Eliza Clark

Image Credit: Robin Silas Christian

First, I wanted to ask about your journey towards becoming an author. Could you tell us a little bit about how you got to the point of releasing your third book?

A big part of it was that I got onto the Young Writers’ Talent Fund, which is a scheme that supports new writers aged 16 and 25 in the northeast. During that time, I got one-to-one mentorship, which made a really big difference to my writing. At around the same time, I started working for a small literary magazine called Mslexia, based in the northeast, which really taught me the business end of writing, and I used to organise a lot of subscriber events for them. I ran a couple of pitching events and, by the time I got to one of our Indie Press pitching event, in May or June of 2019, I wasn’t planning on pitching my own novel – but then, the publisher Influx posted what they were looking for, and they were basically looking for my book! So, I pitched my own book to them, and they emailed me afterwards to say that they wanted Boy Parts.

It was a slightly unconventional path, but sometimes I think you’ve just got to blag your way win a little bit. From then on, it was more conventional, I would say. I got an agent the week Boy Parts was published and he’s still my agent now.

Amazing. I’d love to talk to you about short stories – I love them and love talking to people who write them because I find them fascinating. I saw that you’d once said, when writing a collection, you’re set up to fail from the beginning and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that and more on your thoughts on the form?

I think I actually feel a little less like that now the book is actually out, as I think it has gone quite well – which is maybe unusual for a short story. But then, I also feel like we only allow one or two a year that do well. I think there’s a lot of like commercial anxiety around short stories in the UK, and I think we’re a bit obsessed with novels here and we don’t have as much of a literary tradition of short stories as they do in the States, for example.

Also, I think that because short story collections are such a mixed bag, I mean it’s rare to read a short story collection and think every single one is great. So, the more varied the collection is, I think some readers will think that the stories won’t all align with their taste, so it can feel like you are setting yourself up to write something that doesn’t sell super well because it won’t appeal to everybody and a lot of people will think, ‘Oh, I like some of it, but I didn’t like it all.’

I quite like that about that about them though!

Me too, and I feel like I tend to be a lot more forgiving of short story collections – maybe that’s just because I like short stories as a form, but I also read quite broadly, so I’m not necessarily kind of going to be turned off if I get a story in a particular style.

Yes, that makes sense. But even if you don’t read broadly, I think short stories are a great opportunity to dip into a genre you don’t always read without too much commitment!

Yeah, I’m definitely feeling grateful that I feel my readership is enjoying the genre side of the book, which is about half the book. Actually, when we went out to publishers, we spoke to one publisher who wanted to strip out all of the genre stuff, which made up about half of the book. So, it’s interesting that the idea that everything has to be of a certain ‘type’ extends to the publishing industry.  

I also wanted to ask about the world building aspect of your stories – what I love about a good short story is how it feels like a perfectly formed world that you are thrown into. It made me wonder about how difficult it is to have so many ideas and mould those ideas into a collection of fully formed worlds? 

I think I’ve benefited a lot from the fact that the collection was built up over about six years. Some stories were written, or at least the first draft was written, at the start of 2018, and some stories were written at the start of this year. I’ve benefited a lot from that because it just means that I was able to come up with more ideas essentially – I haven’t had to sit down and come up with a short story collection all at once, which seems, to me at least, a nightmare way to write a short story collection. 

I feel like each story is made up of two or three little ideas. A lot of them bounce off a direct point of inspiration. The title story, ‘She’s Always Hungry’, is a good example of this because for years I’ve been wanting to do something with the idea of capturing a mermaid or a mythical creature and keeping it as a pet. That was directly pinched from a Japanese exploitation film called Mermaid in a Manhole, which is about a man who finds a mermaid in a manhole. I’d like been wanting to do something with that for ages, and then there’s also song I really like by an artist called Nicole Dollanganger called Poacher’s Pride. The song is a description of shooting an angel, hanging it out to dry, and gutting it. Again, I just really liked that image, I thought it was really strong, but I couldn’t quite make it work on its own. But then, I was doing some research and I read a book called Killing for Company, which is about Dennis Nilson, and there’s this really interesting chapter that talks about the culture of some fishing villages in Aberdeenshire, and how they will end up being quite matriarchal because men die so young out fishing. I read about how there are only about six last names in the villages, and they only use the same handful of first names, so they have this really elaborate nicknaming system to work out who is who. I was really interested in the linguistic aspect of having this very elaborate naming system and also the idea of this matriarchal fishing village where the men are pretty much sent out to die at work. I guess I realised that those two ideas could slot together quite comfortably – most of the other stories came together in that kind of way I think. Sometimes I’d want to do something about a film or a song or something that interested me, but the idea didn’t really work on its own, so I came up with a setting or an additional hook that fits it all together and makes it work.

That’s very cool. In terms of themes, a lot of readers have noted themes of hunger, desire, and infestation that run throughout the stories, and you also have specific stories that really focus on one issue, like climate change or body image. Do you ever start with a theme that you want to explore, or do they weave themselves in while you’re mixing up your ideas and inspiration?

I think that actually comes in later for me. I tend to not really know what a story is about something thematically when I start writing it, if that makes sense. Although there are some more obvious stories, like ‘Build a Body Like Mine’, which is about the tapeworm, and I definitely didn’t start writing that thinking it was just about a tapeworm – I was thinking about disordered eating when I was writing that. I suppose, in that case, I was thinking about writing a story about disordered eating, rather than one that fits more broadly into an overarching theme. And I think that, actually, those themes come about because most writers are quite narrow in their themes. Well, I’m definitely quite narrow in the things I’m interested in! I feel like I have like three topics that I like to do over and over again. For the most part though, I don’t go into writing about any specific theme. Going back to the title story again, I was very much thinking, this is going to be about capturing a mermaid, rather than this is a story about gendered power systems. Those elements weave themselves in.

And when you do write about a specific issue, like in ‘Build a Body Like Mine’, you’re writing about a very real issue in such an abstract, somewhat fantastical way. I found that particular story so affecting – so much more so than I would if I was just reading a straightforward exploration about disordered eating, or any topic really, so I wondered what you think is the power in approaching issues in an abstract or supernatural way?

I think it might be the fact that an idea is wrapped around a metaphor – I think that makes it easier to process, and easier to understand, particularly if it’s something you haven’t personally experienced. I also feel like a lot of my interest in short stories and fiction in an anthology format came from science fiction, and I’ve always been interested in how a strong high concept metaphor can really like carry a theme in a way that doesn’t feel very didactic or obvious. And within that metaphor, you can smuggle in a lot of meaning to carry it through.

Yes, sometimes, if you put an issue in an alien or unfamiliar setting, it’s almost easier to relate to! And the images are so otherworldly that they stick in your mind for much longer, I think.

I also wanted to ask you about your narration, as I really liked that you wrote from both female and male perspectives in this collection, so I wanted to ask you about your decision to do that. Was it, in some way, a push against people who always assume female authors must be the narrator?

Probably not intentionally, I think. In general, the narrators I picked were dictated by the story – the title story, for example, wouldn’t make sense if it was narrated by a woman, or at least it probably wouldn’t be as affecting. I don’t know, I sometimes think that readers are more hung up on the gender of the narrators than I am. I actually recently did a reading of one of the stories, ‘Goth GF’, and I remember people behaving as though the gender of the narrator was a ‘reveal’. And I remember thinking, ‘Well, no, you made the assumption of the gender.’ I did find it interesting because people asked me about writing from a male perspective a few times, but I genuinely haven’t put that much thought into it, and it’s not something that’s out of the ordinary for me.

If you could make one change to the UK publishing industry, what would it be?

Oh gosh, I think I would like to make it more accessible to new writers from marginalised backgrounds because it feels like, if you’re in certain positions – like maybe you’re an influencer or journalist and you don’t necessarily have much of a background in fiction – it can be quite easy for you to get attention. Whereas there are people who’ve been plugging away for years at fiction who aren’t necessarily getting a chance and are hitting up against gatekeeper after gatekeeper. And I suppose I would like to make the industry less money-led and more arts-led, that would be the big change I’d like to make.

On that note, are there any new authors and new voices that you’d like to recommend?

Yes, definitely! There’s Lucy Rose, who’s from the Northeast. She wrote a book called The Lamb, which is coming out in January. There is a Rochelle Dowden-Lord, and her book Lush is coming out in May. And then, his first book actually came out in 2019, but I’m really looking to Alex Allison’s second novel, Greatest of All Time, which is coming out in January as well.

Our final question that we asked everyone is, do you judge a book by its cover?

Sometimes! I definitely know that other people do it, so I’m very careful about my own covers. I feel like, if a cover is a bit crap, I probably won’t pick it up – but if I feel like, even if I don’t necessarily like the cover, but I understand the vibe it’s trying to convey to me, I’ll probably still pick it up. But then, even if I like the cover, but I can understand that the book’s probably not for me, I won’t pick it up. So, I suppose it’s a factor!

Very diplomatic!