Fighting It Interview with Regi Claire
Could you tell us a bit about your new collection Fighting It – where the initial ideas came from and how it developed?
Writing the book felt like an organic, intuitive process. I think I started off with a couple of stories inspired by friends, snatches of conversation we’d had on the phone, for example, and memories shared over a cup of tea or while dog walking. It was only after having completed several stories that I realised they were all somehow ‘connected’. Not in any blatantly obvious way – setting, characters etc. – but at the much deeper level of imaginatively exploring various aspects of our constant battle to retain belief in ourselves. A battle I’m convinced we all fight, even if we don’t always admit it.
Once I became aware of this leitmotif, I tried to channel my creative energies, though there wasn’t much need to. I was myself at that time going through a prolonged phase of strong self-doubt, which quite naturally was reflected in my writing. Incidentally, the title, though chosen several years ago, proved prophetic: I was diagnosed with bowel cancer a few weeks after the book had been accepted by TRP last summer, and the book-to-be became my talisman, my very own call to battle.
Fighting It is your second volume of short stories, and you have published many more in literary magazines and anthologies (including Cleave and Stolen Stories). Is it a form that you feel particularly comfortable with?
I do feel I have an affinity with stories. Both as a writer and as a reader. They’re short and yet complete. They can encompass and illuminate whole lives, whole worlds. Depth, not length. You end up with a finished ‘creation’ (I hate the word ‘product’, it makes writing sound like a factory process!) within a manageable space of time – and you stand a good chance of getting it published, relatively quickly, in a literary magazine or an anthology. And there’s something truly satisfying about reading a story in one sitting, perhaps while you’re on a train or a bus or during your lunch break. Afterwards, you can hold it in your head, turn it over in your mind, inspect it from all angles. Stories are perfect for today’s fast-paced, sound-bite lifestyle.
That said, I do love reading – and writing – novels. In fact, I’ve just started on one. There’s a sense of immersion that’s quite a kick, to the point where I begin to inhabit the world of my characters so completely I find myself using purple nail varnish and eyeliner, just like my protagonist.
The protagonists of the stories are all concerned in some way with making choices, or reflecting on choices made; many of them find themselves at turning points in their lives. Was this a theme you consciously chose to explore?
No, not consciously. But I like stories to contain an element of ‘drama’, tension – character in action or action in character. Which is what making choices (like Max in ‘Cool Room 3’ or Nicole in ‘Heat’) or reflecting on them and then acting accordingly (like Florence in ‘Snow White and the Prince’) is all about. I love reading thrillers and detective fiction and as a student was a great admirer of dramatic monologues.
Of course, there’s the biographical side, too. Having met my husband-to-be, Ron Butlin, in 1992/93, I found myself at a crossroads: if I gave up my life in Switzerland, I’d not only lose the prestigious job I had as a research assistant and Ph.D. student in the English Department at Zurich University but also my whole social network. In the end I chose love. And decided to continue with my Ph.D. – with two supervisors, one at Edinburgh University, the other in Zurich. Well, that was the plan. Once settled in Edinburgh, however, I started writing fiction, something I’d always, in a vague, dreamy sort of way, imagined I might do. After I won the Edinburgh Review Tenth Anniversary Short Story Competition in 1995 (in the previously unpublished author category), the Ph.D. files and folders were gradually confined to a cupboard. Then, years later, came the final decision: I threw out several bin bags full of research and, almost guiltily, gave up on the Ph.D. My professor in Switzerland said he was proud of me.
You’re a creative writing tutor at the National Galleries of Scotland, teaching workshops which use the Galleries’ artworks as inspiration. Your own writing has a very visual quality to it and you use very striking imagery, particularly when you describe the natural world – do you find inspiration in art?
I have many artist friends – one is actually visiting me right now, from France – and I very much enjoy going to art exhibitions. But for my writing I prefer unmediated reality, coloured merely by my own perception. I’ve always liked looking. Looking at things, at people. At the shape of a tree, say, or the colour variegations of its bark, at the way the light slants over someone’s face, or the way they move their eyes. Recently I saw a crow perched high on a stone pillar, quite still, and with a small, silvery container of barbecue sauce in its beak – it was the perfect real-life statue!
The stories in Fighting It are set all over the world, from the French embassies of Middle East to the Swiss autobahn, and many characters in the stories dream of travel and escape (such as Laura, in the title story, reading guidebooks in her cell or Rosie in 'Invisible Partners' with her sudden desire to go ‘abroad’, anywhere). Do you think that fiction can offer the kind of escape the characters are searching for?
To a certain extent, yes. While recovering from my operations – and once I felt up to it – I did a lot of reading. Often I became so engrossed that I actually forgot all about my illness: the best testimony to the escapist power of fiction, I’d say. Of course, this power is only temporary, a bit like holidays (even in the story, Laura knows she will need to keep a lid on her violent urges for the rest of her life, books or no books). Rosie enjoys imagining other people’s lives when she reads the lonely hearts column, but with her it’s also a case of not quite feeling at home where she is. Many of my characters experience a similar kind of ambivalence, a sense of in-between-ness, which is also my own. I have dual nationality now, but I still feel much more Swiss than British. And, I suspect, always will. Not even reading (or writing) fiction can change this.
When did you start writing? Was it a childhood passion or did you come to it later in life?
My parents’ house was full of books, and reading has always been a great passion of mine. When I was about eleven I first tried my hand at writing and, in the privacy of my bedroom, embarked on an illustrated love and adventure story about Native Americans, sparked off by the novels I’d been reading. In my adolescence I only produced a few angst-ridden prose poems (all written in German). Later, as a student at Zurich University, I enrolled for an advanced language course in Bath. Instead of the presentation I was supposed to prepare for one of the classes, I ended up writing – and reading out – a short story set in Orkney, called ‘The Loner’ (I was obsessed with ancient monuments in those days). The other students liked it and my tutor encouraged me to send it off to literary magazines, which I did. I’m still surprised at the number of personal and rather positive rejections I received. Until I came to Scotland, I never wrote creatively again.
How does the writing process begin for you? Does the story tend to come first or the narrator’s voice?
Sometimes the voice – Max, the fed-up family man in ‘Cool Room 3’, Rosie, the lonely elderly widow and ‘foreigner’ in ‘Invisible Partners’. Sometimes the story – an adulterous love affair with terrible consequences (‘Heat’), a transsexual’s experiences (‘Everybody Goes Crazy Once in a While’). Often, inspiration comes from something I’ve read in a newspaper or heard or seen. ‘I Call Her Salome’, for example, originated from the overheard remark, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been moved by anything, or anyone, in my life’. Or something may simply pop into my head out of nowhere, a single phrase or a sentence, an image that refuses to leave me alone until I’ve brought it to life in a story. ‘Russian Blue’ started out like that, with a woman escaping from a psychiatric clinic, a woman on the run. A lot of the time, though, these images, sentences or phrases already ‘contain’ the voice and suggest the story. So it’s really all mixed up together.
Which authors have most influenced your writing? Are there any Scottish writers you would particularly recommend to BooksfromScotland.com readers?
I can’t think of any influences as such, but I do have many favourite authors. Some of them I admired when still at school, others I got to know at university, and still others much more recently. In no particular order, they are: Henrik Ibsen, Heinrich von Kleist, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Georg Büchner, Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Andersch, Stefan Zweig, Jeremias Gotthelf, Goethe (especially Die Wahlverwandtschaften), Heinrich Böll, Max Frisch, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Charles Dickens, Graham Greene, William Faulkner, Harold Pinter, J.M. Coetzee, James Lee Burke, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, John le Carré, Martin Cruz Smith, John Connolly, Irène Némirovsky, Katherine Mansfield, Carson McCullers, Rosamond Lehmann, Jean Rhys, Toni Morrison – the list could go on, and on.
As for Scottish writers, Louise Welsh and Lesley Glaister (not Scottish but based in Scotland) spring immediately to mind. And my husband, Ron Butlin, of course! Also Elspeth Davie, Alasdair Gray and Edwin Morgan. In addition, I’d like to specially recommend the many fine authors published by the smaller presses, as the latter don’t have the clout and money for big PR campaigns or to pay for shelf space, special displays, 3-for-2 offers and other discounts in bookshop chains and supermarkets.
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Each of the stories in 'Fighting It' illustrates an aspect of the title phrase: they focus on people struggling with their individual lives and destinies.
