Author Interview - John Storey
- Submissions Northodox Press
- Oct 12
- 4 min read
1) What was the inspiration for To Fetch a Pail of Water?
Strange as it might seem, it began with reading the nursery rhyme Jack and Jill. I began to wonder about their back story and about the symbolism of the hill and the well. I knew from my academic work that the rhyme had existed in various versions, carrying different meanings, since at least the eighteenth century, and I also knew that in America it had often become a morality tale about the dangers of social climbing. But for me there was always a certain magic in the rhyme that could not be captured by these interpretations.
At the same time I was reading Freud’s case studies, frustrated at how they lack an imaginative narrative; that is, they are great stories not told as great stories. I began to think of Jack and Jill as a case study in the return of the repressed.
And so I suppose it was the coming together of the nursery rhyme and Freud’s case studies that was the initial inspiration for the novel.
2) To Fetch a Pail of Water is your second novel, after A Drowning Man. How did the
writing process compare when working on each novel?
Writing a detective novel requires very careful plotting. Therefore, with A Drowning Man I had a plan from the beginning to the end; a structure to which I could add and subtract depending on how the story was developing. The process was quite different with To Fetch a Pail of Water. It was more free-flowing; at times almost stream of consciousness with a sober edit chapter by chapter. I started with two characters and the idea of climbing up and falling down as where the story starts and where it concludes and I just slowly filled in the details in between. It is a mystic cliché, I know, but I allowed the characters to live and grow in my head.
3) Would you say that your academic background influences your writing?
Yes, I would.
First of all, being an academic requires one to write all the time: books, articles, conference papers, lectures, and reports. You learn to be disciplined and the more one writes the better one becomes at it (or at least that is how it is supposed to work).
Second, being an academic requires one to research material that one might not otherwise encounter. In my case, my research and teaching of Freud had an enormous influence on my two novels and the short stories I write.
Thirdly, both of my novels have an academic setting, at least initially. This is because this is a world I know best.
4) Are there any titles that you could compare To Fetch a Pail of Water to?
I can’t think of particular novels that I would compare with To Fetch a Pail of Water, other than to say as a doomed romance it probably has lots of predecessors.
Although they tell very different stories there are titles that have a similar mood. I would include Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Death in Venice, Reflections in A Golden Eye, and Rebecca. All of which I reread when I was writing the novel.
During the course of composition I began to think of the novel as Romeo and Juliet meets Bonnie and Clyde and then that perhaps it was a weird remake of True Romance.
5) What are your preferred genres to read?
When I was writing A Drowning Man I read a lot of crime fiction, including work by Macdonald, Sjowall & Wahloo, Welsh, Chandler, Montalban, Cain, Highsmith, and Mishima.
However, I usually read all sorts of things. For example, I have just read quite a few books by and about Jane Austen in preparation for a keynote address I am presenting at a conference in Morocco in November. At the same time I was reading or rereading fiction and poetry, including A Season in Hell, To Have and Have Not, To the Lighthouse, Last Exit to Brooklyn, The Waste Land, On Chesil Beach, The Ice Palace, and The Garden Party and Other Stories.
6) Do you have any further novels planned?
I am currently writing (almost finished) a collection of twenty-six short stories called Northern Gothic. The stories are dark and unsettling, and like dreams often without beginning or end, with characters troubled by forces that can seem inescapable. Although I call them gothic, their settings are realistic and not fantastical. Put simply, my use of the word gothic is Freudian. All the stories are marked by the influence of the work of Freud, especially his concepts of the unconscious, the return of the repressed, and the importance he places on the interpretation of dreams. None of these concepts are named as such but rather exist metaphorically like a darkness that comes and goes; always leaving traces and always obscuring people’s understanding of why they do what they do, especially when the past refuses to remain in the past, making the present seem ‘uncanny’.
7) What advice would you give an aspiring author?
Writing is a productive combination of experience, observation, and imagination. But to allow imagination to feed off experience and observation a writer needs discipline. Read and write every day until it is as natural to do as breathing, and always remembering that good writing requires good reading.
Order John Storey's To Fetch a Pail of Water and A Drowning Man here:
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