Fen: Stories

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England was the language of breaking and bending and it would suit our mouths better. None of us would ever fall in love with English. We would be safe from that.” Daisy Johnson is youngest Booker nominee". BBC News. 20 September 2018 . Retrieved 13 October 2018. Having a child (or anyone you love) is a prelude to loss, whether yours or theirs. The more you want it, the more you have to lose. This story is an allegory for growing up and leaving home. AS Byatt’s short story, The Stone Woman (see my review see my review HERE) came to mind. Every story is deliberate and stark. Even as I read simple exchanges, it seems like the characters are meant to be lit via chiaroscuro... There are hints of miracles and resurrection. I immediately thought of Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary (see my review HERE). But this is darker than Tóibín’s novella, and without the explicitly Biblical framework, it’s more unknown and unknowable.

The shifts that Johnson charts are part of the texture of 21st century life – if you’re describing people on the cusp of adulthood then “it should feel that way, that gender is fluid, that sexuality is fluid”, she says. The collection is also “rude, it’s about sex, it’s got swearing in it” – and as it makes its own transition into the public sphere, she’s steeling herself for a broad range of reactions. “There are relatives who are reading it now who I don’t think are going to like it,” she says. “I didn’t write thinking that it would ever be published.” We meet the sisters some time after an unspecified disaster that has sent them to a tumbledown seaside house in the North York Moors. Their father is dead – he is a mysterious, often malign absence in the novel, like, says Johnson, a monster in the corner – and the move has precipitated a depression in their mother so severe that she, too, becomes absent, leaving them to forage tinned food and roam about the place while she remains shut up in a bedroom. But it’s the sense of peril that Johnson builds, a kind of suppressed, poltergeist energy, that makes the book propulsive and disturbing far more than any single plot detail. What was she trying to do? She’s already working on novel exploring another liminal zone – the network of canals that thread through post-industrial Britain. Mixed with the nervousness that makes Johnson sit up straight in her chair, measuring out each answer with stop-start care, is a confidence that the wide spaces of the fen have helped her to find her voice. The Romans were the first to drain the Fens, but it’s ongoing, never permanent: nature is strong. This opens with unexpected consequences of recent drainage: eels everywhere, but there’s something not quite right about them, nor with Katy’s sister - and there’s a connection. It explores identity, sisterhood, and transformation in a very similar way to Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (see my review HERE). You watch yourself pretend you’ve never known anything in your life and never much felt the compulsion to. You want to make him think you have no history or education; that you might have had language once but it’s gone now. You want to make him think you’re so scrubbed clean of any sort of intelligence that he can lay himself out on you and you’ll soak him up.”

by Daisy Johnson

As part of my work with UN Women, I have started reading as many books and essays about equality as I can get my hands on. There is so much amazing stuff out there! Funny, inspiring, sad, thought-provoking, empowering! I’ve been discovering so much that, at times, I’ve felt like my head was about to explode… I decided to start a Feminist book club, as I want to share what I’m learning and hear your thoughts too. I think it’s high time that we think about those stories, and I guess this is what we’re doing with JK Rowling now. We’re thinking about the stories that our children are reading and what they’re going to teach them.” At 29, she is the right age to have read Harry Potter, and remembers that her family would buy two copies of the books and she and her brother and sister would fight over them. “They were an integral part of my reading experience. You know, it was a really important part of a lot of people’s childhoods.” a b "Lancaster graduate praised for Booker Prize shortlist achievement". www.lancaster.ac.uk. 17 October 2018 . Retrieved 13 October 2018.

Johnson currently lives in Oxford. [17] Her favourite writers include Stephen King, Evie Wyld, Helen Oyeyemi and John Burnside. Her favourite poets include Robin Robertson and Sharon Olds. [18] Had she been unsuccessful as a writer, Johnson suggests that she would have been a shepherd. [1] Novels [ edit ] In 2015, she won a two-book deal with publisher Jonathan Cape for a collection of short stories and a novel. [10] The short story collection titled Fen was published in 2017. Set in the fens of England, it draws upon the memories of the area where Johnson grew up. It comprises a set of linked short stories, focusing on the experiences of women and girls in a small town. Johnson describes the collection as liminal and mythic. [11] The collection won the 2017 Edge Hill Short Story Prize. [12] Marco and Arch looked so like one another, like a mistake doubled across space. She looked like leftovers.” In het openingsverhaal verandert de zus van de vertelster in een paling. Ik zeg het je maar. In een paling. Sinds ik Daisy Johnson heb gelezen, maak je mij niet meer wijs dat dit onmogelijk is. Natuurlijk kun je door te stoppen met eten in een paling veranderen, wat dacht je?

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It’s a project she first explains as being inspired by the authors she was reading and studying when she started working on the collection in 2014, writers such as Sarah Hall, Kelly Link, Karen Russell and Mary Gaitskill. “A lot of short-story writers are … creating stories that otherwise might be realistic, but have this seed of change in the middle,” Johnson says, citing Hall’s award-winning story Mrs Fox, in which a woman changes into a vixen during a woodland walk: “The transformation destroys the reality around it.”

Within these magical, ingenious stories lies all of the angst, horror and beauty of adolescence. A brilliant achievement." (Evie Wyld) I know who you are though in a moment I will not. It is getting. I do not remember the word. Soon it will be. How easily they go again. There is no loyalty in language. There is no...” The literal, physical pain of language, and the desperate ingenuity to find ways circumvent it, was very like Ben Marcus’ The Flame Alphabet (see my review HERE) and also Kafka’s In The Penal Colony (see my review HERE), though the causes, situations, and consequences are utterly different. It’s a lonely job, and the pull of tides and sea creatures is stronger than the pull of the nearby townsfolk. For another magical look at such themes, see Jeanette Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping (see my review see my review HERE). I loved slipping in and out of these elemental short stories. Like the eponymous marshy Fens, which were drained centuries ago, but retain an aura of folkloric mystery to this day, the stories are infused with a hazy liminal quality, and a dash of lurking menace. Watery myths, magic, and superstitions seep through the gaps (and gaps, spaces, and blanks recur with significance) in beautiful, unsettling ways, scouring the lives of the poor inhabitants - poor in many senses.

MSt alumna Daisy Johnson 'On getting an offer for my writing …' ". Master's in Creative Writing. Oxford University. 2 March 2015 . Retrieved 13 October 2018. Nevertheless, she embarks on an improbable relationship, which is unexpectedly cut short and even more unexpectedly transformed. maybe 'the lighthouse keeper' is my favourite, because i like lighthouses and a girl living alone and doing her own thing and celebrating a fish.

Many of these characters are young women and teenagers exploring the emotional and sexual power of their incipient womanhood. “There’s something about being a teenager – I remember it as being awful. I’m sure not everyone does, but it’s such a strange time. Everything you look at, all the little bits, like going to the pub, are really weird, because you’re going through this massive breakdown of person.” Als er plaats is in je hoofd en de schrijver schrijft goed, dan kan er veel gebeuren. Je begint bij de eerste alinea, en je zult het zien: wat zich op de eerste pagina aandient, neem je na een paar bladzijden aan als waar. Een gezin verhuist, een grootmoeder sterft, een liefde gaat uit. Fen is on one hand ordinary. There's couples, sex, pubs, marriage. But within that, she weaves tales of magic and darkness, of inexplicable things, underpinned with something you understand. A longing, a need, that's ordinary, but works with the otherworldly.

Summary

She has been longlisted for the Sunday Times Short Story Award and the New Angle Award for East Anglian writing. She was the winner of the Edge Hill award for a collection of short stories and the AM Heath Prize.