Author Interview - Jan Kaneen
- Submissions Northodox Press
- Aug 3
- 5 min read
1) What inspires your writing?
Everything and anything, from what’s happening in the news, to my grandchildren, to what other writers are trying, to a piece of artwork, to a passing thundercloud, to an abandoned building, to a bug on my windscreen. Then sometimes I’m not inspired at all and just sit down, put my pen to paper and write, (or latterly start tapping my laptop). It’s gibberish at first but nearly always turns into something interesting. It’s called free-writing, and I was shown how to do it at the Open University when I enrolled on their Introduction to Creative Writing course. I began writing ten years ago at the age of 50 as a sort of mindfulness therapy or literary exorcism – to put overwhelming emotions on the page not in me, and free-writing is a brilliant way of doing just that, of channelling your subconscious and seeing where it takes you. It’s also brilliant because if you sit about waiting for inspiration to hit, you’d write so much less. Writing, in my opinion, is a curious fusion of inspiration, skill, creativity, hard work and determination. Getting on with it and keeping on with it are right up there with inspiration as writerly necessities I reckon.
2) Where did you first discover flash fiction, and what made you want to give it a try?
The first task I was given when I started at the OU was to write a 300-word story, just for the eyes of my tutor group and tutor, for their friendly feedback. I’d never heard of flash fiction and was very nervous about it and wrote a wee piece about my youngest son’s cocky banter, and was delighted when my brilliant tutor, the writer and poet Caroline Gilfillan (who sadly passed away in 2023) thought it was fab and encouraged me to sub it somewhere. The Bath Flash Competition had just started and with Caroline’s support I subbed it there and was gobsmacked when the story, which I had entitled Humbuggery, was longlisted and published in their first ever anthology. And that was that – I was hooked. Two published books with a third on the way and an MA in Creative Writing all focusing on flash, is quite the obsession.
3) What are the core themes of Hostile Environments?
Since writing short allows me to write about everything and anything, when I came to curate my short stories and flash fictions into a collection I assumed it would be a tricky task, until I realised that what I thought was a hotchpotch of unconnected, cross-genre tales were all about the same thing - the dangers inherent in being different - and about how it’s hard to stay safe when you don’t or can’t conform to what the status quo or received wisdom of a place and time wants you to be.
Being and feeling safe it seems to me is a fundamental human right and yet anywhere can be a hostile environment – the home, for a person subject to domestic violence, your own car, for a black American, an unadapted train, for a wheelchair user, a city park, for gay couples. And this can be invisible to people on the outside of the experience. Collectively the stories in Hostile Environments seek to reveal these differences by showing how one person’s sanctuary can be another’s hell, being as much dependent on gender, age, race, disability, sexuality, personal belief systems, and how we self-identify as on actual physical place. So I suppose the answer to the question is the core theme of Hostile Environments is equality - or the absence of it in this crazy world we all share - and that to get to somewhere like real fairness and justness we need to stand in each other’s shoes, stop viewing the world through the prism only of ourselves, stop telling each other what to think and believe in.
4) Are there any writers that you could compare your work to?
When I’m writing flash, maybe I’m a bit Tania Hershman with a dash of Rosaleen Lynch. When I’m writing short stories maybe I’m a tad Daphne Du Maurier spliced with Elizabeth Von Armin (but from a working class rather than a privileged point of view). And when I’m writing long – have not got a scooby.
5) What are your preferred genres to read?
I don’t really think in genres, I just love to read striking or unusual stories or poems, or prose poems, and I like weird forms– hybrid stories told as instructions or recipes or crosswords or even equations; or stories told in startling voices or from an unusual point-of-view. And I love language too. There seems to be a current vogue for unlyrical writing, as though foregrounding wonderful language might tip the reader out of a story. It doesn’t with me. Maybe it’s because I write and read flash a lot, a form in which readers don’t often sink into narratives like they do when reading immersive novels, but are aware they are reading as they are reading (like when you read poetry) so when I come across exquisite language in longer works, I luxuriate in it rather than calling it purple! All this makes me tend to love authors rather than genres and my favs include John Gorden, Alan Garner, Iris Murdoch, Jane Austen, Virginia Wolf, Angela Carter, Daisy Jonson, Maggie O’Farrell, Daniella McLaughlan, Ann Cleeves, Katherine Mansfield, Hilary Mantel, Stephen King, Octavia Hill, flash writers Sharon Telfer and Ingrid Jendrzejewski, and loads, loads more – pretty cross-genre then!
6) Do you have any further works planned?
I have another flash/short story compendium bubbling under that’s a few stories short of a collection, and I’m also 30000 words into a novel-length historical fiction/crime/sci-fi mash-up - working title Everywhen and the Third Entanglement, the opening of which has been shortlisted for several prizes and which I really must crack on with. Trouble is I’m also writing a horror/romance novella in the form of a diary, and an unsettling weird and eerie urban-fictional novella-in-flash (a form in which every chapter is a fully resolved flash story under 1000 words, but which, when read in sequence, tells a longer overarching story), working title, Artifact. It’s anyone’s guess which one will get finished first.
7) What is one piece of advice you would give to an aspiring author?
As rejection is all in a day’s work for a writer of short stories and flash fiction, finding close writer friends with whom you can share success and failure, (and learn to treat those two imposters both the same), to misquote Kipling, is so, so important. In the days before Twitter was ruined by you-know-who, there was a talented and friendly, mutually supportive flash community there. Sadly, those days are gone, and we have scattered to Substack, Insta and Bluesky or left the socials entirely, but I was lucky enough to find my tribe before that happened and there isn’t a day goes by I don’t online chat with my flashy and short story feedback buddies - so my advice would be join groups, enrol on workshops, meet like minds. Also, I would add this, just because a story gets rejected again-and-again doesn’t mean it won’t ever find a home. I once wrote a flash that got rejected 14 times from online mags where I wasn’t even getting paid. I then entered it into a competition, and it won. Creative writing is so subjective, and submissions are about sending your work to the right place at the right time and not giving up. True story.
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