What influences and inspires you as a writer?

My main inspiration normally turns up in the form of imagery, and my main influence is often anything with a fairytale element. Ekphrasis has always been really useful for me when it comes to writing poetry, but writing prose tends to come from images that just appear internally. I do write stories from ekphrasis or personal experience, but they tend to be a lot harder to write and work with for some reason.

As for the fairytale element, this tends to be about how the story is written, or how the content or narrative is treated rather than what the content actually is. I’m not really into having dragons or unicorns in my stories unless you’re going to subvert it and set them in the most mundane reality you can think of. 


I’d like to share some examples of fairytale-inspired works that I feel influence me: Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber (of course), Aimee Bender’s The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, Joe Hill’s 20^th Century Ghosts, and Joanne Harris’s Jigs and Reels, all of which are also short story collections – something which will have been an influence on me writing mostly short stories myself.