SJ Bradley interviewed by Katy Wimhurst.
3:AM: When did you start telling stories and why do you think they are important?
SJ Bradley: I’ve been doing it ever since I was a little kid. Ever since I was in primary school I was obsessed with writing and telling stories, and reading everything I could get my hands on. I read everything in the library, and I used to read my Mum’s magazines, and in Secondary school I used to write all sorts of stuff, scripts and stories and novels, constantly. There was this one Physics teacher who read everything I wrote and kept telling me to keep going with it. I don’t know how he made the time to read it all, but I’m glad he did.
Stories are how we understand the world – they’re how we make sense of things and convey ideas to others. They’re key to understanding other people’s points of view and entering somebody else’s reality. They’re an escape. They’re important for all sorts of reasons.
3:AM: Your book of short stories recently published is Maps of Imaginary Towns (Fly on the Wall Press), described as ‘gritty yet tender’. Can you say something about putting this collection together? A number of the stories have been previously published in anthologies and magazines. How did you decide which stories to include in the collection and indeed in what order to arrange them?
SJB: It’s the result of many years’ work, this book. I had loads of short stories lying around, published and unpublished, and during the pandemic I was doing a Facetime-based writing retreat with a poet friend of mine, and she told me about how she puts a collection together, which is to write down the title of each story, and a brief summary of what the story’s about, what the themes are, and put it on an index card. So I did that with all of the stories I wanted to put into a collection, and put them on the rug and kept moving them about. When I looked at it all together, the old stuff and the new stuff that I was working on at the time, there were really clear themes that emerged – like the impact of austerity, ideas about community and hope and escape – and even though some of the stories were written at different times, and in different genres, it was so clear that there were themes that tied the stories in the book together. When it comes to ordering, that really was just a matter of moving the cards around until it felt like the collection had a bit of an arc and a rhythm to it. In the early part of the collection there’s a grouping by theme that’s to do with austerity, then it flows onto some of the weirder stuff, like ‘The Stonechat’ and ‘Meet Yourself Coming Back’ and ‘Toro’, then on into some of the funnier and more hopeful family-based stories like ‘Coming Attractions’, ‘Top Dog’ and ‘Harmony Grows’. I was really keen to finish on an optimistic note and that was why I put ‘Dead Letters’ last.
3:AM: One theme of the collection is the impact of austerity. In ‘Discrepancy Matrix’, cuts to their budget leave social workers struggling under huge workloads, without enough resources. ‘The Gordon Trask’ is about the underfunding and then closure of a place that offers music classes and activities to children and the community. Why do you consider these important stories to tell? And what sort of research did you have to do to ensure they read authentically?
SJB: A lot of it was just based on things that I was seeing every day at work. ‘The Gordon Trask’ is based on a true story about a music centre that closed down, back when I was working in the special needs arts education service in Leeds. Other stuff was based on things that I’d learned when I’d been working in education or in children’s charities. You hear and see things that you’d rather not know about. Austerity is no joke. It’s ruined people’s lives. The last fourteen years have been a pretty grim time and in a lot of the places where I worked, people often felt powerless, they felt like they weren’t being listened to. I wanted to counter that by writing about some of the things I was seeing and hearing.
It felt important to me to tell these stories, and I didn’t know of anybody else doing the same thing. If somebody else had been doing it, I might have leaned harder into the speculative end of things. But as far as I knew, nobody else was, so I kept on with it.
It would be great if we started to see an end of austerity. For one thing, it’s been a horrible time for a lot of people. And for another, I’d really like to start writing about other things.
3:AM: There are realistic and sci-fi/speculative stories in the collection. The latter tend to be about human rather than technological problems and often extrapolate from tendencies in our world. The first story, ‘Backstreet Nursery 2050’, for instance, explores a failing democracy and underfunded social services, set in the future. Do you think that speculative fiction sometimes offers a more powerful lens for interrogating contemporary concerns?
SJB: Definitely. ‘Backstreet Nursery’ and ‘Genus’, and some of the other more speculative stories, are basically concept-driven fiction. They’re led by me asking the question, “what if the Government was led by civil servants, instead of elected officials?” and trying to see what the outcome of that might be. In the aftermath of Brexit I kept hearing people say politicians should be held accountable for lying, and that they should get punished if they knowingly lie while they’re campaigning. Or that we should introduce a jury service style system for our politicians, instead of voting for them. I was really interested in those two ideas, and the story arose out of that. These questions can’t really be answered in realist fiction. It’s only by going full speculative that you can follow the question to its conclusion. Speculative fiction is also the only way we can envision a radically reorganised society and imagine what the problems of such a society might be. Even an idealist like me has to admit there might be some problems.
3:AM: You put a lot of care into the creation of realistic characters, even when the stories are only a few pages long. How do you go about bringing your characters to life, especially in a very short word-count? Do you have any favourite characters in the collection?
SJB: Thank you for noticing. Realistic characters make anything believable, even when your story’s set on another planet. Even in short fiction, it’s useful to have a full sense of your character, who they are, how they might act in any given situation. It helps that I’ve worked in so many public-facing frontline roles, and that I meet such a lot of interesting people every day at work. I’m also an avid listener of other people’s conversations, in the library and on the bus and in the street and in the supermarket. Sometimes I wear headphones so it looks like I’m not listening in, but secretly, I am. I’m a terrible ear-wigger. Never say anything important near me, because I’ll file it away somewhere and it’ll end up in a story. Anyway, if you’re saying my characters are realistic, obviously it’s all paid off.
My top tip for anybody wanting to do the same is never wear headphones, unless you’re only doing it to hide the fact you’re ear-wigging.
3:AM: A lot of your story endings seem fairly open-ended. A recent review said the stories ‘resist closure: quandaries continue after the final page is turned, people face uncertain futures and ambiguities are unresolved.’ Do you agree with that sentiment and if so, why do you choose this kind of ending?
SJB: I really like the endings in Raymond Carver and M John Harrison’s stories, where the endings are ambiguous, where you’re wondering what’s going to happen to the characters at the end of the story. An ending like that allows the characters to have an ongoing life that goes on in the reader’s mind after the story has finished.
I don’t like treating the reader as though they’re an idiot. The approach that I like is when the reader enters the story, engages with the characters and the world, and draws their own conclusions. So much of my work is based on real life, and real life doesn’t have neat endings. I want the reader to go away still thinking about what they’ve just read, and to me, an open ending is the best way to do that.
3:AM: You also have written novels, Guest (2017), a fictional look at the infiltration of the Green movement by police officers who engaged in long-term relationships with protestors, and Brick Mother (2014), set in an underfunded and understaffed psychiatric unit. The social and political dimensions of your novels echo those of the short stories in Maps of Imaginary Worlds. What have you found the main differences between addressing these issues when writing a novel and a short story, and which form do you prefer (if either)?
SJB: I wouldn’t say that I prefer one over the other, only that the story dictates the form. A novel allows you to tell a story from multiple perspectives, which is what I did in Brick Mother. It also allows you to get deeper into the psychological and emotional effects of a series of events on a single character, which is why it was the right form for Guest. Up until now I’ve found it hard to sustain a speculative approach across a whole novel. It’s sort of something I’ve been working my way up to. For me, genre is a bit like dipping into the dressing-up box. That’s how I’ve ended up with stories that aren’t quite realist and aren’t quite speculative, like ‘I Want You Around’ and ‘The Stonechat’. A thing I’d like to do next is to write a fully speculative novel. That’s something I’m working on at the moment.
3:AM: On your website, it says you are involved in The LS6 Living Museum in Leeds, a project you have been working on with the Hyde Park Picture House, which includes capturing memories and stories from the local area. Can you say a bit about this project and why it interests you as a storyteller?
SJB: The LS6 area is where I lived as a student, and it’s such an interesting area with a lot of great history. Leeds, unlike most other cities, still has hundreds of back to back houses, most of which were built around the turn of the 20th century. They were usually worker’s houses, for the nearby tanner or dyeing plants, or for the quarry. They’re poor quality housing, with no insulation of any kind, and because they’re back to backs, you get an awful lot of people living together in very close proximity.
I’ve always felt like there’s a lot of fascinating untold stories in these houses, in what is quite a small area of Leeds. The LS6 Living Museum has been about capturing that history and gathering audio stories where people tell me their memories of the area, and gathering it all together so that people who live in the area can learn more about their neighbours, and about who else used to live in the house where they now live. Sort of like a budget version of ‘A House Through Time’, but for whole streets of back to back housing.
I’d like to do more of it, but unfortunately there’s no ongoing funding for that project at the moment, and I’m not at the point where I can keep doing the volume of work needed to continue to gather the stories as a volunteer. I spent ages on a couple of grant applications last year that unfortunately got turned down. If any of your readers know of any grants or funding, or want to donate to help me continue on with it as a project, I’d love to hear from them.
3:AM: What are you working on at the moment? Any projects in the pipeline you would like to tell our readers about?
SJB: I’m currently developing some new audio scripts for a series called Uneasy Listening, a series of audio plays that will be shown in local theatres and community centres and then ultimately recorded and produced as a podcast. The script reads will be open to anyone.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWEE
SJ Bradley (above) is a writer from Wakefield whose short fiction has been published in the US, UK and Ireland, including in Comma Press’s Resist! anthology. She is the winner of a K Blundell Trust Award, and a Saboteur Award for her work as editor on Remembering Oluwale. She is a recent graduate of Cambridge University’s PG Cert in Teaching Creative Writing, which she attended with a bursary from First Story. She teaches short story writing for Comma Press, was director and instigator of the Northern Short Story Festival, and has been writer in residence for First Story in Leeds and Bradford.
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
Katy Wimhurst’s first collection of short stories was Snapshots of the Apocalypse (Fly on the Wall Press, 2022) and her second collection Let Them Float (Alien Buddha Press, 2023). Her fiction has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies including The Guardian, Writers’ Forum, Cafe Irreal, Kaleidotrope, and ShooterLit. Her first book of visual poems, Fifty-One Trillion Bits, was published by Trickhouse Press (2023). She sometimes writes essays on speculative fiction and interviews writers for 3:AM Magazine. She is housebound with the illness M.E.
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English (United States) ·