As part of my interview series Writers on Research, I spoke to author Giselle Leeb on the research process behind her short story collection Mammals, I Think We Are Called (Salt, 2022).
I wanted to start by exploring a phrase you use at the very beginning of the collection, which I think encapsulates one of the major themes of Mammals, I Think We Are Called. In your story ‘The Goldfinch Is Fine’, you introduce the idea of ‘the new natural’ (p. 5) – a contemporary idea of ‘the natural’ that encompasses aspects of nature, culture, technology, animal consciousness, artifice and the uncanny. I wondered if you could expand on how challenging or expanding ideas of what is ‘natural’ might have fed into your work on Mammals, and whether you feel ‘the natural’ is still a useful or meaningful phrase.
I was inspired by ‘the natural’ when I had stories in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and Reckoning Magazine (a journal of creative writing on environmental justice), alongside non-fiction pieces by Christopher Brown, who I then interviewed for Reckoning. He talks about how our very concept of the natural shows our separation from nature, and how wild animals are becoming habituated to the urban environments where he lives. It’s a kind of new natural, or perhaps a recognition that we can’t get back to how things were before and must grapple with the current climate crisis starting from where we are now.
After reading Sapiens and then the mind-blowing The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (the latter after my book was published), I think differently about the world, how society and nature change radically over time. My story ‘Drowning’ is about this change and the human incapacity to comprehend such enormous shifts in their environment. This is not to say I’m letting humanity off the hook for the disastrous environmental situation we are in. The fact that things do change so much also means that we can change them. If we grapple more with what’s happened before, we’ll be better equipped to do something about our current situation.
In ‘The Goldfinch Is Fine’, ‘the new natural’, besides being about the changing climate, is also perhaps an (unconscious) poke at the conventional idea of normality, something I’ve wrestled with my whole life, being split between wanting to belong and liking non-conformity. A very human dilemma as we are social animals. Every definition of the unnatural implies there is some absolute standard of the natural or normality. I haven’t found one yet! In describing his acceptance of his sexuality as ‘the new natural’ the main character plays on and counters this. I love the word ‘unnatural’ in horror because it sounds so very Lovecraftian and uncanny, and often funny too.
I’m curious there about how you connect the ‘natural’ and the ‘personal.’ I suppose attached to that are the ways we respond emotionally to this new state of nature, particularly to nature as encompassing the climate emergency. One of the prevalent responses in Mammals is that feeling of numbness or paralysis in the face of unfolding disaster. You describe this feeling succinctly in your closing story ‘Barleycorn’: ‘[The student] can’t quite acknowledge the feeling that there is no easy answer to the failure of humans to act on the environment. All that money, all that poverty, and the earth collapsing, while new strides are being made towards commercial travel to other planets. What is the point of studying? What is the point of theory?’ (p. 209). I’m curious as to whether you’ve experienced this kind of despondency in yourself or others, and whether writing Mammals helped to work through that kind of feeling.
I’ve definitely experienced despondency about the environment. The task of changing things seems so overwhelming and it’s difficult to know how to take on huge corporate players and politicians. Oddly, like with many crises at the moment, a lot of people I know don’t even talk about it, except to briefly express the impossibility of doing anything about it. Possibly both of these things are a sign of our times: a focus on the individual and a feeling of powerless about taking on the establishment, as if the battle has already been lost.
I’m not sure about working through the feeling by writing. For me writing is more a reflection of how I’m feeling. I often have no idea what I’m feeling until I write something down and think: oh, so that’s how I feel. The one way I’ve found to feel better is to take action, no matter how small. If you imagine all the protest movements, all the people doing something about the climate or corrupt governments, imagine how much worse things would be without them. This gives me hope. There is an effect.
As a creative response to changes to both the climate and to our idea of ‘the natural’, I’d argue that Mammals belongs in the tradition of speculative and hyperrealist fiction which attempts to tackle the themes that realism cannot. In my reading, while the collection remains grounded in tangible emotions, it consistently swerves reality and in Doing so opens up the stories to possibilities that are arguably beyond the scope of the realist/‘everyday’ short story. Does this resonate with you at all?
It does. I’ve naturally (that word again!) gravitated towards speculative elements in my stories, although I’ve also written (almost, mostly) realist stories. Kelly Link, one of my top writers, describes the fantastic as an intensifier of reality, creating additional space for emotional resonance in a story. I think that rather than swerving reality, my stories are representing it in a different way, hopefully incorporating new aspects of how we think and behave, by which I mean our less conscious aspects, rather than just our conscious selves.
The unconscious is important to me because that’s what got me writing, and I’m fascinated with the language of dreams and symbols. It’s also where fantasies and fairy tales come from. Angela Carter came up with a brilliant phrase to describe fantastical literature when she said that she was writing a ‘social realism of the unconscious’.
I wrote an article about representing reality in fiction for The Word Factory: The fantastical, fabulist, surreal, slipstream, literary mode of writing
Other than the broad themes around nature and climate, one of the other themes that I found pervading the collection was that relating to medicine and medical ethics, particularly to the process of monitoring typically involved with treatment. In several of the stories, medical professionals or scientists monitor patients, test subjects and animals. It seems like a theme which is aptly built to deliver and explore ‘the uncanny’, and I hoped you could speak to why that feeling of being monitored, particularly in a medical sense, is so conducive to unsettling drama.
I think the connection is to do with authoritarianism, power and powerlessness, both in people’s personal lives and in society. The feeling of being watched and controlled with no agency is perfect for dystopian and uncanny fiction. It feeds on fear, that some powerful and unpredictable outside force could strike at any moment, and is a direct threat to the integrity of the self.
I grew up in apartheid South Africa, a police state, and witnessed the attempted dehumanisation of most of the population by the government, and the general lack of freedom of speech and action. The protagonists in ‘Scaffolding’ and ‘Are You Cold, Monkey? Are You Cold?’, relate the abuse in their personal lives to doctors and science respectively. The latter story is particularly disturbing as the experiments, based on Harlow’s psychology experiments on baby monkeys, are being conducted to help humans. In the former, the doctor is an authority figure who seems, at first in any case, to be distant and unconnected to the patient. They do briefly connect, but the chance at changing their power dynamic is lost when they switch roles. In ‘Pain Is a Liar’ this sense of powerlessness is taken further to a dystopian nightmare where people are tortured for fun by a privileged class. In ‘Dividual’ the distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ becomes a split in the self.
Medicine, while incredibly helpful, also induces fear, a potential invasion of the body while in a weak state. Like much of science, the average person does not know much about it, and must put their trust in a complete stranger, the doctor.
I have ambiguous feelings about doctors. Some are lovely and empathic, but I’ve also had experiences where they operate from a position of power and snobbery and perhaps became doctors for the wrong reasons.
Finally, I wanted to move away from these more central themes to ask something about your creative responses to the place you were born. In your story ‘Drowning’, South Africa is centred for the only time during the collection, evoking both the desert landscape of the Karoo and the conurbations of Durban and Cape Town. I wanted to ask how it feels for you to write about South Africa, particularly as I know you’re working on a memoir of your childhood there. What does it mean for you to write about South Africa? What does South Africa mean when you write it?
I’m still finding out as I write the memoir… Writing about South Africa feels like home. It’s background, a part of me that is just there without me having to think about it. It is indirectly in my writing, in the themes of some stories, for example authoritarianism. When I write directly about it, like in ‘Drowning’, a lot of visceral details come up, landscapes vividly experienced through the senses, and strong emotions. I think partly because of the intensity of childhood, but maybe also because it was a country where you had to deeply examine everything, and yourself in relation to it.
Giselle Leeb’s debut collection, Mammals, I Think We Are Called (Salt), was longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2023. Her stories have appeared in publications including Best British Short Stories 2017 (Salt), Ambit, Mslexia, The Lonely Crowd, Black Static, and Nightjar Press.
http://giselleleeb.com
@giselleleeb.bsky.social
Joe Bedford’s interview series Writers on Research is made possible with National Lottery funding via Arts Council England.