How did it feel winning the V.S. Pritchett Short Story Prize?

I was really shocked. I never go to these things expecting to win, but it just felt so apt for this story to be recognised. I’m from Stoke-on-Trent, and this year marks 100 years of Stoke-on-Trent’s city status, and I’m involved in  their centenary celebrations. The city plays such an important role in my writing, and because Blessing in Burslem is set there, (Burslem being one of the six towns that makes up the city) it felt like a really lovely thing to achieve in this centenary year.

Were you interested in literacy and writing from a young age?

I always say that I grew up with the chattering of working-class matriarchs who were always talking, gossiping, telling stories, never about themselves, always about each other, always full of old wives’ tales, urban myths and family legends. But they were also incredibly wise and really funny, just without the pretty articulation. ‘Scruffy wisdom’ is what I always call it, so, I guess I was hearing stories right from the start.

It was only when I  started to think seriously about writing as a career that these stories started to re-emerge. I’d read Alan Bennett’s ‘Talking Heads’ at Sixth Form College, and I remember thinking “I want to write like that”. Because he wrote about those ‘for whom life generally happens elsewhere,’ and it was those people whose stories never get told that I wanted to tell.

You originally worked in radio, how did the transition to author come about?

I’d worked in radio since a work experience at 15 became a ‘job’ I did whilst at university – helping to pay the rent, and then during my MA at the University of Manchester, my part-time job at Kiss shifted into marketing and events for the Galaxy rebrand and so post MA, I went full time and spent the next 15 years in commercial radio launching regional stations or looking after the events programme.

I was still writing but writing for radio – blogs, web content, or coming up with marketing initiatives and ‘ideas’, but it was during my last position as Marketing Director where I was working on capital of culture projects at Radio City when I saw an advert for a short story competition in my local bookshop and I just thought “I’m going to have a go”. I ended up coming 2^nd and one of the judges came and asked me if I had other stories and when I said no, she told me to seriously think about that. It really struck a chord with me because I’d always written, never published, but would occasionally send off a story that would place in a competition and perhaps for the first time I thought “maybe I’ve got something here”.

I was 32 and thought that if I don’t do this now, I never will but didn’t know any writers, didn’t know how to ‘become’ one as it were, knew I would still need to work so did what I knew which was academia; applied to do a PhD in creative and critical writing at Bangor University and that was how it all started. Then, in 2009, whilst writing my nan’s eulogy and remembering all the things that she used to say to me as a little girl, I realised I was actually writing a short story.  I called it Broken Crockery and sent it to the Guardian’s short story competition on a whim. And it won  It was my first publishing credit in a national broadsheet magazine and suddenly I was writing.

Moving on to Blessing in Burslem, what inspired you to write from the perspective of the Windrush generation?

I’m always trying to challenge myself to create a different voice, or to give a voice, to an underrepresented, marginalised life that perhaps wouldn’t otherwise get that platform; an ordinary life lived by somebody who’d been living here completely invisibly. Because there are many, many people who exist on the perimeters, completely invisible. I’d been thinking about the Windrush generation that was still in the news, and I was so outraged, so frustrated, when this was their home and I often do this: when I can’t do something directly I can at least write about it. So I did.

I was also thinking about the female body – for a different story entirely – but I started to think about identity being stripped away and what if  this was about a body being disrobed with every layer revealing another part of the self. How would that make the invisible visible? How would somebody then see that person for who they really are, especially after trying to hide this body so they don’t stand out? The body is full of stories, even though we keep many of our stories to ourselves, but they can be interpreted by those who observe through art. So that became the idea. Blessing would, on a whim, apply to be a close nude in a life drawing class and as the ‘outside’ of her is being painted, the ‘inside’ stories are coming to the fore.

What draws you to the short story format?

I feel like I can do so much with it in a short space of time. Sometimes with the novel, I feel like I’m trying to say too much. I’m trying to pull and fill things out that don’t need to be there. And I always say that a really good short story is not the one you’ve just read, but the one you’re left thinking about.

I think also you can play with voice so much more in a short story, because you can have a very strong polemical voice for 2,000 words and people perhaps won’t feel as pummelled by it as in a 60,000 word novel. You can leave things up in the air for the reader to carry on contemplating and, like I say, the short story can also become a very potent, provocative way of writing about something that I can’t do anything about. But I can put this woman’s life in the spotlight for a very short space of time, and hope it grabs someone’s attention.

How do you like to approach the writing process, meticulous planning or something looser?

I just see where things go, but I’d like to be a better planner. It’s mainly because of time constraints. I lecture, I have a family. So as much I would love to write every day with a meticulous focus, I have to write in snatches when and where I can. So, everything starts off long-hand in notebooks, in my diary, little bits of conversation and dialogue, and then I start to ask myself what I want the story to be about. I sometimes pose myself a question. What is this person’s objective? How do I get her from A to C via B? And then I just play with voice until I have it absolutely watertight in the hope that the reader will follow it anywhere.

Blessing in Burslem started off as a third-person, then it went to first-person, and both dragged their heels on the story. It was a week before I sent it in to the competition that I changed it to second-person because I suddenly started thinking about how the  second-person allows that sense of detachment which is what she’s trying to do. She’s trying to detach herself in order to see herself. So I changed the whole thing and the immediacy of it jumped off the page. It has a rhythm to it as well. She can have these long monologues  where it’s all tripping off the tongue really quickly, and then she can slow it down because she’s getting more meditative about it and fluctuating between all her pronouns – I, me, you. It enabled her to have conversations with herself, with her deceased husband, with the reader, and it just worked so much better.

Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?

Just do it. I know I’m really lucky, because I’ve been able to go through the academic route, largely on bursaries and scholarships which has meant that I’ve always worked alongside other writers and had to share my work. I do think that it’s massively important to always be part of a writing group to build up confidence, it’s also a way of working out why you respond to prompts as you do.

And never throw anything away. I’ve got stuff in carrier bags from when I was writing at university that I was able to recycle for a collection that got published 25 years later. I think I’ve always been writing – snippets, journals, blogs, thoughts, story ideas, and that’s what you need to do, because writing is an art, a craft, a job, and like anything, it takes practice. Just do it every day, even if it’s writing your diary. Virginia Woolf always said that if she didn’t write it she wouldn’t find ‘the diamonds in the dust heap’. I always loved that phrase, because I think that’s what I do. Sometimes you’ve just got to get it down on paper, and you’ll find that a couple of sentences will be the start of something bigger. So just do it, and never throw anything away.

You can learn more about Lisa and her works here.