Interviewing Penny Jones

Hellooo!

Last week I reviewed the excellent horror collection Behind A Broken Smile by Penny Jones with a host of excellent short fiction tales that all take you inside the character’s heads and get to see how they see the world. I’ve been a huge fan of Penny’s work for a few years now and so was delighted to have the chance to ask a few questions about the new book.

How would you booktempt Behind A Broken Smile?

James Worrad did my cover and I love it, I think it’s both beautiful and disturbing in equal measure, so I would probably just shake it in someone’s face and go “Wooooo” in a ghostly manner, hoping to entice them with its beauty. If that didn’t work, I’d probably ask if they wanted to read about the everyday horrors that lurked just round the corner.

A lot of your stories are about explaining a character’s version of reality to a reader. What attracts you to that approach?

I’m a big fan of the unreliable narrator in stories, whether that be due to the mental state of the narrator, their age, or just that they’re in a situation that is new to them. I love the fact that we always see things with our own biases be they conscious or unconscious. I also love the fact that we are all the protagonist in our own stories. A few years ago there was a raft of new vocabulary that kept being posting on-line, one of these was Sonder - The realisation that everyone, including strangers passing in the street, has a life as complex as your own, which they continue to live, despite your own personal lack of awareness of it. I’ve always been slightly sad that this term is one that hasn’t come into daily usage, as I feel the concept, understand and kindness behind it is an important one. As I said before we are all the protagonist in our own story, but in somebody else’s we’re just the supporting cast at best, and the villain at worst.

What comes first – the character or the situation they are in?

Always the situation. A lot of my stories start from me thinking There but for fortune go I. Through my life, both personal and professional, I have come across people who due to nothing more than circumstance have had to make some terrible decisions; some of these decisions they have been in control of, some of them they haven’t; but often they don’t have the opportunity for those decisions to be either what they want, what is best for them, or what the world deems as ideal. To presume that someone will always want, or be free, to make the most moralist decision comes from a space of privilege that really only exists in the saccharine world of Disney. My stories tend to go through several tellings in my own mind, they’re often from a place of truth (experience, news, social media), I then try to retell the story to myself without the bias of media or friendship for example. I then take Stephen King’s advice and apply What if? to the story, and think how I might react to being in that same situation. I try to take my emotional reactions and responses, then study them and think how other people would react, what would be different? What would happen if they kept making the wrong decision? If I kept making the wrong decision? The character chosen is usually whichever I think makes the most interesting story with the situation given.

How was the process of choosing what goes in the collection?

The backbone of the collection for me was always about looking at the fragility of mental health, at how and what impacts it, and how those triggers can be something so commonplace.  That something that seems boring and mundane to one, can be terrifying to another. I did make the decision for the collection to not be 100% horror, as although I would categorise myself as a horror writer, not everything I write is. It was a decision I didn’t take lightly, but the stories such as Places to Run, Places to Hide I feel fit well within the collection, and I’m so glad that my publisher was so supportive of me encompassing different styles and genres within the collection.

The other part of the process for me was looking at mirroring the collection, so the first and last stories both are about the protagonist’s relationship with a doll, there are stories about nature, cars, mental health; long stories, flash fiction, psychological horror, weird fiction; but each piece from the start of the book to the end is to my mind an echo of its sibling. As I mentioned earlier, I like to take the situation and see how different people would respond, and how their story would differ to another’s.

While looking back at these tales do you think the way you have approached short fiction has changed?

I think from a purely ideas point of view there hasn’t been much change in my writing, but I hope that from a stylistic view that my narratorial voice is becoming more my own (though there are certain stories in this collection that I have tried to emulate other authors who I admire, as a homage to them). I also hope that my grammar is getting better, I moved schools between Wales and England and missed the lessons on punctuation. My teacher on realising this tried to teach me by telling me that you use a full stop when you stop to take a breath, and a comma when things are connected. Well, anyone who has met me knows I never stop for breath, and in my mind, everything is connected.

What else can we look forward to from you in the future and where can we find out more?

I had really bad writer’s block earlier this year. I knew what I needed to write but I just couldn’t bring myself to sit down at the computer. I think it was partly exhaustion and partly impostor syndrome. Not going to conventions and having that sounding board for ideas and discussion was a real drain on my writing ability. I also for once found myself without a deadline, and I cannot write without a deadline. I decided to utilise the skills of Alex Davies, who is well-known within the UK genre scene, and we developed a Kick Penny up the ar*e package; I have just finished working with him on a haunted house novella called Wayside, which is currently out with beta readers, and I’ve just started today on my new novel, a thriller called The Poor Door.

What great books have you read recently?

There are so many, but I think my top reads of last year were Piranesi by Susanna Clarke and Things We Say in the Dark by Kirsty Logan. I loved what they both did with the form in their storytelling. Their unreliable narrators were both written with such depth and love, and there was a beauty to their tales that seemed to come from within the narrator, rather than from the writer or reader.