It's cold, it's wet, it's January. Time for another series of exclusive short stories and another series of podcasts. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be hearing from Rodrigo Urquiola Flores and his translator Shaina Brassard, as well as Tim Conley, Cynthia Banham and Samuel Rigg. But we kick off this winter series with Cynthia Zarin and Housekeeping.

Zarin reveals that both the houses in her short story are taken from life, but with a certain amount of embroidery.

"Everything is drawn from life," she says, "because what else is there?"

Her protagonist is torn between New York City and Cape Cod, her heart "in two places at once", the author continues, but that's hardly unusual. "Very few of us live lives that are not full of complication and conflict."

After five books of poetry and a glittering career as a journalist, Zarin says she fell into prose fiction almost by accident.

"I'd started writing, actually, a letter," she explains, "and then that letter just became something I wrote all the time. It started out as a letter to a specific person, but it became absolutely something else."

Zarin's novels Inverno and Estate are constructed in layers, with significant moments tolling through them like bells – a natural form for a writer who believes that "everything is about memory".

But it's a form that took some time to emerge. When she showed the work in progress to her friends they would say, "OK sweetheart, it's very beautiful, but what is it?"

Zarin says that she began to find out what her letter might be when the artist and writer Leanne Shapton told her to "Stop trying to put it together, take it apart." And she identifies a meeting with her agent, Luke Ingram, as another turning point.

"We started to talk about the structure," she recalls, "and we drew it on a napkin."

As a poet and journalist, Zarin says she finds prose fiction something of a liberation.

"The idea that you can have a character and you can decide that she has red hair – it's fun."

We'll be having more fun next time with Rodrigo Urquiola Flores and the translator Shaina Brassard.

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This Autumn series of podcasts has already brought us Helon Habila, Caroline Clark and Kasimma. We round it off with Ephameron and her graphic short story .

This enigmatic comic imagines a couple divided by distance but reaching for connection by talking about the weather. So when Ephameron joined us down the line from Antwerp, we began with an update on the skies.

Clouds are endlessly fascinating, the author says, "A lot of painters have been interested in painting skies and how you do the textures right."

In , Ephameron uses watercolours, a technique she says she first adopted when she was travelling, pairing it with a font based on the video game Minecraft.

"I'm an artist," she explains, "so I try and draw inspiration from a lot of different corners of the web."

This broad vision, married with a background in fine arts and an ambition to tell "stories that are set in real life, that are talking about real issues", puts Ephameron's work firmly on the boundary between art and story.

"I really want to push the borders," she says.

That's all for this Autumn season.

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We've already heard from Helon Habila and Caroline Clark in this Autumn series of podcasts, and we'll be rounding out the set with Ephameron in the next couple of weeks. But this time we welcome Kasimma and her short story Mama Taught Me That.

This story is set in the 16th century.

"We are not really sure what life was like then," Kasimma explains. "After colonisation, a lot of our culture was destroyed or merged with the beliefs of the colonisers, so that we don't really – in my opinion – have the original culture and beliefs that we had then, before European intrusion."

Some of the most important differences in Igboland – the homeland of the Igbo people in southeastern Nigeria – were around women's rights, she continues. "Everybody was equal. Both male and female owned land, both male and female could do the same kind of jobs. There was no 'A man is better than a woman,' or 'A male child is preferred.' All these things are just debris of colonisation."

Many of the details of life five hundred years ago are lost, so there was a lot of freedom in trying to capture that world view.

"It's mostly just fiction," she says.

Our ancestors may have been more connected with the natural and spiritual worlds, Kasimma continues, so there is a lot to learn from them. "But we shouldn't go back. I don't want to go back. I like my phone, and I like my laptop. I like the airplanes, I like the nice hotels. I love how far we've gone, as human beings, to make life easier for ourselves and to bring communication closer."

Next time we'll be communicating with Ephameron, discussing the weather and her graphic short story . 

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This Autumn series of podcasts started with Helon Habila confronting the difficult legacy of slavery in the US. Over the next few weeks, we'll be talking with Ephameron and Kasimma. But this time we welcome Caroline Clark and I Will Go.

Clark tells us she isn't really sure where this haunting story started.

"I could tell you a story about how this story came together," she says, "but it probably wouldn't be the real one."

The author explains how she assembles her writing mosaic fashion, instead of a "linear, chronological manner".

"I think that's what I have to do," she says, "to get my words out there – come upon something from a different angle."

This mysterious process may have served her in poetry, memoir and now fiction, but she isn't hung up about genre, suggesting that her work is "all connected".

"When I've written everything you'll have the video game of Caroline Clark," the author adds, "and you can play it."

We'll be levelling up with Kasimma next time as we discuss history, equality and her short story Mama Taught Me That. You can find her here on the site or via Apple podcasts, Spotify, Acast and Podchaser and more. 

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Here in the northern hemisphere it's getting misty and mellow all over again. Time for Autumn 2025 and another fruitful harvest of podcasts, ripened to the core. Over the next few weeks, we'll be hearing from Caroline Clark, Kasimma and Ephameron. But we launch into autumn with Helon Habila and his story Paradise.

Habila tells us how, after twenty years of living in the USA, in this story he's trying to "make sense of America".

"History is not past," Habila says, "it's still with us, and we're living the consequences of that history of slavery in America. To even begin to understand the place, you have to grapple with that history."

Paradise puts different Black experiences alongside each other – a Nigerian girl living in Northern Virginia, a young woman whose mother is Nigerian and whose father is white, and a vision of the Brazilian countryside "filled with Black people". But at the heart of the story are two twins, whose ancestors were enslaved on the Strout Estate.

When they return to the house, there's "almost a beautiful symmetry", Habila says, "a cycle coming to a close".

"You can only imagine that, for them, what it must feel like." To be free people, he continues, knowing their ancestors could never have dreamed of the freedoms that they enjoy today, "that's the contradiction, that's the complexity in American history and the American present, where the past is always in conflict with the present".

Some people want to erase the evidence, Habila adds, to "rewrite history. They want to claim that the slaves were actually happier being slaves than Black people are today."

The pressure on academics, the new boldness of people in power to say out loud what could only be said before in a whisper is "scary" he says, but he has to go on. "The only thing one can do as an artist is just to remind people and historicise these things and try to turn it into art."

Next time, Caroline Clark will be talking about the inevitable pain of the writing life and her short story I Will Go.

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This summer series of podcasts has taken us from the snow and ice of AL Kennedy's Expedition Skills to the blunt heat of Ali McClary's Proper Magic, and from the staccato fragments of Pete Segall's Bolex Man to the unstoppable momentum of Dafydd McKimm's The Nosebleed.

We bring this season to a close with Sheyla Smanioto and the haunting threat of her short story Intruder, translated by Laura Garmeson and Sophie Lewis.

Speaking with the help of the interpreter Jaciara Topley Lira, Smanioto tells us that the story came to her with "almost the last sentence", in a dream where "Somebody was holding me by the throat and saying, 'Look how difficult it will be for me not to kill you when I'm choking you'."

She had to deliver that sentence so that she could recreate the feeling she had in the dream, she continues, "And so that's why I needed to trick the reader sometimes."

The slippery first-person plural, the sudden switches between the present and the past and the abrupt swerves into dialogue that keep the reader on their toes are also a challenge for the writer.

"So, in a way," Smanioto adds, "both me and the reader are victims of what the text needed."

Pito's bar is midway along the great journey from the country to the city that Smanioto charts in her novel Out of Earth.

"It's a historical movement," the author says. "It's a movement that brought my family to São Paulo. But when you look at it as a movement, it always looks like it is made up of a mass. But it's never a mass, it's made up of people."

The people who make this journey are left with a "specific type of loneliness", Smanioto continues, an emptiness that she has tried to fill with her writing by "creating a culture that was a sort of dream, a memory of the past".

Even though she calls herself a "very intellectual" writer, dreams are still central to her work.

"I have studied technique," Smanioto says, "I'm a literature graduate. But I can't create anything if I don't feel it in my skin first."

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This summer, we've heard from AL Kennedy, Pete Segall and Ali McClary. We'll be bringing this series to a close with Sheyla Smanioto, but this time Dafydd McKimm steps into the consulting room with his short story The Nosebleed.

McKimm tells us how The Nosebleed was a story that came to him with the ending already in place, citing the translator Michael Hofmann and his notion of Kafka time, where it's "already too late".

With this type of story, the author says, "You just set the ball rolling and the characters fruitlessly struggle against the inevitability of that ending."

Even though McKimm tries to keep politics out of his stories, it's a notion that feels very 21st century.

"We do certainly seem to be living in a world where, if it wasn't too late ten years ago, it certainly is too late now," he says. "We might be fighting a losing battle."

While the sharp divisions in the bookshop between fantasy and surreal fiction are something of a mirage, McKimm continues, there is still a difference of approach.

"Even though you might write a secondary-world fantasy, where the world is very different to the world we live in," he explains, "it's going to have dragons or whatever, or magic exists, the tone of the world is very similar. Whereas in a surrealist story, or an absurdist story, it's the feverishness of the tone that is turned up. You turn up the dial on your paranoia, on your madness essentially, your internal madness."

Next time we'll be turning up the dial with Sheyla Smanioto and her short story Intruder.

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We've already heard from AL Kennedy and Pete Segall in this summer series of podcasts, and we’ll be hearing from Sheyla Smanioto and Dafydd McKimm over the next few weeks. But this time we're summoning up Ali McClary and her short story Proper Magic.

McClary confesses that the intense friendship between Min and Hazel is drawn from her own experience.

"I hope that all girls, all women have these kinds of friendships," she says, "that feel a little bit magic, a little bit disgusting."

They may not always end well, McClary continues, "but for those brief moments or those long, hot summers, they're really beautiful, and they're the most important thing in people's lives".

The trauma buried at the core of Proper Magic emerged out of the writing process. And it was only when looking back at the story and starting to edit that the author says she realised "how dark and how heavy the secret at the heart of the story is".

"When grief hits," McClary explains, "or there's a big cataclysmic event in someone's life, I think it's fairly common that people slip out of reality a little bit. Everything becomes slightly unreal, they see everything with an entirely different lens because the world as they have known it for so long has been completely shattered."

We'll be looking beyond the real with Dafydd McKimm next time, and his short story The Nosebleed.

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We began this Summer series of podcasts with AL Kennedy arguing that the empathy which powers fiction makes writing it a political act. We'll be talking fiction – or maybe politics – with Sheyla Smanioto, Ali McClary and Dafydd McKimm over the next few weeks. But this time we're zooming in on Pete Segall and his story Bolex Man.

Segall tells us that this series of snapshots emerged after he took up analogue photography. He was wandering around the neighbourhood taking pictures of "the same buildings, the same places" and he began to ask himself "if there are posts in some kind of Facebook group about 'Is there this weird guy taking pictures of your house?'"

As his fictional neighbourhood and its inhabitants came into focus, it became clear the story was about "looking and looking back and being looked at," he continues, a feeling that is "very modern".

"There's a very ambient feeling of being watched," Segall says, "of being perceived."

Bolex Man is a story assembled out of fragments – an accommodating form for someone who "writes in very small bursts" – and it's up to the reader to fill in the spaces between each frame.

"I don't feel like it's my job as a writer to answer questions," Segall explains. "I feel like it's my job to ask, 'What is going on?' To delineate the experience of not knowing what is going on."

After years in which Segall tried to write "conventional fiction" with plot and character, he's embraced his natural rhythm.

"If that means that a story ends up being four words long," he says, "then a story is four words long. And I am in love with that."

Next time we'll be falling for female friendship with Ali McClary and her short story Proper Magic.

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It's raining in London, but it's time for another issue – and another series of Fictionable podcasts. Over the next few weeks we'll be hearing from Sheyla Smanioto, Pete Segall, Ali McClary and Dafydd McKimm. But we begin Summer 2025 with AL Kennedy, and her icy short story Expedition Skills.

Kennedy says that the story emerged out of the "very strange day" earlier this year which saw the commemoration of Martin Luther King and the second inauguration of Donald Trump. Upstate New York was covered in snow and ice, she explains and "it seemed good to put people in that weirdness of first snow, because it always looks like a clean start".

The author was sitting at home "not watching the inauguration… the most not-watched inauguration in history", and thinking about wealth.

"It is a time when the wealthy are just inconceivably wealthy," she says, "and other people are always dodging complete destitution."

In Expedition Skills, Martin wants to wander across boundaries like kids, who can "go wherever they like". But the limits on our freedoms are never quite as solid as they might look, Kennedy argues, "because a lot of policing and democracy and power is about consent. And if you don't consent, the people in charge, they're always a massively smaller number."

If people want to keep politics out of fiction, "you'd have to keep people out," she continues.

"Writing well, trying to create characters that people can enter into and practise empathy, and reverse the psychological pressure that is online, that's a political act. I'm sorry, it just is. That's why people like Erdoğan and Trump and Bolsonaro and all the variety of dictators who are floating about, that's why they'll arrest you. That's why they'll suppress your work. That's why they like burning books."

Kennedy's latest novel, Alive in the Merciful Country, features a set of major characters who are all damaged in one way or another, but "that's life", says the author. "Very hard to not have trauma. I don't even know if it's entirely healthy to not have any obstacles."

And it's either great pain or great joy that delivers the extraordinary emotional spike that fiction requires. Writing about the positive side may be "very difficult", Kennedy adds, but only focusing on the bad things in life would be "psychopathic. It's just, buckle up and try to make the good stuff interesting."

Next time, we'll be looking for the good stuff with Pete Segall and his short story Bolex Man.

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