Tracy Fahey's Blog, page 2

The peculiar focus of a residency (or, how I wrote THEY SHUT ME UP in a Finnish forest)

A good residency allows for many things. A rethink, a reset, a new clarity on writing, the company of fellow artists and writers, a supportive atmosphere....and, crucially, a place to produce creative work.

What do you do when you need to write a novella for a deadline? If you can at all, get a residency. I was lucky enough to get a Saari Fellowship for March and April 2023 in a beautiful, remote (and initially snow-covered) forest near Mynämäki, Southwest Finland. Here, the Saari Residence hosts a funded two-month residency, where you live in a small community of international creatives. There is so much space here to walk and think and write, and so few distractions. The company of the residents is also a stimulus to creativity - when I was there in March and April 2023, there were writers, artists, filmmakers and a curator in residence from Scotland, Finland, Syria, Israel and the Ukraine, as well as visiting researchers from Finnish universities.

I spent March 2023 walking in the snow, taking night-time saunas, learning some lamentably bad Finnish, exploring the area, talking to my colleagues about our projects, writing a commissioned short story and planning my novella. I'd researched it in Ireland, so the first month was essentially drafting out the story in the form of a synopsis, and working out what I was saying - and how - and why?

Then April 2023 (apart from some trips to Helsinki, Turku, Uusikaupunki and Inio island) was largely spent in my studio. Most mornings I'd walk to work from my cabin to the Barn studio complex, initially through the light crunch of frozen snow, and later, as the spring unfolded and the landscape was revealed, through grass scattered with flowers and dappled with sunshine.

This is the part that I both love and dread - the grind of steadily outputting words. The isolation helped. The lack of Wi-Fi certainly helped. The supportive atmosphere was a boon. But mostly, it ended up being me, at my desk, holding myself to account. Though the novella is set in Ireland, and I'd researched it there, living in this heterotopic bubble in a strange country lent me the necessary detachment to consider and reflect on what I really wanted to say about women, invisibility, agency and revoicing...

...but that's a blog post for another time.

A huge thanks to the Saari Residence and the Kone Foundation who made my stay and the writing of this novella possible. Kiitos!

Pre-order They Shut Me Up here.

Researching my novella - THEY SHUT ME UP

It's almost here! My new novella launches on Friday 15th of September at Fantasycon in Birmingham. Click here to pre-order it from PS Publishing.

So what's it all about? Without giving too much away, this novella uses Irish folklore as a lens through which to revoice silenced narratives, and to restore agency to the contemporary protagonist through her female ancestry.

And so launches the first part of my new mission; to write redemption songs for older women; to revisualise them as imbued with the power of the Cailleach.

Massive thanks to the patient and wise Marie O'Regan, commissioning editor of Absinthe Books, an imprint of PS Publishing, for her work with me on this project.

I researched this project in County Clare, Ireland, where I live, and many notes were taken in historical locations, that I'll discuss over the next few days. However, I am much indebted to Clare County Library and their excellent Local Studies Centre (which features in this novella) - a restful and wonderful place to spend hours going through the archives, helped by the knowledgeable and kind staff. The Centre holds books, journals, newspaper cuttings, and all manner of historic papers. Although a lot of the content has been digitised and is available online, there's a special kind of analogue joy in reading the original documents.

If you're visiting Co. Clare, especially if you have any genealogical or historial queries, I warmly recommend the Centre.

Pre-order They Shut Me Up here.

Meeting the Hag

Two years ago, in a cottage here, I met the Hag. I met her in the folktales of Sean O'Conaill, the storyteller who once lived there.

And since then I've been researching a body of different work related to her. I've finished one of these projects, a novella, publication details of which will be announced soon, and just finished the second, a new collection.

Just a pause now to thank the extraordinary forces that helped shape this work; four residencies granted by the beautiful Cill Rialaig, a Saari Fellowship from the Kone Foundation, Finland, and funding by an Individual Arts Bursary and Grants Under The Arts.

And the Hag.

Go raibh míle maith agat, Cailleach

Shortlisted for British Fantasy Awards!

I'm delighted to announce that my last collection, 'I Spit Myself Out' (2021, Sinister Horror Company) has been shortlisted for Best Collection in the British Fantasy Awards 2022.

This book was very important to me - narratives of female body fears. The germ of the idea has been with me since recovering from illness in 2011, and with it, a new sense of the vulnerbility of the body. Over the next ten years, this seed slowly bloomed, giving rise to a desire to explore these fragilities, and the special fear women have, the recognition that their bodies represent a place of permeability.

I am so thankful to everyone who voted in these awards, who bought this book, who reviewed it, and those who supported me when I was writing it.

Most especially, thanks to my marvellous editor and publisher, Justin Park of the Sinister Horror Company. You can support them by buying the book here.

2020: Writing During A Pandemic

I won't lie. the first three weeks of the COVID-19 lockdown were ugly. Locked down on my own, conscious of my autoimmune disorder, with increasingly uncertain timelines as to when I could see friends and family again...I didn't cope very well. I think I spent that time grieving. And definitely not writing. Words eluded me, slid, eel-like away. Trying to write horror felt like it was triggering cognitive dissonance - with my brain trying to stay positive, yet simultaneously trying to go to dark places to write. To top it all, we had a family illness, and I felt the acute loneliness of being separated from your loved ones at such a time.So I turned to reading, and started devouring Jane Austen, Georgette Heyer, my comfort reads. And when the words came back, I wrote other things. I've always longed to stretch myself a little, past the confines of my beloved Gothic and folk horror. Now, in June, I've almost finished a co-written epistolary comic novel, in the style of Georgette Heyer, and as I wrote in the last blog post, I applied for and got accepted on to a crime writing course, 'Criminal Intent,' which has sparked a whole other realm of ideas and ambitions.But even more crucially, I slowed down. I realised I'd spent so much of the last few years running from my busy job to write and back again, travelling for work, for conferences, for conventions. All my 'life stuff' was forever on hold, pushed off as unimportant. So I've doing small stuff. Calling friends. Talking to neighbours. Walking within the allotted perimeters. Settling in my own home.I've been contributing stories to charity horror anthologies too, like 'I Write Your Name' to You Are Not Alone (Storgy) and the reprint of 'The Cure' for Infected 2: Tales To Read At Home (Things In The Well). A tiny thing to do, but it feels good. And I'm thrilled to have a brand new folk horror story, 'Dearg-an-Daol' (written before lockdown) coming out in Fiends In The Furrow 2 (Nosetouch Press), as well as a reprint of my story 'Graveyard Of The Lost' in Graveyard Smash: Women Of Horror 2 (Kandisha Press) – an American women-run horror press.There are a few other exciting things in the pipeline too, but that's for my next blog post.So I guess for now, I'm just sharing my experience of writing during lockdown. I'm acutely aware that writing is problematic right now, and I freely acknowledge that experience. I'm also conscious of my privilege in living in a beautiful little Irish village with walks and fresh air during this time. But I wanted to share my reality of changing tracks, and how doing so helped the words come back. I haven't written horror yet...that's still a little way off while the world around us continues to plunge past pandemic terror into horrific acts of racism.But in the meantime I've found other words and other modes.And with that I'm content.

Updates

My updates are sadly overdue, but much to report!My last post centred on my upcoming Limnisa residency. I'm happy to say it was one of the most beautiful and productive writing times I've ever spent anywhere. The place was breath-taking, the other residents so kind and sharing, and the upshot was producing two short stories, 'I Write Your Name' and 'Two A Penny,' one flash piece, 'Haunted By The Ghost,' and story notes for another short, 'Love Like Blood.'Most significantly, the third edition of The Unheimlich Manoeuvre was published in March 2020 by the Sinister Horror Company. This third, hardback edition is a beauty; containing all of the material in The Unheimlich Manoeuvre as well as Fahey’s essay ‘Creative Evocations of Uncanny Domestic Spaces,’ five additional stories, an original print and piece, ‘Remembering Wildgoose Lodge,’ and complete story notes for all stories. And there's also a mini-collection, Unheimlich Manoeuvres In The Dark which is composed of the additional material, for those who already have a copy of the original. All can be purchased at https://www.sinisterhorrorcompany.com... other news, I'm delighted to say that since I last wrote a post, I've had work accepted for Fiends in the Furrow II (Nosetouch Press), Gothic Detective Thrillers (Flametree Press), Infection II (Things In The Well Press) and After The Sirens Have Faded (A Murder Of Storytellers) and another for an as yet unannounced line-up. I've also applied for and been awarded a place on a crime fiction progamme, 'Criminal Intent.'In the meantime I'm working away on my next collection, 'I Spit Myself Out,' and hoping to announce more on that soon...

Off to Limnisa

I can hardly believe it, but in September I'm off to Limnisa for a writing retreat. I won a short story competition run by the retreat, and my 'You're Next' scooped this lovely reward...I've been looking longingly at images of Limnisa for over a year (and entered their competition last year too). It's on the peninsula of Methana in Greece, and the combination of blue skies, blue sea, serene hammocks, homecooked food just looked divine.Resolve: to enter more writing competitions. It's easy to feel discouraged if you don't succeed, but it's worth trying. Next up: applications for a Hawthornden Fellowship and a Hedgebrook residency.Wish me luck!

Writing Updates

I haven't updated in a while, but here are some scraps and fragments of news...I'm delighted to say I've had two short stories accepted for publication: 'Sin Deep' for Nightscript V and 'Inside Out' which has just been published in Volume 40 of Supernatural Tales. I've also written some stories that I've dispatched into the void to seek new horror homes: 'Possession,' 'It Comes Up,' and 'Listen To My Skin.'For Women In Horror month, I wrote a blog post for Colleen Anderson on folk horror, The Past is Always Present: New Music for Old Rituals, and a piece for the Horror Tree website -Contemporary Dystopias: Women, Bodies, Horror as well as doing an interview with Promote Horror.And speaking of interviews, I've been doing some more of these, with Simon Bestwick on The Lowdown, talking to Kendall Reviews about New Music For Old Rituals, and with Georgina Bruce as part of her Escape Room series. Finally, I'm grateful for the love that keeps rolling in for The Unheimlich Manoeuvre with thoughtful and insightful reviews by Kit Power on Gingernuts of Horror, D.K. Hundt on Kendall Reviews, and Kimberley Wolkens who won a runner-up award in the Writers' Domain review competition for her critique of The Unheimlich Manoeuvre. Thanks so much to you all.

Old Year, New Year

So long, 2018. It’s been a strange and demanding year, but from a writing perspective, a very interesting one. It’s seen my old collection of the domestic uncanny (The Unheimlich Manoeuvre) reissued by the Sinister Horror Company, and my new folk horror collection (New Music For Old Rituals) published by Black Shuck Books. I’ve also co-curated and co-edited The Black Room Manuscripts IVwith J.R. Park (which included my story ‘That Thing I Did’). I published one essay on the work of Aideen Barry, ‘Suburban/Domestic Gothic,’ in The Gothic Reader: The Gothic in 28 Texts and wrote another ‘Contemporary Folk Horror: The League of Gentlemen’ for Horror: A Reader. I was commissioned to create a text response to artist Marie Brett’s ‘Last Breath,’ for her 2018 film tour. I wrote a column for Ginger Nuts of Horror's 'Childhood Fears' column, and contributed a piece on 'Strawberry Spring' to Mark West's Stephen King Mixtape. I’ve done a This Is Horror podcast with J.R. Park and been interviewed by Kendall Reviews. Additionally I was invited to contribute short fiction to Imposters III (‘The Woman In The Moon’), the Pocket Guide to the Sinister Horror Company (‘The Thing Upstairs’), The Spooky Isles Book of Horror (‘Come Away’ and ‘The Black Dog’ plus two short essays), and fulfilled a lifetime ambition of guesting in a Christmas annual with the inclusion of ‘The Girl Who Kissed The Dead’ in the Sinister Horror Annual. I’m so grateful to my editors Justin Park, Steve Shaw, Lynda Rucker, Andrew Garvey and Simon Bacon for their help and advice in working on these projects.So my plans for 2019? I want to set myself the target (also articulated by the lovely Penny Jones under her own New Year’s resolutions) of writing one short story a month, and regularly submitting to anthology open calls. I did this in 2016, and it was a good way to hold my writing self to account. I’d like to finish my third collection, I Spit Myself Out; tales of terror emanating from within. I’m also going to write reviews, starting with those of the best fiction I’ve read in 2018.But this is also going to be a year of broadening out my creative horizons. I plan to try on different voices; attempt new ways of writing exploring different tropes in horror. I’ve been challenged to write longer-form fiction, so I’ll aim for a novella, or at least a novelette. I’m lining up an interview and a podcast. I haven’t drawn in a long time, so this year I’m going to do some illustration. I’m already co-scripting a stand-alone graphic novel and preparing a piece on Angela Carter which will go online shortly.And the rest of the resolutions? To say yes to more and more diverse creative opportunities.Here’s to 2019. Happy writing to us all.

My Second Collection : New Music For Old Rituals.

I can finally reveal that my second collection, New Music For Old Rituals, will be released this November by the wonderful Black Shuck Books, the home of the Great British Horror series of anthologies, and so much more.This collection is inspired by the Irish folklore I grew up with; the strange stories, the sacred sites, the household rituals. For me, folklore is a living entity. It flows and continues; it reappears, reinvented and reinterpreted, over and over again.These nineteen tales, in their different ways, explore the idea of legacy. They look at the shadows left by a past that is continually recurring in the present. Irish society today continued to be informed by the shades of na Sidhe, of ancient practices, of old, whispered stories.You can hear it.It's in the wind blowing over the portals of the Other world, over dolmens and fairy mounds, through whitethorns and stray sods.New Music For Old Rituals.