Spotlight On…

I first crossed paths with Tania Hershman through Zoetrope Virtual Studio’s Flash Factory office and immediately felt impressed by her tireless dedication to the promotion of the short story and other writers’ work.

I can only imagine the amount of time, work, and effort she puts into The Short Review, her monthly journal dedicated to reviewing short story collections, and into her blog where she consistently spreads the good word on literary magazines and writing contests the world over.

I enjoyed and admired her short story collection The White Road and Other Stories. The title story in particular has stayed with me, an ending that is as haunting as it is brilliant. Tania took some time out from her hectic schedule and generously responded to my questions. Here she is, under the spotlight, adazzle.

–Ethel Rohan

Writing-wise, where are you now?

This may sound ridiculous, but I am still recovering from the publication of my first book, The White Road and Other Stories. The book deal in June 2007 was a 30-year-old dream come true, and I felt as though I was holding my breath for the 15 months until the book came out. I couldn’t believe it was actually going to happen. Then the effort required to promote and market the book as an author published by a small press came as quite a shock to me, and has been consuming much of my time and head-space since.

I have been writing almost exclusively flash fiction, under 500 words, which I generally write in one sitting, with not much revision. While I love flash, and I’m really lucky to have found a number of editors of lit mags who like my flash stories, I do miss the process of working on a longer story, watching how it unfolds over time, spending months polishing it. I hope to get back to that, but now that I am living in the UK again — after 15 years in Israel where there was really no local English-speaking market for my book — I am so excited about being here that I am saying yes to everything and doing the rounds of library book groups, reading events etc… It’s wonderful! But it’s also another thing that keeps me from writing.

Writing-wise, where are you going?

Well, when your lifelong dream comes true, I have found that it is not so easy to find a new goal, a new ambition. As a short story writer, I don’t want to just work towards the next collection of stories. I want to challenge myself, try something new. I have enough flash stories for a collection of flash, but am not that keen to have another book out, I’m worried I may not write again for years!

So, right now I am looking for new ways to keep me on my toes, and the major one at the moment is that I set myself up as writer-in-residence in the Science Faculty of Bristol University. I’ve always loved science. I studied Physics and Maths at university but was never a very good scientist, so I became a science journalist and did that for 13 years until a few years ago. I approached the Dean of Science, he was very keen, and has basically given me carte blanche to wander around the science departments, embedding in labs etc.

Since I am making this up as I go along, and no-one is really supervising me, it has taken a little time to get going, but for the past few weeks I have been spending an afternoon a week in a biochemistry lab in the Medical school, learning about wound healing, watching zebrafish larvae, finding out how science is actually done. Every small thing fascinates me! I also met with some high energy particle physicists last week that I want to “embed” with, who work on equipment for the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, and am trying to get to meet with a group working in the Nanoscience and Quantum Information Centre.

However, and this is a big one, I have never consciously written inspired by real life, and so I have no idea how I might use what I am seeing and hearing in my short stories. The Dean would like one short story a month for the Faculty Web site, so I need to produce something. I am also a little nervous about how the researchers I am observing and chatting to will feel about what I write. But fear is good, fear keeps me motivated!

I also want to start working on longer stories again. Long for me is anything over 500 words. I want to get stuck into something more meaty, as I mentioned above. No, I have no thoughts about novels, they seem alien to me. I have been dabbling in some bad poetry, so who knows, maybe a little more of that.

What informs your creative process? How do you keep inspired?

Well, as I said above, until now I haven’t looked to real life for direct inspiration. Half the stories in my book are inspired by articles from New Scientist, so that’s me taking inspiration from reports of science. Most of the flash stories in the book were written for challenges set in one or other of the online writing groups I was in at the time: WriteWords, Zoetrope, the Fiction Workhouse. I thrive on those kinds of things, someone saying: Write a 250 word story using the words “caramel” and “perspex” told in the third person backwards. I also love borrowing short phrases from a whole load of poems and using those to jumpstart my flash stories, something I learned from the Fiction Workhouse flash-writing “blasts” that we used to do. Poetry juxtaposes words so wonderfully and weirdly, it really fires my imagination.

Only recently, in the last six months, have I started carrying a notebook and pen around and jotting down observations and first lines that pop into my head. I never thought I “needed” to do this, who knows where I got that arrogance from?! But I realize, as I am approaching 40, that I just don’t remember the great lines that swim into my mind, the wonderful images I see as I’m out and about, or the beginnings of stories that come just as I’m going to sleep, and if I don’t write them down, they’re gone.

Of course, being embedded in various labs, I have a notebook (Moleskine, navy, unlined) to write down my thoughts and observations. But I haven’t, as I mentioned, quite worked out how and what will result from this. I don’t find writing directly about something really works for me. I like to play with it, twist it and shake it around, and see what happens.

Tell us something that most people don’t know about you?

Every now and then I get those blog award things that ask me to reveal 7 Interesting Things, so I am not sure how much is left! OK, for about the last 20 years, no matter what country I am in, someone, somewhere, will turn to me and say “I hope you don’t mind me saying this but…you really remind me of Emma Thompson”. Now, I don’t really look like Emma Thompson, the actress, but it’s been happening for so long, no matter how long or short my hair is, or what colour, or where I am—in Israel, America, and most recently in a local Bristol library — that I figure there must be something in it.

How has the Internet impacted your reading and writing? What is the future of print publication?

I am not sure whether I would be writing now if it wasn’t for the Internet. I love blogging, it really helps me think through things as a writer, and my blog helped me find an online community of writers when I didn’t have one near, which was vital for me at that time. The Internet constantly gives me stimulation in the form of writing groups and writing challenges, and as well as calls for submissions, competitions etc… And, most importantly, being published online, together with Facebook, Twitter and blogs, has enabled me to share my work with others and also to find many many more writers and their work, which is just a joy.

Being published online has different advantages to print, the main one being that it is easy to share your work. However, there is still more kudos attached to print publication, I think. Personally, I am not a snob about these things. There are excellent online publications and shabby print publications, so I take each case on its own merits. I don’t see print publications disappearing — I was very surprised when I started compiling a list a few months ago on my blog of all the UK and Irish publications that accept short stories, because I discovered many more than I thought (108 and counting) and a great number of them are print. So no worries about the future of the tree-based lit magazines yet!

If you didn’t write, what would your life look like?

Here I am, someone who uses her imagination as part of her work, and yet I cannot even imagine what my life would look like if I didn’t write. When I don’t write for a while, I feel quite ill. So I imagine I would be rather green and sickly! I could have carried on being a science journalist but that wasn’t really creatively satisfying, writing about other people’s innovation.

Do a five minute free-write with the word “audition,” and please share:

Try me, test me, touch me, slip me in and under and turn me over and around. On stage make me dance for you, sing and stride and let loose all I am. And then you sing me back to where I came from. Pass, I pass and then I fail and fail, and still you test me, try me, face my face and back to back we slide and move and you hold all the sway here, tumbling I trip.

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Tania Hershman, a former science journalist, is the author of The White Road and Other Stories, (Salt Modern Fiction, 2008) which was commended by the judges of the 2009 Orange Award for New Writers.  Tania’s stories have been published in literary magazines including Cafe Irreal, Riptide, The London Magazine, Smokelong Quarterly, Litro, and Pedestal, and broadcast on BBC Radio 4.

Tania is Grand Prize winner of the 2009 Binnacle Ultra Short competition, and European regional winner of the 2008 Commonwealth Short Story Competition.

She is founder and editor of The Short Review, a journal dedicated to reviewing short story collections, the current Fiction Editor of Southword magazine, and one of the judges of the 2009 Bristol Short Story Prize, the 2010 Brit Writers Award and the 2010 Sean O’Faolain short story competition. She reads a lot of short stories.