We Can't Outrun Pain: Interview with Priya Sharma

As if delivered by a generous crow, Fiction Unbound's Gemma Webster, was given the gift of a conversation with the UK writer Priya Sharma. Sharma's short story "Fabulous Beasts" was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson prize and won a British Fantasy Award for Short Fiction. Pick up a copy of her short story collection, All the Fabulous Beasts. This book will rip your heart out and you won't be sorry. You can even follow the collection on Facebook. Sharma also has a short story in the upcoming New Fears 2 anthology, which drops in September but can be pre-ordered now. 

Author Priya Sharma*

Gemma Webster: Several of your stories feature what feels like a distinctly English type of fairy mischief. Did you grow up romping through the lovely green countryside or were you a city kid? 

Priya Sharma: I grew up in a Cheshire market town in the 1970s. It had a population of about 15,000. A fair-sized town with its own industry, but the countryside was right there. I would walk for miles with my best friend, Michelle, down lanes and we'd talk about everything. I remember proper dairy farms and milk delivered in clinking glass bottles by a milk float in the dark, bats in the twilight, a hedge full of fat spiders, a calf still covered in its caul, hedgehogs and the stinking hot summer of 1976 when the roses were covered in ladybirds. I love cities but  part of me will always belong there.

Milk Float By Tagishsimon, CC BY-SA 3.0

GW: Your stories are published in a variety of places that evoke certain genres, horror, science fiction, fantasy. How do you characterize your work? 

PS: Characters and their developing stories sometimes steer me off course from the original genre I'd envisaged writing. I don't mind that, except when I'm writing for a specific brief. I'm commitment phobic, so I'd be very unhappy if I had to write pure horror or fantasy only. That's the joy of short stories. I can wander all over the place.

I love books that mix up genres and that there's much more darkness to be found in literary novels these days. If I were to name specific books I enjoy in that respect, I'd include Geek Love by Katherine Dunn, The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break by Steven Sherrill, Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham, The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt, Under the Skin by Michel Faber, and The Pesthouse by Jim Crace.

GW: I love the bird table you created in the first story, "The Crow Palace." Is there a real crow palace? 

PS: I wish that I had a crow palace! We moved house last year and are actively encouraging birds into the garden. So far we've had greedy pigeons, sparrows, a bolshy robin, tits and finches, but my favourite are the pair of magpies.

Ellen had quite a wide net with Black Feathers: A Dark Avian Anthology, where this story first appeared. She wanted bird-themed horror. I do a lot of research when writing. I'm lucky enough to know an ornithologist called Val McFarlane. She's taken interested groups on trips all over the world. I spent an interesting afternoon in her garden where I got to quiz her on birds. 

Corvids interested me the most because they're clever. My story came from a news feature about a little girl who left food for crows in the same spot each day. In return they started to bring her presents.

GW: I love that. You are a doctor. What kind of medicine do you practice? 

PS: I am a GP (General Practitioner). I think the US equivalent is a family doctor. It's cradle-to-grave medicine, which I enjoy. I feel very privileged to be able to do this work.

GW: Do you have some magic source of stopping time?

PS: Sadly I'm not a time lord like Doctor Who. That would be nice. 

GW: Why do you think science works so well when writing the weird/fairy tales?

PS: Science and stories always had equal footing in our house as I was growing up. My dad would tell us about the Ramayana in the same tone he would use for explaining photosynthesis. I think it's about having the same sense of wonder. Science and maths are awesome in the true sense of the word. My mum loved history, fiction and the mystical. She loves stories.

Science always takes a leap forward when someone makes a huge leap of imagination. Imagination is key. Also, there's a lot of psychology in weird tales/fairy tales. They have so much to say about the culture and values of the time, as do their reinventions. 

GW: At Fiction Unbound we are admirers of Ellen Datlow. A tweet of hers was what led me to your book. You have worked with her on several anthologies, what is the best part of working with her? 

PS: That she's 100% about the story. An invitation to submit is never a guarantee of acceptance. She'll be brutally honest about what doesn't work for her in a story but lets you find your own way to fix it. I also like her anthology themes- the sea, dolls, birds, Alice in Wonderland.

GW: I could fill up my reading list for the rest of the year! Your cover art is beautiful. What should we know about the artists? 

PS: One of the reasons I  wanted to work with Undertow Publications is that Mike Kelly takes as much care with the covers as he does with the content of the books he publishes. Vince Haig does a terrific job of all the cover design on UP's books.

The hardback cover is illustrated by Jeffrey Alan Love. The image was commissioned by Tor for "Fabulous Beasts", so I was delighted that he was happy for us to use it for the cover of All the Fabulous Beasts. I love the pared back palette and textured, mythical figures in his work. They are full of knights, giants and gods.

Hard Cover Art Work By Jeffery Alan Love*

Jeffrey's client list is dazzling: The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, The New Yorker, Scholastic, HarperCollins, Tor, Gollancz, Ballantine Books and Walker Books. He's also winner of the World Fantasy Award for Best Artist, a gold medal from the Society of Illustrators, a Silver Spectrum Fantastic Art Award, and two Academy of British Cover Design Awards, he has been nominated for The British Fantasy Award, The British Science Fiction Award, and the Chesley Award.

The paperback artwork is by a Japanese artist called Hiroko Shiina, known as C7-Shiina who is a graduate from Toyko Design Gakuin College. Mike Kelly and I spent a fair bit of time sending images back an forth and  were pretty struck with C7's work. In contrast with Jeffrey's art, C7's images are very intricate and baroque. She repeats dark themes in her work; reduced anatomies, tattooed flesh, fetishism, of death and unfolding wings, opium poppies and transformation, the primordial forms of embryos and decorated foetal skulls, masked lovers and the black gloves of a killer.

Paper Back Cover By C7-Shiina*

GW: They're both so beautiful. This collection has a lot of longing and characters finding their way through grief. Is that a topic you are still writing on? 

PS: Longing and grief are an essential component of growing as a human being. We can't outrun pain. I think they always exist in my work in one form or another. Love too, I hope.

GW: What has captured your imagination now? 

PS: Ooh, current obsessions. I've become a bit obsessed with Antony Gormley's figurative work. I'm not sure if that will ever translate into a piece of writing in response to that, but I like how he's reinvented that idea again and again in various forms. The idea of being focused on one thing and exploring it utterly appeals to me.

GW: What's next? 

PS: I'm working on a few short stories that I've promised people, so fingers crossed that they'll take them. One is my own variation on the theme of children raised by wolves. The other is about an event that occurred when I was student. A pig was burnt to death on an urban farm in Merseyside. It was years ago but I never forgot reading about it.

GW: What are you reading that you really love? 

PS: The Power by Naomi Alderman was powerful and sometimes a very difficult read. I admired that it was a challenging, wonderfully written book, that also managed to be a thrilling page-turner that was very accessible.

Another book that has impressed me recently is The Dig by a Welsh poet called Cyan Jones. It's about a sheep farmer and a man who digs for badgers to use for baiting (fighting with dogs). Jones has stripped the prose right back into something very pure and poetic. I envy his skill for brevity.

Pereira Maintains by Antontio Tabucchi crept up on me and the final few chapters were an immense payoff. Pereira is the most unassuming character, working quietly in a fascist Portugal of the 1930s, until a meeting with a young man incites him to action.

The Cabin at the End of the World is a novel by Paul Tremblay that was a very intense read. Take it on holiday with you. Preferably somewhere remote.

GW: Do you remember your dreams? Do you ever fly in them? 

PS: I have a very vivid memory from childhood. When I went to bed I would lie on my front, head up the pillow and I would feel like I was falling, rather than flying. And it felt fantastic. I'd do this a lot. I'd be falling through space and, instead of stars, there were toys. I stopped being able to do it when I was 4 or 5 and I remember feeling like I'd lost something.

As an adult the only recurrent dreams I have are stress dreams. One of the worst is that I'm at university again and I have a few weeks to revise a whole year's work. I sometimes consciously dream and I catch myself thinking, What the hell am I doing? I've passed this course. What if I fail this time?

GW: That sounds exactly like the anxiety that crops up for me when I am writing! Are there any upcoming appearances/readings/events that people should know about? 

PS: I'll be attending British Fantasy Con, Chester (October). Everyone is very friendly.  Come and say hello. I'll be thrilled to meet you. Hopefully I'll also be reading at an event on ghost stories in December 2018 at Keele Hall, Staffordshire, UK.

*All images (except for the milk float) were provided by and used with permission from Priya Sharma.

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