THINKING ABOUT KNIVES...

The social crimes of family dysfunction, petty long term cruelty, and occasional suicidal or psychopathic outbursts have frequently been part of my long fiction. However two long terms as writer-in-residence in a women’s prison have shown me that the sharper focus of the short story might perhaps be very well suited to explore the darker themes inevitable in such a setting.

In prison I worked with individuals who had walked the razor edge of survival all their lives, whose given role as victim had been transformed by circumstance to that of perpetrator. At first, these perceptions crept into my long fiction, from Long Journey Home - about women in a Japanese internment camp - to my most recent novel The Woman Who Drew Buildings (out in September) where one of the two main characters is just out of prison.

However, more and more those sharp insights into individuals on the edge began to crystallise into elements of a short story. This distilled form reflects the epiphanic glimpses and the flashes of insight I experienced many year in recent years through this inspiring contact with the people as I encouraged them to write and to read to make more sense of their world.

The outcome of all this is KNIVES, a series of short stories - ranging from the inspired ravings of an old woman, once respectable and now on the streets, to a young man who goes to view a house and has a near miss with a psychopathic killer, to a young woman - more sinned against than sinning - hell bent on self destruction. There are other, less pathological stories in the collection - of a woman breaking free from a long and confining marriage, of a boy learning his craft deep in the bowels of the earth.

But I think that - more than violence, more than darkness, all these stories reflect the knowingness and the sense of irony - even comedy - that is the human saving grace of people under stress and in either physical or psychological confinement.

Knives (Iron Press) is launched this month (April 2009).

Happy reading, happy writing

Wendyx