Featured Creative: Gemma Fairclough
Gemma Fairclough is a writer living in Manchester. A range of unsettling influences, including horror films, surrealist art, and folklore inspire her writing, which frequently centres upon experiences of alienation, grief, and aberrant desire. Her novella, Bear Season, a dark fairytale set between the United Kingdom and Alaska, is scheduled to publish next year with Wild Hunt Books.
Interview conducted by Amy Douglas, Digital Marketing for Wild Hunt Books. Edited for length and clarity.
Firstly, can you tell us a bit more about how you got started as a writer?
I knew I wanted to be a writer by the time I was sixteen, although I had no idea how to turn my vague ambition into a discipline. I read as much as I could, decided to study literature at university, and I felt energised and inspired by the books I enjoyed most. But I struggled to connect what I liked about reading with how I wrote. I experienced them so differently: whereas reading was a daily commitment, writing felt precarious, sporadic; something I gave a go now and then and with which I pendulum-swung from feeling overconfident to unworthy with no in-between. Then, a few years ago, I turned a corner and began to treat writing more as a practice, not something I had to pull off perfectly or else give up. I stopped writing in isolation and got to know other writers, learned how they manage self-doubt and procrastination. I started to notice what, specifically, I enjoyed most when reading – sharp and restrained prose, attention to detail, bleak settings, black humour – things I could emulate in my own work. While it’s been many years since I started wanting to be a writer, it’s really only the last few years when I seriously got started with writing.
How did you originally get involved with Wild Hunt Books – what drew you to us as a publisher?
I heard about Wild Hunt Books’ call for novella submissions through my writing group. You were looking for folk horror, fairytales, the gothic – in other words, all the things I’m drawn to and love writing about, and it just so happened that I was working on a novella at the time. You were also keen to hear from new and emerging writers, which encouraged me to submit. I liked that, as an independent publisher, you had a clear idea of the types of literary voices you were looking for, and I admired the writers you were influenced by, such as Shirley Jackson, Daphne du Maurier and Han Kang. As I was writing a novella with an experimental structure and some very dark themes, I thought that Wild Hunt Books would understand my vision and be a good home for Bear Season.
Bear Season is told from multiple points of view and in found texts – why did you choose to utilise this medium? How does this impact the story?
Gothic literature has a long tradition of telling stories from multiple points of view, often through letters, diary entries or narratives reported second-hand – the most famous and possibly the best example being Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which reveals a story of a monster (what that is, the creature, Frankenstein himself, or some wider social evil, remaining ambiguous) fragment-by-fragment in a terrific slow-burn. I love slow-burn horror that gradually builds up dread, not resorting to quick scares that risk dissolving tension too soon; I love horror that unsettles rather than jumps out at you, becoming more terrifying as you pull back more intricate layers of the thing lurking behind it all. I’ve always been intrigued by found texts as a medium of storytelling, particularly in the horror genre, such as The Blair Witch Project, and the way that these texts masquerade as “real”. Found texts can be particularly effective for framing stories about the supernatural or unexplained mysteries, lending credibility to the incredible, stretching our imaginations to accept the impossible as truth when we are given apparently tangible evidence. Even as we acknowledge the text’s fictionality, its conceit of factuality makes the horrors seem somehow more plausible, closer to home. This blurring between fact and fiction is something I wanted to evoke in Bear Season: the multiple narrators and found texts will, I hope, invite speculation, reveal their secrets slowly and unsettle.
Could you tell us a bit more about the Write Like a Grrrl programme as well as the writing group that you and your peers created?
Write Like a Grrrl is an amazing programme aimed at women and non-binary writers. Their six-week writing courses, delivered in small groups, provide an encouraging and supportive environment for learning how to write better, whether you’re new to writing or have some experience. The courses are also engaging, fun and affordable. I did Write Like a Grrrl’s first level fiction writing course, Ignite, followed by their second level course, Inspire, in 2019. Ignite helped me to develop strategies for conquering self-doubt and making writing a regular discipline (instead of something I felt guilty about never doing enough of, and yet shirked from, cringing, whenever I briefly attempted it). It also taught essential writing techniques, with sessions featuring readings and practical exercises covering the foundations of fiction, such as character, setting and dialogue.
The follow-on course, Inspire, built on all of the above and taught more advanced writing techniques, as well as providing the opportunity to get constructive feedback on a piece of writing from the course tutor and other members of the group. Our group got on so well that we decided to continue monthly meet-ups to share and critique each other’s writing after the course finished. Forming a writing group produced a long-lasting, positive impact on my writing: having a monthly deadline to share work maintains discipline and accountability. It provides a network of other writers to ask questions, share concerns and exchange news of writing competitions and submission opportunities. Allowing trusted peers to give honest and constructive feedback has helped me to improve my writing. Reading their work, in turn, has taught me more about writing and how to be a better reader. In addition to being talented writers, they’re insightful readers who give feedback generously, and I feel lucky to have met them.
Finally, tell us your favourite myth or folklore.
The Greek myth of Persephone has always stuck with me, although I wish I’d been more conscious of the more, shall we say, problematic elements of the story when learning about it as a millennial child (namely: man fancies woman so he abducts her?). Through a contemporary lens, certain tellings of the story smack of dodgy gothic romance with a dark and tortured male lead, glossing over his love interest’s worrying lack of consent. Leaving that aside, what’s beautiful about the myth is its powerful illustration of how seasons came to exist. Persephone’s abduction by Hades to the Underworld unleashes the grief and fury of her mother, Demeter, goddess of the harvest and grain, at losing her daughter, causing the first winter. Although Persephone is allowed to leave the Underworld and be with her mother for part of every year, bringing spring with her and winter comes round again when she returns to the Underworld. In her intriguing dual role as goddess of spring and Queen of the Underworld – deity of growth and death – Persephone presides over the inherent mortality of all living things, as well as their rebirth in the seasonal cycle. As a story about desire, a mother’s grief, and the unfortunate eating of some pomegranate seeds, the myth is packed with drama and rich symbolism.
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