All Lit Up: Tell us about your book There’s Always More to Say. What can readers expect?
Natalie Southworth: There’s Always More to Say is a collection of nine stories (three are linked) about female ambition, family fragility, and madness.
The stories navigate an open dialogue between “winners” and “losers” and the stories we tell ourselves about these ideas. As a reader and writer, I’m drawn to characters who can’t cut it—they get sick, struggle to reinvent, fail to adapt to the demands of modern life. They are people trying to get by in a hyper individualistic world, who have bought in, at some point, to its offerings and promises, but it’s a battle. They have a lot to teach about loneliness, love, grief, family, death…
ALU: What’s the hardest part of being a writer?
Natalie: Maintaining self-belief.
ALU: Do you have any writing rituals that you abide by when writing?
Natalie: Before I write I read, usually poetry. I can’t write anywhere except the desk in my home office, although I can revise in a dentist’s office waiting room, no problem.
If my kids are home and I’m writing, I tell them I’m on a Zoom call for work and close the door. This tends to keep them away more than if I tell them I’m writing.
ALU: What books have you read lately that you can’t stop thinking about?
Natalie: Clear by Carys Davies. It’s a beautiful, sparsely written novel about love, language, and an unexpected bond that takes place at the time of the Scottish clearances. And, what an ending!
ALU: Which writers have had the most impact on your own writing?
Natalie: Joy Williams, for the power of her wit. Mavis Gallant because she takes no prisoners. James Joyce for The Dubliners. Per Petterson for his unadorned yet poetic sentences. Alice Munro is probably who I return to most, but if there’s one book, it’s Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower, which I read once a year for the way the bedsheets and underwear flap in the courtyard, as much as anything else. I go back to it so I can marvel at its simplicity and indirectness, its magic and humour, a mysterious book about a complete world.
ALU: What was your most rewarding moment as a writer?
Natalie: My first published story.
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Natalie Southworth’s short stories have appeared in literary journals in Canada, the US, and the UK. They have won The Brighton Prize, placed third in The Moth Short Story Prize, and were finalists for The Fish Prize, The New Quarterly‘s Peter Hinchcliffe Award, and Prairie Fire‘s McNally Robinson Booksellers Short Fiction Contest. Originally from England, she lives in Montreal with her husband and children.
Photo credit to Vivian Doan.
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