Insignificant Gestures is longlisted for the 2011 Edge Hill Short Story Prize, and is available to order from Pewter Rose Press. Author Jo Cannon came by today for this mini-interview.
Jo, welcome. Congratulations on publishing your debut collection of short stories, ‘Insignificant Gestures’, and thanks for swinging by as part of your blog tour for the book. Having read the collection, although I love the title story, I think probably Needle-stick Baby is my favourite. Is it set in a place you’ve lived in? And what is the illness that the doctor is exposed to?
Thanks, Lane, I’m glad you enjoyed that story. It is set in an English city, probably Sheffield, which for unspecified reasons has become anarchic. But the straitened conditions in which the protagonist, David, works are taken from my memories of working in Malawi as a young doctor, where I received a serious needle-stick injury in similar circumstances.
The hostile patients and looting by staff are based on events in Iraqi hospitals during the Gulf War. At that time my children were young, and my irrational fears – which we later learned were whipped up through a process of disinformation – focused on separation from them, probably because my mother was a child evacuee in world war two. One of the terrible consequences of war is that children are unprotected, and in Needle-stick Baby, David’s anxiety is heightened because his evacuated daughter has Down’s Syndrome.
However, the backdrop to the story may not be real. David has been abandoned by his wife, and the dystopia may just be a projection of his traumatized, chaotic inner world. David’s needle-stick injury exposes him to HIV-AIDS. There is a four month incubation period before he experiences the – possible – conversion illness. But in my story, this is a moment of liberation; a metaphor for the acceptance of mortality.
Hmm, so there’s an element of hypochondria. Although health fears are justified, even sensible, if you’re exposed health hazards as part of your job… But are we all a bit hypochondriac these days, and if so, why? Is it because of the Daily Mail telling us that just about everything causes – or cures – cancer?
It’s a great question, Lane. I could pontificate at length, but don’t wish to clog your blog! Hypochondria is more often called somatisation these days. Your Daily Mail reader could be described as hyper vigilant. We are healthier than ever, but people seem consumed with health anxieties. Certainly media scares are implicated. Maybe once the necessities of life are secure, we develop unrealistic expectations that our bodies will function perfectly for ninety years, so any ailment seems an outrage. In a secular society, we are less ready to be fatalistic. Yet there is a skewed assessment of risk: we strap our kids into a metal box and hurtle about, putting them in real danger, whilst worrying about more tenuous threats.
OK, well sorry for sidetracking on medical things Jo. I guess one occupational hazard of being a GP must be that people seek your opinion on all things medical. Back to your stories now. ‘Insignificant Gestures’, the title story in your collection, was first published in the Fish Prize 2007 anthology. I pulled out my copy of the anthology recently, wondering if I’d change anything were my story in it to be republished. I noticed then that further edits had been made to ‘Insignificant Gestures’; was it the Pewter Rose Press editor or your self-editor who prompted those changes?
I edited all the stories hard, almost rewriting them, before submitting them as a collection. I’ve been on a steep learning curve for the last five years. The original version of ‘Insignificant Gestures’ seems clumsy to me now. My editor asked for a few corrections. She dislikes excessive use of semi-colons, and the word ‘suddenly’. Often, after an inner struggle and some argy-bargy, I reluctantly accepted she was right! I was an irritating author to work with.
All the indications from shops are that people do not buy short stories. Do you think that is true or not? And what do you think is the point, in the end, of short stories?
Sadly, it is true in the UK. I read them for an intense blast of meaning and language. But maybe you mean what is the point of writing stories? In an existential sense, none at all! Yet between birth and death some hours remain unoccupied by work, child rearing or the vegetative functions of life, which must be filled.
According to Tove Jansson’s ‘Comet in Moominland’ – which I heard discussed this weekend as a philosophical work – though the meteorite approaches that will obliterate us, still there is merit in baking a delicious cake to share with friends. We must go wherever our creativity takes us. For my husband this means clinging to a crag at the end of a rope; for me, it is writing short stories.
Nicely put! Jo, thanks a lot for dropping by, and all the best with the collection, and your future writing.
Thanks for your interest and support, Lane. I’ve enjoyed your stories too, and shall look out for them in the future.
