GREETINGS, BOOKWORMS! I’m Aisha Kandisha, Head Librarian at Kandisha Press. Join me in the dusty stacks of the library I will never leave again as I chat with some of my favorite Women in Horror. Today we feature author Tracy Fahey!
Tracy Fahey is an Irish writer. She has been twice shortlisted for Best Collection at the British Fantasy Awards; in 2017 for The Unheimlich Manoeuvre and in 2022 for I Spit Myself Out. Fahey’s short fiction is published in over thirty American, British, Australian and Irish anthologies and her work has been reviewed in the TLS, Black Static and Interzone. Her poetry is anthologised in High Shelf IV journal (2019), and collections Under Her Skin (2021) and Under Her Eye (2023), both from Black Spot Books. Her most recent publication is the feminist folk-fiction novella, They Shut Me Up (2023, PS Publishing).
Fahey holds a PhD on the Gothic in visual arts, and her non-fiction writing on the Gothic and folklore has appeared in Irish, English, Italian, Dutch and Australian edited collections. She has been granted writing residencies in Ireland, Finland and Greece. In 2023 she was the recipient of a Saari Fellowship by the Kone Foundation.
What made you want to become an author? Did you have an “Aha!” moment when you knew you were born to write? Or perhaps a beloved book inspired you?
I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t reading and writing stories—one followed the other so naturally. At school I loved English class, and writing imaginative compositions, and my first job, as a teenager, was writing and reading stories for a local pirate radio station. I loved getting lost in words. And then life caught up with me, and for the longest time I simply forgot to write. Being seriously ill thirteen years ago reset me. I was rebuilding myself, my identity. And stories for me have always been about meaning-making. So I turned back to them…and that was the true beginning of my writing career.
What do you believe are your strengths in writing? And when you feel you need to improve on a particular writing skill, how do you go about it?
What comes to me most naturally is the feel of a story, the ability to inhabit a character, to sense their thoughts, their emotions, their pain. I step through stories with my characters, channelling them like a medium.
I also love research, especially folkloric research—I’m a lecturer, so I really enjoy the slow process of uncovering a subject, finding links, finding a way into it.
When I want to expand or improve my writing, I read. My best teachers have been Angela Carter, Donna Tartt, Shirley Jackson and Douglas Coupland. I also love attending writer workshops. I find they direct my thoughts (and words) in ways I hadn’t anticipated.
What are your thoughts on the book industry today, or more importantly, about the book community? Do you feel it is getting harder or easier to make it as an independent author these days?
First of all, some optimism. I think that the book industry is taking the idea of representation a lot more seriously, and I love the platforming of diverse voices, the opportunity for readers to see themselves on the page. In terms of community, my close circle of writer friends are phenomenal; supportive and helpful. And the wider book community of writers, reviewers, bloggers—well, I love the enthusiasm for literature in all its forms. However, from a practical point of view, I think it’s always been hard when you try to operate as a writer outside the mainstream ‘large’ publishers. I took a career break for two years to work solely as a writer, and ended up having largely to be my own marketer, own publicist, own promotor. And that side of things has never come easily to me. I find it difficult (the equivalent of shouting ‘BUY MY BOOK’ at people) and also exhausting to operate on social media, advertising wares. Honestly, I just want to research and write and think about books.
Worse, there’s now an expectation that writers have to constantly share everything about themselves on social media and in newsletters, and I find that alarming. Although I love lecturing and giving workshops on writing, blogging about research, and discussing the process of writing in interviews like this, my Victorian self politely declines to open my locked diary—in fact, as I get older, I often think wistfully of Emily Dickinson barricading herself firmly away from the world to write.
Tell us about your work. What story are you most proud of?
My stories are my darlings, and I love a great many of them. But I have a special fondness for the first story I ever wrote, ‘Looking For Wildgoose Lodge,’ as it was also the first story I ever had published, back in 2013. It’s a very short story that manages to look at death, loss, uncanny homes, folklore and storytelling—some of my favourite themes. Plus, it’s so permeated with the essence of my grandmother that I cry whenever I re-read it.
I also like ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ from my third collection, I Spit Myself Out. A story told through the parts of an Anatomical Venus, it received an Honourable Mention from Ellen Datlow in 2022, and is reprinted in 2024 a wonderful British Library collection, Doomed Romances: Strange Tales of Uncanny Love, where I get to share a table of contents with my hero Angela Carter.
What are your upcoming works and plans for the future?
I’ve just had a novella come out from PS Publishing, They Shut Me Up, a story of a woman in the throes of mid-life change that becomes darker and stranger way, where she herself becomes haunted. This novella is the start of a whole body of work I’ve amassed around the figure of the Irish hag in folklore, the Cailleach. I spent two years and five residencies in Ireland and Finland working on this research and writing. I’m obsessed with reimagining the Cailleach in contemporary culture as role model—as an emblem of a proud, strong older women. She’s so significant in terms of female empowerment, the environment, and transmission of story, values and beliefs. I’ve published some stories about her in 2023, ‘Asylum’ (Lost Atlantis, Flametree), ‘Witchwalking’ (The Fiends In The Furrows III, Nosetouch), ‘Uhripuu’ (Unquiet Grove, Egaeus Press)‘The Cailleach Bheara’ (Mythos Machine, Flametree) with several more to come in 2024. My intention this year is to stop writing, and to edit and finish this collection, Queens of the Crone Age. There’s also a weird, time-twisting, Sapphic novel on the back burner too, but I’m also giving some academic papers on the Hag this year in Ireland and Germany, so let’s see what I have time for!
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