GALLEY BEGGAR PRESS SHORT STORY PRIZE 2023/24

An interview with GBP Short Story Prize author Ruby Opalka

Hello Ruby! ‘Spume of the Mouth’ is a wonderful story. I’ve been trying to think of a way to summarize it here, but it’s about so many things: old age, the longevity (with all its triumphs and tragedies) of an individual relationship, loneliness and friendship… not to mention place (because the setting, Portland, is so vividly drawn and feels like a pivotal part of the story). Is there anything else you’d like to add, to set our readers up?

Thank you!  

It’s definitely about all those things, particularly loneliness, but where I really started was with the idea of a quarry. I grew up not far from the Isle of Portland and so visited the quarry there quite a bit throughout my childhood. Since then, I have become really interested in what it does to a place/landscape/community when you dig out a huge chunk of its physicality (the limestone from Portland was taken out and used for buildings like St Paul’s Cathedral, for example). This turned into an interest in human bodies as somehow connected to rock bodies, and what it might look like to think of people as having the ability to be dug/hollowed out as well, or that we might take what we need from other people in a similar way to how we take what we need from the earth. I don’t particularly mind if this is what people take from the story, but that was my initial interest with it. And aside from that, it felt to me like a story about realising that at any point in your life, you can simply decide to do or be something else.

And please tell us what you can about that title. What does it refer to? 

Good question! In one sense, it was just a way of describing how Dolores’ mouth looked when she spoke, and more metaphorically how the things people with dementia say are often seen as ‘froth’ or random babbles. Other than that, I love listening to people chat and wanted to capture in the story at large something of the amusement of arbitrary conversations, how often we just say things to each other for the sake of it, not necessarily meaning anything in particular, which also felt to me like ‘spume of the mouth.’ Also, and maybe most truthfully, I just really liked the word ‘spume’.

We’d love to hear a bit more about the inspiration for the ‘Spume of the Mouth’: How and when did it come to you, and how did you set about writing it?

I wrote ‘Spume of the Mouth’ as part of my MA dissertation, which was a collection of stories all beginning with some kind of geological feature that I would grow a story from. The geology was an underpinning or a way of telling the story, but in the stories themselves, I was most interested in character, and particularly characters who felt slightly outside of things, who wanted intimacy and closeness, but who didn’t necessarily know how to reach that. All of the stories centre around a dizzied heatwave summer, take place near and around my hometown in Dorset, and imagine various and varied queer lives within this rural, coastal environment.

In terms of the writing of ‘Spume of the Mouth’ itself, I began with the dynamic between Nora and the young couple next door. In small towns, people mostly still know their neighbours, but at the same time there’s a gap in what we really ­know about someone and I was interested in the things that we fill these gaps with. There’s something quite funny to me about living in such close proximity with someone, but ultimately being pretty clueless about them and I wanted Nora and the couple to be equally baffled and judgemental about each other.

Once I began with that initial scene, the story (unusually for me) just flowed straight from there and I wrote it pretty much in one sitting.

Nora! What a great human being. Tell us a bit more about her. 

Nora was an important character for me for many reasons. As I mentioned earlier, I’m really interested in loneliness. I work in an art gallery shop and so I’m chatting to the public every day and I am regularly struck by the extent to which people in this country feel lonely and in need of even those small interactions with strangers.

I wanted all the characters in the story to be lonely in their own ways, to be reaching for something that they couldn’t quite grasp. For Nora herself, she is living with a lot of loss – of her partnership with Dolores, the landscape as she knew it when she was young, and the people she has known earlier in life. I think she has reached a contentment though, having fun with her own interiority, and her own capacity for change. With this element to her, I was asking myself, what happens to quarried land? What happens to the spaces left behind, and how can those spaces be something other than loss? 

It was also important to me that she was older and queer. I have never really met that person in my own life, and so it was fun to be able to imagine that within the communities I grew up in. She is playing a lot with her gender in the story as well. I wanted her to have this feeling that it’s never too late to explore and change things about yourself, and that there can be silliness and joy in that, despite the current hostile environment for trans and gender diverse people in the UK.

When she has the thought that she is not yet fossilised, she is having the basic realisation that for as long as she is living, her composition is moveable.

There are some great comic flourishes in ‘Spume of the Mouth’ (just one example being the maggots in the hoover…), these flashes of levity that relieve and also deepen the narrative. Do these things just occur to you? And was it important to you that humour was part of the story?

Thank you! That’s good to hear. I was actually worried it was a really sad story. While I was writing it, I was channelling the detached but abstractly amused mood you reach (or at least I reach) after spending a lot of time in your own head and for some reason those were the kinds of observations that came to me. I wasn’t necessarily aiming for humour (I don’t think I’m a particularly funny person), but I was definitely allowing silliness and curiosity in. So I’m happy it doesn’t read as totally bleak.

OK! On to your writing more generally. How long have you been writing? Do you have a daily routine?

I’ve been writing stories pretty much since I could hold a pen so around twenty years. My parents recently found a photo of me writing on a piece of toilet roll when I was around three or four. Obviously most of those things are now fairly undecipherable.   

In terms of my routine, I try and write in the evenings after work, but I don’t think that’s necessarily my most productive time, more just circumstantial. I love going to late night cafes where there’s a general background chatter, or often I’ll listen to electronic music. Occasionally, and more often when I’m editing, I need total silence. I pay a lot of attention to rhythm and the way word combinations can either sing or fall flat, so I read my work aloud a lot. I try and write at least something every day, but rely on the pressure of a deadline to finish work in a substantial way.

Writing and rewriting: What’s your ratio?

Before the writing and rewriting, and maybe the longest bit for me, is mentally holding the story and characters and getting a feel for exactly what I want to tell. Then when it comes to writing, I find that it either flows straight away, or it’s a huge labour. When it flows, I find that it doesn’t need that much rewriting, but when it’s more of a labour, I feel like I am endlessly rewriting and gutting the whole thing until eventually something emerges that barely resembles what I began with. So sometimes it’s 90% writing and 10% rewriting but more often it’s 10% writing and 90% rewriting.

And what are you working on at the moment? 

Currently, I’m continuing to work on the collection of short stories I began during my MA. I like to have a few different stories on the go at one time so I can jump between them when I get bored. The stories all interlink and touch each other in various ways, which has been fun to write, and to imagine the wider community. Right now, I’m writing about a character who comes back to Dorset to care for a parent, and a strange day they spend with a former talkshow host who has moved to the countryside to hide from scandal. And also one about a kid who finds a headless seal on the beach.

Other writers. Tell us about some you especially admire – and also what you’re reading at the moment.

There’s so many!

In general, I love writing that does unexpected things with language and that captures the minutiae and fantasises of people’s lives. And anything a bit weird and queer.

I just finished reading Brandon Taylor’s The Late Americans and Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, both of which I really enjoyed. I loved the rhythms of desire in The Late Americans and found Drive Your Plow very funny and so interesting in how she depicts the relationship between humans and animals.

Other writers I admire (in a non-exhaustive way) include: Audre Lorde, Carmen Maria Machado, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Sabrina Imbler, bell hooks, Andrea Abreu López, Eileen Myles, Torrey Peters, Carson McCullers, Bryan Washington, Ocean Vuong and Randa Jarrar.

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

This is a hard question!

As I mentioned earlier, I listen to a lot of electronic music while I write – stuff like Godford and Sofia Kortesis. I also love Jungle, Frank Ocean, Belle and Sebastian, Helado Negro, Kae Tempest, Adrianne Lenker, Tierra Whack, The Streets, Talking Heads and so many others that I can’t think of right now.

In the gallery I work in, I’m always surrounded by loads of great art, some current favourites including Pearl Alcock’s work and Aya Haidar’s amazing embroidery pieces. I wouldn’t even know where to begin with my favourite artists in general though, there’s too many and I’m horribly indecisive.

I am also very lucky to be surrounded by loads of amazing artists, writers and performers in Manchester who inspire me all the time. They are all my favourites!

“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?

I absolutely feel that horror on a regular basis. I don’t know if I’m particularly qualified to advise other people, but when I’m stuck, I usually play really loud music so I can’t hear myself think and just launch in with whatever flows, or otherwise I read. Whenever I write, I have a few books on me, so if I get into that feeling, I open a page at random to remind myself that there are so many interesting ways of arranging words and telling a story and that I am capable. Failing that, I’ll speak to one of my best friends who is also a writer, and we’ll have a good moan together.

READ ruby’S GBP SHORT STORY PRIZE NOMINATED STORY, ‘spume of the mouth’, HERE.

RUBY OPALKA is a writer based in Manchester, UK, where they completed an MA in Creative Writing in 2023. They are currently working on their debut short story collection, which explores queer intimacies, the strangeness and pleasures of bodies and the meeting point of people and geology. Their work can also be read in The Manchester Anthology 2023.