SJ Bradley participated in the Alton Towers Residency in April 2019. We spoke to her about the theme park, the Northern Short Story Festival, and writing both short things and long.

What kind of themes would you say crop up most often in your writing?

I often say that I like to write about real things. I suppose by that I mean things that actually happened, stories that are little told, or that other people don’t think about or write about. I like to open up fairly obscure topics and write about people or groups of people that get forgotten about.

Place is quite important too. I like to set things in the North of England, because that’s where I live. I don’t think it gets written about enough. For me there’s a lot of good writing that comes out of the North, and a lot of good writers who are based there.

Do you have a personal story about Alton Towers? What kind of relationship do you have with the park?

Before I went on the Residency I had never been to Alton Towers before. I’d been to some fairly bad theme parks. When I was at school we used to go to Lightwater Valley quite often, and Flamingo Land. I can’t remember which it is, one of them has quite a large part of the park dedicated to a petting zoo. So there’re rides, and then there’re loads of bunny rabbits and guinea pigs too.

With Alton Towers I don’t know what my story would be. I like the place, but everything’s so heavily monetised. There are lots of things that you can’t get into unless you actually pay extra money. In terms of being a park in the way that I understand it, as common space where everyone can go, and which is a place for play and socialisation… well, it doesn’t feel like a park in that sense.

You’re director of the Northern Short Story Festival. Can you tell us a bit more about this?

I started it about four years ago now. Through the work of publishers like Comma Press and Valley Press it became clear to me that there were a lot of really good short story writers in the North of England, but there wasn’t really a forum to celebrate their achievements, or to give other writers access to them. That was a big part of why I started the festival: to celebrate Northern writers and to celebrate the short story form.

It’s not a hugely commercial form. You can be excellent at writing short stories – the best in the world – but you’ll never be famous for doing it. The best short story writers that we have in this country – people like Zoe Lambert and Angela Readman – are terrific writers, but they’re not famous. People have often never heard of them, but they write these great stories, and I find that mind-boggling.

One thing that people often say when they come to the festival is how great it is to be able to hear writers talk about their work, and to have access to those writers, and to be able to learn from great practitioners.

You write both longer fiction in the form of novels, and shorter fiction in the form of short stories. What is the difference between the two forms for you?

They’re two very different forms. They’re both hard to write well, but I think short stories are especially hard because you’re trying to say a lot in a very spare way. You don’t have the opportunity to explore or follow several narrative threads in a short story the way you can in a novel.

My approach to the two is quite different. When I write a short story I’m writing about one single thing that happens and leaves the reader with an impact. It might leave a lot unsaid, but I want to implant those ideas in a reader’s mind, and leave them thinking about them afterwards. With a novel I can say much more, and I can say it more explicitly. I want readers to follow my characters and root for them and see what they’re going to do. Writing a novel is bigger, so it involves more research and planning, and you have to think about how you keep track of the structure more than you do with a short story. If you don’t a novel can get out of hand!

How do you identify with being a Northern writer?

I grew up in Wakefield, during the Thatcher years. In parts of the North, you can still see the scarring from when the mines and other industries closed down, and nothing came in to replace them. I think that’s a big part of why Labour is so successful in parts of the North. You have this long history of people joining their union because they had to for their industry, and and a general distrust of the Conservatives because of what was done in the 80s, the results of which you can still see today.

Parts of Guest were set in a fictionalised version the 1 in 12 Club in Bradford – a longstanding social club set up during the 80s as a response to government comments about welfare claimants. Places like that had a big influence on what I wrote about in Guest. In part it’s about local people starting something that they see as necessary in their local area, and it being run by the people who live there, for the people who live there, and everything being affordable and welcoming. Today’s Yorkshire is a vibrant and exciting place, full of brilliant artists, thinkers and writers, with tremendous resourcefulness and wit. That’s one of the things I love about living there. It’s full of people who get on with things, despite whatever obstacles may be in their way.

That is part of the Northern Short Story Festival culture as well. It’s really important to me that we make the festival as inclusive and welcoming as possible. A day ticket is affordable in comparison with other literary festivals, and we give away free and bursary tickets to people who need them. If we could afford to we would make the whole thing free!

You can’t help but be shaped by the place you come from. All these experiences and collective memories and the industrial history of the North and the modern culture of the North are inseparable from me as a writer and me as a person. They define my preoccupations and what I write about.

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SJ Bradley is a novelist and short story writer from Leeds, whose short fiction has appeared in various journals and anthologies. She is a K Blundell Trust Award winner, and a Saboteur Award winner for her work as editor on Remembering Oluwale. As well as being Fiction Editor at Strix magazine, she is also director of the Northern Short Story Festival. Her second novel, Guest, is out now, available from Dead Ink Books. Her website is sjbradleybooks.blogspot.com.