GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS SHORT STORY PRIZE 2023/24

An interview with GBP Short Story Prize author Sarah Messerschmidt

Hi there Sarah! Congratulations on your GBP Short Story Prize longlisting – it’s been such a pleasure. And – ‘Twins’! This is one of two short stories on the longlist this year which are especially hard to summarize, so we’re going to ask you to do that for us. … Can you please introduce ‘Twins’ to our readers in just a few sentences, here?

Hello! The pleasure’s all mine, so firstly thanks very much.

In ‘Twins’ an unnamed narrative 'I' encounters two strange pieces of fruit in her kitchen. She develops an instant tenderness toward them, and begins to look after them according to how she understands care. The protagonist’s methods of nurture lack coherence, or are ambivalent, as she allows the fruit to rot, while regularly introducing fresh items to the mix; she at once sustains ‘life’ — or its appearance — and enables decay. The story culminates with a knock at the door from a concerned neighbour, and the protagonist is confronted with a relation that, rather than reinforcing her sense of belonging among people, is itself a mis-recognition.

And can you tell us about its inspiration, as well as the writing of it? (I’m wondering especially about your own fruit bowl, and any role it might have played.) 

The process of writing the story was somewhat circuitous because it took form as I was developing an essay comparing two books, one by the philosopher Sarah Kofman and the other by the novelist Clarice Lispector. Each of those books has a great deal to do with ingestion, nurturing and identity (at least, that’s what I argued), and the ‘Twins’ story is something like a creative by-product of the kind of writing and thinking that I was doing then. As well, I find myself eager to play when I write nonfiction, and more and more give myself the space to do things that are spontaneous and to the side of what I ‘should’ be doing.

There is a language of love in ‘Twins’, with the protagonist quickly taking on the role of carer, nurturer, ‘friend’ – as well as the application of some wonderfully affectionate nicknames to her new protégées: they are her ‘roguish council’, her ‘little urchins’, ‘pitiable little beings’… Can you expand a bit more on this? 

I wanted to draw out a misplaced empathy in the protagonist, as in: how far will she go in her delusion? I think she can take it farther than a bowl of rotting fruit. Loneliness is a relatable feeling, but what somebody does to soothe their loneliness can be entirely quirky. There’s also something a bit sinister about how the protagonist relates to the twins. As you note, she considers them roguish, pitiable urchins. It’s their spidery fuzz of mould and conjoining bodies that confirm their sentience for her. So while there’s certainly a language of love, I hoped to convey an undertone of horror (revulsion) and control.

I’ve lived abroad for many years, and find that even after becoming familiar with a place, there are still moments of deep alienation. I think I must have been dealing with some of my own feelings of strangeness and desire for connection in a foreign environment.

Thematically, entropy – or atrophy, or maybe both – seems to be an important facet of ‘Twins’, and lends that final utterance a particular poignancy. Would you say this is right?  

Quite honestly, this isn’t the first time I’ve found myself drawn to ruination. So this is exactly right. But the final ‘alas—!’ I also find somewhat funny. The tone of the remark is a little ambiguous (is the neighbour exasperated, amused, defeated?). I had a German flatmate for a time who told me that her grandparents used to say ‘deswegen’ to their grandchildren when they were being naughty, (it actually translates to ‘therefore’ or ‘hence’) and I really liked that strange, light scolding.

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

Professionally, if I can say that, I have been writing for about eight years. But I’ve been writing or telling stories in some form for longer than this. At the moment I’m working on a project that involves letter-writing and cinema.

My daily routine includes walking outside, cooking and reading. I think the best assistance I can give myself in writing incorporates those three things as kind of non-negotiable elements to an open but focused mind. It’s such a pleasure to nurture other parts of me in tandem with a practice that is, quite often, very solitary (and sedentary).

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

The best writing tip I’ve received is to try writing from different angles when feeling stuck. It could mean changing perspective (of a character, for instance), or it could mean writing what I mean to say, but backwards. It probably depends a lot on the kind of writing I want to do (prose and poetry are such different beasts), but I think the key of the exercise is to loosen up.

The worst writing tip is to keep pushing through the stuck-ness. There’s nothing worse than staring at a laptop for hours and having nothing to say.

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

I think my bad and good habits come from the same impulse, but controlled to greater or lesser degrees. I really gain a lot from reading other writing, not necessarily to extract another writer’s voice or style and incorporate it into my own, but to relish in something outside of me. I think one of my best writing habits is to read a lot and widely (for pleasure, first and foremost!), but at the same time I am easily distracted.

Claire Louise Bennett’s Pond came up in the judging meeting when we were talking about ‘Twins’ (there’s a vegetable/fruit bowl in that book too, and a pair of aubergines receive lavish, tender attention) – which made us wonder more generally about your influences… Can you tell us about some authors you admire, as well as some that you are influenced by?

I’m delighted to read that comparison. Although I’ve never read Pond, I understand that C-L B writes from the perspective of a person newly living in rural Ireland, which is similar to my own circumstances. We have to stave off the isolation somehow.

As for authors I admire, the answer to that question is so vast and always changing. Recently I’ve enjoyed reading Péter Esterházy, and Susan Taubes is so wry and adroit in Lament for Julia. I’m a fan of Jean Genet, but then again I think it’s easy to love him. I’m often excited by writers who are dexterous with language, a little acerbic, and who aren’t afraid of the surreal and/or amplifying daily oddities.

And what are you reading at the moment?

I’m in a grazing phase at the moment, picking at several things at once. More poetry than usual, which is great because I am an eager novice. I think I’m attracted to discordant, seemingly frivolous poems that contain a tiny kernel of pure beauty. And I’ve had Antonia Fraser’s biography of Mary Queen of Scots on my nightstand for ages. Grazing that one slowly…

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

I don’t exactly have favourites of anything, but I love the dystopian fairytale visuals of the film Angel’s Egg (Mamoru Oshii). The only performance I’ve seen of Ligia Lewis—so far—I also loved because it was so percussive and musical, and manipulated levels of intensity, a cappella, in quite a gripping way. Makes me think I should spend more time in theatres. I’ve recently watched a couple of films by Jumana Manna. Her newest in particular (Foragers) is really good. She treads the line between visual art and cinema so deftly, and incorporates sound into her filmmaking in a brilliant way (‘documentary,’ no less). Among the many gifted Palestinian filmmakers out there, she’s got an impressive and crucial voice.

“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?

Horror indeed! Every writer I admire, with both great and modest amounts of success, shares the common experience of feeling that each new project means embarking on uncharted territory, and not knowing how to do it. Writing has a strange quality of being always somewhat out of reach — even if you’ve done it before, it remains a question if you can do it again. I haven’t learned how to get beyond that feeling, and I don’t know if it’s possible (maybe it’s a specific kind of stage fright), but I think the looseness I mentioned above is fairly important. In my experience, writing doesn’t respond well to excessive control.

Read Sarah’s 2023/24 GBP Short STory Prize nominated story, ‘Twins’, here.

SARAH MESSERSCHMIDT is a writer interested in art, literatures, and interdisciplinary approaches to the (moving) image. She has been affiliated with Maumaus in Lisbon (2021) and ‘The Whole Life: An Archive Project’ at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin (2022). Sarah was a Writer in Residence supported by the Kunstverein München (2022), and is currently an artist-researcher on ‘The Expanded Librarian’ supported by CRASSH at the University of Cambridge (2023-24). A perennially shy but eager storyteller, a fledgling poetic contortionist, in 2023 she was the Bold Types winner for short fiction with the Glasgow Women’s Library. Her work takes many forms, and has appeared in Another Gaze, Artforum, Art Monthly (UK), Camera Austria, Cashmere Radio, MAP, Mousse, Texte zur Kunst and Third Text, as well as the forthcoming book Reading Kofman in Constellation, edited by Rachel Pafe (Pseudo Press).