The art of writing #44 : Katy Wimhurst

How did you first come to writing fiction? What is it about the form that resonates?

I probably wouldn’t have written fiction if I hadn’t got chronically ill in my 30s. I would have continued in academia or moved into curatorial work and written books on art. When first severely ill with M.E. – which is a hugely disabling illness (even if many medics misconceive and trivialise it) – I was way too ill to do anything creative. However, I was fortunate in that my cognitive abilities gradually improved to a level where I was able to start writing short fiction; and telling stories was fun, a focus for imagination. I particularly like writing surrealism, magical realism or dystopias because there are fewer restrictions on what can happen in a story and more space for odd ideas. I like the challenge of creating off-kilter worlds, one foot firmly in this world, the other in a different, askew one. The stories I most enjoy reading inhabit this fizzling world between the mundane and the weird, too. And while I’m unsure how subversive any particular story can ever be, I agree with Ursula Le Guin that, ‘The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the ways things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary’.

How does a story begin?

Most often a single image comes to me; I’ll then leave it to sit for a while in my subconscious before more consciously trying to develop e.g. characters and a setting around it. Sometimes I get an idea from a non-fiction source - e.g. a podcast about astrolabes or inequality - and then I chuck in a speculative element to stir (a talking cat, a dystopia in which starfish are part of the currency) and try to come up with a scenario or character to pin it on.

What made you shift from fiction and essays to visual poems? What brought you to the form?

I first became interested in making visual poetry during the first lockdown caused by the coronavirus. It was actually a double lockdown for me, having months earlier suffered the most severe relapse in my M.E. in many years, so I was mostly confined to bed in pain and unable to sustain even the periods of concentration that writing short stories require. When health allowed, I started to use a free Photoshop app on an IPad, layering photos I’d taken myself in the past and images from Creative Commons public domain sources; the text often came from things I chanced across on social media, in books or in journals of my own, sometimes then manipulated using Dada techniques. I didn’t really know what I was doing, though. I began paying more attention to the visual poets on Twitter, some of whom I’d known loosely for a while there. I started to recognise just how refreshing, how open visual poetry was as a form, though still feel now that I’m very much learning about it. I love that visual poetry is liminal, sitting on the fertile line between art and writing (I’d loved making art as a child, and having studied for a PhD in an art history department, I have a decent visual eye, too). I can engage creatively (sometimes using random techniques) with things - whether an ecological article or The Epic of Gilgamesh, a photo of a seahorse or of a human silhouette - without getting bogged down in the plot-character-setting demands of conventional fiction. I also appreciate that it isn’t a monetised and competitive field in the way writing fiction can be.

You’ve published stories in numerous journals. Do you see your writing as a single, extended project, or a series of disconnected threads? Are you in the process yet of thinking about collecting any of your work into a manuscript?

Each story is hopefully self-contained but there are themes I return to and my writing generally tends to be dark or dystopian but with magic realist or surreal elements and/or humour woven in. My first collection of short stories, Snapshots of the Apocalypse, is actually going to be published by Fly in the Wall Press in January 2022. An early press release is here.

Have you a daily schedule by which you work, or are you working to fit this in between other activities?

At present, due to my current severe relapse, health constraints inhibit much creative work, but I try to do a bit each weekday.

What are your favourite print or online literary journals?

There are lots of good visual poetry magazines online, including this one as well as Ric Journal, 3am, and Babel Tower – Ric Journal’s funny Apocryphal Interviews with dead people like Ramses II or Kafka are one of my favourite online things. I like the brief, unpredictable stories in Cafe Irreal. I listen to more podcasts than read magazines, such as The New Yorker fiction podcast, where I first discovered Donald Barthelme, Penteract Poetry podcast, which explores experimental poetry, and the Literature and History podcast, which discusses the literary expressions of various historical epochs, starting with ancient Sumer. Actually, I listen to more ancient history podcasts than I do literary ones – I love learning about Mesopotamia or the Bronze Age Collapse.

Who are some of the writers you are reading lately that most excite you?

I love the work of lots of visual poets on Twitter including Hiromi Suzuki, Richard Biddle and Amanda Earl. Last year I read a few books by the surrealist James Knight who has opened my mind to what creative work can be and do. Sarah Ramey’s touching, witty memoir about severe chronic illness, The Lady’s Handbook For Her Mysterious Illness, is a book I relate to, especially the idea that the journey through chronic illness is a traumatic, non-linear, underworld one. In terms of fiction, I dip back into my favourite short story books, such as Kelly Link’s Get In Trouble, Crista Ermiya’s The Weather in Kansas, Irenosen Okojie’s Speak Gigantular, and Leonora Carrington’s The Seventh Horse.

 

 

 

Katy Wimhurst’s first collection of short stories, Snapshots of the Apocalypse, is to be published by Fly on the Wall Press. Her fiction has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies including The Guardian, Writers’ Forum, Cafe Irreal, and ShooterLit. Her visual poems have appeared (or are soon to appear) in Ric Journal, Steel Incisors, The Babel Tower, Dreampop Press, The Indianapolis Review, Talking About Strawberries All of the Time, and Seaborne Magazine. She suffers from the illness M.E.

A selection of her visual works appear in the fifth issue.