Fen: Stories

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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.

When he says he likes your boobs or that your bottom is tight or that you’re pretty fun aren’t you, you tell him words are cheap enough to spit and push his face the place you want it to go.” The result, wrote its Guardian reviewer, is is an original and gripping book, in which “boundaries shift and slide and myth and folklore seep up from the sodden ground and insinuate their way into her characters’ solid-seeming lives”.

Daisy Johnson is youngest Booker nominee". BBC News. 20 September 2018 . Retrieved 13 October 2018. 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.” Kushner, Rachel; Burns, Anna; Edugyan, Esi; Robertson, Robin; Powers, Richard; Johnson, Daisy (13 October 2018). "How I write: Man Booker shortlist authors reveal their inspirations". The Guardian . Retrieved 13 October 2018.

As part of my work with UN Women, I have started reading OUR SHARED SHELF IS CURRENTLY DORMANT AND NOT MANAGED BY EMMA AND HER TEAM. I think it’s high time that we think about those stories, and I guess this is what we’re doing with JK Rowling now. We’re thinking about the stories that our children are reading and what they’re going to teach them.” At 29, she is the right age to have read Harry Potter, and remembers that her family would buy two copies of the books and she and her brother and sister would fight over them. “They were an integral part of my reading experience. You know, it was a really important part of a lot of people’s childhoods.” She stops, waits, nods. The male-dominated stories we have told ourselves are missing such a large part of human experience that there needs to be space for alternative ones next to them, she explains, a space opened up by the irruption of the uncanny. “It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be writing about male characters, but women need to appear not only as mothers and partners, they need to appear as I-carrying figures in their own right.” I just saw a mentally unbalanced woman and equally imbalanced towns-people who apparently were very bored and used her and her fish as entertainment. Maybe. We saw the others via the MC. She could have been imagining their interest. Surprising, gorgeously written, and profoundly unsettling, this genderfluid retelling of Oedipus Rex will sink into your bones and stay there." (Carmen Maria Machado)

by Daisy Johnson

She… saw the ends and starts of conversations swimming up and then receding into the loud. Boat words she knew from Ruben caught at her like hooks.” It is an area which has featured in Graham Swift’s Waterland (which while a very different book, has in common that the Fens themselves almost end up a character, and has a slight obsession with eels) and is the historical setting for Paul Kingsnorth’s wonderful The Wake. 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.” Perhaps what’s most terrifying is it could be anywhere: “You could be driving around that landscape and you come round the corner and you see this hotel,” Ms Johnson said.