The dribble interview! Final leg of my book tour

Well, my book tour finally comes to an end today on the blog of Tania Hershman, whose own amazing collection stories, The White Road is also published by Salt, a book of stories inspired by scientific ideas and taking off into the most inventive realms of the imagination. Tania conducted her own riveting book tour at the end of last year - hers was a pilot tour for the Cyclone book tour scheme which Salt recently introduced. She knew therefore how much hard work book tours can be - I have spent most weekends for the last ten weeks thinking so hard about my own writing and writing in general that I think my brain's about to implode - and how distracting from writing. Tania therefore decided to give me a break with a 'dribble' interview, that is, an interview in which each of the answers must be no longer than 50 words! It was a great relief, and great fun - and yet the interview is incisive, I think: no surprise, as Tania is a whizz flash fiction writer. Some of the flash stories in her collection are the best and the most resonant I have ever read; John says that too, and as a poet he has very high standards for flash fiction.

Today's interview is here, and don't forget that all of the Cyclone tours remain on the Salt website, and you can click back and read all the interviews where I bare my writing soul!

New leg of my book tour: prose v drama and adaptation.

The penultimate leg of my virtual book tour, Around the Edges of the World, is now up on the amazing blog of novelist Debi Alper - after endless technical glitches, apparently, so I'm even more grateful than I already was due to the fact that in order to host me she is stopping out from her amazing account of the Grenada revolution and invasion. (I wrote about this last yesterday, and about Debi's very striking and unusual crime thrillers).

Debi asks me about the differences between writing prose fiction and drama, and about the special problems of adapting one's own work from the first of these forms to the second.

Politics and audiences - new leg of my virtual book tour

Today my virtual tour of Balancing on the Edge of the World goes to Italy and the blog of novelist and short-story writer Charles Lambert. This is something of a reciprocal thing, as last year I hosted Charles on his own Cyclone tour of his wonderful collection of stories, A Scent of Cinnamon. I am a great admirer of Charles's work, and I wrote about his sophisticated (in literary terms) yet utterly moving and accessible novel, Little Monsters, here.

The intelligence behind his writing and which he brought to his own book tour would, I knew, guarantee that the questions he asked me this week would be thoughtful and searching, and indeed they get right to the heart of some of my main concerns as a writer. He asks me about my political consciousness (with a small p) as a writer, the differences between writing for a radio and a short story audience, and the reasons for the variety of the stories in my collection (and in the process I spill a few more beans about my past).

Writing jumpers, literary lenses and a Prize Draw: my virtual book tour

A prize draw today on my virtual tour book tour! A copy of Balancing on the Edge of the World for each of three lucky readers who leave their names in the comments section of the interview on dovegreyreader scribbles, this week's stop-off. Dovegrey gets me talking about my writing jumper (below), would you believe, as well as other accoutrements of my writing life.


And we discuss the issue of literary lenses: am I holding a microscope to the minute details of life in my short stories, or am doing something rather different which requires a different kind of lens?

My virtual book tour: snails, kids, acting and porridge

Today my Cyclone virtual book tour for Balancing on the Edge of the World comes nearer home, just up the motorway to Keeper of the Snails, the amazing blog of novelist Clare Dudman (whose great books I wrote about yesterday). (Currently she's blogging about the silk worms she's keeping!)

Clare asks me in depth about my use of a child's perspective in my fiction and in fiction in general, about how much I use people and settings from life and how acting relates to writing. Other things, too, including getting me to reveal my recipe for porridge!

This book tour is turning out to be fascinating. As Barbara Smith comments on today's leg, it's really interesting to be presented with the different responses and angles on the book from the different hosts, and I must say it's also a wonderful opportunity to be able to talk about the book and what I'm trying to do in it in such depth.

For instance, it's a great surprise to me that Clare finds similarities in my stories to those of Chekhov: the last writer I'd have thought I was like was Chekhov, simply because I think of Chekhov as a tradition, and I see many of my own stories as innovative. Stupid, of course, because Chekhov was enough of an innovator in his own time, and Clare is right, I do, like Chekhov, often use the minutiae of life as a telescopic window onto our wider place in the universe. Interesting how we need others sometimes to remind us of our influences...

An even bigger surprise to me today was that Clare took all of the stories in Balancing as being set in the north, whereas in fact some of the settings I had in mind were Welsh! Part of the reason for this is that I tend not to specify geography as I'm looking for universality (there's just one story in the book in which I do): I want readers to sink into the situations in my stories (and not be alientated, as I think readers can be, by the names of places they don't know or don't know well). But Clare also says she feels the voice and tone of the stories are northern, which I must say makes me feel quite weird. I know my fictive (and real-life) voice is pretty ironic, but I always thought I got that from my dad, and not from having lived in the north for admittedly many years now...

And Clare sees an edge of anger in the stories. You see, you just can't fox some people...

You can read the interview here: