Stargazing: An Interview with Neil Clark

I forget where I stumbled across your Twitter account (or when for that matter). But I do remember being struck immediately with how many emotions you were able to convey in such short word count, particularly within your Twitter stories. You have such a knack for building out these fantastical worlds but yet you keep them grounded in everyday commonalities that a lot of folks experience but never recognize. (Watermelon Skies in Wigleaf is one of my favorite examples of this). Can you talk a bit about how you focus your characters or narrators? How do you balance levity in their voices, especially in such dark and unknown concepts such as death, war, space, and the horror that is dating?

Thank you so much!

You know, when I’m drafting those Twitter micros, I usually overshoot the 280 character limit by quite a lot. But I find they can almost always be stripped back without detracting from whatever it is I’m trying to say. Writing them has been a great way to learn how to cut the fat out and get a story right down to the bare bones. It’s not for everyone, but it’s served me really well in the last couple years.

Rather than character, most of my stories tend to stem from something in my life that I want to explore. You mentioned Watermelon Skies there. That story came about after a tragic event in my life. I wanted to explore grief and friendship in the context of distance and isolation. Before I knew it, I was putting my best friends in space and killing off the narrator’s brother. I guess my characters are product of the stange environments I put them in, combined with a fair dollop of the autobiographical.

By far my biggest motivation to write is the joy and pleasure I get from it. So even in the sad stories, I’m usually going to have some element of humour in there. How do I approach balancing levity with heavier concepts? The same way I would approach it in life, I suppose. There are times when having a laugh and a joke is appropriate and helpful. There are times for sobriety, empathy and sensitivity. But I also think there’s real poignancy in the space between. The funny anecdote in the eulogy, for example. Or the banter between two soldiers in a war. Or the stand-up comedian backstage, in tears. Conveying that in writing can be risky, of course, but writing should always involve risk. Like in life, you just have to trust your judgement.

Also, high five for conflating horror and dating there. The line between the date and the existential horror story often = no line at all.

Time is such a banal measurement the majority of the world takes so much pleasure in — we construct our entire lives around the milestones that come with meaningless time frames. In your book you touch on so many recurring themes of big and small accounts of time: relationship arcs, fleeting moments, the span of a childhood or an entire lifetime,  eras, years, seconds, single video frames or scenes. It’s really fascinating to me the topics that writers thread throughout their work and the way we zoom in on things that endlessly trouble us. With this book, do you feel you’ve released a lot of your obsession with time? Or do you feel like it’s a topic you’ll forever write about? A good spiral, per say…

So, I’m thirty-four now. Weird age. I’ve started doing that old man thing where I’m always harking back to the good old days. At the same time, I feel like I’m still an invincible young man. At work, I feel like one of the cool kids, then I pause and realise I’m talking to someone who was born after the year 2000 and I have a boss who is younger than me. I don’t know where I’m going with this, but yeah, I’m still obsessed with time. I look at the sunrise and think about how it’s actually the Sun from eight minutes ago. I think about how I’m interacting with people in different countries on social media and it’s the evening where I am but where they are it’s breakfast time. I think about the food in my fridge going past its sell-by date. I think about how, when dinosaurs roamed Earth, a year was 370 days long. The spiral continues, forever…

I’m curious if you consider your book linear or if you consider it a series of black holes that dip in and out of other universes. As a reader, I loved the playfulness of starting at a story entitled ‘When It’s Time To Go’ and ending on a story entitled ‘Tonight, I Fall From The Sky’.

 Oh definitely something to be dipped in and out of. Story order was something I put very little thought into.

There’s this book called ‘The Book of Disquiet’ by Fernando Pessoa. It’s an incredible collection of these aching autobiographical fragments jotted down over the course of the author’s life. That book is one of my favourites, but it’s also a book I’ve never read from cover to cover. I just pick it up every now and again and read a random page or paragraph. That’s how I envisaged people reading Time. Wow.

Speaking of ‘When It’s Time To Go’, that piece was originally published in Okay Donkey during what seems like your first year publishing in the wild world of Web. Did you have any inkling back then that that story could potentially be part of something larger? Did these stories come about individually or grow out of each other?

Yeah 2018 was my first year of having stuff published online. That piece was out in the November. The imposter syndrome was very real at that time, and the reaction to that story was a great balm. Still, I’d never have believed I’d be working on a solicited collection the very next year.

Fun fact – that piece got added to the manuscript at a very late stage. We discovered a major plot hole (even by the standards of one of my plots!) in one of the stories. This was during peak first wave COVID and I was in no state of mind to fix it, so we made the decision to replace it with ‘When It’s Time To Go’. It’s the only piece in the book that’s previously published in a journal, but I think it works well with the themes in the book and it’s a worthy late addition. Shout out to Okay Donkey, too. They seem to be going from strength to strength, and they’re outstanding at supporting the writers they’ve worked with, even long after they’ve published them.

Long-live the writers that don’t realize they’re writers until their late 20s or 30s. What got you into writing? How did you realize there was an entire literary world on Twitter? Can you talk a bit about your daily writing practice and if/how you prioritize stories to put on your timeline versus stories you want to publish with larger mags?

Cheers to that – and shout-out to those in their 40s and above, too. It’s never too late!

Growing up, I channelled my creativity into drawing. English was actually one of my weaker subjects at school. I guess that changed when I was at university. I enjoyed the process of writing essays more than any of the lectures or tutorials. Sometimes I’d get feedback along the lines of, ‘Even though your arguments were off the mark, it was well written,’ and I’d be pretty chuffed with myself.

In terms of creative writing, I played around with different forms for ages before I found my voice. That’s a natural part of growing as a writer but it’s also painful, to be reaching for something and not being able to grasp it. I grew so much when I found flash fiction, which came on my radar through places like Cheap Pop and The Molotov Cocktail. Then a piece of Twitter microfiction caught my eye with the #vss365 hashtag (which stands for very short story, 365 days a year if anyone was wondering) and I thought I’d give it a go.

Most days, I at least try to post a Twitter micro on my timeline. I write them on breaks, on public transport, when I’m cooking, that sort of thing. They keep the creativity going, and it’s also a cool way to use social media, which I’m otherwise inept at. The stories I end up sending to journals/ mags are the ones I write during designated writing time, when I’ve set aside an hour or two to sit with my laptop and a cup of coffee or three. So, I suppose it’s not really a case of prioritising one over the other. The two things co-exist peacefully in my life.

Any writers, publications, or editors you want to lift up? Folks you’ve worked with that have shaped how you put work out into the world?

Well I’ve got to start with Cavin Bryce Gonzalez and Zac Smith from Back Patio Press, without whom Time. Wow. wouldn’t be a thing. They’re such cool guys and I loved putting a book out with them.

This side of the Atlantic, Jude Higgins does so much for flash fiction in this country, and she absolutely crushes it running the Flash Fiction Festival (which I had such a great time at in 2019) as well as the Bath Flash Fiction Award.

I also want to lift some of the wonderful Twitter micro fiction community, if that’s ok. The stuff these people put directly onto Twitter most days adds so much joy to my feed. I’ve put their Twitter handles here, too. I’d urge anyone to check them out and give them a follow:

Rachel Newcombe @rachelnewcombe8

MP McClune @MPMcCune2

Ellen K @poeticnihilist

Patchie Steve @PatchieSteve

DeRicki Johnson @derickijohnson

Voima Oy @voimaoy

Irene Dreams @_Irene_Dreams_

Jana Jenkins @janalynnjenks

Caleb Echterling @CalebEchterling

Barlow Adams @BarlowAdams

Roppotucha Greenberg @roppotucha

Natalie Reilly-Johnson @nreillyjohnson

Craytus Jones @craytusjones

Kelvin Rodrigues @KelvinROfficial

Lisa Manus @lisamanus

Laura Besley @laurabesley

The Alphabet @moomoosuem

250 Fiction @250Fiction

MKClark @mkclarkbooks

Anika Carpenter @StillSquirell

Sal Page @SalnPage

Alva Holland @Alva1206

Laila Amado @onbonbon7

Michael Clark @Michaelbigchees

Roz Levens @RozLevens

Carol Beth Anderson @CBethAnderson

No doubt I’ll have missed someone whose words I love, so please forgive me!

One of my favorite things in writing is how we get to play with punctuation. Visually, I was already sold on Time. Wow. purely because of where you placed the periods. It creates this flat tone that totally drives attention to the stupidity in the ways our lives are built and the way time halts getting at our true desires.

Shout out to the legendary Brent Woo, who did the cover art. He did such a great job of embellishing the punchiness of the title and drawing the eye to it – almost making the title a piece of art in its own right. I just love that cover.

It’s been interesting to hear people’s pronunciation of it, too. I call it ‘Time [pause] Wow’. Others don’t put the pause in. One time I showed it to someone who was like “Time dot Wow,” as if it was some website or something. I liked it, though.

This is a bit of a tangent, but here in the UK, we don’t call it a period. I didn’t know that’s what Americans called it until my late teens, when I was editing a group assignment with an American overseas student. He kept telling me to put periods in. I eventually worked out what he was talking about, but the few minutes before I did was a very confusing time in my life.

 Not to choose favorites, but do you have favorites in this collection?

I’ve got a soft spot for the second story in the book, ‘Different’, because – spoiler alert – I’m a sucker for a twist ending.

The cool thing about releasing a collection is how people who have read it tell you their favourites, and it’s often ones you didn’t expect. A lot of people mention one called ‘Glue’, which I didn’t think was anything special. Conversely, few people have mentioned ‘Different’, so I’m glad I could give it some love on here.

I just want to end this conversation by saying thank you for creating the word ‘spaghettifying’. It’s one of my favorites now: the way it’s spelt, the way it wiggles around on the page, the way it rolls off the tongue.

Been a pleasure to chat with you, KC, and I love how your thoughtful questions have invoked some answers that are longer than most of the stories in my book!

You know, your concluding remark brings up the ultimate question of the universe that we can leave the readers to ponder. What would happen if you put spaghetti in a black hole?