Our fiction genre kicked off this week with a short story by UK-based writer Barry Charman, who delivers the lovely "Why The Fire Doesn't Play With The Rain." It's a story, in Charman's own words, about "trying to unravel prejudice and it sort of explores how absurd it is."
Barry Charman is a writer living in North London. He has been published in various magazines, including Ambit, Griffith Review, The Ghastling and Popshot Quarterly. He has had poems published online and in print, most recently in The Literary Hatchet and The Linnet’s Wings.
Rose Costello, one of the Umbrella's managing editors, spent some time talking to Charman about the story and his work as a whole. This is a transcript of their conversation:
Rose Costello: Would you like to tell us a bit about yourself? It's not a job interview, don't worry. You don't need to impress us.
Barry Charman: I mainly write short stories right now, lots of science fiction and horror, things like that. I've been self-employed as a writer for about ten years now. In the past ten years I've probably sold about a hundred short stories, flash fiction, poems, things like that. So it's been a full-time, you know...
RC: Occupation. Occupation, because it occupies your time.
BC: Yes, I always said I was a writer because I didn't know what else I'd be.
RC: Obviously I Googled you before speaking, and I was really surprised to see that you wrote horror. Reading the pieces you sent in...I loved them all, but it didn't strike me that the person who wrote those would be the same person who writes horror. What do you think of that?
BC: Well I tend to write in many different types of different types of genres. I also worked on a children's novel recently. And there's quite a big overlap between children's literature and horror, and creativity and imagination, and the more imagination and creativity you use, the stranger the ideas become, and the more you have to play with ,really. So I think if you're trying to do something creative and explore different ideas and get the potential of those ideas, you do sort of veer towards stranger, more surreal ideas like horror and science fiction, because that's the bigger playground for ideas.
RC: Surreal is a really good word for this story, I think.
BC: A lot of things I've written I find are difficult to categorize. They're sort of literary stories but they're horror or dark fantasy or they have science fiction elements and they're quite difficult to categorize, which I think is a good thing because it's something that makes it interesting.
RC: It's probably a harder sell, because publishers like too have boxes to put you in. In this story you have Cathy and Tommy, and we know she's young but we don't know how young, and we know they're running away but we don't know where from. Under normal circumstances, I'd be there going, "for god's sake will you just tell me what's going on?" But what I loved about this is that with only little hints of information, I built up a whole picture in my mind, and I think that's really hard. todo.
BC: Well that's the joy of flash fiction really. You have to create a whole, precise world in less than a thousand words. A lot of the things I've done have been flash fiction. For some reason I seem to be quite good at just exploring a lot in a few words. It makes you be more precise.
RC: One of the few clues as to where it might be is the word "handcar."
BC: Well it's meant to be more of a timeless piece that could be anywhere really. It's a story about prejudice and war and trying to untangle those sorts of things. It's a sort of story that's always going to be timely, sadly.
RC: What inspired this particular story?
BC: Not sure, really. Maybe I had the image, or the title. Sometimes you have the title and you don't know what it means, and it stays with you for years. Then suddenly you know what it means.
It's a piece about trying to unravel prejudice and it sort of explores how absurd it is.
RC: It does work very well on its own but I can easily see it fitting into a novel where we get their whole story.
BC: I get that a lot. I do tend to write stories where people go "and what happens next?" and the answer is "well, that was it." It's always good to write something that leaves people wanting to know more and wanting to know what happened next. Any good story feels like the beginning of something, and you just might not know what happens next.
Barry Charman
Barry Charman is a writer living in North London. He has been published in various magazines, including Ambit, Griffith Review, The Ghastling and Popshot Quarterly. He has had poems published online and in print, most recently in The Literary Hatchet and The Linnet’s Wings. He has a blog at http://barrycharman.blogspot.co.uk/
Rose Costello
A love of language and literature has helped Rose Costello to make a living at home in Ireland and abroad for more than 30 years, first as an English teacher, then as a journalist, writer and editor. She has written contemporary fiction, historical fiction, children’s stories and poetry. Over the past two years, she has fallen in love with the short story form and is focusing on that. Based in Dublin, she is perpetually planning to move westwards.