Emma Hislop (Kāi Tahu) is a Taranaki-based writer. Her work has appeared in literary journals and anthologies in New Zealand and overseas. She is heading to Australia in September on a month-long residency in the Blue Mountains and describes here the backstory to her latest book, Ruin and Other Stories.
The first story I wrote in the collection is set in South London and is titled The Game. It was 2013 and I’d returned home to New Zealand five years earlier, after a decade living overseas. Much of the time I’d lived in Brixton. A complicated friendship and a hideous Boris Johnson fruit and vegetable sculpture formed the beginning of that story. Something about the distance between London, where I spent much of my 30s and Wellington, where I now lived, was useful in sparking my memory and allowing me to see things clearly. I write fiction, but often the stories start with a kernel of truth, of personal experience. It’s probably that old “write what you know” thing. I love how anything can happen in fiction - and with short fiction, in particular, it’s like there’s nowhere to hide. Anxiety is almost my default setting and I’m fascinated by relationships, hyper-aware of what’s going on around me. I think I probably observe people quite acutely. That sounds creepy written down, I’m not a stalker.
People more clever than me have described Ruin as an exploration of power. It’s almost like hearing others describe the book has enabled me to frame it in a certain way. Now that the book is out in the world, I can see there are certain themes running through the collection, that I wasn’t aware of at the time I was writing the stories. I can see that I’m interested in power and the way in which it plays out, whether it be coercive and lurking in the background, or much more blatant. I think that’s Ruin’s main preoccupation, probably. I didn’t set out to write a violent book, and yet, here it is. That’s fascinating to me.
Fur is another story set in London, this time on the Underground. Anyone who has lived in London can probably relate to the experience of commuting to work on the Tube. I tried to get at this feeling of obsession and claustrophobia in the writing.
A good friend and I lived in Brighton in the UK in our 20s. We ran out of money and answered an ad in the newspaper for live-in chambermaids in Wales. The manor house was fancy and the pay was terrible, but we had a brilliant time. Only a few details stayed the same, but Sweet on the Comedown was sparked by that time. Housewarming was written in a house by Te Awakairangi, in the Hutt Valley. I’m interested in realism, and trying to get things to feel as real as possible on the page. That’s where my editor Anna Knox at Te Herenga Waka University Press was really brilliant. I mean, she was brilliant at lots of things. But she would say to me, “So something’s boiling in the pot on the stove? What’s in the pot?” Part of me would be like, it doesn’t matter. You can’t see in the pot. But she’d want to know that macro-level detail. And that just made the world even more real, I think and I’m so grateful for that expertise. A writing constraint I tried to set myself for this story was to keep everyone at the party inside the house. The characters kept wanting to leave. Sometimes writing feels like a form of madness.
