Gaynor Jones participated in the Alton Towers Residency in April 2019. We spoke to her about making the complex simple, Alton Towers memories, and how fear becomes creativity.

What would you say are the themes that appear most often in your work?

At the moment I’m struggling because I’ve just closed off a lot of themes. A lot of my work has been a reaction to the birth trauma and postnatal depression I had. I didn’t start writing until my daughter was two-and-a-half and I needed to get all of that out. So there’s a lot of fertility, motherhood, bodies falling apart, and bodies not behaving the way they should in some of my writing.

Now that I’m in a more positive frame of mind I’m a bit stuck! I feel like I’ve done everything I can with those themes. I feel like I’m moving on to writing about coming of age, youth, children and dysfunctional teenagers. I was a very dysfunctional teenager, and I’ve spent my life working with teenagers. That’s where I’m focussed at the moment. The short story collection I’m working on – I describe it as surreal coming of age tales – includes a lot of the tropes around being a teenager: sex, drugs, rock and roll… but all with strange and surreal twists on them.

Do you have a particular “Alton Towers” story, or some personal connection with the park?

The main one that I remember is being told off, although I don’t remember what I did! I know that I was taken there to watch the fireworks. I know something happened and I was told that I was “ungrateful”. That’s my earliest Alton Towers memory. I’m sure I didn’t do anything too terrible! I probably just pulled a bad face.

That one sticks with me because it’s the earliest, and shame is such a strong feeling. But there are other, funnier ones. I came here as a teaching assistant, and I was with a group of children with additional needs, who had to have someone go on the rides with them at all times … but I was too scared to go on the rides! So the other teaching assistant had to go on all the rides twice.

You write a lot of flash fiction. What is it about the form that appeals to you?

I’ve been writing for a long time, about 10 or 11 years, and it was something that was quite popular back then, even though people think it’s more of a now thing. I write flash fiction because I’ve written it for so long that it comes naturally to me, and it’s nice to feel like you’re good at something. I don’t particularly want a challenge right now to do more difficult things – I’m not really interested in making my life more difficult!

At the same time I had a phase earlier this year where I thought I really had to stop this, and really had to push myself. But that’s a self-sabotage thing I do sometimes when things are going well: oh I’m going to ruin this somehow. So I’ve been pushing back against it.

Also there’s the fact that my work naturally seems to fall at around 400 words. Most stories just fall into that small space, and if I try to write longer ones they often don’t turn out as good.

You’ve described your writing as being “simple ways of describing weird shit”. Can you expand on that a little?

I was reading an interview with Helen Rye, who won the Bath Flash Fiction Award. She wrote a piece that was about a flower, but really it was about the refugee crisis, and I remember reading it and reading the interview and thinking: right, so you take the most complicated thing you can think of and you make it really simple.

I remember I was sitting in the garden in a deck chair with a pen, and I thought, what’s really complicated? Nuclear physics. I went on Google, and I looked up a couple of terms, and I wrote this story called, “It’s Complicated”. It was about a man who had the power to end the world, but I wrote it in the most banal way, so that by the end of the story people would be lulled into a false sense of security. Then the last line was, “Then he pressed a button and the world stopped”. I wanted people to be surprised.

I can’t write beautiful sentences. That’s a thing. I just can’t, and if I try it sounds ridiculous. So I get my power from images and situations and characters. Also, I feel like there’s nothing wrong with writing simply! There’s space for every kind of writing and every kind of story.

You mentioned in your application that you are often scared of many things. Do you think this plays into your work, and if so, how?

I’ve never really thought about it in terms of my work. I’m scared of flying, the dark, death, nuclear disaster, and very scared of werewolves even though I know they aren’t real. I think in relation to my work… I have such a vivid imagination that I can always picture the most terrifying thing.

I used to have generalised anxiety disorder (GAD). What happened was, I would see the worst possible scenario in my head in a flash within a few seconds. I had a fear of water, and I’d think that if I spilled some water off my umbrella on the bus someone would slip on it and crack their head open. And I’d see all that in a flash while sitting on the bus.

When I recovered from that, after some great therapy, the first story I wrote was called “Living With It”, and it was about that. Fear of things has given me a really visual imagination, and so when I think of an odd story I can just see it in my head straight away.

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Gaynor Jones is a short fiction writer based in Manchester. In 2018 she was the recipient of the Mairtín Crawford Short Story Award and was named Northern Writer of the Year at the Northern Soul Awards. She is currently working on a short story collection. Find her at jonzeywriter.com.