Clare Wigfall

„A great short story may be brief, but it demands and relies upon personal investment from the reader. I believe this is why the very best short stories can haunt you long after you’ve read the concluding line, because so much of the experience is not just about the words on the page, but is individual to you and the way your own brain interprets and digests what you’ve read. There’s something magical about that.“ Clare Wigfall

British writer Clare Wigfall was born in Greenwich in 1976. She grew up in Berkeley, California, and London and began writing at an early age. After being an assistant and editor to the late President of Mensa, she graduated from The University of Manchester in 1998.

Clare Wigfall temporarily visited places like Prague, Morocco, Spain and Norwich after she finally decided to settle in Prague and lived there for nine years (currently she is living in Germany, Berlin).

As well as teaching creative writing and running a face-painting and clown company and a community figure-drawing workshop, she wrote her first book called „The Loudest Sound and Nothing“ (published by Faber and Faber, 2007).

When she was twenty-one, an editor from „Faber and Faber“ visited her university and afterwards read one of her short story she’d written. The next day he immediately called her, to send for „more stuff“ but at that time she’d just finished two other stories, but she sent him those. Only a week later she got a request on writing a book for „Faber and Faber“ and the best part was that the decision about its subject and form was left to her, which is a great and also unusual opportunity. The result is to be found in „The Loudest Sound and Nothing„- a collection of „disturbing and darkly provocative short stories”.

The question still : why writing a collection of short stories instead of a novel? The answer was given in an interview taken place from her new home in Berlin.

What is the difference between writing short stories and full-length novels?

„One aspect I appreciate is the economy of the form; the story must create a world, a mood, a plot, wholly-real characters, an exploration of life and its complexities, and all within the space of only a few pages. There’s something almost beautifully mathematical and precise about it, and what you leave out is as important as what you leave in. For that reason, I suppose in a way your safety net is taken away, because when you write a short story you’re relying on an unknown quantity: your reader. With a novel you have the space to fill in all the gaps, with a short story you’re forced to leave these for your reader to complete“ [...]

About the book (from the Faber jacket-notes):

One long hot summer, Eveline drowns a wasp nest, and while digging amongst the tiny corpses makes a sinister discovery. A university professor arrives unannounced at the door of an Arizona fortune-teller, little knowing how this woman will alter his life. A sudden spate of disappearing new-borns terrifies a young mother. As the Prussian army encroaches, the besieged city of Paris asks an enormous sacrifice of its city zookeeper. And over a Coca-Cola in an Andalusian village bar, a woman hears from a stranger the worst thing a mother can do.

„The characters in Clare Wigfall’s stories are all searching for something missing, something absent. As they go about their seemingly ordinary lives, the dark undercurrent of life, with all its complications and imperfections, is gradually revealed. Extraordinarily compelling, incredibly skilled and pitch perfect in tone, these stories mark Clare Wigfall as a debut writer of enormous talent.“

After getting the task to do researches as per theme „You can’t stop a teacher when they want to do something. They just do it.“ ( I’m happy about it afterwards) and to find out more about the writer Clare Wigfall, I am really curious about meeting her. While I was doing my research I first noticed, if you type in her name and “google” it, you won’t find “wikipedia” listed up on top of the search results, which is kind of “unusual” nowadays =)

Therefore I was more surprised to see her name on “myspace” which I think is definitely more personal than a dry entry at wikipedia.

I think it’s a great pleasure listen to a young writer who is telling you about her experiences not only in writing but , somehow as a “chart breaker”. What kind of issues she has to proof wrong concerning short stories or the fact that she is pretty young, just to refer to what she said during an interview “I feel I have a lot to discover”. How her writing process looks like and of course her reaction about her success, as her book was recently long listed for the 2008 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Also I would like to know what kind of things inspires her and where she, as someone who still has a soft spot for J.D. Salinger’s work, gets these inspiration.

Finding out that she loves the stories of J.D. Salinger and (I guess) artist´s work of Jan Vermeer, makes her even more sympathetic and I am really looking forward to meet her soon.

~ von mi am September 29, 2008.