As part of my interview series Writers on Research, I spoke to author Rosie Garland on the research process behind her collection Your Sons and Your Daughters are Beyond (Fly on the Wall Press, 2025).
I wanted to start with a general question about flash fiction and its relationship with research, primarily because this series hasn’t covered the form as widely as novels and longer short stories. I’m curious to know how research fits into your process, if at all, and whether you feel as though flash fiction encourages a different approach to research than longer forms.
Great place to start… as I’ve never been asked about how I research flash fiction. I get asked it all the time about my novels! Maybe there’s an assumption that, because flash fiction is short, it doesn’t need the same level of care and craft as a novel. I disagree. I research my historically-themed flash as carefully as for my historical novels.
I don’t overload the reader, however. The way I see it, the art of good research is when the reader barely notices its presence, only that everything feels right. Personally, I don’t care if an arrow is fletched with swan feather, eagle feather or magpie feather. I want to know who is shooting it, who dies, and why I should give a damn.
Whether a novel or a flash, what’s core for me is the emotional heart of the story; the way the characters interact with their world, whether that’s Ancient Egypt (‘Irt-irw’ – more on her below), the Bronze Age (‘Under the Water, The Dead are Still Moving’) or the present day (‘Your Sons and Your Daughters are Beyond’).
Before circling back to research as a practical part of the writing process, I’d like to focus in on the sense of the uncanny that pervades Your Sons and Your Daughters are Beyond. Many of the stories feel like nightmares, not just because of their surrealness and unease but because they so often depart from an otherwise intact logical base – things are going right, and then suddenly, for reasons beyond our understanding, things are going very wrong. I wonder whether this reading resonates at all, and whether the uncanniness of nightmares has informed your writing.
Rather than nightmares, I link my interest in the uncanny and the unusual to my earliest experience of story. A very early memory is of my grandmother reading folktales and fairy stories complete with magical dragons and talking beasts. I plunged into impossible elsewheres and elsewhens where the magic just happened.
Without leaving the safe harbour of her lap, I could travel far from my isolated childhood rural home. From fairy tales it was a short step to Alice in Wonderland and Edgar Allan Poe. From Asterix to Beowulf, science fiction to science fact, I explored new worlds, learned new things, thought new thoughts. Enchanted and yet everyday at the same time. It rooted me in a sense of the extra-in-the-ordinary I’ve never lost.
It’s why you’ll find animals – talking and otherwise – appearing in unexpected places in many of my stories, such as ‘What business has a horse to look down on me?’, ‘Love measured in rabbits’ and ‘An eel can produce its own body weight in slime to wriggle out of a tight situation’.
Setting the uncanny aside, there are, in my reading, a few other dominant motifs that give Your Sons and Your Daughters are Beyond cogency even amid its diverse themes. One which I was particularly drawn to is the motif of astronomy – stories about stars and stargazing – and the broader scientific motifs which also pervade the collection. I hoped you could tell me what it is about astronomy that may have inspired some of your work, and whether you had a perspective on why the stars seem to have elicited so much human creative endeavour throughout time.
A great place to start is to write to your passions, and my writing springs from a variety of interests and obsessions. Despite failing science quite heroically at school, I have a lifelong fascination with astronomy. I fly to the moon and play amongst the stars in stories like ‘The Astronomical Menagerie’ and ‘The Names of Stars’.
My creative imagination is sparked by the question What If? The received wisdom is that stars are infinite and uncountable. I asked myself What if someone had the job of counting the stars? The result was the story, ‘What becomes of the night when there is nothing left to see?’.
As always, I’m seeking the universal themes… that which unites us. There’s an old saying, As Above, So Below. In my hybrid piece ‘Perihelion is the closest a comet gets to the fire before managing to escape’, I imagined a comet travelling around the solar system, shuttling from brief moments in the sun before hurtling back into the cold. I reflected on times in my life when I’ve felt like that: going round in circles and never getting anywhere. I have a suspicion that might resonate with a lot of people…
Yes, I think so. Beyond the thematic, I’d also like to ask a more practical question on tense. The predominant tense of the collection is present tense, which some writers attribute to immediacy and intimacy, and which sometimes feels like the ‘natural’ tense for flash fiction. I hoped you might be able to share your insight into the opportunities and challenges that using present tense offers, and whether it really does feel like a natural fit for the form.
I do use present tense in a lot of my flash fictions (longer fiction as well). You’re right, it does engender a sense of immediacy. It’s one reason I use it for a character from the distant past (for example in ‘Under the Water, the Dead Are Still Moving’), in order to bring them up close and personal to the reader.
However, I play with past tense too, especially if the character is someone who is stuck in the past and unable to move on with their life. For example, there’s the fox in ‘An Eye for an Eye’ and the protagonist in ‘Good with Words, Bad with Numbers’.
This choice of tense goes hand-in-hand with the choices I make when it comes to point of view. Flash fiction is a great opportunity to experiment and play with point of view, for example second-person ‘you’. It’s tough to sustain for a novel (though a few brave souls have tried), but is well-suited to flash. It creates an intimacy, especially important when the character is unusual in some way. It’s why I chose it for ‘Happy Ever After with Bear’ and ‘Self-possessed’.
To close, I’d like to hone in on a particular story. In the forwarding note to ‘I am Irt-irw, Daughter of Pedamenope!’, you introduce us to the mummy of Irt-irw, which is on display at The Great North Museum in Newcastle. The story, written from the first person perspective of Irt-irw, is a compelling imagining of an ancient voice lingering through time. What is it about the mummy of Irt-irw that inspired you, and how did you approach writing about a real historical figure, both practically and perhaps (in an age in which some human remains are being removed from museum displays) morally?
As mentioned above, I write from my passions. Another of my enduring fascinations is for the people and history of Ancient Egypt. There’s another saying, The past is another country, they do things differently there. I disagree – to me, envy feels like envy and love like love, whatever the era.
In ‘I am Irt-irw, Daughter of Pedamenope!’ I did careful research (including a visit to the wonderful Great North Museum in Newcastle), but as mentioned above, I wanted it to be a background hum. Far more important was to reach back through the millennia and take the hand of Irt-irw as a real person, capturing her emotions and desires. To draw her close.
Whether from the past, the present or the future, I’m interested in creating people who are generous and greedy, curious and silly, cantankerous and mean, nurturing and disobedient, courageous and cowardly. Characters with unrequited desires because of guilt, self-denial, or fear of social condemnation. In short, living and breathing people, just like the reader.
Rosie Garland writes long and short fiction, poetry and sings with post-punk band The March Violets. Poetry collection What Girls Do in the Dark (Nine Arches Press) was shortlisted for the Polari Prize 2021. Her latest novel The Fates (Quercus) is a retelling of the Greek myth of the Fates. In 2023, she was made Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Val McDermid has named her one of the most compelling LGBT+ writers in the UK today.
Joe Bedford’s interview series Writers on Research is made possible with National Lottery funding via Arts Council England.