Today I am delighted to
welcome one of my favourite writers as a guest on the Blog. Amanda Huggins has
kindly returned to talk about her new short story collection Scratched Enamel Heart (published by
Retreat West Books).
Read my review at the end
of this post.
Amanda Huggins is the author of Scratched Enamel Heart, a new short
story collection which features ‘Red’, her prize-winning story from the 2018
Costa Short Story Award. Her previous short story collection, Separated From the Sea, received a
Special Mention in the 2019 Saboteur Awards. She has also published a flash
fiction collection, Brightly Coloured Horses and a poetry collection, The Collective Nouns for Birds, which
won the 2020 Saboteur Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet.
Her fiction and poetry have been placed
and listed in numerous competitions including Fish, Bridport, Bath, InkTears,
the Alpine Fellowship Writing Award and the Colm Toibin International Short
Story Award. Her travel writing has also won several awards, notably the BGTW
New Travel Writer of the Year in 2014, and she has twice been a finalist in the
Bradt Guides New Travel Writer Award.
Amanda grew up on the North Yorkshire
coast, moved to London in the 1990s, and now lives in West Yorkshire.
Scratched
Enamel Heart
The
resilience and frailty of the human heart lie at the core of this second short
story collection from award-winning author, Amanda Huggins.
A
lonely woman spends a perfect night with a stranger, yet is their connection
enough to make her realise life is worth living? Maya, a refugee, wears a bracelet
strung with charms that are a lifeline to her past; when the past catches up
with her, she has a difficult decision to make. Rowe’s life on the Yorkshire
coast is already mapped out for him, but when there is an accident at the
steelworks he knows he has to flee from an intolerable future. In the Costa
prize-winning ‘Red’, Mollie is desperate to leave Oakridge Farm and her abusive
stepfather, to walk free with the stray dog she has named Hal.
These
are stories filled with yearning and hope, the search for connection and the
longing to escape. They transport the reader from India to Japan, from mid-west
America to the north-east coast of England, from New York to London. Battered,
bruised, jaded or jilted, the human heart somehow endures.
Animals and nature feature in so much of
your writing, is this intentional? What part do animals/wildlife/nature play in
your own life, do any of your fictional creatures come from your own experience
of animals?
No,
it isn’t intentional, however I do have a deep-rooted love of animals and the
natural world, so I guess it’s inevitable. My partner and I are members of the
RSPB and really enjoy birdwatching, both at nature reserves and while walking
on the moors or the Northumberland coastal paths. We also have a menagerie of
seven part-time cats – four semi-strays which we feed, and three others which
are perfectly well looked after but have just latched onto a good thing!
I
always aim to convey a strong sense of place in my stories, and rural
landscapes feature regularly in my work. I’m originally from the Yorkshire
coast, so the sea plays an important part in a number of my stories – such as
‘Where the Sky Starts’ and ‘Light Box’ in Scratched
Enamel Heart – and it is also the all-encompassing theme of my debut novella,
All Our Squandered Beauty.
I find my characters are shaped by the places they inhabit, particularly in
those stories set in the distinctive landscapes of India, Japan and North America – for example, ‘A Longing for
Clouds’ and ‘Red’.
The
locations which feature in my stories are always inspired by real life travels
– I would never set a story somewhere I hadn’t visited myself. The koi fish and
the beautiful garden in ‘A Potential Husband’ were inspired by my travels in
Japan, as were the fireflies in ‘Soul of a Fighter’. Nature also features
heavily in my poetry, and one of my favourite poems in The Collective Nouns for Birds is
‘At the Kitchen Table’, which I wrote when snowed-in in the North Pennines.
Hal,
the dog in ‘Red’, is a creature of the imagination, though I’d love to own a
dog like him! Similarly, Jigsaw, in ‘Where the Sky Starts’ isn’t based on a
real pony, though I loved horses and horse riding as a child and often
pretended that the grey stallion which lived in a nearby field was mine! The
only real life creature I have written about is my favourite cat, Duzzy – she
was the inspiration for the poem ‘Not-Quite-You’ in The Collective Nouns for Birds.
I am a self-confessed fan of all your
writing, Mandy. You are an inspiration particularly as you write across
different genres and forms. When an idea first comes to you how do you decide
on its final written form, what is your decision process for turning it into a
story, flash fiction or poem or longer?
Thank
you, Tracy, you are very kind! I’m a huge fan of your writing too!
The
truth is that I don’t often think about the final written form when I start to
write. As the idea develops, it becomes what it wants to be, but often changes
its mind! Poems have morphed into stories and vice versa – as you’ll see from
reading The Collective
Nouns for Birds and Scratched
Enamel Heart side by side – and stories that tried to be something longer
have ended up being flash fiction. Also, all three of my novellas are based on
short stories of approximately 2000 words – it’s all very fluid. Because my
prose leans towards the lyrical and I tend to write a lot of narrative poetry,
I find there is a natural crossover between the two writing forms.
How have you found writing during
lockdown? Have the words dried (I've struggled to write any fiction) or have
you tapped into a flood? Can you share any top tips for surviving lockdown as a
writer? (I know this might be obsolete by the time of posting - so I may change
the question to how you survived and kept writing (or not) during lockdown).
At
the beginning of lockdown I was still heading out every morning to the day job,
and I found that incredibly stressful and suffered from deep anxiety and the
odd panic attack. I also felt guilty and useless for feeling that way when all
around me there were people going to work in much more dangerous circumstances – and of course still are.
As
a result I struggled to write anything new for weeks – or to concentrate well
enough to read – but I did eventually produce a poem and a short flash piece
about the lockdown. The latter is published on the 100 Words of Solitude
website here.
I
think the lockdown experience may inform my future writing in more depth, but
it’s too close right now.
I
find that walking and communing with nature help to get the words flowing
inside my head – I just wish I could hold onto them until I got home! And when
I find my mind is a blank, then I look at an old piece of work I’d given up on
to try and spark new ideas.
I’m
surviving furlough by sticking to a rigid routine. I get up early, go for a
walk before I sit down at the computer, and then exercise again before lunch,
and take time out to read in the afternoon. My partner and I have also spent
more time together watching TV in the evenings – something we would never
normally do!
We all have our favourite stories. Sorry
to ask you to choose between them but do you have a favourite(s) from this
collection and why?
It’s
a tough question, but I think my favourite story has to be ‘Red’. It was
rejected by several magazines, and failed to reach so much as the longlist in
three smaller competitions, before it went on to win third prize in the 2018
Costa Short Story Award. I always had faith in it, and that faith was
eventually rewarded!
There
are a few other contenders as well, including ‘Part of Sami, Part of Malik’
about the bond between two refugees, which was written for Interact Stroke
Support. I had the joy of listening to it performed live by the fabulous actor,
Andy Lucas at the Arcola Theatre in Dalston back in February. I’m also fond of
‘A Brightness To It’, the newest story in the collection, and the one which my
third novella will be based around, and ‘A Longing for Clouds’, a story set in
India that has been around for a good ten years in many guises and versions.
The protagonist, Maggie, is one of my favourite characters.
Can you tell us about your next writing
project, what do you have in the pipeline?
As
you’ll have gathered, I’m juggling three novellas at the moment! I’ve just
started the third, and am currently tweaking the second, Crossing the Lines,
which is based on the story, ‘Red’.
My first novella, All Our
Squandered Beauty, based on the title story from Separated From the Sea,
will be published soon by Victorina Press.
Where can we buy a copy of Scratched
Enamel Heart?
My review of Scratched Enamel
Heart:
Scratched
Enamel Heart by Amanda Huggins (Retreat West Books) is a collection of 24
stories, and impressively her third collection of short fiction. The prose
throughout, whether in flash form or longer, is breath-taking at times, lyrical
as poetry and heart-wrenching.
Numerous stories made me cry, purely because
they triggered an emotional resonance. I cried at the ending of the opening
story, ‘Where the Sky Starts’, not because it was sad or tragic but I
completely understood the protagonist and his desire to escape. Each story has
an authentic setting which brings it alive, and Huggins takes us all over the
world to drop the reader into new and different landscapes. I particularly
loved how I didn’t what to expect when starting a story, these stories are as
unique and individual as the charms on Maya’s bracelet in ‘Scratched Enamel
Heart’. The characters are often the forgotten and overlooked people of our
world, the refugees, the abused and those who believe themselves unlovable.
Some of them find refuge, home and acceptance, others don’t always get the
happy ending they long for.
To pick out a
favourite story is tough, one is the Costa Short Story Award finalist ‘Red’, an
uncomfortable story where a girl finds a much needed friend in a wild dog.
Others include the title story and ‘A longing for clouds’, again about
friendship but this time between an employer and her long-suffering loyal
employee. The shorter flash stories intersperse their longer siblings,
sometimes making you gasp or gulp with their power and never breaking the
spell.
A collection to
keep and cherish, to read again when times are tough and remember our lives can
be filled with love, friendship and understanding. Amanda Huggins is a writer
who understands what makes the world beautiful.
