As part of my interview series Writers on Research, I spoke to author Karen Stevens on the research process behind her collection Brilliant Blue (Barbican Press, 2025).
I’d like to start by asking about place. Most of the stories of Brilliant Blue emanate out from the Duncock Estate: a fictional council estate in Hampshire. The estate works as both a focal point for the drama but also as a kind of binding agent for the collection, melding the stories of Brilliant Blue into a beautifully-observed evocation of a specific (if fictional) social environment. I hoped you could share how the idea for Duncock came about and how your broader experiences of similar real-world environments may have fed into that.
The stories in Brilliant Blue were originally written as standalone pieces to submit to competitions. Over the years, I’ve accumulated quite a collection of stories, and one afternoon I decided to lay them all out to see what they revealed to me. I didn’t fully realise at the time, but I now see that this was a semi-conscious attempt to develop a sense of writerly identity. It was valuable because it helped me to see my preoccupations more clearly as a writer. I’m very interested in the British working-class system, and many of my stories unfold in working-class settings, exploring what it means to feel, connect, and cope in a world that’s anything but equal.
Fortunately, I had some objectivity when I began sifting through everything, since I’d written some stories years earlier. That distance allowed me to see which pieces were weaker, which covered territory that was too similar, and which had a different mood from the collection I could sense was emerging. The pieces I picked had a common thread – people going through tough times, weighed down by their histories, and caught in relationships where real connection was missing – but the collection needed something more, to make it cohesive. The binding – or glue – was definitely missing at that point.
I decided to do some research and re-read the short story collections that I love, with an eye on how other writers create cohesion. Colin Barrett’s collection Young Skins made a real impression again (oh, the joy of re-reading!). All of his stories are set in the same fictional Irish town of Glanbeigh, and the opening piece skilfully uses setting to establish a tense, edgy atmosphere and to illuminate the lives of his characters – listless and stuck, some lurking on the edges, others pushed there.
I love writing setting because it’s more than just the time and place of a story – it’s a way to shape mood and meaning. So, like Barrett, I set about developing a unifying setting, which became the Duncock estate: a fictional location loosely inspired by a sprawling housing estate I know well, and where a relative still lives. My aim wasn’t to faithfully recreate this place through description, but rather to evoke an atmosphere I experience whenever I visit. I wanted the physical environment to create a mood that reflects the mental landscapes of my characters. I really enjoyed working the stories with this in mind. I think writers are often drawn to creating fictional places that feel recognisable – Thomas Hardy’s Wessex springs to mind – because the imagination can move more freely, unburdened by the friction between reality and invention.
Tying in with that idea of using place as a binding agent for the collection, several of these stories feature recurring characters who appear and reappear at different stages of their lives. This brought to mind other collections of locality like Joshua Jones’s Local Fires and Louis de Bernieres’s Notwithstanding, in which disparate characters fulfil different roles in other characters’ stories. Could you expand on how you handled these recurrences? What creative choices did you have to make in re-employing characters, and were there opportunities or challenges involved in balancing their presence in other stories?
I really enjoy reading short story collections with recurring characters, and my first experience – about thirty years ago now – was the collection Come to Me by Amy Bloom. It’s a brilliantly nuanced collection, in which several stories feature characters who reappear in different contexts or are connected to one another. I found it fascinating to see different facets of these individuals, and so it felt like a natural decision to have my characters recur – walking in and out of each other’s stories – because they’re united by their shared location.
Practically, I needed to develop relationships – connections and disconnections – crucial in fiction. I began by deciding that the central characters in three stories would be family members: Andy, Gina and Emma. Andy’s story would come first in the collection. In it, he chooses to remain a bystander when his good friend is involved in a violent event, prompting him to reflect on his position in his troubled marriage to Gina. In the later stories featuring Gina and Emma, we see how this incident has plunged Andy into full-blown depression, and we witness how it affects them as they navigate their own crises. Gina may seem abhorrent from Andy’s viewpoint in his story, but her own narrative reveals the depth of her frustrations. Similarly, Emma might appear to be a selfish teenager in Gina’s story, but we come to understand how her parents’ preoccupation with their own lives and their fractured marriage has impacted her – leading to an illicit liaison with an older man.
These three stories – placed at the beginning, middle, and end – provided a useful structure for developing connections between other characters in the collection. This helped me determine whether a particular character should appear as a bit-part, a secondary figure, or a more integral presence. This process was by no means a quick turnaround. Yes, I had already written the stories, but weaving connections between individuals required extensive writing, reshaping characters and situations in new and often unexpected ways. It took a good few years. I had to be patient.
In Gina’s story, a young man Bez – part of Emma’s teenage gang – was originally just a secondary character, but I couldn’t get him out of my head. He’s not entirely comfortable in his environment, and is politically-minded. I gave him one line in the story that reveals his stance on class, when he’s refused a match to light a cigarette by the landlord of a local pub: ‘You lot, eh? … You posh lot. Keeping everything to yourselves and fuck the rest of us.’ That line – ordinary enough – stuck with me, and I found myself writing Bez’s story at the point when I thought the collection was done. I removed another story to make room for him, and it took me ages to write. A challenge? Absolutely, especially as I was eager to get the collection out into the world. But for a long time, I couldn’t work out what I wanted to say through Bez. In the end, the challenge became an opportunity: Bez evolved into a working-class lad who ends up at university, passionately voicing his views on the British class system while working a summer job in his local DIY store. He became a mouthpiece for my own preoccupation with class, and I had a lot of fun with writing his story. It brought a different tone to the collection – which I liked.
In the end, I hope the use of recurring characters prompts readers to fill in the narrative gaps between stories – something I particularly enjoy in short story cycles – and serves to unsettle their initial impressions and moral judgments. I wanted readers to recognise the complexities and contradictions we all carry as we navigate our paths, because it’s hard to walk a straight line in a wobbly world.
Throughout Brilliant Blue, the links between characters are often fraught, and I think these dramatic tensions come partly from the fact that they are connecting, or perceive themselves to be connecting, across cultures and class boundaries. Evidently, culture, class and social mobility are some of the key drivers of the collection, and there are moments in which these divisions seem by turns vast or insurmountable and then paper-thin or imaginary. I wonder if this liminal quality comes from a personal place, and whether you’d be happy to share how that may have fed into your creative approach.
I grew up in a poor working-class household, and in the mid-1990s, education offered me the kind of social mobility that Tony Blair envisioned when he entered Downing Street in 1997, with his belief that wider access to Higher Education would be the great social leveller. I suppose I’m living proof of Blair’s vision, having built a career in academia. But I don’t feel middle-class – and if asked, I would defiantly define myself as working-class.
The impact of this ‘in-betweenness’ (as I call it) is that I often experience imposter syndrome when engaged in predominantly middle-class environments, yet also feel distanced from my working-class roots. My feelings aren’t unique. In The Uses of Literacy (1957), Richard Hoggart wrote about the ‘uprooted and the anxious’ – the working-class scholarship boy of post-war Britain who sought self-improvement through education, only to become ‘the odd man out’: no longer able to fit into his working-class community and too self-conscious to feel at ease with his middle-class peers. Much of my writing explores this psychic tension. Indeed, the stories in Brilliant Blue pivot around moments when class lines are crossed or blurred, and people become more acutely aware of their power and powerlessness (whether real or imagined) within the hierarchies of class relations. It sounds heavy – but there’s humour in these moments too. I love a book that makes me laugh, especially at important moments when it feels inappropriate to do so.
Connections between characters are, of course, not all incidental; many of the characters are dealing with difficulties within their families or, often, extended families. These families are also, in many cases, changing in character – family members are leaving or returning, relationships are breaking down or repairing, structural changes are taking place – and many of these changes form the collection’s most epiphanic moments. Again, I’d love it if you’d be happy to share how your own perspective on family helped you to imagine these family dramas.
I don’t know anyone who lives – or has lived – in the ‘perfect’ family set-up, where everyone gets along brilliantly and life unfolds like a fairy tale, happily ever after. It seems there’s always some kind of tension, from minor irritations to long-standing grudges, and sometimes a tragedy or the revelation of a secret can tear a family apart. Personally, I’ve had a fairly dysfunctional upbringing, and my experience of family is that it’s a dynamic in constant flux, shaped by differing personalities, choices, and changing circumstances. In life, these variables inevitably lead to either emotional outbursts, or they’re internalised. The stories in Brilliant Blue explore the internalised – the ‘hidden’ psychodramas that arise from incidents and circumstances that bring about change, in some way – offering the reader (hopefully) a more complex, varied and individual insight into how different people respond to love, loss, duty, societal pressure and more.
Tolstoy captures it perfectly in the opening line of Anna Karenina, when he writes: ‘‘All happy families are alike but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion’ (Penguin, 1978). In this, he encapsulates what we seek from fiction, as readers: stories are about struggle – we don’t crave equilibrium. The best stories are in motion, and I think this is especially true of the short story, where there’s less room for ‘easing in’ or preamble. A short story must begin on the cusp of change – when things are in flux, disarray or conflict – in order to bring about a profound moment of realisation for the central protagonist.
All of this brings me to a quote from the final story in the collection, ‘The Real Deal’, something that really struck me. To paraphrase an observation from your character Gavin: ‘This might seem unreal to you, Emma – a cliché, even… But it’s never cliché, is it – when things happen in real life to real people’ (p. 81). For me, this encapsulates how deftly Brilliant Blue brings threads of so-called melodrama (via class, family, etc.) into a personal, realistic literary context. I was reminded of the various nods to soap operas throughout the collection, and I wanted to ask if you feel, as I do, that the collection is doing something to treat working-class characters (in particular) less like functionaries in a melodrama and more like real people ‘in real life’?
I write and think about the world from a working-class perspective because this is where I come from, so it was never a conscious decision to write working-class characters who feel ‘real’. The goal of all writers is to craft characters who are complex, flawed, and emotionally authentic. But I suppose the challenge of writing working-class characters is that the label ‘working-class fiction’ tends to conjure two opposing, and somewhat cliched stereotypes: lazy, insular and brutal individuals, or honest, hardworking people who value family and community.
When I read Andrew Cowan’s novel Pig, I was completely blown away by how he transcends the usual stereotypes. It’s a beautifully crafted and sensitive story, in which an adolescent boy’s dreams are set against the harsh realities of a town in economic and post-industrial decline. In a similar vein, the people in my stories live where they live and are busy working through their problems and aspirations – just like anyone else. I think this is what lies at the heart of Gavin’s line about cliche and real life: we’re so accustomed to reading middle-class narratives, and seeing middle-class drama on telly and in films, that other lives can seem less real or substantial, or are reduced in our imagination to cliche. The people in my stories may be living in more precarious financial situations, but their loves, losses, hopes, and trials are just as unique and valuable as anyone else’s, regardless of class.
Karen Stevens writes short fiction and has been published in a variety of anthologies and journals, including The Big Issue, Fish Publishing, Salt Publishing and Valley Press. She was runner-up for the prestigious ALCS Tom-Gallon Trust Award in 2023. Her edited collection of essays Writing a First Novel: Reflections on the Journey was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2014. Her co-edited collection of short stories High Spirits won a Saboteur Award for Best Anthology in 2019. Karen is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Chichester and lives in West Sussex. Brilliant Blue is her first collection of short stories.
Joe Bedford’s interview series Writers on Research is made possible with National Lottery funding via Arts Council England.