Fen: Stories

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I'd end with the fact that one can never be totally sure of what you have read or are made to understand when reading a Johnson story. MSt alumna Daisy Johnson longlisted for Sunday Times EFG Short Story award". Master's in Creative Writing. Oxford University. 13 February 2017 . Retrieved 13 October 2018. Such particularity of perception is rare and refreshing, and this sense of invigoration is intensified both by Johnson’s commitment to placing women at the heart of her stories (so much so that, at one stage, a lighthouse keeper is described as “wommaning” her radio), and by the attentiveness she brings to the business of imbuing their narratives with elegance, pattern, shape.

There’s no one specific source for the hotel, with its gothic-style long chimneys and stained glass windows. Located “not far from Cambridge, or the sea on the train,” it throws a wide beacon over the East of England.

But her experience of moving around the county for her dad’s work certainly provided some potent images.

I know who you are though in a moment I will not. It is getting. I do not remember the word. Soon it will be. How easily they go again. There is no loyalty in language. There is no...”Living in Ely when she was very little, in an attic bedroom within sight of Ely Cathedral, Ms Johnson developed a one-sided correspondence with the magnificent ‘ship of the Fens’.

Daisy Johnson's book came to me by chance. I retweeted a contest, didn't know what books to say I liked, and was given a surprise bundle. The moment I read the blurb, I knew I had to read it. So I've been dipping in and out. Female protagonists each find themselves rooted in a British landscape that's familiar, but surrounded by a world that isn't. The stories continue to surprise. The first one Starver seems set up to be a standard teenage anorexia story when a girl announces she is going to stop eating, and does. But metamorphosing into an eel is very much not part of the standard script. And is there a link to the last story where a female lighthouse keeper encounters a fish that seems to have almost human qualities. Look out in that one for the representations of male sexuality which wants to possess rather than enjoy. Water is definitely Ms Johnson’s medium. Her Man Booker Prize shortlisted novel Everything Under (2018) is set along the canals of Oxford, where she now lives. While her short story in Hag: Forgotten Folktales Retold (2020) retells ‘The Green Children of Woolpit’ Suffolk tale with a tainted well. Read More Related Articles Johnson currently lives in Oxford. [17] Her favourite writers include Stephen King, Evie Wyld, Helen Oyeyemi and John Burnside. Her favourite poets include Robin Robertson and Sharon Olds. [18] Had she been unsuccessful as a writer, Johnson suggests that she would have been a shepherd. [1] Novels [ edit ] some of the stories felt a bit too weighed down by towns and houses and humanity. the wild is there and creeping in at the edges, and her girls are strange little animals, but i'd been hoping for more of the flatlands and marshes and a real sense of being in a part of the country i'm not familiar with.Yeah. She took the first crate, upping it on her hip. She did not know why he always asked; she felt always busy: out every morning sifting for goods through the sands, scanning the water for something left behind. He didn't think magpie work amounted to much; he didn't know any better. Daisy Johnson's story collection Fen was unanimously beloved... firmly situating her among the UK's most exciting new voices. -- Marta Bausells * Elle *

I've been working my way slowly through Fen and not wanting it to end - Daisy marries realism to the uncanny so well that the strangest turnings ring as truth. The echoes between stories give the collection a wonderfully satisfying cohesion, so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I cannot wait to see what she does next." (Sara Taylor, author of The Shore) My thoughts lead me to this book – the author’s debut book, a short story collection. Like Everything Under its main setting is the rivers, and land/water boundaries of an area near an English ancient university – but in this case of a light rather than dark blue hue. That atmosphere - and the meeting of land and building, nature and human - is key to ‘The Hotel’. In the first episode we hear how a “witch” is blamed for a spate of child deaths - more plausibly caused by polluted water - and drowned in a pond. Read More Related Articles It’s not hard to imagine the flat, foreboding landscape of the Fens outside this circle, and the creeping water. When we were younger we learnt men the way other people learnt languages or the violin… We did not care for their thoughts; they could think on philosophy and literature and science if they wanted, they could grow opinions inside them if they wanted. We did not care for their creed or religion or type; for the choices they made and the ones they missed. We cared only for what they wanted so much it ruined them. Men could pretend they were otherwise, could enact the illusion of self-control, but we knew the running stress of their minds."

I think that’s one of the things I love about the Fens, that things like Ely Cathedral you can see from miles and miles away because it’s so flat.” Where the short story collection Fen alighted on tales of shape-shifting variousness, Everything Under focused on the mother-daughter tie to devastating effect; its “Oedipus” was Gretel, a lexicographer whose mother abandoned their houseboat with an unknown man, and who subsequently spent her childhood in a foster home. Their reunion in Gretel’s adulthood is inflected by their private, invented language and told through the lens of the mother’s dementia. Its originality and linguistic inventiveness drew critical praise – and that Booker shortlisting.