal for the most extreme and challenging experiences which life can throw at us. Helping us learn to cope with triumph and disaster and all of that…

But it can also be brutal (that’s a very fitting word) in its own right – especially so in an individual sport like athletics where your teammates are also often your rivals in a very literal way. 

I’ve done a lot of running myself, right up to half-marathons and marathons, and of course it’s physically and mentally exhausting – but it’s also incredibly lonely and boring and repetitive at the same time. I don’t think it’s a surprise that a lot of literature has been inspired by running in particular. Your mind has to go to other places simply to survive.

I also think there’s something fascinating about the status and mentality of athletes who are not quite at the pinnacle of their sport. If you were the 100th best (man) in the world at, say, football or basketball or baseball, you’d now be pretty famous and certainly a millionaire many times over by the time you retire in your mid-30s. Alternatively if you’re the 100th best in the world at running marathons or archery or synchronised swimming, there’s little glory or money in that, you’ll definitely need to get a “proper job” as soon as you retire if not before, yet you’re still making at least as many sacrifices in terms of the dedication and discipline it takes to achieve incredible things, they’re just not quite Olympic gold or household name incredible.

I’m pretty certain that the decision to make your protagonist a woman was no accident – and there are times she is just so acutely, heartbreakingly vulnerable (and in what seems a very female way). Can you tell us more about that? 

Yes, the protagonist of this story absolutely had to be a woman. As above, Mary Cain was the original inspiration, but I also did a lot of further reading around conditions such as Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (also known as Red-S), whereby athletes are on such strict diet programmes that they inadvertently starve their bodies of the nutrients they need to function. In football, there’s evidence that female players are up to six times more likely to tear their ACLs – the worst possible injury for a footballer – but also 25% less likely to make a full return afterwards than men. There’s an increasing acknowledgement that menstrual cycles have an impact on athletic performance, but barely any scientific interest in the subject. And so on…

It’s not an original observation, but I was conscious that women live in a world that is predominantly designed by and for men – sport is one interesting way to explore that I think. And ultimately, the protagonist of my story is vulnerable, but it’s not because of any personal weakness – she’s strong, determined, powerful, even ruthless, but a victim of circumstances and people with more power than her.

Also, just to be clear, I write under a pen name (or a Heteronym, to borrow from Pessoa) partly because I want people to come to my stories with limited preconceptions. But I am a man and I tried hard to get this story of a girl and woman to be as accurate and authentic as I could make it. I did a lot of research for the sports aspects, but also credit to my writing group buddies (Jaclyn, Micaela, Sophia) who offered really valuable critiques of my first draft.

OK! How about your writing generally. How long have you been writing? Do you have a daily routine? Are you working on something at the moment?  

I’ve been writing fiction for maybe 25 years now? But have only taken the big leap into submitting my work for other human beings to read in the past couple of years. It means I have a really big body of work to constantly work on – a few dozen short stories, a couple of novellas, six novels in various stages of completion, and even a graphic novel that will probably take me decades to complete.

Most recently I’ve been re-editing a polyphonic novel about the art world which I finished during lockdown, and working on a new novel that I’m about a third of the way through. That one’s difficult to describe, but it’s partly about corporate accountability and how society seems to find it impossible to reckon with slow violence (such as air or water pollution) in the same way as fast violence (like murder).

I wish I did have a daily routine. Like lots of writers I have a pretty demanding day job and family life, while also occasionally trying to fit in other hobbies, time to exercise, eating a proper meal once in a while, and so on. Being able to write depends upon unearthing a little time and energy somewhere in the cracks.

What’s the best writing tip you’ve ever received, and what’s the worst?

Best? To be frank I find most writing advice unhelpful personally, but for some reason George Saunders illuminates creative writing in a way that no one else does – especially with short stories, which feel much more technical and less forgiving than longer pieces. For any writer who hasn’t read it yet, I think A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is just extraordinary. A must-read.

Worst? “Write what you know” – I think you should write anything that inspires you, whatever it might be, then worry later as to whether you can do it justice or not. Second-guessing yourself and limiting what you can write about isn’t going to achieve very much.

Habits, too. What’s a bad writing habit you have – and give us one that’s proved fairly useful, too.

Leaving things half-finished for years before coming back to them? I honestly think that’s my best and worst writing habit.

On to other writers. Name a few favourites. And tell us what you’re reading at the moment.

Too many favourites to mention, but the first books I read which inspired me to write my own fiction were Czech authors like Bohumil Hrabal, Milan Kundera, Ivan Klíma, and Ludvík Vaculík. There’s something about their blend of deep philosophical moments interspersed with dark humour that really appealed (and still does). I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that most of those writers were forced to have other jobs out in the real world either – their engagement with the wider world feels authentic and hard-earned.

More recently, I think a lot of the most interesting contemporary fiction is coming from East Asian women – Mieko Kawakami, Han Kang, Sayaka Murata (another writer with a “proper job”) to name a few.

I’ve also recently discovered Lynne Tillman, who writes like no one else – almost every sentence is its own short story. And I have to say that the Peninsula Press reissues of her work have the most incredible covers too.

I always have a few different books on the go, ideally some fiction and non-fiction to bounce around between. At the moment, that’s Disobey! by the French philosopher Frédéric Gros, which is helping to inform the new novel I’m writing; a book called TulipoMania by Mike Dash, which covers the introduction of the tulip to Europe and the infamous tulip economic bubble during the Dutch Golden Age; and Greek Lessons by Han Kang. I’m only halfway through that so will reserve judgement, but I think The Vegetarian and Human Acts are works of absolute genius.

And here’s a spot to namecheck any other favourite things: artists, arts, films, cinemas, TV, music… whatever you like.

What a question! I’ve been a huge fan of Yorgos Lanthimos since being fortunate to see his earliest films at the London Film Festival, so really excited to try to catch Poor Things while it’s still in cinemas. I watched Aftersun recently, which is brilliant, and it felt like it shared some themes with this story.

I’m that cliched person that says they have varied music tastes, but I think it’s true? Things I’ve been listening to recently include the latest albums by Danny Brown and Earl Sweatshirt; Lingua Ignota; Datura by Lorelle Meets The Obsolete; Collection by Patio; some “hyper-melodic black metal” I found on Bandcamp called Spider God; Marika Hackman; Mandy, Indiana; HEALTH; anything and everything by The Breeders, Kendrick Lamar, and Tim Hecker. I’ll stop there!

“The horror of the blank page” is something that has – by pure chance – popped up in our social media timeline two or three times over the past week. So we want end by asking all of our longlisted authors: Do you feel that horror? And how would you advise other writers to get beyond it?

In short, no!

As you can tell from other answers, I always have more writing projects on the go than hours available to feasibly work on them. I have too many half-complete pages that need finishing to ever reach a blank one. 

But generally, if I do feel uninspired, I find that throwing myself into something else creative – a film, an exhibition, someone else’s writing – is usually enough to get me going again.

read a arbor’s GBP Short Story Prize nominated story, ‘i was a girl runner’, here.

A ARBOR is an author based on the south coast of England, with past publications including Five Dials and The Liminal Review.