GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS SHORT STORY PRIZE 2023/24

An interview with GBP Short Story Prize author K. Lockwood Jefford

‘A Family Gathering’ uses photography and the family album as a springboard into explorations of familial life, unspooling over decades, and focuses particularly on the lives of three siblings: Bella, Kit, and Sidney, from when they are toddlers right through to middle-age. Can you add a little bit more by way of introduction, to set the reader up?

A Family Gathering traces the relationships between three sisters from childhood to mid-life, in the context of the wider, extended family. Told from the oldest sister’s point of view in a series of vignettes, the story aims to explore the influences on how their lives unfold alongside each other and apart – family expectations? Aspirations? Events? – and how this plays out in their relationships with each other.

And tell us more about the inspiration for the ‘The Family Gathering’: How and when did it come to you, and how did you set about writing it? 

The complex intersecting ways in which families work – or don’t – has always fascinated me, ever since my mother had to yank me away from standing and staring at large family groups gathered on the beach at Barry Island or Tenby. The seeds of this story were sown pre-lockdown when, in a free-writing exercise at a Spread the Word writers’ workshop, I wrote the cine film scene featuring three sisters, Bella, Kit and Sydney – the names just came to me, I don’t know from where – which resonated with others when I read it aloud. Thinking about these sisters, the phrase ‘her other scars are invisible’ started circulating in my head – perhaps remnants of a dream? I began writing scenes exploring the unseen, emotional damage caused by a violent, traumatic event to one sister, both to her and her siblings, in a family where there is no real language for emotions. Initial drafts were titled Her Other Scars, but I had no overall shape or structure in mind, beyond exploring vignettes of how the sisters enact what they can’t speak of, and what would be seen of this from the outside?

Fitting fifty years into one short story is some feat and must have had certain challenges. What were they, and how did you deal with them? 

Fitting fifty years or so into one short story was a challenge – is it too cumbersome? what do I include, leave out? While workshopping the story, a writing mentor I was working with at the time recommended reading Annie Ernaux’s The Years, and this fabulous, seriously impressive book really opened things up. I hit on the idea of using significant family events – birthdays, anniversaries, funerals – framed by family photographs and a cine film, records that can’t speak either, only be seen and interpreted. This allowed me to both mark time and describe what an observer might see, balancing revelation and restraint, while offering plenty of space for the reader’s imagination. I played around with the chronology, but once I had the beginning and end images, the story began to come together.

This is a very specific question, but there is one wonderful – and horrific – detail about some scars underneath one of the sibling’s eyes. You offer a graphic (and totally matter of fact) summary of how such scars come about, in a way that lent the story so much texture. It felt very real. Do you have a medical background – or is this something you went out and found out?

Yes, I do have a medical background! (Very) long story short: I trained as a doctor, during which time I was involved in a serious car accident sustaining my own facial scars, and really appreciated the skill of the surgeon who treated me. After qualifying, and prior to specialising as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, I worked in Accident and Emergency, where I learned to suture, or stitch, and found it an incredibly satisfying, rewarding job.

For the story, I had to research the suture materials. I like the effect of bringing medical language into a piece of writing, and I’ve done that in a couple of stories. It’s always evolved from how the story is developing, rather than being something I’m determined to do.

How long have you been writing?

I came late to writing ‘seriously’. At school, as soon as I could read and write I did the usual things – wrote poems, songs, plays to perform at family gatherings, even started a novel once, so the idea was there. A teacher spotted something and suggested journalism, but I didn’t know any writers and it seemed so abstract, I couldn’t imagine the nuts and bolts of it, so it remained something on the side. During medical training in London, I acted and wrote bits for student and local theatre, including a stint as a stand-up comedian, writing my own material. I always kept a notebook, particularly while travelling, and completed a short course in creative writing at City University whilst re-taking my final exams. But once I qualified and started full-time clinical work and further training, I struggled to find time even to read anything other than medical literature – short stories and poetry were the only things that fitted into this dense timetable. And still I knew no writers.

Fast forward to 2012, when I spotted an ad for a part-time creative writing course focused on short stories and booked myself onto it – it was like a part of me came alive. Then, in 2015, I was able to reduce my work hours significantly and completed an MA in creative writing at Birkbeck and, finally, met other writers and learned something of how the writing world works.

Do you have a daily routine? 

Having had a salaried job in the NHS job I’m used to, and feel contained by, a routine, so I do have one Monday to Friday, but unlike work-work, it’s not rigid, and highly adaptable to the domestic and family stuff of life. I usually sit down at my desk any time between 8am and 10am, and work until I’m too tired – or stuck – usually between 4pm and 6pm, much later if I have a ‘deadline’ or I’m on a roll. If it’s going well, I don’t notice time and my husband must call me three times for dinner. When I’m finished for the day, I love to go for a walk for an hour or so, to mull, to let my mind wander. Punctuating this routine are the two writing workshop groups I’m part of with the wonderful writer-friends I met at Birkbeck – one group meets weekly, the other monthly.  These spaces are essential to my writing process, and my sanity.

And are you working on something at the moment? 

Since completing my first collection of short stories last year, I’ve been gathering thoughts, ideas and materials for my next project. I’ve focused on reading writers of both short story collections and novels – currently Julia Armfield, Camilla Grudova and Josephine Rowe, an Australian writer I admire. I’ve also been trying to lap up some art – films, galleries, theatre, dance – both alone and with my husband and others. I’d like to rise to the challenge of writing something longer – I do think short stories and novels are different beasts. I have a novella concerning a psychiatrist whose brother kills himself, but I’ve also begun pondering a family drama concerning three sisters across six decades inspired, loosely, by Federico Garcia Lorca’s play, The House Of Bernarda Alba. I saw a fantastic production of it recently – in an audience full of sixth formers bursting with opinions in the interval – at the Theatre Cervantes in Southwark. I’m looking forward to getting into the meat of something new, something that stretches new muscles.  

What’s the best writing tip you’ve ever received?

I believe the single most important thing that has enriched my reading and writing, and enhanced my skills as an editor, was the poetry module on the MA. To read in depth, exploring sensory language and metaphor, drilling right down into sentences, words, syllables, to relish the sound and feel of language, and how it looks on the page, was such a joy. Two of the first writers that inspired me at school were also poets – Laurie Lee and Dylan Thomas. If this were all distilled into a tip it could be – read poetry, read work in translation, where each word will have been carefully considered.

Other tips I return to are: to put work away for at least a week – the longer the better – before re-reading, and to read everything aloud –perhaps record it and listen back.

A writer at an Arvon workshop advocated to ‘keep ignorant of the publishing world’. Hard, if not impossible, to follow, but retaining a sense of freedom from commercial pressure and write what you want to write how you want to write it, is important, isn’t it?

and what’s the worst?

What has not helped me is the notion of the primacy of plot. Perhaps it’s my natural response to anything that sounds too didactic, or like a rigid adherence to rules, but if I start anything thinking about conflict, inciting incidents, resolution, etc, I feel paralysed. I respect and understand the importance of structure, of what happens to and between people being important, as well as their internal lives, very much so, but I have to start from a much looser place, to write scenes, and then edit towards a tighter, more coherent shape.

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

Hmmm. I think a bad writing habit is that I can become obsessed about something that’s not working, and be unable to leave it alone, to take a break. It makes me distracted and restless, not great to live with. Ask my husband.

A useful habit is always carrying a notebook to scribble down thoughts, observations, eavesdroppings, on buses, trains, in shops, cafes, hospital waiting rooms, the gym, the street etc. Many such scrawlings form seeds of something that finds its way into my writing. One story in my collection was drawn from notes I made during a day alone with my notebook in Valencia. Also, notebooks are such a pleasure to search for and buy, especially when travelling.

What about other writers? Can you tell us about some authors you admire, as well as some that you are influenced by? 

I always find this question difficult as there are so many, and I can’t differentiate those I admire from those that I’m influenced by, as all writers I admire must influence me in some way, consciously and/or unconsciously?

At school, the first books that made me want to write were Laurie Lee’s As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, because of the images that rose from the page, and Dylan Thomas’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, because he described the normal way children are cruel to each other in such a recognisable way. I still have them on my shelf, and every time I pick them up I find something that inspires.  Another longstanding favourite is Mary Gaitskill’s  Bad Behaviour – she signed my dog-eared copy of at an event in London last year. 

Since I’ve started to think of myself as a writer, the first books that really excited me, opening up possibilities and offering permission to take risks with form, were Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, followed by Max Porter’s Grief is The Thing With Feathers. More recently, some of the writers I’ve been inspired/influenced by include Annie Ernaux’s The Years, as mentioned above, and Gwendoline Riley’s My Phantoms, because of how she captures interpersonal nuance, the moment-to-moment shifts in mood and tension between people, especially mothers and daughters. I came late to Arundati Roy’s wondrous The God of Small Things, and other that inspire include Avni Dish’s Burnt Sugar, Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat, Sara Baume’s A Line Made by Walking, Edouard Louis’s The End of Eddie, Derek Owusu’s That Reminds Me, Caleb Azumah Nelson’s Open Water, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americana,  

Regarding short stories in particular, my current favourite is Samanta Schweblin’s Seven Empty Houses –  I had to keep putting down, to record a sentence or two, to reflect on a story’s dark mood, tone or meaning. And I loved the way she talked about her work and writing at a recent event – with the inspiring Vanessa Onwuemezi – at the Charleston ‘Shorts’ festival. There are so many others that have written stories of everyday life, capturing places, people, moods, in such an original and true way, and as much as by what’s said as what’s not, that the story resonates long afterwards – Clare Keegan, Wendy Erskine, Rachel Tresize, Gurnaik Johal, Irenosen Okojie, Carmen Maria Machado, Eley Williams, Clare Fisher, John McGregor, AL Kennedy, Lydia Davis, Grace Paley, Lucia Berlin, Amy Dennis Johnson, Percy Everett, Ann Quin, Betty Howland.

I read a lot of fiction from independent publishers and work in translation, especially from Pereine Press.

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

Art – I like so-called modern and contemporary art, but I’ve become very fed up with the amount of blurb galleries put up on walls these days. I want to look at the art, whatever it is. Old favourites include Picasso, Klee, Hopper, Paula Rego, Lee Krasner, and I’m a big fan of photography – Cindy Sherman’s a longstanding favourite, and I saw a recent show by Alice Neel which was absorbing. As I’ve travelled and visited more galleries – last year in Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand – the more I see how narrow the selections in UK galleries are. There’s so much more.

Films – I prefer international/European film. Old favourites include the Three Colours trilogy by Kieślowski – the images, especially Juliet Binoche in Bleu, still haunt – and I love almost anything by Almodóvar. Other films that have stuck with me more recently include Force Majeure by Swedish director Ruben Östlund – a fascinating study of a marriage out of its comfort zone, and Fallen Leaves, by Finnish writer/film-maker Aki Kaurismäki – a sensitive, tentative portrait of loneliness and trying to relate to others. One of my favourite things is going film festivals, and especially the short film selections – we saw a couple of cracking, films at the recent Korean Film festival at the (relatively new) Garden Cinema in Covent Garden. Folkestone has a fabulous classic old cinema, The Silver Screen, which also hosts their regular documentary film seasons, another genre I’m drawn to.

Music – to dance around the house to: soul/funk e.g. George MacCrae’s Rock Your Baby, Franky Valli & the Four Seasons’ December, 1963 (Oh What A Night), 80s punk/post punk The Clash’s Rock the Casbah, Tom Tom Club’s Wordy Rappinghood, for romantic nostalgia, almost anything by Al Green – such a voice, we saw him live at the Albert Hall and Radio City, or Elvis Costello – such a wordsmith. Also the voices of Shirley Bassey, Dusty Springfield, Charles Aznavour. More recently, if I want to listen to something beautiful. Moody and relaxing, it’ll be Fado – e.g. Marisa, Amalia, or Flamenco – e.g. Estrella Morente.

I go to see Dance as much as I can, Sara Baras – a flamenco dancer from Cádiz, moved me to tears at her show at Sadler’s Wells last summer. I had to gulp down a sob – it rose that fast to my throat – as she stamped her heels and toes.

“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 to end by asking all of our longlisted authors: Do you feel that horror? And how would you advise other writers to get beyond it?

I take this as a metaphor for feeling stuck, paralysed, blank, like you’ve no right to call yourself a writer and you’ll never be able to write a single decent sentence ever again so you may as well just walk away now? Yes, I do feel that sometimes. I think it’s normal (isn’t it?), in any artistic/creative field.

In my experience, a paralysing emotional state like this is helped by doing something, getting mind and body galvanised and engaged in a task. Some writers have their own preferred thing, e.g. go for a walk, a run, brew coffee/tea, move to a different place, phone someone, play with Lego, The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. Whatever. Perhaps this is a bit cringey, but I do have a series of quotes about writing that have chimed with me, pinned up around my desk. Things like: Good stories are about the otherness in everyday life. Or Make characters complex by what’s not in the story.

I think it’s important to make a mark on the page, or screen – I always write first drafts long-hand so it depends on what it is I’m stuck with. I would do something like set an alarm for 2, 5, 10, 20, 30 minutes, and free-write, starting with the first thing that comes into my head, or use one of the lists of writing/warm-up prompts I keep on file from workshops, and write without the pen leaving the page, completely unadulterated or edited, until the alarm goes off. And/or I go for a walk for 10, 20, 30 plus minutes around the neighbourhood with my notebook and write down anything – objects I see people carrying, or wearing, or in a window, including colour, condition, material, as much detail as I can. It doesn’t matter, the point is to get momentum going. John McGregor, in an interview about his writing day, talked about all the things involved in writing – thinking, walking around, sharpening pencils, re-ordering the desk, making a sandwich – all of it counts as part of the process. It’s all writing.

READ K. lockwood jefford’S GBP SHORT STORY PRIZE NOMINATED STORY, ‘family gathering’, HERE.

K. LOCKWOOD JEFFORD is from Cardiff, South Wales, and a former NHS psychiatrist and psychotherapist. She completed an MA in creative writing with distinction at Birkbeck in 2017. Awards include first prizes in Brick Lane Bookshop short story award (2023), Bath Short Story Award (2021) and the VS Pritchett Prize (2020). Her work appears in Prospect Magazine, Mechanics’ Institute Review, Aesthetica magazine, 100 Voices (Unbound, 2022) and many short story prize print anthologies including Bristol, Fish Publishing, Rhys Davies. She has recently completed her first collection of short stories, Picasso’s Face, supported by an Arts Council DYCP grant.