The Seeds of Inspiration: An Interview with Sam Reese [Full Interview]
Meet Sam Reese — short story fanatic, award winning author and creative writing mentor.
Ever since reading Sam’s book-length short story collection Come The Tide, I’d been looking forward to interviewing him. The man has a unique gift with words, and an affinity for crafting rich environments and scene settings. Come The Tide is one of those spellbinding books that kidnaps the reader, sucking them inexorably into the pages until they are utterly absorbed and unwittingly playing the role of the main character.
Sam is a bonafide globetrotter. Born and raised in New Zealand, Sam acquired his PhD in Australia before travelling the world (collecting places and characters for his books) before eventually settling in the UK. He’s currently using his considerable talents to nurture a new generation of writers at York St John University in the North of England whilst putting the finishing touches on his next two books.
Sam has published titles in both fiction and non-fiction. His work has earned him the Arthur Miller Centre First Book Prize, the Lazuli Literary Prize, first place in the Brittle Star Short Fiction Contest and finalist status for the Glimmer Train Short New Writer Award.
Q. So, you’re a self confessed short story nerd (“Yes!”), you enjoy reading essays and you’re an award winning critical writer. What is it about short form fiction and creative nonfiction essay that particularly captures your heart and attention?
So, for me it’s really about the poetry of language. I only really became interested in short stories at the end of high school. The few short stories I’d read really didn’t engage me, until one of my teachers gave me Catherine Mansfield’s short stories to read and that was a kind of revelation. Her stories used language in such a kind of poetic way and they don’t have a forced meaning, in the way that lots of the short stories I was ‘taught’ did — they were kind of like fables or they had a very clear moral at the end, whereas this was a way of writing that was very open, felt very free.
Also, I just like the fact that they’re easier to write than novels! I’ve tried writing longer fiction and every time I’ve tried writing a longer piece or I’ve had an idea that seemed like it was crying out to be a novel or a novella, I’ve got to about the thirty or forty thousand word mark and realised that actually, the idea was just a kind of short story idea. So in, I think, three cases now, I’ve written about between thirty and forty thousand words and ended up cutting it down to five or six thousand. I don’t recommend that as a process for composition. I don’t think you need to write eight times as much and then cut it down, but I do find that my particular way of imagining stories and imagining characters lends itself to shorter pieces that are more about a moment of insight or a moment of recognition rather than longer stories about progressive growth, or change over time.
Q. How many unfinished projects did you go through before you got to a finished project?
I started writing short stories semi-seriously when I was about seventeen. By the time I’d finished a collections-worth of short stories, I’d been writing short stories for about ten years. In that time, there were two long projects that I completed — I got to between forty and fifty thousand words — so at the very short end of what a possible novel length could be — and both times I sat on them for a while and realised they were actually a much short idea. So the first collection of short stories really was a process of trial and error and I think the earliest story in there is something I wrote in 2012. The book was published last June, 2019, so I guess there was about a seven year period between when I started writing things that actually became part of the collection and when the collection was finished.
I’ve got a much better idea of what I’m doing now! Or I feel like I do, anyway. And so, I’m actually at the point now where I’ve just finished my second collection of short stories. That has been a process of two years of writing. Over time, you definitely get better at understanding your own process as a writer and your own priorities and also how to project manage writing something the length of a book, because the only way to learn how to do that, is to do it. The good thing is that once you start learning, it’s actually really manageable and it’s something that you can learn how to do which makes sense to you.
Q. Are you an advocate of sticking with one project at a time or is it okay to bounce between a few different projects?
It’s definitely okay to bounce between projects! Definitely. For me, that’s one of the reasons why I like writing essays and nonfiction criticism at the same time that I’m writing short fiction because for me, I think it’s really important to be able to give ideas space. I always conceptualise it as kind of the back part of your brain — I don’t actually know scientifically whether that’s where your subconscious sits and does work when you’re not consciously thinking about things but that’s always where I imagine sending ideas when I’m not working on them. I always find that my subconscious will process them and build on them or make connections, so that when I come back to that project or I switch tracks, I’ve always got the next step or at least can see more clearly how I can get to the next step.
I’m also a big believer in a good record keeping system for bits you’ve written that you’re not sure what to do with, because what I’ve often found is that short stories that weren’t quite working will suddenly make sense later on when I either write a new fragment or when part of my brain makes a connection between a couple of smaller bits. So, although a couple of stories in my first collection were ones that were much longer and got cut down into something much shorter, there are also some in there that were originally two or three shorter fragments that I suddenly realised one day, when I got the right perspective, had this thread that tied them together.
Q. When you’re creating a collection of short stories, or nonfiction essays, what’s the key to building a collection which turns into a really good book, rather than having, say, thirteen short stories which all just happen to be inside the same dust jacket?
Yeah, I think it’s about realising common themes. Some of my favourite short story and essay collections are ones that don’t necessarily have recurring topics or recurring settings but are ones that have some other kind of resonance between them in terms of the ideas or the motifs.
One of my favourite bits of advice to students writing individual short stories is: A good way to wrap up a story is to return to the image or tone you started the story with. There’s a story by a writer I really like called May-Lan Tan where she starts and ends the story with the character listening to music; it’s not connected to anything else that goes on in the story but gives it a sense of unity. I think the same thing applies to a collection of essays or short stories; it’s finding ways to return to similar motifs or themes but also organising the whole thing so that there’s some kind of echo between the start and the end. I find with collections of essays, the ones I really like start with a topic and return to looking at it in a slightly different way at the end. I never know if that’s the way they were written or just the thematic order in which they’ve been organised but really it doesn’t matter. They might be the first two things you write but something that bookends the collection can be really useful.
Q. Most of Come the Tide is written in the first person and there’s this delightfully compelling and inviting “I” which makes it easy for the reader to slip into the narrative and the narrating characters. What brought you to that style & method of writing? Was it a natural or was it a deliberate choice to write that way?
It was a deliberate choice for me and it was something that went against the way I naturally wrote. My own Instinct was to write in post third person, almost like you’re looking over the shoulder of characters and that was, in part, because for a long time I found other people very mysterious. I think one of the reasons I’m very drawn to writing is that I like being able to understand how people work. What I found was that I was writing stories that were kind of empty, they were too impenetrable, it was too hard to get inside the characters. Because you couldn’t get inside the character’s mindset, you couldn’t get into the story.
Switching to writing in the first person was a way to start trying to look inside the story and get underneath the surface; it was a deliberate strategy to try and pull the reader in. You can do really interesting things by creating distance between the reader and a piece of writing but I think it’s hard to be successful with writing which is too alienating because it takes a lot of effort for a reader to persevere with a piece like that. If you can find a way to engage the reader with a character’s point of view and the way they see the world then I think half the battle is won.
Q. Water, loss, transitional moments & loneliness — isolation even — are strong themes throughout Come the Tide. Where do those fascinations come from & how do they motivate you as a writer?
I think they come from a couple of places; one of them is probably down to my own experience. I’m lucky, I haven’t had to experience a lot of loss but it’s something that writing has always helped with — both reading really good writing and writing about my own feelings or responses. I guess the other place it comes from is my artistic interest, particularly music. One of my main areas of nonfiction writing is jazz and the relationship between jazz and literature. So much of jazz centres on the experience of being alone and the relationship between being alone and being part of a group; the whole movement in jazz is about the soloist, who steps out on their own, finding some form of connection with the rest of the group. That’s a motif which I think is in the background of a lot of my writing. I also listen to jazz a lot as I write and I think that tone just seeps into my writing subconsciously.
Q. The short stories in Come the Tide feel very inside the moment & very intimate, and they often give a sense of the lines between fiction & nonfiction being ever-so slightly blurred. In places it almost feels like surreal memoir. How much of Come the Tide is semi-autobiographical or inspired by your own identity and experiences?
The entry point to a lot of these stories was actually a place. I was writing about somewhere that had a strong meaning or impact on me, in fact I think every story in Come The Tide is based on a place that has some close connection to me. In that sense, in terms of being in a space and the way you respond to it, in the way you remember it — it’s probably very autobiographical!
Lots of the events are invented and quite a few of the characters are people I’ve imagined based on things I’ve overheard or observed. I’m a very big believer in being a magpie, in collecting ideas from things that you see, engage with and things you remember from being a child. Childhood memories are really great moments to build a story around. Come The Tide is a collection that definitely brings together imagination with memory.
Q. In a previous interview with Rob McClennan you mentioned that you write with special attention to how your work sounds when you read it aloud. You were born in New Zealand and moved to Australia. You’re very widely travelled and now you’re in the UK, both down South and up North. Do you think your writing style or “voice” will change based on the different accents and dialects that you gather as you go from place to place?
I think so, definitely! I noticed that the stories in Come The Tide which I wrote while I was in Australia have a distinct tone compared to the ones I wrote after I left. I could probably say that the stories in the next collection have a much more coherent voice because they’ve all been written while I’ve been living in the North of the UK. None of the stories are actually set here but there’s definitely something about the way language is used here that I find both challenging and enriching. I’ve also found myself watching quite a lot of things that are set in the North, which has also probably intensified that because there’s such a particular way that the North is represented in TV and film.
Yeah… The North of English is somewhat unique!
Yeah!
Q. You’re not a fan of writing conventionally styled dialogue and you’ve turned that into a strength. Do you ever poke the bear and have a go at writing conventional dialogue just to see where it goes, in drafts?
I do. A couple of stories in this collection had slightly more conventional dialogue when I first put the manuscript together. For me though, and you’ve really hit the nail on the head, I find conventional dialogue quite difficult. It’s probably the hardest thing for me to write, it’s one of the reasons why I think it’s good for me to practice it, it’s good to try doing things that you find uncomfortable; but it’s also one of the reasons I’ve ended up developing a very distinctive and unconventional dialogue style.
As a writer you’ve got two options with something that you think is a weakness: you can either spend a lot of time working very hard to bring that weakness up to the level of everybody else and do the thing, dialogue in this case, the way that everybody else does it or you can find a way to make that weakness part of your strength, make it part of your distinctive style. Dialogue was the thing I felt was my greatest weakness and is also the thing I think is now most distinctive about my style. I’ve turned that weakness into something that makes my writing a bit different.
Q. In Overgrown (the second story in Come the Tide) your character talks about going through a deep creative block. Have you ever had writer’s block, and if so, what did you do with it?
I’ve never had writer’s block in the sense that I haven’t been able to write, fullstop, but what I have found is that there are certain ideas or stories that I’ve hit a wall with, where I’ve come to a place where I either don’t know what comes next or I can’t find a way to write what I feel comes next.
This is one of the reasons why I really advocate having a couple of projects on the go at the same time because I think, first of all, that changing projects can actually help you solve the problems that are blocking you — there’s a kind of interesting cross-pollination that happens. But also because writer’s block often comes from places where we’ve got an emotional connection to what we’re writing. It’s a bit like a kind of Gothic scene where you both want to see and don’t want to see, like the fairytale of Bluebeard and the wife, opening the door both wanting to and not wanting to see the bodies of all the previous wives.
Recently I read a book called From Where You Dream by Robert Olen Butler and his biggest piece of advice in the book is don’t look away. When you’re writing, feel the fear. Let yourself be aware of whatever emotion is causing the block and then lean into it. I found that difficult at first. Switching project gave me the space to be able to work out what the emotional block was and then come back and solve it. I found, over time, that by doing that, I’ve got better at not looking away. I’ve got better at working out what’s stopping me with a story and finding ways to keep going.
Q. Stepping away from Come The Tide, you’ve also published a number of nonfiction critical works, including the award winning Short Story in Midcentury America. How do you get started with nonfiction?
It always comes from something I have a bit of an obsession with. Something that I find personally interesting, that I want to look up things about on the internet or go to the library and read more about. I remember there was a certain point in my English degree as an undergraduate where I stopped having to write essays on topics and books that had been set for me and started getting more freedom to write whatever I wanted. Realising that I could legitimately write nonfiction about almost anything to do with literature was this kind of huge opening up for me in the way that I thought about my own interests. They were no longer something I was just curious about, they were something I could run with.
The Short Story in Midcentury America really just started because I loved reading these short story writers; these people who are writing really strange unsettling short stories in the middle of the 20th century, some of whom knew each other, some of whom didn’t, but all seemed to be interested in the same kind of thing.
I think there’s a bit of detective work involved in writing most nonfiction, in the sense of having a hunch about something. There’s a lot of excitement and energy you can build once you start learning how to get into that mindset of following lead and untangling a thread, seeing where your instincts can lead you.
Q. Can anyone write nonfiction?
Yes. Absolutely! I’m a very big believer in people writing about things that interest them and also the validity of writing from any point of view. I think that one of the biggest barriers to our connection with one another in the world, and also as readers, are people’s beliefs that they are missing some kind of qualification to write about something or to tell their own story or to pursue a topic that they are really curious about or feel like they have an interesting point of view about.
I think that often the most interesting stories and the most interesting essays come from people who don’t, on paper, have ‘this qualification’ or ‘this expertise’ beforehand. That process of discovery and of bringing your own life to something that is a bit different or that maybe you’re not an expert in just yet, that’s actually really enriching and can lead to really interesting writing.
Q. In both nonfiction and fiction, do you deliberately try to write publishable material or do you write exactly what you want? How do you get the balance?
I really start by thinking about myself. First of all, what do I want to say? And second of all, as a reader, what interests me? What do I care about? I think focusing on the product which will come out at the end of the writing process can be a really big block to any writer, but particularly to somebody just starting out. I always advise students to focus on the process, not the product. In other words think about what gives you pleasure in writing, what ideas matter to you. Think about how you want to tell the story or how you want to approach this topic. Once you’ve finished it there’s always space to make changes or to get advice on the final shape but I think you shouldn’t worry about questions like ‘who’s going to publish it and where’ until you’ve actually finished telling the story.
I know there are some writers of short stories who are very strategic. They might go and look at particular magazines and write trying to fit a particular magazine’s style. You can definitely do that, there’s nothing invalid about that as an approach. But I think writing is more satisfying and generally more successful when you understand what you want to say as a writer and when you know what you like when you read. Use those to guide you and worry about where it goes afterwards.
Q. You mentioned you’d been writing fiction for over ten years and working on Come The Tide for four before you approached Platypus Press. How did you know you’d reached the point of going to knock on a publisher’s door and that you were ready to publish?
There was one thing that was a turning point for me: New Writing North started a Northern Writers Award. I had been working on short stories for a while and I knew I wanted to put together a collection but I was living in the North and I thought this is a particular competition I could enter a book with, so I used the deadline for that as my impetus to finish the stories I hadn’t finished yet and decide on what would actually make up the collection.
After I submitted it to the contest I looked over what I had written and thought — actually this is not just a draft that I’m sending off to a competition, I actually feel like this makes sense; there’s a coherence and energy here that I hadn’t quite seen. So before I’d heard anything back from the competition, I sent a proposal off to Platypus Press, who I’d wanted to send the book to for a while, and they wrote back within a week asking to read the full manuscript. And so I ended up withdrawing my entry to the competition because I’d gone further than I thought I would.
I think that’s a story you hear quite often actually. Yes, it can be tough finding a publisher. Yes, it can be tough getting lots of rejections. But when you get your writing to the right place and once you’ve found the right people for your work, it can happen very quickly. I think the best thing is just to get your writing out there.
Q. How did you choose the piece you sent to the publishers?
I had had some of the stories published already and so that was my first guideline. I thought okay, I know these pieces are of publishable quality because they’ve been published — one print and a couple of online magazines. From that point on I just had to pick two more stories and I just chose ones I liked. I didn’t think too much about what the press were looking for — for better or worse — I just tried to trust my own gut, what I thought I would like to read in their shoes.
Q. Which are your favourites from Come The Tide?
I really like the opening story Cliff People; it’s still one of my favourite things I’ve written. Unlike some of the other stories I’ve talked to you about which were the product of a long time period or very intense editing, Cliff People was something that I wrote in an afternoon and it’s been edited a little bit only really proof-read, it’s basically as I wrote it. I think that’s something else that took me a long time to work out — how to trust my own creative instinct and when I felt like had a good idea just to block out time to make it happen, put it down on paper, get it out.
The other story that I really like is at the opposite end of the spectrum, it’s one that I spent a long time writing and which I thought was going to be a much longer piece, and it’s Lake Country. Lake Country is a story I tried to write twice before I got it right. The first time was just a short story, which was a bit strange; it was set in America in the first draft and was based on an idea I had ready a short story translated from Japanese, so it was very abstract. Then I had the experience of going to Tasmania and visiting a lake very much like the lake in the story and I suddenly thought this has got a lot more going on. The original idea plus the setting started to build inside me and so (this is the longest single piece of fiction I’ve ever written) I wrote a forty-five thousand word short novel / long novella and then I got a few people I trusted to read it and even before I got their feedback I already had the feeling that [the story] was a much simpler idea. In the end [I ended up] editing down the longer piece and changing the ending and that’s the final version.
I think my two favourite pieces probably embody the two opposite extremes of my writing process. Either very quick, intense and unedited or very long but going through several stages and involving quite a lot of editing.
Q. You mentioned that you’ve got a fiction project finished, I’m assuming going to publication and I think there’s a nonfiction pipeline as well? What are they about and when are they coming?
The second collection of short stories is called (at this point) I Go Astray and it’s going to be coming out with Platypus Press as well, sometime next year.
The nonfiction project has changed changed quite a lot; originally I had the idea to pick up on a writer I was really interested in and develop something like a biography that mixed in travel writing and a little bit of literary criticism but for me, the thing that’s really important in nonfiction just wasn’t there — which was actually interest. I realised that I didn’t want to do anything more with that writer, I was kind of done with that. Now I’m working on a new nonfiction project looking at loneliness some more. My second nonfiction book Blue Notes was about jazz, literature and loneliness and now I just want to focus on the literature and loneliness parts, looking particularly the way that storytelling helps us make sense of the experience of being alone. You can see really that my nonfiction and fiction interests are merging more and more together. At this point I can’t tell you when that will be coming out, it’s still in the very early stages.
Q. How would you advise first time writers to go about becoming an attractive prospect for a publisher and then to go about looking for a publisher.
One thing that really helps is to get a couple of pieces published online and I think in the past publishers used to be more interested in finding writers who had print publications to their name but I think today, being published in an online magazine is just as valid and there’s no status differential. Getting your name in a magazine that publishes things you’re interested in, that aligns a little bit with you, is really helpful.
The other thing that makes you really attractive as a writer is having a clear narrative about who you are and understanding what it is about your experiences, your point of view, your personality that make you a bit different. For me, I spent a long time trying to get the blurb about myself right — the ‘bioblurb’ people talk about online — and actually that’s something that, once you get it right, makes a great deal of difference in getting people’s interest. Because publishers will see so many different people, having something that makes you stand out as a writer will be really helpful.
There are two ways you can go about looking for a publisher. The first, if you think you want to be published through an independent publisher, is simply to find writers you like reading and see who’s published them. Look at who the publisher is on the books you keep coming back to while you’re working on your own project or look at which names are recurring on your own bookshelf.
A really useful guide is the MSLexia Indie Press Guide; this is published every year or two, they’re up to the third edition. This is particularly useful if you’re based in the UK, it lists all the independent publishers based in the UK. That’s how I discovered my publisher! I basically just read through anybody who was publishing short fiction or was open to publishing short fiction and started researching them. I took a couple of days and when I discovered Platypus I realised they had absolutely beautiful books and they were interested in telling the same kind of stories that I was; until that point, until my book, they hadn’t actually published any fiction — they’d only been publishing poetry and memoir but I felt some kind of affinity with them.
If you want to be published with a commercial press, I think the same rule applies. Look at the writers you read most often, look at the people who’s writing shares the most with your own and then find out who represents them and approach them. That information is actually very easy to find out. Find out who represents that person and what kinds of things they look for in submissions.
Q. In your opinion, what is the most important skill or ability all professional writers need?
Their own voice!
Q. What advice or top tips would you give to aspiring or brand new writers?
Write often. Experiment and try new things out. Read and learn what things you like reading as well as what things you find satisfying to write. Practice thinking about what’s underneath the surface; what is driving your story? What is driving your character? That heart is what makes writing really exciting.
Q. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever been given?
Good question… I’m just trying to think what it is! Aside from being told to use fewer semicolons, which I was told often as an undergraduate.
I think the best piece of writing advice I’ve ever been given is: follow the brush. This was a piece of advice I was given by a writer whose work I really liked and who I really didn’t like in person. I met this writer and something about our personalities which really didn’t gel but I still really liked their writing and this piece of advice, maybe because it came from someone who I at least knew wasn’t trying to flatter me or fob me off. This advice was to let the pen guide you, follow the brushes; an idea of writing as the pen itself guides you, letting a story lead you on and I think that sense of openness and being prepared to follow an idea wherever it takes you is where my best ideas have come from.
Q. Following on from that, do you do a lot of freewriting?
Yes, I do. This is one of the places where I find myself coming up with ideas that solve stories; not going out of my way to find a solution but accidentally finding the answer in a piece of freewriting or experimenting with writing a scene or describing a place. One of the biggest reasons I advocate for freewriting is that it unlocks things that you didn’t know you needed.
Q. Last question! What is the title of your favourite book and who is your favourite author?
The title of my favourite book is The Diving Pool. It’s a collection of three long short stories by the Japanese writer Yoko Ogawa; I bought it because I liked the cover, I saw it in a bookshop and I read it in a single sitting and have come back to it probably more than any other single book.
My favourite writer is probably the Argentinian short story writer Julio Cortázar. I think Cortázar understood the short story as a form better than anybody else. When I read his writing, however many times I’ve read it, I still find something that I can learn or something that surprises me or something that makes me approach my own writing in a new way.
Come The Tide is an eerily beautiful window into transitional moments, masterfully manoeuvring the reader into a whistle-stop tour of the world &, like the Ghost of Christmas Present, letting us glimpse just enough to be profoundly moved before sweeping us along to a new destination.
Come The Tide and Sam’s other works are available through Amazon. You can also read Sam’s brand new short, I Go Astray.
