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AMHurley.com
Andrew Michael Hurley was born in 1975 and brought
up in the North West of England. After living in Manchester and London,
he returned to Lancashire, where he makes a living teaching English and
writing. He has an MA in Creative Writing from Manchester Metropolitan
University (MMU). His stories have been published in magazines such as
Libbon, Muse and Positive Space. He is also a regular contributor to
Transmission. He has completed two short story collections; Cages and
other stories (Lime Tree Press, 2006) and The Unusual Death of Julie
Christie and other stories (Lime Tree Press, 2008).
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Short
Story Collections
The Unusual Death of Julie Christie
(Lime Tree Press, 2008)
reviewed
by Diane Becker
Cages and Other Stories (Lime Tree Press)
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Interview
with Andrew Michael hurley
The
Short Review:
How long did it take you to write all the stories in your collection?
Andrew Michael Hurley: I
must have been writing the stories for about year or so, though the
ideas were probably around for a lot longer than that in notebooks and
on scraps of paper sticking out of notebooks. The last story in the
collection – A Jewish Giant In The Home of His Parents in the Bronx, 1970
– is the oldest story, and I decided to include it as it seemed to
match the themes of the others and it felt as though it captured the
doubts, fears and failures that are present in the book as a whole.
Some of the stories came fairly quickly, like Spark Guns
for example, while others were much more challenging to get right and
went through many many revisions before I was satisfied that I was
telling the story I wanted to tell. Spire, The Unusual Death of Julie Christie, Muscle and Good Soil are in this category, but I think they’re the stories I learnt the most from by writing.
TSR:
Did you
have a collection in mind when you were writing them?
AMH: Only
in a loose sense at first. I knew I wanted to try and write stories
that were predominantly set in the North-West – because I’d not really
ever written about the place where I grew up – but it wasn’t until I’d
written three or four did it become apparent that I was exploring
similar things in each. In the end the locations of the stories were
actually pretty varied, from London, to Saddleworth Moor, to North
Wales, to Rhodes, but were linked by themes of disconnection and
transformation.
TSR:
How did
you choose which stories to include and in what order?
AMH: There
are several stories that didn’t make it to the final collection – ones
that just wouldn’t go anywhere – ones that lacked that unifying force
that good short stories have and just sort of drifted around not really
doing anything. There was one about an ex topless model
that I really wanted to make work but couldn’t. Another about a man who
shreds his very tall wife who has turned into paper. Perhaps I’ll come
back to them one day.
I decided to bookend the collection with two shorter stories, the first one, Dinosaurs being about a relationship in its incipience and the last, A Jewish Giant... about a relationship at its end. Both stories are about delusion. The rest of the stories I loosely paired – Good Soil and Spire, for example, are both about the absence of expected love; Spark Guns is about the fragility of adulthood, and its partner, The Unusual Death of Julie Christie is about the fragility of reality.
TSR:
What
does the word "story"
mean to you?
AMH: In
terms of the short story, the best writers are those who can tell you
one story but in doing so enable you to ‘know’ a much larger one. Short
stories can be brief and still work – Amy Hempel is very good at short
shorts – but the shorter fiction becomes the less it can really work as a
story. Flash fiction has more in common with haiku poetry, I think.
In
a general sense, I think "story" still means what it has always meant
to me. A story is something which takes you somewhere else; something
which gets under your skin, enlightens you, angers you, frightens you;
something which ultimately shakes your hold on the world. It operates on
an emotional, sometimes visceral level, and that being the case if a
story doesn’t move me in some way, however briefly, I feel a little
disappointed by it. I want to wonder and be astonished when I read. I
want to be shown the world in a new way, to be brought to it obliquely,
to have it described to me with words that I would never have chosen
myself but are so very very right.
The
more I think about this question, the more I think I probably have a
fairly orthodox understanding of "the story". I’m naturally drawn to
storytellers rather than stylists. I agree with Raymond Carver when he
said that "extremely clever chi-chi writing...puts me to sleep". I’m not
against experimentation in itself but self-referential,
trying-too-hard-to-be-post-modernist writing seems more of an
academic exercise for the writer to show their working out, and I'm not
sure if I truly enjoy reading it. I think of James Joyce: Finnegan’s Wake stretches the boundaries of the novel, for sure, but is ultimately pretty unreadable. The Dead, however, is a great story
because it allows you in and holds you to the very ending, which always
moves me in a way that I can’t quite explain, but I know that I have
been moved.
TSR:
Do you have a reader in mind when you write stories?
AMH: No,
I don’t think I do. Not consciously anyway. I don’t write to please a
particular person. I don’t think I could write at all if I had to
think, "would so-and-so like this part?" I think that I have the
reader, rather than a reader in mind.
I
write for myself and write about what I find peculiar, interesting,
unsettling. I’m sure all writers do to begin with, even if they feel
they have to fulfil the expectations of a particular demographic later
on. I’m certain all writers are driven by a similar innate compulsion
and put words on the page in order to try and make sense of the world
for themselves. It’s quite selfish, I suppose, and presumptuous that
your little obsessions will be someone else’s too – but surely the joy
of writing comes from creating your own realities, from playing
make-believe. Writing allows you your childhood back for a time.
TSR: Is
there
anything you'd like to ask someone who has read your collection, anything at all?
AMH: I’m not sure I’d know
what to ask them, beyond what their favourite story was and why. It
would be interesting to know if certain stories touched them, but then
again it’s not always very easy to say exactly how they do. Certain
stories haunt you for reasons you can’t always explain. In the
collection, Spark Guns does it for me more than any of the others.
TSR: How does
it feel knowing that people are buying your book?
AMH:It’s amazing where your
stories end up and how what you write interests people. Someone from
Poland contacted me for a copy of the book as they wanted to read the
story Bricks which is about a Polish migrant worker in London.
It’s odd to think of your stories being read in places you’ve never
been. I love that they’re out there and being interpreted in different
ways.
TSR:
What are you working on now?
AMH: At the moment I’m taking a break from short stories and working on a novel called Mistletoe.
It’s a totally different discipline and to be honest it’s taken me a
while to start enjoying it. A short story I can start and finish in a
few weeks, so I’ve had to be much more patient than I’m used to being.
I’m a slow writer anyway and so all the hurdles that are there when I
write short stories have been enlarged as I’ve been writing the novel.
But I’m beginning to see the whole shape of the thing now. I can
actually imagine myself finishing and that’s exciting.
TSR:
What are
the three most recent short story collections you've read?
AMH: Last Night
by James Salter, which is just a fantastic
collection of stories – a
sort of cross between Raymond Carver and John Updike. In complete
contrast, I’ve enjoyed The Little Black Book of Stories by AS Byatt.
Most recently, I’ve re-read Alice Munro’s Selected Stories. I go back
to it again and again for lessons in how to marry style and
storytelling.
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