Learning to Read the Stars
Tom Conaghan (ed.), Reverse Engineering
Scratch Books, 176pp, £9.99, ISBN 9781739830106
reviewed by Phoebe Tee
In his introduction to Reverse Engineering — the inaugural publication by Scratch Books — the collection’s editor and interviewer, Tom Conaghan, invokes cartographers and mapping. He marvels that ‘one amazing story is only a minute piece of the map,’ and writes of the ‘landmass’ and ‘[n]avigating’ of stories. The book’s project is a good one: to disassemble seven short stories, and map out how they work. ‘Understanding writers’ craft,’ Conaghan sets out, ‘is less like a nautical map than learning to read the stars — it’s not important knowing the route of if the purpose of the voyage is to get lost.’ He lays out his aims and methods clearly: he wants ‘to find out from a writer how they arrived at their story’. In the undertaking of the project, he shows us his workings: his grappling with what short stories are, how they operate, and what they are for; an attempt, his attempt, at understanding.
The stories in this book are excellent and varied. Conaghan asks good questions, and gets good answers — some long and eloquent, others frictive, all instructive. In placing each story before each interview there is a delicate balance between the work speaking for itself and the anticipation of question and answer. Knowing that the interview is waiting for us gives the reader a kind of nerdy, greedy attentiveness. Reading Okojie’s ‘Filamo’ — a dense, surreal, religious story — in this context gives me a better understanding of the story’s narrative and a greater imagining of its rich, ripe imagery, while her invocation to ‘enjoy the wildness’ grants the reader a certain freedom in the parsing of ‘Filamo’.
In the reading of Conaghan’s questions and Chris Power’s answers, I found myself reflecting on Power’s ‘The Crossing’ — an intimate story of rivers and stepping stones — for longer than I usually would have; there is a certain pleasure in seeing the story’s engine. Power, a ‘gamekeeper turned poacher [whose] series, A Brief History of the Short Story, has run in The Guardian since 2006’, speaks to Conaghan in a shared mode of language. His story engages with mapping and diversions — a near-perfect fit for Conaghan’s project.
Mahreen Sohail’s ‘Hair’, too, maps onto this ethos of rigorous disassembling. Her writing is metatextual; the self-aware ‘girl’ of the narrative ‘[f]eels herself rising to the middle of this story’. In her answers, Sohail interrogates her own impulses, the ways that the story developed ‘[n]ot consciously’ and ‘surprised’ her. There is a curiosity in her conversation with Conaghan, in the way she lets us in on the process of the story and how it altered as it became itself: ‘it became clear’, ‘I tweaked that’, ‘suddenly it was about hair instead and I found that could be the engine that would give the story a richness’.
Jessie Greengrass also gives us an insight into the ‘semi-conscious’ work of writing ‘Theophrastus and the Dancing Plague’, her story of constant wandering. At some points, Greengrass’s answers butt against Conaghan’s questions: when asked about the registers she used, she answers that ‘[t]his is probably the sort of thing that I don’t tend to think about'. She does not, she explains, ‘put a lot of thought into why the story needs to be as it is,’ instead comparing her writing to ‘being able to just hear that a piece of music is in tune as opposed to having to think about it consciously'. The book's cartographic metaphor places emphasis on the intentional and conscious, on scrutinising and choosing every moving part. Greengrass, in contrast, chooses the elusoriness of tune to explain her writing; she values the unconscious and unknown, the workings humming away beneath the bonnet. ‘I don’t think things through very well before I do it,’ she says. ‘I write by writing.’
Jon McGregor scrutinises the choices and ‘why’s of his story from a somewhat greater distance — that of 20 years of writing life. His contribution, ‘The First Punch’, slams into the reader and then opens out into questions of intimacy and betrayal. In one of the pleasing dialogic twists of Reverse Engineering, McGregor — describing his early short stories — engages with Chris Power’s observation of tendencies towards ‘the prevaricative voice’. In this interview more than any other, we watch a writer try to understand his choices and to map his earlier writer self. Reflecting on his process, McGregor ‘suspect[s] that some of that vagueness’ in his story arises from lack of drive’; he ‘imagine[s]’ that he ‘played around a lot with how long to stay with one strand before cutting back to the other’. We watch him re-encountering his work ‘pleasantly surprised by some of the key images', and engaging with the ‘imprecise’ act of memory itself.
Joseph O’Neill — author of the swooping, swerving final story ‘The Flier’ — is the quietest, and funniest, of Conaghan’s interviewees. His story is melancholy in the way that only funny things can be. O’Neill also engages with the unconscious and unknown in his own writing: when asked about his protagonist he’s ‘not sure what to think of him’. At points, O’Neill pulls away from Conaghan’s questions. ‘Can I disagree?’ he asks, in response to the suggestion that he does not ‘want a conventional sense of realism’ in his descriptions of New York.
Reverse Engineering is not, can never be, an objective mapping of the world’s short stories. Mapping is not an objective project in its own right. In invoking the ‘pin and prod’ of the lepidopterist, Conaghan gestures at the flaws inherent in the search for objective scientific cataloguing. However, like a good scientist, Conaghan is ready to test theories as he goes. In his interview with Greengrass, she shares her thoughts on ‘the story as a sort of argument’. Later, when interviewing Sarah Hall about her story of ‘land-steal’, intimacy and transformation, ‘Mrs Fox’, he uses Greengrass's notion of story-as-argument as a prompt. These questions and answers are generative: Greengrass's comments become a springboard for Hall's assertion that a short story is at once ‘an enquiry’ and something ‘like a piece of river’.
There is, in this impulse to define through metaphor, and in the slippage between these two definitions — river and enquiry — something of Conaghan’s whole mission. The engine of this project, in the end, is its ambiguity — the spaces where Conaghan allows for dialogue and disagreement. It is in the places in between losing and mapping — where Conaghan’s rigorous questions rub up against revisions, semi-conscious choices, surreality, half-memories — that this project of stories, and questions, and answers, is at its best. The book, the result, is not a meandering loss, or an accurate map, but something like a port — a place for stopping, and reflecting, and disagreeing, and setting off.
The stories in this book are excellent and varied. Conaghan asks good questions, and gets good answers — some long and eloquent, others frictive, all instructive. In placing each story before each interview there is a delicate balance between the work speaking for itself and the anticipation of question and answer. Knowing that the interview is waiting for us gives the reader a kind of nerdy, greedy attentiveness. Reading Okojie’s ‘Filamo’ — a dense, surreal, religious story — in this context gives me a better understanding of the story’s narrative and a greater imagining of its rich, ripe imagery, while her invocation to ‘enjoy the wildness’ grants the reader a certain freedom in the parsing of ‘Filamo’.
In the reading of Conaghan’s questions and Chris Power’s answers, I found myself reflecting on Power’s ‘The Crossing’ — an intimate story of rivers and stepping stones — for longer than I usually would have; there is a certain pleasure in seeing the story’s engine. Power, a ‘gamekeeper turned poacher [whose] series, A Brief History of the Short Story, has run in The Guardian since 2006’, speaks to Conaghan in a shared mode of language. His story engages with mapping and diversions — a near-perfect fit for Conaghan’s project.
Mahreen Sohail’s ‘Hair’, too, maps onto this ethos of rigorous disassembling. Her writing is metatextual; the self-aware ‘girl’ of the narrative ‘[f]eels herself rising to the middle of this story’. In her answers, Sohail interrogates her own impulses, the ways that the story developed ‘[n]ot consciously’ and ‘surprised’ her. There is a curiosity in her conversation with Conaghan, in the way she lets us in on the process of the story and how it altered as it became itself: ‘it became clear’, ‘I tweaked that’, ‘suddenly it was about hair instead and I found that could be the engine that would give the story a richness’.
Jessie Greengrass also gives us an insight into the ‘semi-conscious’ work of writing ‘Theophrastus and the Dancing Plague’, her story of constant wandering. At some points, Greengrass’s answers butt against Conaghan’s questions: when asked about the registers she used, she answers that ‘[t]his is probably the sort of thing that I don’t tend to think about'. She does not, she explains, ‘put a lot of thought into why the story needs to be as it is,’ instead comparing her writing to ‘being able to just hear that a piece of music is in tune as opposed to having to think about it consciously'. The book's cartographic metaphor places emphasis on the intentional and conscious, on scrutinising and choosing every moving part. Greengrass, in contrast, chooses the elusoriness of tune to explain her writing; she values the unconscious and unknown, the workings humming away beneath the bonnet. ‘I don’t think things through very well before I do it,’ she says. ‘I write by writing.’
Jon McGregor scrutinises the choices and ‘why’s of his story from a somewhat greater distance — that of 20 years of writing life. His contribution, ‘The First Punch’, slams into the reader and then opens out into questions of intimacy and betrayal. In one of the pleasing dialogic twists of Reverse Engineering, McGregor — describing his early short stories — engages with Chris Power’s observation of tendencies towards ‘the prevaricative voice’. In this interview more than any other, we watch a writer try to understand his choices and to map his earlier writer self. Reflecting on his process, McGregor ‘suspect[s] that some of that vagueness’ in his story arises from lack of drive’; he ‘imagine[s]’ that he ‘played around a lot with how long to stay with one strand before cutting back to the other’. We watch him re-encountering his work ‘pleasantly surprised by some of the key images', and engaging with the ‘imprecise’ act of memory itself.
Joseph O’Neill — author of the swooping, swerving final story ‘The Flier’ — is the quietest, and funniest, of Conaghan’s interviewees. His story is melancholy in the way that only funny things can be. O’Neill also engages with the unconscious and unknown in his own writing: when asked about his protagonist he’s ‘not sure what to think of him’. At points, O’Neill pulls away from Conaghan’s questions. ‘Can I disagree?’ he asks, in response to the suggestion that he does not ‘want a conventional sense of realism’ in his descriptions of New York.
Reverse Engineering is not, can never be, an objective mapping of the world’s short stories. Mapping is not an objective project in its own right. In invoking the ‘pin and prod’ of the lepidopterist, Conaghan gestures at the flaws inherent in the search for objective scientific cataloguing. However, like a good scientist, Conaghan is ready to test theories as he goes. In his interview with Greengrass, she shares her thoughts on ‘the story as a sort of argument’. Later, when interviewing Sarah Hall about her story of ‘land-steal’, intimacy and transformation, ‘Mrs Fox’, he uses Greengrass's notion of story-as-argument as a prompt. These questions and answers are generative: Greengrass's comments become a springboard for Hall's assertion that a short story is at once ‘an enquiry’ and something ‘like a piece of river’.
There is, in this impulse to define through metaphor, and in the slippage between these two definitions — river and enquiry — something of Conaghan’s whole mission. The engine of this project, in the end, is its ambiguity — the spaces where Conaghan allows for dialogue and disagreement. It is in the places in between losing and mapping — where Conaghan’s rigorous questions rub up against revisions, semi-conscious choices, surreality, half-memories — that this project of stories, and questions, and answers, is at its best. The book, the result, is not a meandering loss, or an accurate map, but something like a port — a place for stopping, and reflecting, and disagreeing, and setting off.