Fictionable

Already this summer we've heard from Samantha Harvey, Patrick Cash, Carolina Bruck and her translator Ellen Jones. This time we're getting under the surface of Jack Klausner's short story The Coalface.

Klausner tells us how this story emerged from a memory – his partner's mother remembering her own father eating a block of melted cheese for his tea. "It sort of spun out from there," he says.

While Wales is no monolith, Klausner explains, in South Wales mining still looms large. But over the last thirty years its meaning has changed.

"Now it seems it's almost like a ghost that hangs over families, or hangs over towns," he says.

Coal once represented "hope and potential", Klausner continues, driving industry forward to progress and prosperity. But as the climate crisis accelerates the black stuff has taken on a more menacing shade.

"It might end up being in someone's fireplace, keeping them warm," he says. "But you've got to get it there, and it's a dark and dangerous journey to that point."

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This summer series has already brought us Samantha Harvey and Patrick Cash. Now it's time for Carolina Bruck and her translator Ellen Jones, with Bruck's short story China.

We start with questions of vocabulary, as Bruck clears up exactly what a china is and fills us in on the cultural significance of the gaucho.

The author says she was writing against Esteban Echeverría's poem The Captive, inverting the traditional Argentine dichotomy between civilisation and barbarity.

"Civilisation has always been associated with everything that comes from Europe," she says, "and la barbarie – this savageness – has always been associated with the indigenous, with what was original to America."

In China, Bruck upends Echeverría's scheme. "Civilisation is associated with Constanza the Mapuche woman," Bruck explains, "who rebels against the savagery of Eugenia and her family, who aspire to be as European as possible."

The myth that Argentina is a European nation is still a powerful force – all the more so after Javier Milei's victory in last year's elections. Life for Argentine writers is "bad, in a word", Bruck admits. "Those who work in the culture industry are suffering, the government is attacking them."

But fiction can still make a difference. "The impact it has is neither direct nor mechanical," Bruck says, "but it represents hope."

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Last time Samantha Harvey let the cat out of the bag, diving straight into the heart of her story Bona Fide Nihon-kitsch. This time Patrick Cash is a little less spoiler heavy as he talks about and reads from his story Trish Malone.

Cash tells us how the cabaret artist who takes a leading role came to his rescue a few years back and has been "wandering around" ever since.

He recalls work as a journalist reporting on the Albert Kennedy Trust, a charity specialising in young LGBTQ+ homelessness, which "fed into this story".

"I'm interested in how some queer people can feel that distance from their family," Cash explains. "And then having to come back and reconnect with her brother was something I found fictively intriguing."

As someone who grew up in the southwest, he understands the claustrophobia of small-town life and how some queer people "dream of leaving and going to the big city… But, of course, you never leave your past."

Cash made his name as a spoken word poet and playwright, a training which he says stood him in good stead when writing for the page.

"What writing for performance really gave me is the understanding of what keeps an audience's attention," he says.

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The weather may be up the spout but it's still summer, so it's time for another batch of Fictionable podcasts. We'll be hearing from Susan Muaddi Darraj, Carolina Bruck, Patrick Cash and Jack Klausner in this summer season. But Summer opens with Samantha Harvey and her mighty short story Bona Fide Nihon-kitsch.

If you haven't read it already, you might want to head over there before you hit play, because Harvey got straight to the nub of things as soon as we started talking.

She told us how she got started on a story that looks death square in the face. Sitting beside someone in their last days, "You know that you should be feeling something splendidly profound," Harvey says, "but you can't quite find what it is."

Time grinds to a halt, with normal life suspended – just as it is for the astronauts in her latest novel, Orbital. Set across a fractured day on the International Space Station, Harvey says she relished the challenge of translating that "extremely rich visual world to the world of black marks on a white page", but struggled to feel "it was all right for me to write it in this age of great veracity".

"I wonder why this would be interesting to anybody," she asked herself, "that some woman in Wiltshire has made up some stuff about being in space."

In the end she decided to give herself permission, Harvey adds, "and it just has to be good enough".

"This is what fiction can do," she says. "I believe in fiction."

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In this Spring series of podcasts we've heard from Jenny Erpenbeck, Grahame Williams, Lauren Caroline Smith and Rose Rahtz. We bring it to a close with Jakub Żulczyk and his story Many Years of Hardships, translated by John and Małgorzata Markoff.

Żulczyk became a bestseller with hard-hitting thrillers such as The Institute and Blinded by the Lights, a semi-autobiographical novel which the author turned into a hit show for HBO. But Many Years of Hardships draws on deeper roots.

"One of my first memories from childhood is my grandmother telling me stories about little dwarfs," Żulczyk explains. His hero, Big Barrel, is one of the characters from the Polish imaginary, a krasnoludek only two inches tall.

A lot of Żulczyk's writing comes from "dark places", he continues, but in Many Years of Hardships he gives his twisted sense of humour free rein. "At the heart of it all, it’s a funny story."

But there's a serious side to Big Barrel's struggles with food, doggos and a shadowy figure pulling all the strings. Surrounded by war, powerful corporations and the climate crisis, the dwarf's predicament feels all too familiar. "We live in a world now where everyone feels like this," Żulczyk says.

The challenges we face may be acute, but the author remains an optimist.

"Totalitarian structures, or power structures, or violent structures ultimately fail in confrontation with powers that are open-minded, that have freedom of thought, open channels of communication and so on."

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This spring we've already heard from Jenny Erpenbeck, Grahame Williams and Lauren Caroline Smith. This time we welcome Rose Rahtz and her short story Where Hast Thou Been, Sister?

Rahtz tells us how the story started as a response to the opening of Macbeth, where there is a roll of thunder and Shakespeare's First Witch asks, "Where hast thou been, sister?"

"I've always really liked the witch's response, because she's so perfunctory about it," she says. "She just goes 'I've been killing swine, obviously, I'm a witch'."

Thinking about female power and powerful children, Rahtz transported Shakespeare's blasted heath to a farm park and turned his witch into a toddler. There's something mighty about a small child, she explains, "It's that tug between huge power of emotion and complete impotence within the world."

Channelling her eldest daughter, who was a "force of nature" when she was young, Rahtz sets her uncanny toddler loose – though she insists that no animals were harmed in the making of this story.

Witches are outlaw figures who disrupt the patriarchy, Rahtz continues, and writing is a kind of disruption to her job as an English teacher. While the GCSE English language paper is a "horrorshow" where children are being asked to dance a grammatical jig, "the joy of being an English teacher is you teach around the edges of the curriculum".

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In this Spring series of podcasts we've already heard from Jenny Erpenbeck and Grahame Williams. Now it's time for Lauren Caroline Smith and her short story The Placing of Hands.

Smith looks back on her teenage years, when being a committed Christian made her something of an oddity, and reflects on what it’s like to be a person of faith within a predominantly secular culture.

Our culture is very individualistic, Smith says, so if you're following Christ, "you’re not following the culture… to be so fully part of it is kind of rebellious."

We're being persuaded all the time, she continues, in politics, fashion or wider society – "primarily to buy things". But when churches put the focus on converting young people at large-scale events, religious persuasion can tip over into manipulation.

"They make you kind of vulnerable," Smith says. "There's all this music playing, there's people praying for you, there's people telling you how you should feel… That can become spiritual abuse."

She's still not sure where she is in her journey of faith, but Smith says that books can often play a similar role: "For me it's often the same thing."

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Last time we heard from Jenny Erpenbeck, who told us that before her latest novel Kairos she'd "never written a love story". This time we welcome Grahame Williams and his short story Making It Happen.

Like the industrialist Sir John Harvey-Jones, an inspirational figure in Making It Happen, Williams says he's not much of a planner: "If there's a spark, then let's just start writing and see where it goes."

He didn't set out to tell the story of the Troubles, but – as in his own childhood – they loom over Quinton McCandless's life as an "ever-present threat".

"Stuff was going on, heinous things happening," Williams says, "that constant reminder that we live in quite a difficult and strange place."

Growing up, he didn't have "a very sophisticated understanding of the Troubles", Williams adds, and there was always an expectation that he would leave.

"My story was, I left Northern Ireland and the narrative was fulfilled," he says. "But what happens if you don't leave, if you have to stay?"

Living with a young family in England, Williams says he really feels "that distance from home… There's an ache, there's a pain that comes from having left."

Despite this sense of loss and the many troubles that beset Quinton in Making It Happen, Williams says he maintains a sunny outlook on life: "I'm definitely an optimist."

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Spring has finally sprung and with it another series of Fictionable podcasts. Over the next few weeks we'll be hearing from Jakub Żulczyk, Grahame Williams, Lauren Caroline Smith and Rose Rahtz. But we launch into Spring with Jenny Erpenbeck and her haunting short story Sloughing Off One Skin.

When we spoke down the line from Berlin, Erpenbeck began by reading from the opening of the story in German as well as in Michael Hofmann's supple translation. Sloughing Off One Skin is set in motion by a piece of paper – a false passport – and Erpenbeck admits she's always been "suspicious of documents".

"Paper is not just paper," she says, adding that it's "a surface, and under the surface things can happen. They are shifting, they are moving. The surface stays unmoved."

Erpenbeck explains how Sloughing Off One Skin ends with a spooky coincidence drawn from life – "in a way this is a ghost story" – and confesses she struggled with the ending for her novel of the refugee crisis, Go, Went, Gone.

"I couldn’t see any kind of end to the story," she says, "and so I thought I’ll write down a solution that obviously is no solution, so that readers can understand there is something left to do."

Borders loom over Erpenbeck's latest novel Kairos as well, which charts the dissolution of the border between East and West Germany in 1989. The author recalls the strange dislocations of changing countries while remaining in one place. "Outside became inside, or our outside wasn’t there any more."

Erpenbeck adds that she has a "strong connection" with questions of memory and "how times are interwoven with each other".

"I wanted to become an archaeologist when I was young," she says, "so I’m still digging."

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We've already heard from Linda Mannheim, Richard Smyth, Ariel Marken Jack. and Robert Neuwirth in this Winter series of podcasts. Now we bring it to a close with Liam Hogan and his short story Backstory.

Hogan tells us how it all came from his suspicion of heroes. "They often have it far too easy," he explains. "If you have someone with supreme skills then… what's the challenge?"

There's a dark thread running through his collection of short stories, Happy Ending Not Guaranteed, but Hogan says "there has to be an element of humour".

Literary fiction may have a problem with comedy, but Hogan is unabashed: "It's the puncturing of pomposity, which is just fun."

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