Last month we interviewed one half of Fractured West?s editing team, Kirsty Logan. This month we get up close with Helen Sedgwick , Kirsty?s co-editor, and learn that is a lot more to this quieter half. Helen is a freelance writer and literary editor based in Glasgow. She won a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award in 2012. At this time, she is?working on a short story collection, as well as a novel. She has published?short fiction and nonfiction; they?can be read in Spilling Ink, Litro, Novel Magazine and Nature, among many others. As an editor, Helen works for Freight Books and Cargo Publishing. Apart from co-editing Fractured West, of which she is also co-founding editor. Helen is also the review editor of Gutter and co-host of Words Per Minute. She teaches creative writing for the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, and has performed her work at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Edinburgh Fringe and Glasgow?s Aye Write.
Rumjhum Biswas: You have won the Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award this year. Please tell us a bit about the award, work/s that won you this recognition, and where you plan to go in your writing life now.
Helen Sedgewick: The New Writers Award from the Scottish Book Trust is one of the most prestigious awards for new writers inScotland. As well as helping to fund the winning writers, the Book Trust also sets each of the winners up with a mentor and runs a variety of helpful events such as voice coaching and reading nights. I won the award for my short story collection in progress, Statistically Speaking. All the stories approach current scientific topics, from astrophysics to medical science, in a fictional and accessible way. I plan to use my year as a New Writer to complete this collection and start work on a new novel.
RB: Please give us a glimpse of your day to day writing life.
RB: You are co-editor of Fractured West, a journal of flash fiction. How did the idea for Fractured West come about? Tell us about your new magazine, the inspiration, the ethos, style and editorial.
HS: Fractured West ?like many ideas originally came about from having a chat! I?d previously worked as an editor on From Glasgow to Saturn, the on-line magazine of Glasgow University?s creative writing programme, and I really wanted to set up my own magazine. I got talking to Kirsty, who also wanted to run a magazine, so we decided to work together. Winning the Gillian Purvis Award to found Fractured West really helped, and allowed us to create the first two issues of the print magazine and the website. From the start we wanted the focus to be on new voices. We wanted to publish new, emerging or previously unpublished writers. We have both always loved flash fiction, so it seemed like the perfect fit.
?RB: You have co-written a story or more with your co-editor Kirsty Logan. We normally tend to think of writing as an intensely solitary exercise. How do you go about the process of co-writing a story? What advice do you have for other writers who would like to work together?
HS: I think Kirsty and I were able to write together because we know each other so well. We have a very strong working relationship, but we also usually agree about what makes good writing. We have similar taste and are interested in similar topics?although we sometimes address them in different ways?so co-writing felt very easy with her. It?s certainly not easy with everyone, though!
RB:?What short story form do you enjoy working with most, the usual 3000 /5000 words, the traditional flash ? i.e. under 1000 words, the even more challenging less than 500 or 250 or 100 (drabble) or even 50? What according to you are the highs and lows?
HS: Just to make things difficult for myself, my favourite length doesn?t really fit into any of the brackets. A natural story length for me seems to be 1000-2000 words, a bit longer than flash but a bit shorter than traditional short stories. Maybe I should come up with a new name for that length of fiction! I do vary it though, and have written stories as short as a tweet, like this one that won a competition during Social Media Week. At the end of the day, a story should be just as long as it needs to be.
RB:?Did you write as a child? Or is it something that you discovered you had in you in college, etc. Either way, do tell us a bit about those early years.
HS: When I was younger my main interests were music and science. I never wrote very much as a child or teenager, or even as an adult until quite recently. My first fully-formed short story was written in 2007, in my late 20s. I guess it took me a long time to find what I loved! It?s been great having that atypical background, though, and my early interests in science and music certainly feed into my writing now.
RB:?Were there people to encourage you when you started out? Any mentors or people or even incidents and/or books that you?d especially like to mention?
HS: I first started writing when I signed up for an evening class at Glasgow University?s Department of Adult and Continuing Education. My two teachers, Fiona Parrot and Nick Brooks, were very encouraging. I went on to do the MLitt at Glasgow and my tutors there, Zoe Strachan and Alan Bissett, were also a huge help. But most of all, I think my main source of encouragement comes from the other writers that I know, writers like Margaret Callaghan, Kirsty Logan, Katy McAulay and Maria Di Mario. Having people to talk to about writing and the sense of community that comes with that is essential.
RB:?Your story ?Horizon View? in Algebra Issue 2?is written in an unusual, and if I may call it, experimental style; each portion or paragraph located in a different geographic and time zone, often within time spans that take seconds, but connected with the following, all of which finally create an Aleph-like effect on the reader?s mind. I also found elements of flash in this story. Can you tell us about the inspiration and writing process behind ?Horizon View??
HS: The piece was commissioned by Tramway and the brief was to write a story inspired by the theme ?In The Days Of The Comet.? That title originally comes from H.G.Wells, but we were able to interpret the theme in any way that we chose. I wanted to write about the snapshots of humanity that a comet would see during the brief time it passes close to Earth on its trajectory. I used the flash style, and the sense of circularity, to mimic the motion of a comet through the solar system.
RB:?Can you tell us about other stories that you?ve written using new and unusual techniques? With regard to flash as well?
HS: I?ve written quite a few twitter-length stories, which is always a challenge. I?ve also written a piece about the origins of the universe in the style of a cake recipe! That was part of the Once Upon A Universe collaboration at the Galloway Astronomy Centre.
RB: ?Who are your favourite writers, and also some of the flash fiction writers you admire?
HS: I always find this such a difficult question, because my favourite writers change with my mood. I love William Trevor?s and Capote?s short stories, and Dave Eggers? collection of short shorts made me want to write flash in the early days of my career. Janice Galloway?s short fiction is a huge inspiration as well.
RB:?What genre do you enjoy writing more? Have you written any flash in that genre? Please share if they are published.
HS: I don?t really think in terms of genre, I just get interested in a topic or character and start writing. I struggle to place my writing in any particular genre at all. I have called my science writing fictionalized nonfiction, although that?s a bit of a mouthful! My stories in Litro and Cazart are examples of this style.
RB: You have a very interesting set of current projects list at your Helen Sedgewick blog. ?Please tell us some more. And also, are you planning to use the flash fiction form in any of these?
HS: My collection of science-themed stories will certainly involve some flash, and because it?s my favourite project at the moment I?m giving it priority. I?m looking forward to getting back to novel writing as well though. One of my ideas for a book came from the Titan Arum at Kew Gardens, the largest single flowering plant in the world. It?s sometimes given the name ?The Corpse Flower? because it smells so bad, how could I not write about that?
RB:? Give us a glimpse of the spaces/places/situations that have triggered a story idea in your head. And if you weren?t near your computer/writing pad, how did you go about keeping that idea tethered?
HS: It?s hard to say exactly where ideas come from, because they often start from the most unlikely combinations of inspirations. But places certainly are an influence from a particularly desolate beach I visited as a child to a small chapel I saw on holiday inPortugal. Like most writers I know, I carry a notebook with me everywhere. All the ideas get jotted down, even if they sometimes turn out to be illegible or nonsensical! And if I can?t reach my notebook, I tell myself that the really good ideas won?t be forgotten.
RB: What words of advice and caution do you have for writers submitting to Fractured West? Also what puts you off in a flash fiction?
HS: The one thing I?m always looking for as an editor is a new idea. The most common problem with submissions to Fractured West is not that they?re badly written, but that they feel familiar. The voice, themes or characters are too similar to what I?ve read before. So my advice to writers would be: Find something new to say. And I know, it?s not easy!
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Rumjhum Biswas is a writer based in Chennai. Her fiction and poetry have been published all over the world. She has prizes and accolades for poetry and fiction inIndia and abroad, including having one of her stories among Story South?s top ten stories of 2007, being long listed for the Bridport in poetry in 2006, shortlisted for Aesthetica?s Creative Works in 2011 and recently the first prize in the Anam Cara Writer?s Retreat Competition.
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