Can you tell us a little about your writing process? Where do you write from? What’s that space like? How do you approach each day of writing?

Someday I hope to have a room of my own with a door I can close, but until one of my kids moves out permanently (they’re all in college right now now), I write at a desk in my very chaotic living room. I did have to train my family not to bug me when I’m working. Fortunately, once I get in the zone, I am able to tune out most things. Plus, I get to sit in front of a lovely window with a view of the mountains. And it does get quiet, late at night or when everyone is at work/school. I am surrounded by stacks of books and post-it notes, a third of my desk space is covered by a soft blanket for my cat, and my elderly yellow lab snores on his dog bed right behind me. My writing environment may not be ideal for most people, but it’s definitely my happy place.

Read Dawn Tasaka Steffler’s
‘What Moon Wouldn’t Give’

Are there particular stories, myths, or legends that tend to inspire you?

The supernatural elements and fairytales I grew up with are either Hawaiian or Japanese. I remember being terrified of Japanese Obake when I was a kid, and to this day when I drive over the Pali highway in Honolulu, I keep an eye out for hitchhikers. Two years ago, I was working on a flash story that had some Hawaiian ghost elements in it, and I had the best time researching all the scary stories from my childhood. I was thrilled when that particular flash was published by Flash Frog. Around that time I started collecting Hawaiian and Japanese ghost story compilations. I’m telling you — Hawaii has some of the best ghost stories and the Japanese have some of the best monsters! I wish I had more time to just read for fun, to delve deeper into all this rich material so that it can percolate in my subconscious and come out as something speculative or creepy. Someday perhaps.

We are so excited that you’re contributing a beautiful flash, ‘What Moon Wouldn’t Give’, to Inkfish! What inspired your piece?  

I’ve always been really sensitive to and alarmed by the crisis our climate is going through. So one day I was taking a Smokelong Quarterly generative workshop run by Ingrid Jendrzejewski, and we were asked to respond to a sentence: “This is what happened when the moon lost that bet.” The first sentence I wrote in response to that was, “The moon doesn’t see the point in hanging around” which quickly led me to an image of two sisters, Earth and Moon. Earth is going through her death throes, and of course Moon desperately wants to leave… I spent a few weeks going down rabbit holes about Theia and Giant-impact hypothesis, the AMOC current in the Atlantic Ocean, and watching videos of the Apollo 11 moon landing, padding the story with all the details my imagination could come up with. It was such fun.

Space, planets, the moon, comets, all play a compelling role in ‘What Moon Wouldn’t Give’. How do you usually draw on the natural world in your writing?  

One of the things I enjoy the most about writing is the ridiculous amounts of research it sometimes requires. Research that doesn’t make it into the final product but informs absolutely everything. I’m actually very attracted to science; the most disparate information can sometimes add the most interesting and unexpected layer to a story. Like, I have this unfinished story that I want to get back to that links estranged sisters with migrating birds with quantum entanglement. I hit a wall with that story, so it’s currently “in a drawer,” but I keep thinking about it, keep coming across interesting articles in magazines and newspapers that speak to it. It’s definitely marinating.

Does planning and writing a micro or flash piece feel very different to writing a short story or longer prose piece? Do you feel there’s overlap with prose poetry in your work?  

When I first started writing flash in 2022, everything I wrote was around the 1000 word mark, and I couldn’t understand how people wrote anything shorter. But as time passed, I was able to fit my stories into 500 word containers. Then 250 words. Then 100 words. I would compare it to flexing a muscle. I think the other half of it is being able to sense how large a story needs or wants to be. These days I can kind of gauge how large a container I might need when a new story idea comes to me, and I have two longer pieces, probably in the 1500-2000 range, that are on my back burner. I don’t feel like I know how to write that long, but I’ll figure it out because those two pieces hold a lot of energy for me. As far as overlap with prose poetry, I’m no poet. But every once in a while, I write a micro that I don’t understand, it’s different from what I usually write, like a white-hot singular moment, it feels unfinished but yet it’s finished. And my brain wonders, did I just write some prose poetry?

Flash, prose poems, novellas-in-flash, micros all feel like such current and evolving forms. What risks might writers take to push the envelope and what do you see flash fiction developing towards? 

No risk no reward. So, chase what you want. Want to understand how to write a micro? Read a ton of micros. But also, think about what you read. Analyze it. Take it apart. Figure out how it works. Continue to educate yourself, there’s an embarrassment of riches when it comes to flash. Smokelong Quarterly has the best workshop platform in my opinion. But there’s so many quality teachers out there offering the most amazing classes. As far as where is flash headed towards? I’d love to see the novella-in-flash gain more traction. I’d love for the literary world to recognize that the depth, complexity and emotional power of a story isn’t tied to its word count.

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!

For the past year I’ve been working on a polyphonic novella-in-flash that has a transgender teen at its center. But really it’s about the community the teen lives within, and the novella explores the enormous effect, positive or negative, intentional or unintentional, that others have on LGBTQ individuals. A handful of those flash stories have been popping up in lit mags since last Fall. But something new I’m excited for is, embedded within the NIF is a series of more experimental micros where the titles all begin with “David as —.” (David is the transgender teen.) I’m very happy to say the first one in that series is coming out in a few days with JMWW. 

And in July, Mythic Picnic on Twitter (I’m totally not consistent calling it by the other name, I miss that little blue bird so much…) is hosting a collection of previously published stories. It was fun going through older stories to put that collection together and I hope people will check it out! If you still have a Twitter account that is.

The debut edition of your beautiful magazine, Aspier, has just launched! Can you tell us the story of how that came to be, who you’ve included in it, and the work that went into making it so gorgeous?

I was thinking a vehicle that was agile and non-partisan to join the dots, covering present-day Cornish culture essentially, with potential space for arts commentary and journalism. I waited a couple of years with that idea on the back burner, and then decided if no one was doing it, then maybe I could give it a go. There wouldn’t be someone interviewing me for the role of editor or telling me I couldn’t do it because I lacked the experience; I could self-appoint and have full creative control and responsibility. Which was very appealing.

I applied and got a small grant from Real Ideas Organisation for the project in November 2022. It took about six months after that to get the title cleared before I could do a wider call-out to writers to contribute and pieces started to come in. I wanted Aspier to be a friendly home to both emerging and established writers and artists, a little like Inkfish has set out to do. These could be contributors who identify as Cornish, who have adopted Cornwall as their home, writers and artists whose work engages with the region, or Cornish practitioners who have since moved away and are part of our diaspora now. And I didn’t want the subject material to necessarily relate to Cornishness. Contributors are free to submit anything on any subject they wanted to.

I sifted through Cornish and Cornwall-based visual artists I had in mind for the cover illustration, and contacted a couple of different people before I got in touch with Elizabeth Loveday whose work I really loved. Elizabeth creates these wonderful, often slightly dark, wild, whimsical depictions of characters with a spin on stock Cornish imagery. But each of them is so suggestive and full of storytelling. I knew that, instead of landscapes, I wanted characters on the cover who could reference a piece inside on the cover, and Elizabeth’s work is both distinctive and character-driven. She was immediately enthusiastic about the pilot, and kindly did me a few different iterations based on some of the contributor pieces I’d sent to her. There was conversation around configuration and colour (I love this process of exploration and back and forth collaboration!). I can’t remember how it was finally decided that a bal maiden and miner would be a good call, probably it emerged as one potential idea when we met for a coffee and had Elizabeth’s paintings on the table in front of us, but I thought they would speak to a few of the Issue 01 contributor pieces that heavily reference our mining heritage from Chris Silver, Sovay Berriman, and then the conversation Roel Meuleman and I had with Bosena’s Denzil Monk about Enys Men.

It wasn’t a particular planned route I took or any sort of experience or honed skills behind me that made Aspier happen, just the willingness to put in a lot of voluntary hours into a project over the last couple of years and then a pretty clear sense of what I wanted to make – and stubbornness to plough through setbacks to get it out.

Can you tell us a bit about your work as an editor? Do you enjoy it?

Absolutely love it. The editor role at least, seeing these works come in, getting my hands on someone’s piece, taking a metaphorical pen to it and screening for pace, lucidity, where things don’t quite fit together. I do find it difficult having to feed back suggestions when you know that a work means so much to its creator and they may have worked on it for an extensive period of time. Most of the pieces are untouched, there are a few that were edited a little. With Issue 01 behind me, I would probably be more emboldened next time around to make deeper editorial changes and suggestions with work that comes in. I really love the design part of it too, that was all brand new to me so a slow process of trying things out as I don’t speak computer, but satisfying by the end.

But it’s also a real privilege to get to work with and build relationships with the contributors, and hope that I’m being nurturing and encouraging in interactions. From my very limited experience, it’s a really nerve-wracking and exposing thing to proffer a piece of writing, and you’d hope for someone a bit compassionate and thoughtful on the other end to receive it. So, I’m going to try to emulate that as best I can. Though I have found it incredibly tricky to do it on my own though, a bit like being 100% responsible for a screaming baby for two years and wishing there was someone else or a few others to hand it to for a change, and for them to look after it in their own way with renewed energy and knack for singing lullabies. I’m hoping to get an editorial team behind me for the next issue to help share the project out – I think that would be a much more fertile process ideas-wise, less exhausting, and it’s much better to collaborate and share the excitement about a project you are working towards with a group of like-minded creative producers.

Where do you work and what’s your creative space like?

I’m laying claim to a small study space. It has various furniture piled into it like a couple of bookcases and a leftover chest of drawers, and also my desk at the window. I’ve stuck a lot of prints and some drawings up on the wall behind me, by accident they seem to be various versions of beiges, creams, and blacks. On my desk is a random assembly of icons besides a pot of pencils and a pot of pens. There’s a couple of Toulouse-Lautrec postcards, a blue Emily Tapp vase with dried stems in it, and a diminutive, grinning Mexican skeleton in graduation robes and a mortar board which my sister bought me prematurely in a shop in Merida before I knew I’d passed my degree finals.

Because through apparently magical powers it had manifested a good result, I find it to be a morbid token of good luck. A dead plant is next to it which is less inspirational. A little terracotta squirrel I made at school whose ears have since fallen off. A ceramic ghost made by Kate Aimers. There’s often a scented candle on the go to give the room a bit more of a harmonious vibe than it actually has (I’ve run out of tealights again, need to grab another pack). I also have this grey-blue egg made from marble from the Ellora caves at Ajanta. None of these things has a practical purpose (apart from the pot of pens), but they are all lined up on the back of my desk anyway. Currently I also have a little plastic pot of blue Indian ink and a paintbrush on the desk which I’m painting thank you notes for when I’m wrapping the Aspier envelopes up. In full-blown aesthete mode, I’ve been signing them with this beautiful striped, hand-turned wooden Pencole pen I bought at a Cornish fair last year, so that sits in its little velvet pouch in the drawer, I just need to develop the penmanship to operate it properly. And there’s a lot of less lovely general clutter I need to throw away.

I’ve got limited floor space, and a little production line going for wrapping which I do cross-legged on the rug, hemmed in by a box of envelopes and boxes of Aspier issues. And there’s always music playing. At the moment for wrapping books in the evening it’s stuff that’s more dulcet to zone out to – this week it’s been tracks like R.O.B.Y.N. by Luke de-Sciscio, Coolshit Bullshit by Danika, Save My Soul by Sabine McCalla, maybe some This is The Kit, Alex G, some Fionn Regan like Collar of Fur, Snowy Atlas Mountains, or just the whole of his gorgeous 2024 album which has been replaying quite a bit this year since seeing him live at The Cornish Bank a few months ago where he was brilliant.

Do you have a preference for one particular art form or writing form? 

I love short stories, the shorter the better, like one-pagers. I recently read Lou Beach’s 420 characters, and absolutely loved it. It made me feel better about the surreal, fragmentary nonsense that I often generate. In terms of what I like to write, this would be the easiest thing to produce. There’s a pile of stray short shorts, some funny when I read them back even if I can’t remember when I wrote them. Some of them are actually funny, most of them are weird. They’ve built up since I was having a difficult time at university and which I don’t want to throw away but I don’t know what to do with. But I find them a pleasure to shape and return to and rewrite.

The focus of Inkfish Edition 4 is on nature and the environment. Are those themes that find their way into your work? 

I’m really fascinated by our human relationship with the space we inhabit, whether that’s urban or rural, and of reframing ourselves more like animals that are part of an ecosystem rather than regarding the natural landscape as being our playground onto which we project ideas in a very anthrocentric manner. Writing about Cornwall I drift more towards thinking about the right to roam, the absurdity of ownership of a piece of land, acquisition and plunder vs. stewardship and active protection and preservation of natural spaces, and regeneration and growth that comes from that. And I’m also really interested in thinking about the placement of brown and black bodies in these spaces which doesn’t usually spring to mind when picturing idyllic British or Cornish pastoral scenes, or when picturing who is operating custodianship and protection of green spaces, again shifting those preconceived notions and unconscious bias. I’ve touched upon this in my writing before, but they are definitely thoughts I’d like to develop further.

What are you working on at the minute?

Getting Issue 01 out and beginning to think about how to secure Issue 02! There have been a few ideas in terms of creative writing rattling around for years now that I haven’t got around to sitting down and working up. If I can take a few weeks off to have a break, travel across the border, hopefully I can work on those. I won’t share those ideas now in case I back out of them and look like an idiot. We’ll see what happens!

Your work includes both poetry and visual art. Does one or the other of these feel primary to you, or are they both equal passions?

They go hand-in-hand for me. Sometimes I begin by creating characters visually, and then their background stories unfold naturally into poems. Other times, I’ll write a poem and then feel inspired to bring it to life through the visuals. 

Your art is incredibly distinctive. How did it evolve? And which artists and writers have influenced you the most?

Thank you! My work has evolved quite organically over time. Initially, I was drawn to Tim Burton’s filmmaking style and quirky characters. I loved his animated short film, Vincent – that’s actually what first inspired me to start writing poems. Amna Hashmi, who taught me at art school and remains a mentor to this day, introduced me to world-building in art – an approach that’s become central to my practice. Hannah Höch’s photomontages and animated films like Children Who Chase Lost Voices have also influenced how I approach imagined worlds.

Read Yumna Sadiq’s
‘The Leek-Greens’ Hymns’

Some of my all-time favourite books are The Stranger by Albert Camus, Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, and the manga Nonnonba by Shigeru Mizuki. I also love collecting whimsical children’s picture books – they open up imaginative possibilities. Books like The Codex Seraphinianus, with its beautifully mysterious and unreadable world, have also been a huge inspiration.

I grew up listening to my Nani (maternal grandmother), Sadaqat Malik, as she recounted stories of her childhood in Gaya, India, and her migration to Pakistan during the 1947 Partition. Her memories deeply shaped my love for storytelling.  

Can you tell us a bit about your process? What inspires you in the everyday? Are there particular creative problems you encounter, and how do you solve them?

My process begins with either designing a character by using cutouts from old magazines, recipe books, and calendars or writing a rhyming poem. I gather observations from daily life: sounds from my surroundings, random insects that find their way into my home, or a story about a mythical flower I heard during my travels. 

As I dig deeper into an imaginary world, I wonder: What other characters inhabit this world? What roles do these characters play? How do they react in different situations? What kind of challenges do they face, and can they overcome them? As the narrative develops – often in the form of rhyming poetry – the story begins to take shape.

Like most artists, I definitely run into stuck moments. When that happens, I try to step away: go for a walk, or binge-watch Korean shows. A friend once said something that stuck with me: “It’s okay to take breaks… as long as you come back to it!”

What is your favorite piece/series of your own work and what is the most experimental piece/series you’ve ever done?

One piece close to my heart is Map Face – Just an Ordinary Piece of Paper. It was the first little imaginary world I ever created, and it’s also when I discovered how fun and versatile collage can be as an artistic technique. The piece has a playful, slightly absurd tone that still makes me smile.

The most experimental work I’ve done would probably be a short stop-motion clip I made about a character named Gwenter. I narrated the entire thing through song—even though I’m definitely not a singer (and honestly, not very good at it!). But I went ahead with it anyway. It was one of those “just try it and see what happens” moments.

The piece of yours we’re publishing in Inkfish Edition 4 is so unusual and beautiful. Can you tell us the story of how it came to be and the work that went into making it so gorgeous?

Thank you! The Leek-Greens’ Hymns began with a simple question: How would a community of Leek-Greens communicate with the Sun? From there, I started imagining their mythical traditions and rituals—what fruits might hold special meaning, what offerings they’d give to a river spirit or a sacred stone.

The process was layered. I wrote short scenes, created accompanying visuals, and then shaped the poem around those elements. Interestingly, the scene with the mango came afterward. Mangoes mark the peak of summer, and since I was playing with the idea of the summer solstice, it felt fitting to weave that symbol into the work.

Visually, I worked with tones of blue, yellow, green, and orange—colors that evoke the sun’s energy and its gradual disappearance in the final scene. For the mango and certain food offerings, I used photographs, and there are a few small painted areas as well. The textures and color combinations helped reinforce the poem’s shifting moods and atmosphere.

I was experimenting with onomatopoeic language and invented chants that felt ancient, celestial, or ceremonial. I wanted the story to reflect the belief that everything in nature is alive with spirit—a perspective rooted in Japanese culture, which I find deeply moving. I’ve also had conversations with different communities about what they offer to the sea and how star alignment holds meaning for them. Those stories and voices found their way into this piece. 

The focus of Inkfish Edition 4 is on nature and the environment. Are those themes that often find their way into your work? 

Not all the time, but nature finds its way into my work in unexpected ways. In 2023, I created the air spirit, the Leek-Greens, and other characters tied to a fictional character named Orange. I used collage as the main technique, which gave the characters a surreal appearance. I hadn’t planned it, but the characters ended up resembling insects. That accidental resemblance became a starting point—my next step was to figure out the world they lived in and the story behind them.

I’ve spent time in the mountains and several different countrysides, and that’s why I’m drawn to the idea of landscapes and natural elements having spirits and emotions—winds that whisper, trees that listen, faeries that mourn. I’m fascinated by forgotten languages and mythical beings, and nature often becomes the stage—or even the character—for those ideas.

What are you working on at the minute?

Since the end of 2023, I’ve been working on a long-form story centered on a fictional character named Orange. It’s the most expansive narrative I’ve developed so far. I’ve been playing with different forms—collage, sound, stop-motion animation—while exploring how the story might expand beyond the page. There have been moments where I’ve felt creatively stuck, but stepping away and returning with fresh energy has helped the piece grow in unexpected ways. 

Can you tell us a little about your writing process? Where do you write from? What’s that space like? How do you approach each day of writing?

I’m a morning person so I like to get up and get started when my brain is still firing on all cylinders. Most days, I work from my office at home. (Though I can and have written anywhere – a park bench, a cafe, the subway). My office is a comfortable space and I have a mood board where I pin images that I think are interesting or are somehow related to what I’m working on at the moment. (Right now there are pictures of birds on it and strange looking flowers and moody landscapes). This might sound weird, but I approach each writing day a little worried that I have absolutely nothing new to say. The cursor blinks and I think now what? So sometimes I’ll read over what I’ve written the day before to jump start the process. Or I’ll tell myself it’s okay if what I write isn’t great, I’m just going to jot a few things down. There’s no better feeling than when it seems like the tank is empty and then an hour or two later, something unexpected appears on the page.

Who are your favourite flash writers and why?

There are so many! Kathy Fish, Sara Hills, Sarah Freligh, Sabrina Hicks, Matt Kendrick, Emily Rinkema, Ani King, James Montgomery, Dawn Miller, to name a few. I like their writing because it’s lyrical and gorgeous and surprising. Wonderful imagery. Stories that evoke an emotional response. And of course, they all know how to land the ending! I’ll read something by one of them and wish I’d written it, which is the highest compliment I can give.

Read Beth Sherman’s
Flash Fiction

We’re so excited to be publishing your brilliant writing in Inkfish again! The natural world plays fascinating and contrasting roles in ‘Daily Planner for an Anxious Planet’ and ‘Actually, there are eight of us’, your flash pieces from Inkfish Edition 4. How do you approach the natural world in your writing?

It’s an incredibly important narrative element. I like to make sure the reader has a clearly defined sense of the story’s setting. Using sensory details to describe sounds, smells, sights, etc. in the natural world strengthens whatever it is that I’m trying to get across. It’s a great opportunity to elevate my writing with similes, metaphors and specific details. Nature can also help define how a character is feeling, what they want, and whether they’re likely to get it or not.

Does planning and writing a micro or flash piece feel very different to writing a short story or longer prose piece? Do you feel there’s overlap with prose poetry in your work? 

Great questions! I never “plan” anything I write so that part is no different. I usually start with the germ of an idea or an image, a character, an object, a scenario, and go from there. I think writing flash has made my overall writing stronger – no matter what genre it is. The main difference is concision. I look back at short stories and novels I’ve written and think: Did I really need this part? What purpose is it serving? What would be lost if I removed it? (Usually the answer is nothing). The main difference between my flash stories and my longer work is there’s more plot in the latter. This happens, then that happens, then this other thing happens. With flash, there’s no time for that, which is one of the things I like most about it! It’s interesting that you ask about prose poetry. I love writing prose poems – they’re my favorite poetic form. I’ve heard it said that flash tells a story, while prose poetry explores language and emotion in a more open-ended way. I don’t necessarily think that’s a hard and fast rule. I’ve written prose poems that could “pass” for flash and vice versa.

Flash, prose poems, novellas-in-flash, micros all feel like such current and evolving forms. What risks might writers take to push the envelope and what do you see flash fiction developing towards? 

There are so many ways to take risks in short form fiction that probably wouldn’t work as well in a longer piece. I’ve told stories backwards, used different points of view (first person plural, third person plural), experimented with anaphora and epistrophe, explored the hermit crab form (lists, recipes, letters, instructions, etc.), told stories using only dialogue, written braided stories. There’s so much you can do! As our attention spans get shorter, I see flash continuing to grow and develop as an art form, gaining even more popularity.

As well as being a published author, you teach in the English Department at Queens College. How do you feel these two professions work alongside each other?

In the creative writing and CNF courses I teach, I see students struggle with the same types of things that I do. How to grab a reader’s attention. How to show and not tell. How to avoid the reader saying, “so what?” How to know what to cut and what to keep in revision. It’s extremely humbling. We also do a fair amount of close reading. I put many of my favorite flash stories on the syllabus and we discuss what narrative techniques have been used and what we could borrow from these talented writers in our own work. Some flash authors have even visited my classroom virtually, which the students love!

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

I like it when something I see out in the world leads to a totally unexpected story. I get to Queens College at 5 a.m. to beat the traffic and have some quiet writing time in my office there. It’s usually pitch black outside and there’s no one else around except for the security guys and an occasional sanitation truck. One morning, I saw a creature lurching from side to side on the Quad. It was small and furry and had other smaller furry things clinging to its back. I took a picture and Googled what I’d seen. It was an opossum and her babies – in the middle of New York City! It led me to write a flash story called “Creatures” about a college professor who sees an opossum in the early morning hours, along with the ghost of her dead father.

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 have a story called “Natural” in Milk Candy Review [coming out on June 7th] about a taxidermist who stuffs her mother. I love that journal and had submitted two other stories before this one was accepted. I also have a piece in the Flash Villains issue of Molotov Cocktail, titled “Catwoman ponders the intangibles while drinking a whisky sour at McDevitt’s Ale House in Gotham City.” That one was pure fun to write. And I’m currently working on two novellas in flash. One is about a fractured family. The other is about a character whose mother is suffering from Alzheimer’s. Why write only one NIF when you can do two, right?

Can you tell us a little about yourself, where you live, and how you came to be a poet?

Would it be strange to say that I came to poetry by accident? It may be strange but it’s the truth. I never thought I’d be a writer, let alone a poet. I come from a working-class background, brought up on a council estate in Margate, east Kent, I didn’t ever imagine writing, though I always read avidly. But never poetry. I hated poetry at school. I thought it was elitist and to be honest, I couldn’t understand it, none of it seemed to relate to my life at all. I didn’t begin writing until my late 20s – even then this was writing short stories, erm crime stories, rather than poetry. Then I went on a story writing weekend in Cornwall and was asked to write something ‘from the heart’, when I showed the tutor what I’d written, she said it was a poem. I was amazed as I knew nothing about poetry. She suggested I go on an evening course to begin to read poetry and I found I was smitten by all the contemporary poetry we read, and wanted to try to write myself. I was no overnight success but I won a competition after some years of writing poetry and that led to publication. I live in Penzance and love it, I’ve been living in Cornwall for 11 years now and couldn’t imagine being anywhere else.

Read Katrina Naomi’s
‘Pissed Off Nature Poem’ and other poems

We really love your work and we’re so proud to be publishing five beautiful poems of yours in Inkfish: ‘Pissed Off Nature Poem’, ‘River Dart Swim’, ‘Of Nightjars’, ‘A Minor Crime on St Agnes’, and ‘Oak Bouquet’. Each of these poems engages with the natural world in such an emotive, thought-provoking way. Could you tell us a bit about the process of writing them?

Ah thank you. I’m glad you find them ‘thought-provoking’, I suppose if a poem doesn’t try to make you feel or to question or to challenge something in you, then the poetry isn’t doing its job. ‘Pissed Off Nature Poem’ and ‘River Dart Swim’ were written at Dartington while I was leading a course there. It’s an inspiring place though perhaps the ‘pissed off’ might not be the inspiration an organisation might wish for. ‘Of Nightjars’ came about via an invitation from Cornwall Wildlife Trust to hear these birds one night not far from my home in west Cornwall. ‘A Minor Crime on St Agnes’ was written on holiday on the Isles of Scilly. I’m a real lover of islands; I was brought up on one, I’ve found that I’m writing a suite of poems in response to islands. The last poem ‘Oak Bouquet’ comes from a collaboration I’m doing with a visual artist, Julia Giles, who lives on the farm in Cornwall where her family have lived for centuries. We walk the land together, Julia picks things up from the hedgerows and creates directly from her finds. I spot things that intrigue me or that come from our conversations. In this poem, I did as Julia does and picked up a small branch that had fallen in a storm, took it home and stared at it until something happened – this poem.

What is your writing routine and what do you draw inspiration from in the day-to-day?

My routine is usually to swim in the sea first thing, then get to my desk and write after that. That’s very much how my latest collection, Battery Rocks (Seren, 2024) was written. These past few months, I’ve had long covid so haven’t been able to swim, so my routine has been interrupted and I’m still finding my way with the illness and how much energy I have. Happily I’m starting to feel much better now, so I hope to get back to swimming every day soon. The only good thing about the illness is that I’ve had a lot of time to write because I haven’t been able to do much else. I draw inspiration from a surprising number of things – from other poets, from the natural world, from art and film, from the physical body, from politics, from other creative people, from conversations and from experiences. I’m also really into collaborations with other poets and with people from other creative backgrounds, I love discussing our processes and approaches, I’m a bit of a nerd like this. But this always gives me a lot of inspiration.

Environment is a major focus in your writing, one which really heightens the experience we have of your poems, and the way you describe things intertwines amazingly with your distinctive voice. How do you choose and leverage your settings so well?

That’s lovely of you to say. I’m really interested in imagery. I think in another life, I’d be a visual artist, so perhaps that’s why I focus so much on the visual in my writing. I’m not particularly aware of this while I’m writing but I’m always pleased when I see an image that’s working or that’s surprising in some way. I’m not sure that I ‘choose’ my settings, I’ll be walking or swimming or engaged in something and I’ll see or experience something and know straightaway that I want to write about it.

What is the process of crafting a poetry collection like?

Putting it all together is like a giant jigsaw. I always want a strong opening poem and a strong closing poem, then to intersperse my strongest poems throughout the collection. I always want to vary the highs and lows in emotion throughout the length of a collection. I also want a collection to appear interesting on the page, so that it is visually exciting – and of course the cover is really important too and I love choosing the cover images. It takes me a long time to get the poems in the right order. I want each poem to speak to the poem either side of it, whether its in accordance or is argumentative with a poem, I really don’t mind but I feel strongly that each poem needs to speak in some way to its neighbour. Often I think that might only be something that I’m aware of, possibly a reader might be unaware of this but it’s important to me. I don’t think anyone just flings their poems up into the air and places them as they land. Someone’s going to write in now and say that they do, ha ha. I’m running a day’s workshop in London for the Poetry School on crafting a collection in the autumn. It’s something I could go on and on about but I’ll stop there.

What are you working on at the moment?

I’m preparing for various festivals and events coming up over the summer and autumn, where I’m doing a lot of readings with Battery Rocks, the collection is a ‘meditation on nature, risk, swimming and the sea’. And I’m finalising the manuscript for a new pamphlet called dance as if, which will be out in the autumn with Verve Poetry Press. dance as if came about from a collaboration with a dancer/choreographer, Kyra Norman. Me and Kyra have danced together, alongside discussing the similarities and differences between poetry and dance over a couple of years. Finding contemporary dance has really helped me get out of my head and into my body. dance as if, is the result. I hope people will enjoy it, even if they know nothing about dance. I always remind myself that I knew nothing about poetry until I was in my late twenties. Who knows what can bite any of us?

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!

The Slow Horses TV show won two BAFTAS this year and has previously been nominated for a Golden Globe. How does that feel?

It feels good. A lot of hard work has gone into making the show, and I’m delighted that those responsible are being recognised.

What do you think made you a writer? Did your parents or a teacher push you? Or was it just genetic?

Being a reader made me a writer. My mother was a primary school teacher and taught me to read before I went to school. I remember reading lessons going on where I was reading alone with the teacher, rather than in groups with everyone else as I was ahead of them in ability.

There was no need in childhood to escape from my siblings or parents. Reading just seemed more fun than real life and it absorbed me. I think it was inevitable that I’d become a writer because writing fiction is taking part in a dialogue. It’s not a monologue – it’s about responding to all the books you’ve ever read. And I just always wanted to do that. Of course it wasn’t until much later, in my 20s, when I basically had a conversation with myself about it. Said, ‘if you’re serious about this, you’ve got to start writing every day.’ It was a long time before I got to publication, but then, that particular process is always a long one.

Now that the Slow Horses TV adaptation has been produced, do you ever feel that it affects your writing at all? For example, do you see Gary Oldman when you’re writing about Jackson Lamb?

No, not really, because I’ve never had much of a visual imagination. It’s more about having my characters’ voices in my head: a sense of what they sound like, both in terms of what they say and how they deliver their words. I feel that the actors have done such fantastic jobs that, for me, there’s been no interruption in my feelings about the characters from before the TV show was made.

But in many ways, I’ll be the last to notice, because I live in the words so deeply. I’m currently writing another Slow Horses book, for the first time since the TV show aired, and I think I’m carrying on doing what I always did, just writing to the voices. But I notice that when I read stuff over, I can find myself pausing on a line and thinking about how the actors might ‘do this one’. I don’t think it’s affecting the way I’m writing, though.

What are your main/lasting memories of the Slow Horses adaptation process?

When the adaptation process started, my feeling was that it would be a matter of subtraction. That stuff would need to be cut to make it work on screen. Instead – and this took a while for me to understand – it was more complicated. Yes, there were cuts, but so much was also being added. And this is the advantage of having such a tremendous cast. Saskia Reeves can do with a look what it would take me an entire paragraph to describe. She brings the character of Catherine Standish to life in ways beyond what the printed word is capable of. There’s all sorts of stuff that the actors are bringing to the screen. It’s a very different narrative of storytelling to the page.

 How did the show come together with such a fantastic team. And how did your production company persuade Mick Jagger to write The Slow Horses Theme Tune?

It was a long, drawn-out process – particularly in the early stages. Anyone who’s worked in TV knows there can be years between the first meeting and the show being screened and that was certainly my experience. It seemed like little was going on much of the time. I’d receive calls saying ‘so-and-so is interested in getting involved,’ but then there’d be nothing for months and sometimes they’d never be mentioned again.

The fantastic Will Smith came on board as a screenwriter, and various drafts of the script were written. There were still long stretches though – and I mean more than a year – where I didn’t hear anything at all. But it was bubbling away in the background and I just tried not to think about it.

Then two things happened quite close together. One was that Graham Yost came on board as a producer and showrunner. And the second thing to happen was that Gary Oldman signed up. Suddenly it was a done deal. I was told by producers that a lot of people they’d spoken to, directors and so on, had said, ‘No, we’re not very interested’. Suddenly they all found it a little more interesting.

The Mick Jagger thing was completely the opposite. It happened so quickly! I had no idea it was even on the cards until I got a phone call from Jamie Lawrenson, one of the producers, and from Will. ‘Guess who’s doing the music?’ they asked. I couldn’t believe it. Mick wrote the lyrics specifically for the show after he and the musical director had had discussions about what they wanted. They agreed on a sleazy London voice and Mick delivered on that. 

Writing aside, do you have any other sort of professional ambitions?

I never had career ambitions as such; I just wanted to write. While I was working on my first book (which took several years) I worked as a sub-editor. I didn’t see it as a career as such, but I enjoyed it – most of the time. And I was good at it! But really, it was just a way to support myself while writing. If I’d wanted to work my way up the promotion tree, it would have meant taking on a managerial role, which I never had any kind of drive to do and suspect I would have been awful at.

It’s lovely that people are making my books into TV, but it wouldn’t matter to me if that wasn’t happening, so long as I could continue to write full-time. I’ve been fortunate in the way things have turned out.

When you’re writing a book, do you ever let other people inside the writing bubble for a while? To get other opinions?

I don’t even tell anybody what it’s called until it’s finished. I keep everything private. I know that’s not how it’s always done now. Creative writing classes are more of a thing than they were when I started writing and they focus on a collaborative approach that involves feedback at every step of the way. But that doesn’t work for me. I find writing a personal pursuit. I don’t like people seeing early drafts because I know how poor they are and it’s only when I finish, when I think something is ready for publication, that I’ll let anyone else read it.

How much research do you do as part of your writing practice and do you enjoy it?

I’m not a researcher. With Slow Horses, there wasn’t much  research to do. What there was, I kept minimal, and focused more on character than anything else. For instance, readers don’t need to know exactly how telephone surveillance software works and I can’t face finding out. I’ll just describe Jackson Lamb pressing the button that makes it happen and then describe his reaction when he hears what’s being said.

I think if the reader believes in the characters and what they do, then that’s fine. It doesn’t have to be completely accurate. To be carried away by a story, we have to believe in the characters. That’s where I focus my efforts.

You’ve talked in interviews in the past about how you’ve taken characters from the Slow Horses series, and used them in other things that you’ve written, but that they’re perhaps not going by the names we know them by. Was this the case with Dolphin Junction, your collection of short stories?

No, but it’s true of The Secret Hours … I’m interested in a particular kind of character. So they all sort of inhabit the same world, because I tend to write about failures – people not getting on with life, not running their lives successfully. I suppose it’s a stable of characters that I find interesting. Elements of that kind of characters appear in most everything I write.

When I was writing The Secret Hours, though, I’d told my publishers I was writing a standalone book, because that’s what it started out as. And I thought I’d take a break from the Slow Horses series, but it ended up being far more entwined with the series than I’d expected it to be. Yes, familiar characters appeared under different names … I hadn’t told the publishers this was happening. Thankfully they went very quickly from being, ‘Yes, write your standalone,’ (because they were they were kind of supportive – but really wanted me to be writing the series), to being very enthusiastic.

Could you talk us through how you go about creating those characters.

I find that it really happens on the page, rather than in the abstract. When I was starting out, certainly when I started writing Slow Horses, I did write little paragraphs about each of the characters, trying to build backstories, a bit of biography… but it largely felt fake. That said, I needed a certain amount of hard data about each character, so that I could take off from there. But I found that once I put a character onto the page and had them interacting with another character, that’s when I found out what they sounded like and what they really thought. That’s when I really came up with their backstory, their private lives, all that kind of stuff.

I think it all comes down to conversation and description, which appears as I’m writing. For me, and I’m sure this is quite common, creativity is a dynamic process in that when you’re doing it, it energises itself. When you’re sitting in a room trying to think, ‘I’m going to write a novel,’ you could stare out the window for hours without anything happening. It’s when the work is going down on the page that it starts to become clear. I find it difficult to talk about, though – I recognise it when it’s happening, but struggle to describe it.

Can you talk us through your daily writing process. Do you write a certain number of words each day, or write for a set period of time, perhaps?

Many years ago, when I used to sit on that train for three hours each day going in and out of London, I’d use that time to think about what I was going to write when I got home. I didn’t realise how much thinking I was doing in those times until I stopped doing the job (and therefore taking the train each day). Back then, when I finally got home, I’d have an hour and a half when I’d write everything I’d been thinking about on those journeys and it was bliss. I wanted to do that bit all day every day, so I figured if I quit my job, I’d be able to do just that: sit at the desk and write all day long. But I quickly realised that what was lacking was the space in which to work out what I’d be writing about.

I decided I needed to find a way in my (new) daily life of having that brooding time. With no hour and a half deadline to write to when I got home each night, I found I was actually doing less writing than when I was working!

And there was no way you could have worked on the train?

No. I could do other kinds of work, but not writing. I used to review books, and I did plenty of that. But creating worlds and characters, that was something I wasn’t able to do on a busy train.

So what does your brooding time look like now? And how does it fit in with your writing time?

The number of words I write each day varies. I now know when I’ve written my last word of the day. For a while I used to sit trying to force more out and it never came or was rubbish if it did. Now, when I get that feeling that I’m done for the day, even if it’s before ten in the morning, I just embrace it. I read a lot. I go for walks. I listen to music. It’s all quite similar to dossing about, really.

What’s it like in the writers room, when you’re working on adaptations of your books?

I had thought it would be awful. I mean, again, going back to the idea of writing being a very private, personal thing to me, I’d imagined the writers room would involve people sitting around a table and me sulking in the corner, saying, ‘No, you’re getting it all wrong. Stop it.’ Instead, I found it very energising. There was a lot of experience there, and a lot of laughter. Graham was very good at managing us. He spent the first day asking us about ourselves. It was like a therapy group. He was saying, ‘tell us a bit about yourselves and get to know each other.’ It was a bonding routine.

Above and beyond that, everybody was treating the material with a huge amount of respect, talking about the characters as if they were real people. I don’t really do that, so it was quite extraordinary to me to hear the respect the groups were treating the characters with. It was over and above anything that I would have expected.

I’ve had books optioned before that never went anywhere. So it took a while before I thought, ‘actually this one is going to happen,’ and happen with writers who were really good and knew what they were doing, and that it was going to be something I’d be proud to be associated with. I became very enthused, always left the writers room feeling energised, about the books, about the characters, because they were taking them so seriously, discussing things like the way they dressed, where they went to school, questions I’d never thought about.

And all of this was necessary if the TV show was to have a life of its own. Everyone needed to know the characters as well as I did. It’s a different kind of storytelling and not one I was familiar with. It had to be allowed its own energy, its own space. I think to be successful, we had to allow both the writers and the actors to take possession of the characters

What’s your favourite book of your own? And why?

That’s tricky. I mean, I dislike being asked about my favourite book, because I think that you can have a favourite book if you’ve only read five books. Once you’ve read more than that, it gets difficult.

With my own books, Slow Horses obviously changed my life. It didn’t do it at the time – it took about a decade – but it did affect everything. So I’m very glad I wrote that. But the one I look back on with perhaps the most pride is Spook Street. It’s a book that, when I finished writing it, I hated it. I remember giving it to my publisher and saying, ‘I’m really sorry. I’ll do better next time.’ He came back to me a couple of days later and said, ‘What are you talking about?’

When I’m writing, I go all over the emotional graph, from thinking, ‘this is the best thing I’ve ever done,’ to ‘this is awful. I can’t rescue this.’ And that can happen overnight, without my having even looked at the book in the meantime. At the point of submitting a book to my publisher, I generally think it’s awful, and it takes about a year before I can think of it with anything other than a shudder. And I need to be working on the next thing. That’s when I can look back with a more balanced view.

Do you have any plans to write a memoir? Something like an Ian McEwan or Brett Ellis style Magnus Opus, perhaps?

Not remotely. I think all comes back to the writing, you know? A writer who’s doing his or her job well is just sitting in a room alone getting on with it. And there’s not much that’s interesting about that.

Going back to ‘Dolphin Junction’, your short story collection. How did you decide to structure it in the way that you did? Did it just the stories just kind of speak to each other? Or did you have an underlying narrative that you worked through?

There was no underlying narrative. In fact, with one exception, the stories had all been written a long time before the book was published – I don’t really write short stories anymore. I’d like to, but you can get away with more when you’re writing a novel. In the short story, you really need to bang the nail on the head.

Compiling the collection. I took all the stories I’d written or published and decided which ones I didn’t want to see again. The sequenced them in what I thought was the most effective way. Some of them were about the same characters, so they needed to be in a specific order. For the rest, it was just instinct.

The poets among you will know that the order on which you present poems is hugely important, and is rarely the order in which they were written. True, this matters more to the poet than it does to anyone else … But still, it feels like there’s a correct order. I tried to achieve that when arranging the stories. 

And did you find that you were amending the stories as you were putting them together, so that they worked as a collection.

I don’t remember adjusting anything. There might have been one or two continuity things because as I say, some of the some of the stories are about the same characters, but I don’t think they’re connected enough that that was necessary. 

Do you like reading short story collections? And, given recently reported sales increases, do you think the tide of opinion is turning towards them?

Publishers have a strange attitude toward short story collections. They seem reluctant to commit to them, as if readers shy away from them.But there’s something magical about the uninterrupted effect of a short story that you can read from start to finish in one sitting without having to reinvest yourself in it. When you’re reading a novel, you have to put it down, get on with your life, then come back and re-engage with the story over and over. With short stories, you sit down and read the whole thing from start to finish without any interruption. I think most committed fiction readers appreciate this. It’s like getting your narrative fix in one shot. Readers love that! Publishers should rethink their game.