Can you tell us a little about your writing process? What’s your writing space like and how do you approach a day of writing? 

My process — if you can call it that — is often chaotic. I’m not much of a planner, and I’m easily derailed by those brilliant 2am ideas that rarely hold up in daylight,  but seem far more exciting than finishing whatever it is I’m actually meant to be working on.

I aspire to one focused hour of writing a day, every day. It doesn’t sound like much, but that’s not counting the time spent on random Google searches (‘research’),  doing emails, or chewing pencils — all writing-adjacent, but not quite writing.

I like to write early in the morning with my dream-head still in touching distance. My writing space is at the top of the garden, with a view across the sea from Rame Head to Looe Island. Which is blissful but can be another distraction!

Read Jackie Taylor’s
Flash Fiction piece, ‘Private Enterprise’

We’re so excited to be publishing your brilliant writing in Inkfish again! The natural world plays a beguiling role in your flash piece, ‘Private Enterprise’. What inspired you to write this piece?  

Thank you! ‘Private Enterprise’ was seeded in sadness. It began with my reading about the limitations of the Outer Space Treaty — its failure to protect the moon from becoming just another territory, ripe for carving up, squabbling over, exploitation, and monetising by governments and private companies alike.

The walk at the heart of the piece is based on a real walk home from the pub under a glorious full moon. Fictionalised, of course: no one threw up, and there was definitely no karaoke, but someone did say they could hear the moon singing to them!

I’m interested in how we navigate the gap between our day-to-day, surface lives and the environmental and political crises of the world around us. How do we manage to hold both? And how can we write this? Answers on a postcard please!

Does planning and writing a flash piece feel very different to writing a poem? Do you think there’s a lot of overlap between your poetry and your prose?  

Yes, there is a lot of overlap between my poetry and short prose, and often I will work through an idea in both forms. In fact, ‘Private Enterprise’ has had an unsuccessful previous life as a poem! I think of it as a continuum, with poetry with a language focus at one end and   character- or narrative-driven short prose at the other. The question is then one of positioning – how far along that continuum does the piece want/need to sit? Where is its natural home? What adjustments need to be made to accommodate it there? And for me, questions of white space and look on the page drive a lot of my decision-making around form.

What’s the most unexpected, adventurous, interesting, or intriguing thing that’s happened to you during the writing or researching process?

I’m not sure this answers the question, but what keeps me writing — what continues to amaze me — is the ‘ah-ha!’ moment. When I write something that just feels right. Or when something completely left-field appears on the page and I think: Where on earth did that come from? Those times when you surprise yourself are pure (and rare) magic.

We’d love to hear about other pieces of yours that are about to emerge or have recently come out, as well as what you’re working on now!

I’m working on some edgeland-themed CNF, and polishing a pamphlet of poems called bearing, which explores the dislocation I felt after my husband had an unexpected heart attack during Covid (he’s fine now, thankfully!)

– so poems which explore themes around ageing, fear, and love. My main focus is redrafting botánica—an experimental, future-world, eco-themed, long-form, poetry-prose hybrid piece (!). It’s definitely been a case of writing into it to find out what the story is and what sort of container it needs – it feels a bit like archaeology or something! So I’ve been through that process, I think I understand what I need to do, and now I’m reshaping to make the uncovered story work, hopefully!