And we're done - thank you for all your questions!
If you’d like to join in the January Reading group here on the Guardian, we’ll be asking for your book ideas next Tuesday, 2 January 2018 (eep!).
On that note, we wish you all a happy new year!
Michealmack says:
Hi Eley. I’m halfway through Attrib & Other Stories now and really enjoying it. Thank you for the experience. My question is a hoary/whory old chestnut. It’s actually twofold (possibly)
1. Which writers, if any, influence you?
2. Who are your favourite writers?
Guardian contributor Hello! Thanks a lot, and I hope the second half isn't a MASSIVE DOWNER etc. Thank you for your seasonal chestnut. I think it's impossible not to blend the two answers together to a degree
-- if I picture a fire in my house and I only have one pillowcase in which to stash books I'm picking up Thomas Browne, Saki, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy L. Sayers and Ali Smith -- I'd be happy reading these and ferreting around in their margins and cadences forever. If I picture myself throwing down a newspaper and running out into the street in my pyjamas to find the nearest bookshop, it's because new work by Kate Atkinson, Owen Booth, David Hayden, Preti Taneja, Nisha Ramayya, Nell Stevens, Timothy Thornton, Joanna Walsh or Jeanette Winterson has been announced.
Also everyone I follow on Twitter. Compulsively. Twitching, hotching geniuses, goddamnit.
'Books like Ali Smith’s Girl Meets Boy, where gender is specific then kaleidoscopic within its specificity are so, so important.'
AggieH also had some thoughts on the gender neutrality of some of Eley’s characters:
I actively noticed the gender neutrality while reading too. Noticed that it worked very well, as opposed to noticed it because I stumbled over it, if you know what I mean. Would also be interested in the author’s thoughts on gender choices.
Guardian contributor (Hopefully I nodded to some of the above in my ^ answer, and thanks so much for your comment. I am very aware that gender is not really addressed in the book, and maybe that reads as an unuseful (rather than useless) sidestep, so I’m glad it didn’t seem obtrusive! Books like Ali Smith’s Girl Meets Boy, where gender is specific then kaleidoscopic within its specificity are so, so important.
jmschrei says:
Hi Eley!
I was struck by the gender neutrality inherent in the majority of your stories, that is, the gender of the narrator and the love interest, if there was one, was undefined. I even noticed the use of they/their pronouns to refer to a character in passing. I did assume that this was to allow a reader to read gender into the characters as desired, not that any of the characters were necessarily non-binary. However, as a differently gendered (transitioned female to male) reader myself, I am often hyper-sensitive to gendered voice and sexuality dynamics. At times when an author is writing cross-gendered I find it hard to “buy” their character’s voice and wish that they had either chosen a non-gender specific approach or adopted third person. I like what you have achieved but there is often the risk of sacrificing a degree of dimensionality, especially in the romantic stories. For a longer piece, a novel like Anne Garetta’s Sphinx which took genderlessness as a constraint, characters can become flat. Can you comment on your choices regarding gender? Would adopt such an approach in a longer format?
Guardian contributor Hello hello! Thanks so much for your comment, and I will definitely be returning to Sphinx as it has been far too long since I read it. I definitely would not want a lack of any particular gender to some across as a/the gimmick or a central device within the stories you mention: certainly a writer’s treatment or depiction of love, care, loss, attentiveness, desire and confusion doesn’t necessarily transcend notions of gender, but in those stories the gender of the characters (whether protagonists or otherwise) was not really crucial, and specificity might actually be distracting.
In ‘Smote…’ I definitely wrote the characters as both being female-presenting, and a queerness to the sought/advanced relationship or romance between the two central figures dictated how I approached writing it. I have had readers vouch that they inferred (or interpolated?) other genders (and sexualities, if that is the right word for the romance or attraction in the story) for these characters, and for protagonists in other stories: I don’t think this means I necessarily missed the mark in writing female-presenting characters, but that maybe the story was clear enough to be meaningful for all experiences, but hopefully complex enough to be coherent to a specific experience. I didn’t find writing ‘genderlessness’ a constraint, not wittingly anyway: I think for a reader confused acts of heroism don’t require specific or non-specific awareness of genitals.*
*I expect my commission writing slogans for Hallmark greeting cards any time now.
I once wrote the draft of a novel where one character was the embodiment of the ‘gendered noun’ in other languages’ dictionaries (…not a story coming to a screen near you, yet) and the concept of gender specificity, non-specificity and expression is one that does mean a lot to me; I’d really like to try! The moment that anything seems too arch, however, or too obviously constructed for the sake of it I suspect some of the tenderness leaves the representation – curation, rather than writing? Hmm. I shall keep pondering! and hopefully follow-up with something more cogent: thank you for asking!
'I don't think I'd trust someone that was entirely light and assured. They sound like an excellent, committed meringue.'
ID75577 ID75577 writes:
Hello Eley,
I haven’t read your stories, YET, but have watched you reading. It seems you are equipped with a calm ‘presence’ and a youthful ‘charm’. Do you have a dark, delusional side?
& Which is the driving force that inspires your imagination??
All the Happiness & Success for 2018.
Give me a bonus by answering How do you measure Success & Happiness?!
Guardian contributor Ah, thanks! I'm sure you were also very watchable -- say hello next time! I hope you enjoy the book and that you too have a delightful 2018 around the corner.
I think I'm probably deluded most of the time, and also think I am often quite dark -- this may be, however, a delusion.
I don't think I'd trust someone that was entirely light and assured. They sound like an excellent, committed meringue.
In terms of measuring success and happiness, I think probably the attempts at measurement are the beginning of the prblem. Everything is as fraught and nasty and mundane difficult and extraordinary and meaningless and absurd and awesome as, say, the fact hedgehogs and eyelashes exist: it just depends on the day. Have days and be alert, and use as many question marks as exclamation marks: that's probably a good way to begin! (?)
Things get a little odd with ChesterPete:
Do you think a man could ever beat a brown bear in a fight?
Guardian contributor I think they could if they set their mind to it. I don’t think they should set their mind to it. Can they dress as a bear, and the bear as a man?
Who started this fight?
'One thing I struggle(d) with is motivation, and the waiting to hear back from places just with (what can be read as a) resounding ‘NO THANK YOU, SHOO’ can be very drumming-fingers-gnawing-fists disheartening'
Liam Quane says:
Hi! Congratuwelldone on your success! May I ask, how did you get your start?
Guardian contributor Thanks a lot, and for reading! I submitted short stories to various journals and sites and competitions, thickening the skin a bit in terms of rejections but also seeing what tones and styles seemed to stick (on their part) and which just felt forced (on my part). One thing I struggle(d) with is motivation, and the waiting to hear back from places just with (what can be read as a) resounding ‘NO THANK YOU, SHOO’ can be very drumming-fingers-gnawing-fists disheartening. To combat this, I enrolled on an MA at RHUL so that I’d have to be disciplined with submissions and was very lucky to have such a great year group and tutors who helped me sit down and wallop words out/into shape. One of my peers, the poet Declan Ryan (BUY HIS BOOK FROM FABER NEW POETS, pluggity plug, AHHHH), ran an open mic in London’s Betsey Trotwood where I read a bit of prose, and it was there that one of the editors at Influx had a nice word about the piece. I had also sent ‘Spines’ to Ambit journal at that time, and so Influx was able to have a nose through some of my stuff in print. And they generously asked whether I would like to bring together a collection, whereupon I leapt over the moon and kicked various satellites out of orbit in my scrabble to bite their hand off while mixing clichés.
And the rest just [lots of rewriting and kind, firm editorial back-and-forths and self-doubt and hair-pulling and stranged yelps, why, whyyyy] fell into place.
john davidson says:
how many words do you know? i know fifteen.
Guardian contributor I can say for certain that I know thirteen REALLY well (these are they)
VoodooSecrets asks:
I noticed that you often mention eyelashes in your stories. Why is this?
Guardian contributor !!!!!!I’ll have to go back and tot up how many lashes pop up/extrude/flutter. I like things that pop-up, extrude or flutter generally (the unexpected, the delicate, the overlooked) -– maybe that’s why.
I am now sitting here now and trying to look at my eyelashes. It’s not easy; you give it a go now. Soft portcullises. Blinkers. Apparently they are alive with tiny mites. We make wishes on their individual controlled departure, watch adverts for products to lacquer them with little lance-brushes to make them seem thicker or longer. Why do they stop growing at a certain length? Has anyone ever braided their eyelashes? Why do we ‘bat’ them – we don’t (often) ‘bat’ hands or lips together. They’re called ‘lashes’, like whips! Or like ‘lashes’ of ginger beer? Is an eye lashed, like a sail is lashed to a ships boom? God, the word ‘eye-lid’ is absolutely grotesque, isn’t it? The texture of hair so close to the texture of skin so close t the texture of an eye’s surface – there’s a lot going on in the inch of face.
I like the idea of blinking and taking in a scene without having to think about all the above. And also taking something as small as an eyelash and overthinking it into something monstrous. *winks, fluffily*
'All’s fair in love and war, and reading doesn’t have to be an either of those things unless that is something the reader seeks out'
originalabsence says:
Picturesque classic novelists do not normally deploy coded imagery with an esoteric target, as does poetry and the better song lyric. Experimental modernists however might be given to such.
Your excellent stories do seem at times to be liken to a strong hint of poetic code.
Should any coded meaning be read into for example a hedgehog trapped in a swimming pool?
Guardian contributor Thanks for your question -- should any coded meaning be read into for example a hedgehog trapped in a swimming pool? It shouldn’t be necessarily. Nothing’s necessary about reading, or ‘correct’ reading. I hope not anyway – all’s fair in love and war, and reading doesn’t have to be an either of those things unless that is something the reader seeks out.
Personally (although writing it down this does seem SOMEHOW SELFISH AND VULGAR), the moments when I most enjoy reading poetry come when I allow myself to be as playful (more so?) than the writer. You can glut on significance, send spools of yarn in every direction down the labyrinth. So if one reader wants to see the iconography of the hedgehog as working within the network of signification used by Isaiah Berlin’s theories of socio-political engagement, that’s great. If the bobbing, exhausted hedgehog mirrors characters’ frustrated desire, that’s neat. If the hedgehog’s just a hedgehog -- the cigar just a cigar -- that’s right and fine and as it should be. It’s all right and fine.
What did you make of the hedgehog?
If that’s dodging the question (it is, which is also part of the fun of reading), I also just have a certain fellow-feeling for hedgehogs. I am a bit prickly and a bit soft. Also their fate in ‘Animals of Farthing Wood’ RUINED ME from a young age and maybe that’s stuck with me.
I was at a taxidermy class recently and someone at another bench had turned a hedgehog inside-out. An inside-out hedgehog looks like a n uncooked haggis filled with sea urchins.
'If any tentative short story writers are reading this: submit your stories!'
palfreyman says:
Sam says your publishers encouraged you to consider your work worthy of a book length collection. I wonder if you’d tell us a bit more the genesis of the stories: some were already written, some adapted to suit the book, some written specially for it? Would love to know more (including which, if any, were which).
Guardian contributor Hmmmm -- ‘The Alphabet’, ‘Smote…’, ‘Bs’, ‘Alight at the Next’, ‘And Back Again’, ‘Fears and Confessions…’, a form of ‘Synaesthete…’, ‘Platform’, ‘Conscision’ (although this is a mash-up of two previous works), ‘Scutiform’ ‘Spines’ and ‘Spins’ had all been published or performed in one form or another previously, with ‘Rosette’ was commissioned by 3:AM Magazine in the wake of the 2015 general election, written the morning after the results came in. If that’s the weirdest, most doleful, bleeuurghsome story that might explain something.
The rest were all glossy and new. ‘Attrib.’ was in fact written a week before the final manuscript was meant to be handed in, which seems (for a story about Genesis and geneses, for a collection bearing its title) a somewhat backward genesis. The oldest story is ‘Synaesthete’. I’m hugely indebted to Influx Press for suggesting a collection might be panned (in the ‘looking for shiny things in the mud with a sieve’ sense, or otherwise) from the hodge-podge, and (crucially) for telling me what to leave out. And of course to the journals and sites that housed early short stories: printed Structo, Ambit, The White Review and online 3:AM Magazine and Visual Verse gave me such confidence by letting me pop up in their pages. If any tentative short story writers are reading this: submit to these places’ charms! Submit to their calls for new work! Etc.
'Limoncello is sprightly! and refreshing! ... but a whole bottle probably isn’t wise'
philipphilip99 starts us off:
Re: Attrib.: Do you think you could pull this kind of thing off at novel length? Not an episodic thing, but a full narrative arc.
Hello! And thanks for your question – I suppose my answer depends on which things I should be pulling, and from what. One of the reasons I enjoy (…cleave to?) writing short stories might be that they are little self-contained moments of chaos or clarity, and this ‘capsule’ form makes them digestible. Or to completely squander any attempt at sticking to one metaphor: you can tell yourself limoncello is sprightly! and refreshing! and good-giddymaking! in small amounts, but a whole bottle probably isn’t wise.
I do think a lot of the stories in Attrib. rely on a character finding a moment monumental, and then over-scrutinizing, -parsing, -grappling with that instant and their place within it. That could be someone experiencing Stendhal Syndrome while looking at a painting, or obsessing over a word’s etymology and worrying whether they are using the word correctly. I certainly think that I would find it tricky to justify 300-pages of a protagonist just sitting there reeling / having anxious monomaniacal conniptions in this way and then try and tell you it was a novel, just because their line of thought would become so snagged or tangled that the only ‘resolution’ to the story would be to have them saw their own heads off in the final chapter. This is very much my failing, however: I’d drop everything to read authors such as Nicholson Baker, Nicola Barker, Joanna Walsh or Isabel Waidner who pitched such an idea!
I’m currently hammering/yammering/mold-blowing the draft of something that will be novel-length all about how one reads dictionaries, so I’ll let you know/listen out for screams of anguish coming from the rooftops of Ealing.
And we're live! Eley is with us now
Hello everyone! Happy mid-point between Christmas and New Year. Thanks for joining us today.
Eley is standing by, I believe and ready to start answering.
Thanks for all the excellent questions so far. Do keep them coming.
Typing from a brisk and sunny Aarhus in Denmark, thanks for having me, all! I may leap rather haphazardly from question to question, but there'll be a reply to as any as possible...
*dons boxing gloves and looms over keyboard*
Join us for a webchat with Eley Williams on Friday 29 December
Eley Williams will be joining us on Friday 29 December at 1pm to answer questions about her short story collection, Attrib. and Other Stories.
Eley is a fiction co-editor at the brilliant 3:AM magazine and teaches creative writing and children’s literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has a PhD in lexicography – more specifically: “Unclear Definitions: Investigating Dictionaries’ Fictitious Entries through Creative and Critical Writing”. One of her specialisms was finding the fake words that lexicographers put in dictionaries to catch out bootleggers. This explains quite a lot about the joyful wordplay in Attrib. – and is also fascinating in its own right. She also has a poetry pamphlet out with Sad Press (Frit, 2017) and won the Christopher Tower poetry prize in 2005, judged by Philip Pullman and Gillian Clarke.
There are endless questions to ask about Attrib. What, for instance, happened in that cupboard? Does Eley Williams really create sound effects for museum audio guides? How does she know so much about synaesthesia?
Attrib. also has an interesting publication history. Independent presses often dare to take on books that other publishers have turned down – but this time Influx Press did even more. It was the perceptive editors there who encouraged Eley Williams actually to put together a collection, and persuaded her that there would be plenty of readers interested in her talent.
To see how well this gamble paid off, just have a look at the praise Attrib. has gathered. It’s been picked as a book of the year in several papers, including the Guardian. And it’s been a blast to read it here on the Reading Group.
Just in case you haven’t been reading along with us, you can find Smote, one of the stories in Attrib., on the White Review. You might also be curious to see Eley reading and answering questions about Attrib. on Triumph of the Now.
She will be here to answer your questions from 1pm GMT on 29 December. But please feel free to get your question in early below.
Updated
Logging off now, but I'll be back -- thanks again everyone!