Following on from the longlist announcement of the 2016/17 GBP Short Story Prize, we asked each of the thirteen writers three questions about themselves, their story, and their inspirations. Here's Fiona J. Mackintosh, whose longlisted short story Interstate will soon be available to read as a digital single. You'll also find a short biography of Fiona after her answers.   

 

 

I’ve been writing all my life. As a kid growing up in Scotland every time I’d finish a book I loved, I’d start “writing” one in the same vein to try to keep the magic going. But I only started writing fiction seriously – with a view to getting published – when I moved to the US in 1987. Before then I had been living in London with jobs that took up every waking moment and left me no time, energy or imagination to spare. It was only when I ran away from all that and came to live in Washington DC that my real writing life began. I was working in a bookshop so had no money but finally had some free time in my life to write, and within a year I’d had two stories published. Eventually I became part of a dynamic group of women writers who became my lifelong friends and supporters (and vice versa).  

 

Over the years since then, I’ve been working on two enormous book projects. Albion’s Millennium is a multi-book fictional saga following two British families through the upheavals of the 20th century. And Children of Eden is the non-fiction biography of the royal family in 19th-century Tahiti, a story so wide that it encompasses the Jewish community in Dickensian London, the Scottish aristocracy, and the American Civil War. 

 

I only recently started writing short pieces again and have been delighted by the response. In 2016, I had over a dozen flashes and short stories published in the US and the UK, won a couple of contests, and was honoured to receive a 2016 Individual Artist Award in Fiction from the Maryland State Arts Council. And now 2017 has started with a bang – I’m thrilled that my story “Interstate” has been longlisted for the Galley Beggar Short Story Prize. I absolutely loved last year’s winning story by the very talented Ríona Judge McCormack.   

 

 

My husband and I often drive up I-270 to visit family in Gaithersburg, Maryland. One evening as we were on the highway, I noticed a hotel in the middle of a deserted business park and wondered what it would be like to be stranded there without a car, the loneliness of it. Many of us have been alone in those hotel coffee shops on business trips and can relate to Gail’s desperate need to keep the darkness at bay. Otherwise the characters and their circumstances come completely from my imagination. In “Interstate” I wanted to evoke the mood of those Edward Hopper paintings with two people in a room who are - or might as well be – strangers with icebergs of unspoken stories lurking beneath the surface. I must say I’ve never felt as much love for any character of mine as I feel for Julio, for his gentleness, his sadness about his exile from Cuba and about his children growing up too fast. 

   

 

Alice Munro, Alice Munro, Alice Munro! Her prose is measured and unadorned but manages to depict the familiar in new and unexpected ways. She writes about lives that are "dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable - deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum" as she herself said in Lives of Girls and Women. I (humbly) aspire to write in the same tradition, about actual human lives rooted in reality - birth, death, relationships, financial struggles, depression, growth, unexpected encounters, and moments of grace. 

 

Then there’s Katherine Mansfield – “Bliss” is an almost perfect story. I am also a massive fan of Carys Davies - I wish I’d written every single story in The Redemption of Galen Pike. And then there’s Danielle McLaughlin, Thomas Morris, Annemarie Neary ... I could go on and on!