James Stanwix (JS): ONE thing that I really enjoyed about this piece was how nothing which was observed was observed in respect to another thing/feeling/state; everything, even the figurative, was given a non-derivative character, was just itself as the observer saw it. 

I’m curious to know what you see role of figurative language being in the writing of micro-memoir. 

Mabel Gibson (MG): Micro-memoir is restrictive space wise. A lot of my pieces are around 250 words, and so using figurative language is important because you can say more than one thing without taking too much of the space. 

For example in this piece I wrote the walls in the bathroom cry with morning dew because it is much more poetic then talking about a wet wall; and yet we can still understand that that’s what it is. 

It lends insight into the narrator’s state of mind – it’s very dramatic to think of a wall as crying and it feels sort of dream-like and removed from reality. 

Hannah Reynolds (HR): I noticed that this piece plays with the dynamic of the familiar/unfamiliar; as the speaker works through the everyday ritual of a morning commute (“I realise I know all these faces now”), they struggle simultaneously with a feeling of derealisation and alienation (“I’m aware that I have a face but I suddenly can’t remember what it looks like or where it is”). 

To what end/s did you want to mobilise this dynamic? 

Does de-familiarising the familiar have a wider significance to your practice? 

MG: I think a lot of the time my purpose in writing is to have the reader engage with the mundane or everyday in ways they haven’t before and I sort of always aim for something that, even if the content is grounded, feels floaty and as you say derealised. 

The very mundane reality of a morning commute and the narrator’s thoughts which seem a bit detached and I guess occupied by things other than wherever they are commuting to, create a type of tension that feels needed to keep things feeling floaty.

I want the narrator to feel sort of detached to the action or the actual thing/event taking place and I want the thoughts to be sort of the opposite, quite realised and I want my narrator to have a crisis in their heads over breakfast, or on the train. 

I always want the thoughts to be the strength of the piece so I like to use the familiar to sort of juxtapose those thoughts. 

JS: This piece does such a great job of making me feel the weather and through this, of gesturing to a feeling. 

Do you find when you write that you typically begin with an experience you want to recount/explore, a feeling you want to unpack, or at someplace else entirely? 

MG: If I’m stuck I think I typically start with something like the weather, or a colour, or something that visually inspires a feeling that I want to convey. 

Often when I write a piece it feels like a curation.

I collect in my mind the things I see and feel and conversations I have and all kind of things for my writing and sometimes these things all come together and present me something to write about. 

I am working on a novel/novella right now and I’ve had to seperate the writing into seasons because I just can’t write summer in winter and so on.

My writing and my real life are incredibly tangled in a way that would be impossible to undo and so lots of the time I don’t plan, I just write what feels like it needs to be written. 

HR: I was really struck by your use of space in this piece. 

Visually it appears so neat and compact, and yet the content is deeply concerned with how the speaker is spatially related — both physically and symbolically — to the people around them. 

Sometimes there is a feeling of almost crushing closeness, at other times a sense of agonising distance or separation. 

Do you find that the constraints of micro-memoir make this exploration of space more pressing, more tangible? 

Is the form itself, how a piece might look on the page, something that factors into your writing? 

MG: How a piece looks on the page is definitely important to me.

I think everything can impact how a reader engages with your work. 

I have become incredibly fussy throughout my years of writing about which words can even sit next to each based on their shape.

It is incredibly frustrating and exhilarating to me. 

I think it enriches the whole experience of writing for me, but also reading when there is a nitpicky attention to detail and consideration of visuals and aesthetics. 

I love neat and compact because it can be seen as that but also as claustrophobic and you feel like you can’t take a breath and it kind of shows you how to sort of move through the piece. 

Space and how I use it is one of the most important things that I consider especially when writing micro-memoir and its considered for many reasons – I don’t want the piece to look intimidating because the point is often brevity,.

I want to say as much as possible in as little space as possible (this is true for even the novel/novella I’m working on), and I always want to display restraint with neat, tight writing.

READ MORE:

HEM: A Morning in Spring with MABEL GIBSON