The leaves are swirling, there's a nip in the air, so it's time for a whole new bunch of Fictionable podcasts. Over the next few weeks we'll be hearing from Judith Vanistendael, Esther Karin Mngodo, Scott Jacobs and Hannah Webb, but we're launching into Autumn with Daisy Johnson and her short story Conference.
Conference appears in Johnson's forthcoming collection, The Hotel, and she explains that throughout the collection she set out to write about "what it means to live in unsafe spaces".
"We feel like we should be safe at work and protected," she says, "and increasingly it's becoming clear that we're not."
Johnson may never have worked in an office, but the dangers that beset the narrator of Conference are all too familiar.
"I have worked in places where there does seem to be an awkward dynamic."
The conflict in Gaza has made it all too clear how "our safety is really fractured", she continues. "We're all vulnerable, and the people who are supposed to look after us – the police, local authorities, our government – they don't have our best interests at heart."
The narrator first glimpses the "half-things" who whisper through doorways and gather around the coffee cups in the mirror-filled lifts of her shiny offices – a reflection that mirrors the doubling of the two young girls at the heart of Johnson's latest novel, Sisters.
The author admits she's "always trying to write about the double".
"The line of interest for me in horror is somewhere between it being something within us and it being something without in the world," Johnson says. "And I think for me it's most exciting as a reader when we're uncertain of those lines."
Families are always a little uncanny, she adds. "There's something so strange about knowing people for that long and the power those relationships have and the hold they have on us."
Johnson is also writing more and more about the climate crisis and our relationship with the land.
"Often the land is answering back," she says.
We may be faced with global heating, populism and misinformation, but Johnson says she isn't giving up hope in writing. "There is a kind of truth in fiction."
Next time we'll be examining the truths of fiction with Judith Vanistendael.
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