|
Website: ChrissieGittins.co.uk
Chrissie
Gittins was born in
Lancashire and studied at Newcastle University and St
Martin’s School of Art. She worked as an artist and a teacher
before becoming a freelance writer. She writes poetry, radio drama,
short stories, and poetry for children.
|
Short story collections
| Family Connections (Salt Publishing, 2007)
Longlisted for the
Frank
O’Connor International Short Story Award 2007.
Reviewed by Zoe King
|
|
Interview
with Chrissie Gittins
The
Short Review:
How long did it take you to write all the stories in your collection?
Chrissie
Gittins: The collection is made up of stories written over
16 years. I wasn't only writing stories over that time - I also write
poetry, poetry for children and radio drama.
TSR: Did you
have a collection in mind when you were writing them?
CG:
No, I simply wrote one after the other.
TSR: How did
you choose which stories to include and in what order?
CG:
I included most of the stories I'd written by
the time I submitted the collection to Salt. The stories were sequenced
according to subject matter, length and tone.
TSR: Do you
have a "reader" in mind when you write stories?
CG:
I wrote to entertain myself first and foremost.
TSR: Is there
anything you'd like to ask someone who has read your
collection,
anything at all?
CG:
What a good question! What's hard to know is what impact the collection
makes as a whole - what kind of reading experience is it?
TSR: How does it feel knowing that people are buying your book?
CG:
Wonderful and weird.
TSR: What are
you working on now?
CG:
My second collection of adult poems, children's poems and the
occasional story.
TSR: What are
the three most recent short story collections you've read?
CG:
Three collections - Yiyun Li's A Thousand Days of Solitude, Grace Paley's Collected and Ali Smith's The Whole Story and other Stories.
|