Fen: Stories

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Water is definitely Ms Johnson’s medium. Her Man Booker Prize shortlisted novel Everything Under (2018) is set along the canals of Oxford, where she now lives. While her short story in Hag: Forgotten Folktales Retold (2020) retells ‘The Green Children of Woolpit’ Suffolk tale with a tainted well. Read More Related Articles Reading the stories brought the sense of being trapped in a room, slowly The author of Sisters (2020) Everything Under (2018) and Fen (2016). Johnson says she was never one of the teenagers hiding shots under the table in the local pub, or bumming a cigarette in the car park outside. “I was always very good. A lot of my work ethos comes down to guilt. I don’t know if that’s good, but that’s the way it works. I never would have been one of those people, which is why maybe I can write about them, from an outside point of view.” It wasn’t until she moved away, first to study English and creative writing in Lancaster and then for a master’s in creative writing at Oxford, that she began to explore the strange country of her teenage years. “The landscape almost had to be diminished down into a memory for it to be something I could write about, because if you were sat in it, it would be too much … In a memory, particularly a childhood memory, it becomes almost a mythic thing.”

Many of these characters are young women and teenagers exploring the emotional and sexual power of their incipient womanhood. “There’s something about being a teenager – I remember it as being awful. I’m sure not everyone does, but it’s such a strange time. Everything you look at, all the little bits, like going to the pub, are really weird, because you’re going through this massive breakdown of person.” Niet alle verhalen uit deze bundel zijn even sterk, maar ik hou een slag om de arm, omdat Johnson op het eerste gezicht moeilijk te vertalen is. Elk woord heeft gewicht. Terwijl ik las heb ik vaak gedacht dat Engels echt mijn moedertaal had moeten zijn, en dat ik dit boek in de oorspronkelijke taal had moeten lezen, omdat ik dan elk detail van Johnsons smeuïge, zinnelijke taal zou hebben meegekregen. We meet the sisters some time after an unspecified disaster that has sent them to a tumbledown seaside house in the North York Moors. Their father is dead – he is a mysterious, often malign absence in the novel, like, says Johnson, a monster in the corner – and the move has precipitated a depression in their mother so severe that she, too, becomes absent, leaving them to forage tinned food and roam about the place while she remains shut up in a bedroom. But it’s the sense of peril that Johnson builds, a kind of suppressed, poltergeist energy, that makes the book propulsive and disturbing far more than any single plot detail. What was she trying to do? Pronoun] loved her darkly and greatly and with a huge, gut-swallowing want… love spun often into hate.” The overwhelming feeling i had reading it - as if i digested a bunch of psychedelic mushrooms (which i actually never tried so cannot compare) and going through a series of weird and often unpleasant dreams. Her writing is very imaginative. All her sentences work perfectly. But the ideas and symbols of the stories are starting to repeat themselves, especially at the second part of the collection. And while she is very good describing the feelings of adolescent girls, she is a bit out of her depth when it comes to mothers, babies and the profound transformation of motherhood. I would not blame her for that as she is still young, but for me it was very noticeable. Men in these stories are a little more than the decorations, it seems. (And in one stories they are literally used for food).a b "2017 Longlist - The Sunday Times Short Story Awards". shortstoryaward.co.uk . Retrieved 13 October 2018.

Poetic, risky... Johnson's slippery and sensual stories-cum-chapters have an amphibious elemental quality and a contemporary provincial witchiness of their own. -- Phil Baker * Sunday Times * Nevertheless, she embarks on an improbable relationship, which is unexpectedly cut short and even more unexpectedly transformed.When we were younger we learnt men the way other people learnt languages or the violin… We did not care for their thoughts; they could think on philosophy and literature and science if they wanted, they could grow opinions inside them if they wanted. We did not care for their creed or religion or type; for the choices they made and the ones they missed. We cared only for what they wanted so much it ruined them. Men could pretend they were otherwise, could enact the illusion of self-control, but we knew the running stress of their minds." Fen as a female perspective on life? Daisy said it was in part a reaction to feeling angry as a teenager because there were not enough female characters. Daisy cited Sarah Hall (a big influence) - I will stop writing about female characters when you stop asking me about female characters"

Gender is another matter, and again she cites the Greek myths, and how exciting it was for a 13-year-old to read about Tiresias changing gender, “and it didn’t mean anything, it wasn’t a complicated thing to do, of course you can be different genders, it was just taken for granted”. Fen included a trans character, although “I’m not a trans writer and I think that people should turn to trans writers. But I hope that by writing trans characters I’m doing some kind of good.” The stories are in many ways more striking than the better known Everything Under, and this is in part the nature of short stories that cannot meander (Sarah Hall's term for the more forgiving nature of longer novels). She’s already working on novel exploring another liminal zone – the network of canals that thread through post-industrial Britain. Mixed with the nervousness that makes Johnson sit up straight in her chair, measuring out each answer with stop-start care, is a confidence that the wide spaces of the fen have helped her to find her voice. Daisy Johnson was the youngest author ever shortlisted for the prestigious Man Booker Prize in 2018, at the age of 27 (Image: Pollyanna Johnson)Johnson currently lives in Oxford. [17] Her favourite writers include Stephen King, Evie Wyld, Helen Oyeyemi and John Burnside. Her favourite poets include Robin Robertson and Sharon Olds. [18] Had she been unsuccessful as a writer, Johnson suggests that she would have been a shepherd. [1] Novels [ edit ] I have always enjoyed books set around harsh landscapes (am I the only person to find Wuthering Heights a 'cosy' novel?) and that is part of what this book is, set on the flat english Fenlands, is. It also appeals to the small town/village girl in me. Image: “And now for something completely different” – Monty Python’s Albatross sketch ( Source and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrqW_...) The writing is beautiful, and made the elements of magic injected into most of the stories completely plausible, as well as being magical each was so human. Reading this was a joy, I had to stop reading to save some for the next evening. The distinctiveness of this collection is set from the first story – what at first seems to be a tale of teenage anorexia turns into a story of land drainage and transformation into an eel – and is followed by a story of men-eating women who are then possessed by the men they eat and then by a jealous house, and later by a new mother who experiences the visitation of a sailor’s superstition, and by a woman fashioned from the Fen earth and magical belief.