Clare Wigfall at CHAI

Last Saturday afternoon at CHAI House, Clare Wigfall met with book-lovers to talk about her writing and read her prize-winning short-story The Numbers to us. (The story is linked from this page.)

She said that when she wrote the story in Scottish dialect, she never imagined that she would end up having to read it in front of audiences. (Her husband, Troy, had previously joked that she sounds Russian when she reads it aloud, but I'm glad to say I think he was just winding her up!)

She talked about how she wanted the story to play with expectations and how she had deliberately left many things unsaid in the piece - because she herself most enjoys fiction that makes her brain work.  She said that she had originally wanted to write about American anthropologist Margret Fay Shaw who moved to the Outer Hebrides to record music in the 1920s. Clare said that she had never been to that part of Scotland and her rendering of the dialect and the largely pagan atmosphere of the story upset some Scottish scholars. (You can get the flavour of the discussion here.)

She also read another story from her collection The Loudest Sound and Nothing, called When the Wasps Drowned, which was a disturbing story about some children who stumble across a dead body at the edge of their garden. (It reminded me a little of Ian McEwan's The Cement Garden.) You can read the whole story here and also hear Clare reading it at a book launch.) 

Clare also told us something of a fascinating family story which is going to be the basis of the novel she is writing and concerns a great-grandmother who went missing in Penang. She had some beautiful old photos to share with us and  (including one of her grandmother as a  young girl - a portrait so full of life and unlike the posed shots of yesteryear that you'd think it taken recently).  So now her research brings her here.

It has been so good to meet her and Troy and baby Elsa.  Thanks CHAI hosue for hosting this and to Eric and May Lee for who made friends with short story writers across the world when they were putting Quill magazine together.  Eric also managed to get some copies of the book which were snapped up very quickly.


(Thanks May Lee for sending me this lovely picture!) 

Clare Wigfall in KL

(UK) National Short Story Prize 2008 winner Clare Wigfall is going to be working on a new collection of short stories, and a novel for Faber &Faber :

You might be surprised to learn that the novel is set in British Malaya. It will be fictional, but is loosely based on the story of my grandmother who grew up in Penang and about her mother who left her when she was a small baby.

Best news of all though, is that Clare will be here (with baby daughter Elsa Rowan and husband in tow) to research her novel next month.  She told Eric Forbes :

I still can’t quite believe we are making the trip—Berlin is still cloaked under what seems to be a never-ending layer of ice and snow—will spring never come? It will really be surreal to arrive in Malaysia with its tropical climate! Just yesterday I was talking with my husband and saying I wonder what my grandmother would think to know her granddaughter and great-granddaughter are now tracing her footsteps.

And yes, of course, we are going to organise an event where you can all get to meet her.  At the moment e-mails are flying in all directions to get something fixed up - so watch this space for updates.

I think there are some very big fans of Clare's already among those of us who recently attended the British Council's recent workshop as we studied her winning story The Numbers.  

Eric Forbes interviewed her for Quill magazine last year, and you can read the piece here.

Short Story Scoops

On Eric Forbes' blog, Eric and colleague Janet Tay scoop a couple of interviews with authors nominated (as of course Wena Poon is) for the Frank O'Connor Short Story Prize.

Nam Le is a Vietnamese-born author, raised in Australia and his whose 7-story collection The Boat has already received some very positive reviews (see his website) ; and British author Clare Wigfall who wrote The Loudest Sound and Nothing.

Wigfall has this to say about writing the short story :

One aspect I appreciate is the economy of the form; the story must create a world, a mood, a plot, wholly-real characters, an exploration of life and its complexities, and all within the space of only a few pages. There’s something almost beautifully mathematical and precise about it, and what you leave out is as important as what you leave in. For that reason, I suppose in a way your safety net is taken away, because when you write a short story you’re relying on an unknown quantity: your reader. With a novel you have the space to fill in all the gaps, with a short story you’re forced to leave these for your reader to complete—the difficulty for the author is getting the balance perfectly right, creating something that will satisfy.
This is probably what makes short stories—when they’re written well—such an intellectually demanding form of literature, and I suspect is why so many readers shun them. Those who like to stretch their minds and imaginations when they read often feel passionately about the form. A great short story may be brief, but it demands and relies upon personal investment from the reader. I believe this is why the very best short stories can haunt you long after you’ve read the concluding line, because so much of the experience is not just about the words on the page, but is individual to you and the way your own brain interprets and digests what you’ve read. There’s something magical about that.

Elsewhere, Eric also lets us in on his tips for this year's Booker!