Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Fen
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1990
WEBSITE:
CITY: Oxford, England
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: British
http://www.npr.org/2017/05/02/525768008/eerie-fen-is-full-of-dazzling-hard-to-explain-stories * http://americanshortfiction.org/2017/04/24/web-exclusive-interview-daisy-johnson/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2016101125
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2016101125
HEADING: Johnson, Daisy, 1990-
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100 1_ |a Johnson, Daisy, |d 1990-
370 __ |e Oxford (England) |c England |2 naf
372 __ |a Fiction |a Short stories |2 lcsh
374 __ |a Authors |2 lcsh
375 __ |a Females |2 lcdgt
377 __ |a eng
670 __ |a Fen, 2016: |b title page (Daisy Johnson) jacket (born 1990; currently lives in Oxford; writes short fiction)
PERSONAL
Born October 31, 1990.
EDUCATION:Attended Oxford University.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer.
AWARDS:A.M. Heath Prize, 2014.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including the Boston Review and the Warwick Review.
SIDELIGHTS
Daisy Johnson grew up in East Anglia, England, a marshland that was artificially drained and developed into rural suburbs. The area is known as the Fens, and this location serves as the setting for Johnson’s debut short story collection, aptly titled Fen. The collection exclusively features female protagonists, several surreal storylines, and is subtly linked. Notably, the connections between each story are not fully revealed to the reader until the end. In “A Heavy Devotion,” Johnson portrays a mother who loses the ability to speak just when her son speaks his first words. “A Bruise the Size and Shape of a Door Handle” portrays a jealous house: When a young woman brings her new girlfriend home, the house attempts to absorb the girlfriend while attacking the woman who lives there. Another tale, “Starer,” follows a girl who turns into a fish, while “The Scattering” follows a teenager who begins tagging along with her older brother’s friends.
Discussing the collection’s setting in an online American Short Fiction interview, Johnson told Erin McReynolds: “I grew up there, in the British Fens, and when I started writing short stories it was a landscape which—without my much meaning it to—came back to me. The land there is completely flat, with long Roman roads set above the fields, which are mostly peat. It’s striking: the white grey sky; the black land, the grey sea not far away. It seemed to me a land which could contain strangeness, a land which had a voice. This is a place which was underwater, which perhaps still dreams about being underwater.” Johnson added: “I’ve never yet been able to write cities, and I like the idea that this is perhaps because they already have their own noise, their own loud logic. Writers who do cities really well seem, somehow, to tame this noise, to somehow channel it. . . . The Fen, like most rural places, is so quiet until it’s not. You are woken in the night by foxes hunting or muntjac deer mating. It’s quiet enough [that] you can hear what you might not normally hear . . . Maybe that is the landscape I like writing about . . . it’s so quiet you can hear the strangeness you might not in other places notice.”
Reviews of Fen were largely positive, and critics commended Johnson’s surreal feminist voice. Praising the author’s efforts in his New Statesman assessment, Anthony Cummins called Fen a “startling and inventive debut.” He also stated that “Johnson’s mixing of the occult and the banal is a clever way to approach the transformations of youth, with uncanny goings on a proxy for violent rites of passage. Yet the weirdness in these stories is tinglingly alive on its own terms, seldom calibrated to make us ask what is really happening, despite the lurking subtexts.” Michael Schaub, writing on the NPR Website, was also positive, and he commended the “twisted stories that examine sexuality from the viewpoint of female desire.” Schaub then went on to comment: “It’s difficult to explain Fen; it reads like a book that doesn’t want to be explained, only experienced. And thanks to Johnson’s accomplished writing, dazzling imagination and unique point of view, it’s one hell of an experience. Fen is a haunting book about a haunted place, and it’s more than worth it to take the trip.”
Further applause for the collection was proffered by Sarah Crown in the Guardian Online, and she remarked that “Johnson’s protagonists are all female, and mostly young: women who are either in the process of transitioning from girlhood to womanhood, or recently graduated and exploring the powers it bestows on them. By drawing parallels between the state of femaleness and the fens, she reclaims the tired cliches of women as fluid, changeable, governed by mysterious tides and turns them on their head. In a liminal land where boundaries are unreliable and endlessly shifting, her women fit right in.” As Hermione Hoby put it in the New York Times Online, “Johnson has a marshy imagination and wind-whipped prose; the latter is an effective counterweight to the sometimes hyperbolic lore of this shape-shifting world. Here, where both land and life are flat, the privations of rural teenage existence yield wild and elemental bewitchments.” In the words of online Rumpus correspondent E.B. Bartels: “As a reader, the world of Fen won’t leave you. That is Johnson’s power as a writer—she creates a dark, self-aware world that feels heavy and gray and covered in mist. In her universe, if you’re lonely, you can befriend a fish. Words don’t just cause emotional pain, but they form burns and welts. The ones you love can come back from the dead. To read Johnson’s stories is to live in dreams, at once both disturbing and comforting.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
New Statesman, July 29, 2016, Anthony Cummins, “Dark Abracadabra.”
Publishers Weekly, March 13, 2017, review of Fen.
Spectator, September 3, 2016, Jonathan McAloon, review of Fen.
ONLINE
American Short Fiction, http://americanshortfiction.org/ (November 20, 2017), Erin McReynolds, author interview.
Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (June 18, 2016), Sarah Crown, review of Fen.
Kenyon Revie, https://www.kenyonreview.org/ (November 20, 2017), review of Fen.
National, https://www.thenational.ae/ (June 7, 2016), review of Fen.
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com (May 26, 2017), Hermione Hoby, review of Fen.
NPR Website, https://www.npr.org/ (May 2, 2017), Michael Schaub, review of Fen.
Rumpus, http://therumpus.net/ (May 9, 2017), E.B. Bartels, review of Fen.
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Short stories
The first book interview
Daisy Johnson: seeking 'intense strangeness in a world that feels like ours'
Fen’s author explains how short stories were the perfect form to ‘do really weird things and have really weird things happen’
Daisy Johnson
‘I don’t think I would have wanted to write a book that everybody liked’ … Daisy Johnson. Photograph: Pollyanna Johnson
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Thursday 14 July 2016 05.00 EDT Last modified on Wednesday 20 September 2017 05.55 EDT
“The starting point was the eels,” says Daisy Johnson. These strange creatures writhe in “headless masses in the last puddles” as the land is drained in the opening story of her debut collection, Fen, spinning us off into an uncanny world where an older sister can starve herself into becoming an eel, a dead brother can return as a fox, and a house can love a girl “darkly and greatly and with a huge, gut-swallowing want”.
Fen by Daisy Johnson review – an impressive first collection
Johnson’s surreal and atmospheric stories are set in a liminal landscape where girls become eels
Read more
The result, wrote its Guardian reviewer, is is an original and grippingbook, in which “boundaries shift and slide and myth and folklore seep up from the sodden ground and insinuate their way into her characters’ solid-seeming lives”.
Fresh from a morning of publicity photographs and signing hardbacks at the top of the shiny new Foyles bookshop on London’s Charing Cross Road, Johnson ponders the real English Fens, the provisional landscape borrowed from the seas by a system of embankments and pumps. Born in the south-west of England in 1990, she went on to spend most of her childhood in the flatlands of East Anglia. She was, she says, “always aware that it had been somewhere that was fished for eels a lot … You fish for them at night, you wade into the water and there are these quite scary creatures. And then the idea that the water had been pumped away – so where did the eels go?”
It wasn’t until she moved away, first to study English and creative writing in Lancaster and then for a master’s in creative writing at Oxford, that she began to explore the strange country of her teenage years. “The landscape almost had to be diminished down into a memory for it to be something I could write about, because if you were sat in it, it would be too much … In a memory, particularly a childhood memory, it becomes almost a mythic thing.”
Even before she sat down to write, she was clear that she wanted to push these memories beyond realism. “I think short stories are this perfect form where you can do really weird things and really weird things happen and, despite being small, they seem to be able to contain that really well,” she says.
“Cormac McCarthy talks about starting The Road because he wanted to see if he could write a post-apocalyptic novel, and I guess it was a similar thing – could I write intensely strange short stories, but set in a world which felt like ours?”
But the vampires who pull on jodhpurs, polo necks and wellington boots to look for unsuspecting men in the Fox and Hounds, or the son who drains his mother of memory and language, are challenging for reasons beyond their author’s technical resources. For Johnson, the strange allows a writer to “destroy something from the inside”.
Women need to appear not only as mothers and partners, they need to appear as I-carrying figures in their own right
It’s a project she first explains as being inspired by the authors she was reading and studying when she started working on the collection in 2014, writers such as Sarah Hall, Kelly Link, Karen Russell and Mary Gaitskill. “A lot of short-story writers are … creating stories that otherwise might be realistic, but have this seed of change in the middle,” Johnson says, citing Hall’s award-winning story Mrs Fox, in which a woman changes into a vixen during a woodland walk: “The transformation destroys the reality around it.”
But the inspiration for Johnson’s interest in change is more than purely literary. She is addressing a world where it is still notable that all of her protagonists are female, where it is still something of a reversal to find useless, dense men playing bit parts in dramas where women assert themselves and their desires needs to be subverted, Johnson says. It is “ripe for change, is ripe for transformation, ripe for rewriting”.
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She stops, waits, nods. The male-dominated stories we have told ourselves are missing such a large part of human experience that there needs to be space for alternative ones next to them, she explains, a space opened up by the irruption of the uncanny. “It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be writing about male characters, but women need to appear not only as mothers and partners, they need to appear as I-carrying figures in their own right.”
Many of these characters are young women and teenagers exploring the emotional and sexual power of their incipient womanhood. “There’s something about being a teenager – I remember it as being awful. I’m sure not everyone does, but it’s such a strange time. Everything you look at, all the little bits, like going to the pub, are really weird, because you’re going through this massive breakdown of person.”
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Johnson says she was never one of the teenagers hiding shots under the table in the local pub, or bumming a cigarette in the car park outside. “I was always very good. A lot of my work ethos comes down to guilt. I don’t know if that’s good, but that’s the way it works. I never would have been one of those people, which is why maybe I can write about them, from an outside point of view.”
The world in which these fluid figures live is riveted together with shards of everyday life: burnt beef and dating websites, box sets and the tree-shadowed dirt beyond the canal where the older kids go to drink. Strange things may happen in this landscape, Johnson explains, but “I always wanted it to feel like this was something that could happen to you”.
The shifts that Johnson charts are part of the texture of 21st century life – if you’re describing people on the cusp of adulthood then “it should feel that way, that gender is fluid, that sexuality is fluid”, she says. The collection is also “rude, it’s about sex, it’s got swearing in it” – and as it makes its own transition into the public sphere, she’s steeling herself for a broad range of reactions. “There are relatives who are reading it now who I don’t think are going to like it,” she says. “I didn’t write thinking that it would ever be published.”
She’s already working on novel exploring another liminal zone – the network of canals that thread through post-industrial Britain. Mixed with the nervousness that makes Johnson sit up straight in her chair, measuring out each answer with stop-start care, is a confidence that the wide spaces of the fen have helped her to find her voice.
“I don’t think I would have wanted to write a book that everybody liked,” she says. “That would have missed the point.”
Fen is published by Jonathan Cape, for £12.99 and is available from the Guardian Bookshop for £10.39
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Donald Inks 14 Jul 2016 8:25
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“darkly and greatly and with a huge, gut-swallowing want”.
Someone actually published this?
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whitenylon Donald Inks 14 Jul 2016 8:36
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'srong wi that?
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Jessica Oliver Donald Inks 15 Jul 2016 8:50
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They did, because it's an amazing piece of work. And I'm sure the publishers are jumping up and down with joy at its brilliant reviews.
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Web Exclusive Interview: Daisy Johnson
by Erin McReynolds | April 24, 2017
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Johnson, Daisy (Pollyanna Johnson)
April’s Web Exclusive, “A Bruise the Size and Shape of a Door Handle,” is a haunting story whose slow, creeping tension evokes the likes of Edgar Allen Poe and Shirley Jackson. And yet it is so thoroughly modern, an enlightened study of unhinged, potent adolescent-female sexuality. Its author, Daisy Johnson, is surely destined for great things, so we’re thrilled to have her story and interview here.
Erin McReynolds: The collection from which this story comes is called, FEN, referring presumably to East Anglia’s sort of long-uninhabited marshland. What about this location inspires you?
Daisy Johnson: I grew up there, in the British Fens, and when I started writing short stories it was a landscape which—without my much meaning it to—came back to me. The land there is completely flat, with long Roman roads set above the fields, which are mostly peat. It’s striking: the white grey sky; the black land, the grey sea not far away. It seemed to me a land which could contain strangeness, a land which had a voice. This is a place which was underwater, which perhaps still dreams about being underwater.
EM: That sounds deeply appealing for a writer. Sometimes we want a landscape that is visually silent, so our imaginations can fill things in, and sometimes we need “noise” to report or work off of. Do you prefer one over the other?
DJ: That’s a really interesting thought. I’ve never yet been able to write cities, and I like the idea that this is perhaps because they already have their own noise, their own loud logic. Writers who do cities really well seem, somehow, to tame this noise, to somehow channel it. I’m thinking here of The Satanic Verses or Midnight’s Children, which are such loud, bustling books just like the cities they are portraying.
Someone once described FEN to me in a visual way, as bands of color (sky, land, water), which is reflected in the stories — the ordinary cut through with strong moments of strangeness. I like the idea of that translated into sound. The Fen, like most rural places, is so quiet until it’s not. You are woken in the night by foxes hunting or muntjac deer mating. It’s quiet enough [that] you can hear what you might not normally hear: pylons, cars along straight roads. Maybe that is the landscape I like writing about: where’s it’s so quiet you can hear the strangeness you might not in other places notice.
I think a lot of the landscapes I love writing about are made of what you can’t see. The Fen is such an empty landscape. The novel I’m currently working on is partly set on canals which, I think, drew me in because of how murky they are: anything could be hiding beneath. This, perhaps, gave me the space to fill that emptiness.
EM: Who/what were your influences when writing this collection?
DJ: I was, while writing FEN, fanatically reading short story collections, everything I could get my hands on but particularly collections by women. A few books are very ripped and dirty because I was carrying them around in my bag, returning again and again to them, unpicking stories. Sarah Hall’s The Beautiful Indifference, Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners, Claire Vaye Watkins’ Battleborn, everything Karen Russell writes, Jessie Greengrass, Mary Gaitskill, Lucia Berlin.
FEN is a collection of linked short stories, so I hunted down and read a lot of other books like that. Sam Thompson’s Communion Town, Jim Crace’s The Devil’s Larder, all of Junot Diaz’s collections.
There are also some writers, in different genres, that I return to for everything I write. They are my staple, and they save me whenever I am stuck. Stephen King is one of them but also Evie Wyld, Helen Oyeyemi, Robin Robertson, John Burnside, Sharon Olds.
EM: Do any of the characters in “A Bruise” show up elsewhere in FEN? What are the connective tissues between the stories?
DJ: Throughout, there are a couple of repeating images. The pub in “A Bruise” is one which reappears over and over again, as is the pregnant barmaid, who is the protagonist of her own story later on. January Hargrave, the filmmaker, is also in another story. I wanted there to be just enough connective tissue, as you say, to make it feel as if this was the same world. I loved the idea of the characters seeing one another and not realizing they were all experiencing these very strange things. It makes you think about the people you run into on the street.
EM: For being so young, you write with the emotional intelligence and keenness of a person who has spent a lot of time on the planet, observing themselves and others. Were you always a writer? A reader?
DJ: I’m glad! Every writer I know was a reader first in an obsessive sort of way. Writing for me came naturally from the hunger of that. How do they do that? Can I do that? How do they make the reader feel that way? There was a sense of jealous wonder which spurred me on. I’ve been a writer since I was maybe fourteen and it seemed accidental, just something I was doing. Perhaps that’s the thing to do: trick yourself into it. I learned how to observe and record before I knew I was doing it. At that point I didn’t know about editing. I was very happy!
I was born on Halloween so quite a few of my formative film experiences also involved lots of girls in a room screaming for my birthday . . . These pretty much made me the sort of writer I am today.
EM: Ah, yes, the blessed time before editing. It seems we spend all this time learning how to read critically and write knowingly and then must try very hard to forget it, to “find the fun” again, as George Saunders put it. How do you stay in touch with “the fun” while you write?
DJ: For me those early moments of writing without direction—of word vomiting—are always fun. I love the excitement of a barely formed idea, the blank document not yet filled. It’s later that I find difficult. Which means that I try and have a couple of thoughts rolling at the same time. This has, at the moment, seemed to mean that I’m working on a novel with some short stories rocking around in the background. So those days where the novel fights you every step of the way, where you despair, there is always something else to turn to.
I also try and have a lot of reminders around my desk that it once—if not at this moment—was fun. There’s a little framed sign which my partner made for me which says, “I think this novel is going to be fucking amazing.” Which is, inconceivably, something I once said, and which he, sick of my moaning, wrote down and framed.
Reading also helps me. Whenever I’m stuck I pick up a book and, if it’s good, after a couple of sentences I’ll be back in the zone again.
EM: Almost right away, there’s the line “Give a house half a chance and it’ll answer back.” And from there, without giving away too much, the house becomes increasingly humanoid, filled with desire, longing, jealousy. It reminds me of what a chef friend said about why he always closes his restaurant one day each week: “Or else it fights you.” Have you personally experienced houses or other spaces with an anthropomorphic energy?
DJ: I’d lived in perhaps ten houses by the time I was fifteen. Most of them were rentals in the middle of nowhere, and all of them were strange in their own way. One was an old chapel, in another a back door opened out into the forest. A lot of them were strangely shaped. They felt full with everyone who’d ever been in them, as if all of that living had seeped into the walls. I’ll never be comfortable in new builds. They have nothing to say yet, they seem passive, silent. I love what your friend says. All the houses I’ve lived in have their own personalities down to rooms having different feelings to them.
It was in these houses that I first started sleeping badly, having very intense dreams in which I woke to find myself out of bed, rushing around or trying to climb out of windows. When I stayed at a friend’s house in Wales I had the worst I’d ever had, slept with the lights on all night. I always remember which dreams I’ve had where. It feels as if they have somehow come from the houses.
I’m interested, perhaps because of these things, in haunted house stories. For me there is nothing quite as uncanny or terrifying as the place you are living in deciding it’s tired of you. I’m looking forward, one day, to writing a horror novel and scaring the socks off everybody.
EM: This story gives me chills every time I read it, so you 100% have to write a horror novel.
DJ: I’m laying the groundwork, and it’s already scaring me quite a lot. I have to write by the back door so I have a clear exit strategy. The one I’m working on at the moment isn’t horror, but it still has the same—I think—seeping feeling of dread that I’ve noticed in my writing. Everyone feels awfully, mythically doomed.
EM: You’ve managed to capture the onset of female adolescence with such fully realized details—like how we, at that age, glob on to certain music and art and let it identify us. In this case, the films of fictitious director January Hargrave, which are central to Salma’s and Margot’s meeting. What were some of your formative “January Hargrave” experiences?
DJ: That’s a great question. One Christmas my parents bought me a box of videos of everything they thought I should watch. Perhaps that’s where it started. The exhilaration when you first see Pulp Fiction, Marathon Man, Leon, The Last of the Mohicans. The feeling of talking to a friend about them, like a secret that everyone knows. It’s like being initiated into something. I was born on Halloween, so quite a few of my formative film experiences also involved lots of girls in a room screaming for my birthday. The Exorcist, The Shining, Carrie. These pretty much made me the sort of writer I am today.
The first album I bought was Simon and Garfunkel’s [Bridge Over Troubled Water]. The first book I couldn’t believe someone had written was Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow by Peter Høeg. It’s true, everything feels momentous at that age.
Crime dramas are littered with murdered, vanished women.
EM: What do you think is missing from narratives involving female sexuality—in the media, in art?
DJ: A lot is missing. Sarah Hall was once asked why she only wrote female characters and, paraphrasing, said she would keep doing it until people stopped asking her that. It’s true. No one would ever ask why everyone only writes male characters.
Doesn’t it get tiring to do the Bechtel test with every film you watch and come up, again and again, short? Women, in films in particular, just don’t exist beyond being appendages to men. They are often entirely lacking in personality besides being a relation or partner to a male character. Alternatively they are visual bait. Crime dramas are littered with murdered, vanished women. We don’t let our women characters say anything. They are trapped in repetition.
EM: Preach, sister. If I see one more book marketed as “the next Gone Girl” or “Girl on a Train meets XYZ” . . .
DJ: So true, I’m not sure when it became fashionable to call women “girls” again. No wonder a lot of the protagonists go on killing sprees!
EM: What are you reading or what has your attention lately?
DJ: I’ve just read Anne Enright’s The Gathering. I know I’m late to the party but it blew me away. There is something so organic and unlike any other writer about what she is doing with structure and language. I’m stealing all her ideas. I will not apologize.
I’m also reading a new collection of linked short stories, out over here in November, from a British writer Sam Guglani. It’s called Histories, and it’s set in a hospital. It’s quiet and intensely drawn, quite wonderful.
EM: How long did it take you to write FEN? (Also, what’s behind the all-caps of the title?)
DJ: It was maybe a year of writing and then a year of editing with my agent and publisher. I love the all capitals. It’s what people write whenever they email me about FEN and I’ve taken it on. It reminds me of the opening of The Exorcist with that massive red writing. It’s like a warning sign on a road. WATCH OUT.
Daisy Johnson was born in 1990 and currently lives in Oxford. Her short fiction has appeared in Boston Review and the Warwick Review, among others. In 2014, she was the recipient of the A. M. Heath Prize. This story is from her collection FEN, available May 2 from Graywolf Press.
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AUTHOR Q AND A
Daisy Johnson
Interviewed by Euan Hirst
Daisy Johnson sitting on a couch while looking outside a window
We are delighted to introduce you to Daisy Johnson. See below for some more thoughts on ‘Fen’, some questions that Daisy kindly answered for us and a few book recommendations from this author that you are sure to hear an awful lot about...
Have you seen your book in a bookshop yet? How does that feel?
I was in Oxford Blackwell’s this morning. I stood at the till and signed, perhaps, 30 copies. In the photos a friend took I look a little manic. It is intensely strange. I feel as if it is someone else’s book I am scrawling in. It is also the best thing ever: seeing it on the table in the shop I used to work in and love.
Is ‘Fen’ a novel?
On the jacket of the book it calls itself ‘a piece of modern fiction’. I like this. It is neither a novel nor a short story collection. It is whatever you want it to be.
SIGNED FIRST EDITION
Fen
by Daisy Johnson
“There is big, dangerous vitality herein - this book marks the emergence of a great, stomping, wall-knocking talent.”
Kevin Barry - author of City of Bohane
£12.99Save £3
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Ernest Hemingway said “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” A fair appraisal?
I think the trick is in convincing yourself, as Hemingway says, that there is nothing to it. What’s worse than bleeding all over a page is simply sitting and staring at it, trying to find that perfect sentence. Murakami describes writing as a physical effort, like running a marathon. There is something to be said for that; the first thing you have to do is forget how hard it is.
Perhaps it isn’t, anyway, the writer who is bleeding. Writing is, in the end, a sort of blood sport, a thievery. Writers are vampires and anything anyone says is fair game. There aren’t safe-spaces or private conversations when it comes to a writer.
“Writing is, in the end, a sort of blood sport, a thievery”
- Daisy Johnson
Having worked in a (mighty fine!) bookshop did you learn anything that helped you in the publishing process?
Yes. Booksellers are like elephants; if they liked your book they’ll remember and recommend it forever.
What are you currently enjoying reading?
I’ve been re-reading a lot of books recently for research. Madeleine is Sleeping by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum is great. I love Dear Thief by Samantha Harvey which is written like a letter and is based on the Leonard Cohen song Famous Blue Raincoat.
And I read The Dig which was like a large spade to the face; but in a very beautiful way.
Is there a book or an author who you feel is criminally under appreciated?
I feel like a lot of short story writers can slide by unnoticed. Collections like Knockemstiff (Donald Ray Pollock), Battleborn (Claire Vaye Watkins), The Beautiful Indifference (Sarah Hall) and both of Karen Russell’s collections - St Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and Vampires in the Lemon Grove are often overlooked.
I also keep finding my favourite book in the world in charity shops and I can’t believe people are giving it away. I rehome Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow by Peter Hoeg every time I find one.
What next?
The walls of my room are currently covered in spider diagrams, possible lines, angry reminders to myself about tone and dips and flows. I’m working on a novel which I’ve had the idea of for a while but which I’m rewriting entirely from scratch at the moment. Oxford is there; a mostly night time version viewed from bars and kebab shops. There is also a crocodile.
More praise for ‘Fen’
“Within the magical, ingenious stories lies all the angst, horror and beauty of adolescence. A brilliant achievement.”
Evie Wyld - author of After the Fire, a Small, Still Voice
“Reading these stories brought the sense of being trapped in a room slowly, but very surely, filling up with water. You think: this can’t be happening. Meanwhile, hold your breath against the certainty it surely is.”
Cynan Jones - author of The Dig
Thanks Daisy. Considering how proud we at Blackwell’s feel about ‘Fen’ you must be fit to burst. Please don’t...
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Print Marked Items
Fen
Publishers Weekly.
264.11 (Mar. 13, 2017): p53.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Fen
Daisy Johnson. Graywolf (FSG, dist.), $16 trade paper (208p) ISBN 978-1-55597-774-0
Centered in the depressed flatlands of eastern England, the stories in Johnson's debut collection straddle the drama of
transformation in both the uncanny and the everyday. "A Bruise in the Shape of a Door Handle" describes a woman's
house falling in love with her girlfriend. So affectionate is the house that it consumes her arm "to the elbow in
something that once was wall and now was loose, flabby." In "Starver," a girl is transfigured into a fish. Ignoring her
mother's protestations, her sister must set her free in the water once gills begin "shuttering on the side of her neck."
These imaginative depictions of entrapment and escape pair well with more ordinary stories. In "The Scattering," a 15-
year-old named Matilda falls in with her older brother's friends. "In a town where there was nothing to do," Johnson
writes of the group, "they did well at nothing." Their gatherings around an impromptu skate park built into a "copse of
thin trees," follow a familiar teenage arc, but Johnson manages to make these scenes as thrillingly direct as any of the
supernatural fare that precedes them. "She thought there must be times you caught yourself learning," Johnson writes of
Matilda, as she becomes accepted by the group: rather than going from girl to fish, she is conquering the equally
daunting task of going from girl to woman. (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Fen." Publishers Weekly, 13 Mar. 2017, p. 53+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485971602&it=r&asid=84647c528f604be84d8379b4c6502b25.
Accessed 14 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A485971602
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Dark abracadabra
Anthony Cummins
New Statesman.
145.5325 (July 29, 2016): p77.
COPYRIGHT 2016 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text:
Fen
Daisy Johnson
Jonathan Cape, 208pp, 12.99[pounds sterling]
It feels perverse to argue that the stories in this collection could do with more drama. After all, in one of them, a man
returns to life as a fox after a fatal argument with his twin brother, who, in a separate story, courts our narrator without
guessing that she and her female housemates are cannibals. Yet the gradual seepage of excitement is one of the many
peculiar things going on in Daisy Johnson's startling and inventive debut, which puts a supernatural spin on the trials of
women and girls in a small, rural community in Cambridgeshire, topographically recognisable but washed clean of
specifics, unless you count the mention of a Travelodge on the A10.
Reckless drinking and after-dark fumbles at the local estuary are among the main pursuits in the one-pub town where
these tales unfold. We are told of a young man, considered something of a catch, who "liked to take a girl on the bus to
the cinema in the city and then to Subway".
Johnson's mixing of the occult and the banal is a clever way to approach the transformations of youth, with uncanny
goings on a proxy for violent rites of passage. Yet the weirdness in these stories is tinglingly alive on its own terms,
seldom calibrated to make us ask what is really happening, despite the lurking subtexts. In "A Heavy Devotion", a new
mother loses the power of speech as her son gains his; in "A Bruise the Size and Shape of a Door Handle", a teenager
living with her widowed father is attacked by fixtures and fittings after bringing a girl home to bed.
Among the most striking reversals of Johnson's world is that it is men's bodies that are scrutinised and consumed
(sometimes literally). Caught between sexual insecurity and voracity, the young women here turn the tables on their
casual hookups. As the narrator of "How to Fuck a Man You Don't Know" tells us: "When he says he likes your boobs
or that your bottom is tight or that you're pretty fun aren't you, you tell him words are cheap enough to spit and push his
face the place you want it to go." Pungent sex scenes shun metaphor and leave inviting blanks: "His hands on your
back, yours round his neck, the edge of the bed shifting into that position you like ..."
The stories in Fen invest familiar scenarios with fresh energy, and yet a sense grows, over the course of the book, that
they are written to a formula that might be stretched further. Typically they turn on a striking premise: those man-eating
housemates in "Blood Rites", preying on predictable desires; the husband who dies of a blood clot but comes back from
the dead in "Language"; or the woman made of clay in "Birthing Stones", waiting at a restaurant to meet her internet
date.
Then, the conceit established, some bizarre ramifications are catalogued: the cannibals take on the characteristics of
their victims; the voice of the resurrected man makes his wife's nose bleed; the woman on a date hears "the internal
crackings of her baked insides, felt the make-up run from her clay skin".
And often this is where Johnson leaves us, sidestepping any pay-off to skip ahead to the next serving of dark
abracadabra. The clay woman finishes her meal--she has been stood up--only for her date to arrive. "Emma ... I'm so
sorry," he says, and the story ends as she is about to reply. The unnamed man-eater tucks in to a veterinary surgeon and
finds medical terminology "spilling out in a stream I could not see the end of: adrenal, abdominal, abrin, antipyretic,
aortic, arrhythmia ..."
It is tempting to add "And?"--if only because Fen offers ample evidence of Johnson adding punch to the pizzazz. In
"Starver", the narrator, Suze, is a schoolgirl whose elder sister, Katy, has sworn off food, following the historical
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example (or so an ominous prologue implies) of local fish that starved themselves to death after the draining of the land
where the book is set. Suze colludes in her sister's deceptions and eventual self-obliteration because of a sense that Katy
is allowing her into her life in a way that "she'd never done when I tailed her to netball practice or balanced on the edge
of the sofa while she and her friends watched films". The vista of longing that opens up in this small detail shows just
how good Johnson can be when she makes the magic count.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Cummins, Anthony. "Dark abracadabra." New Statesman, 29 July 2016, p. 77. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460898875&it=r&asid=b6ecad02536d10cbe97b2472b9f52bea.
Accessed 14 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A460898875
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Murky subjects, misty settings
Jonathan McAloon
Spectator.
332.9810 (Sept. 3, 2016): p36.
COPYRIGHT 2016 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
Fen
by Daisy Johnson
Cape, 12.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 208
Hot Little Hands
by Abigail Ulman
Viking, 8.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 368
The Bed Moved
by Rebecca Schiff
JM Originals, 10.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 160
A short-story renaissance has been promised since 2013. That year Alice Munro won the Nobel, Lydia Davis won the
Booker International, and George Saunders's best-selling collection The Tenth of December won the Folio Prize. The
rise of the form was declared, but it is mainly now that we're reaping the harvest.
Established novelists such as Philip Hensher, Mark Haddon and Lucy Caldwell have recently published collections. But
perhaps we'd get a better sense of where the form is at present by looking to those who've recently announced
themselves in it.
Twenty-five-year-old Daisy Johnson's excellent debut is set in the precarious and artificial landscape of the East
Anglian fens: marshland that has, against its will, been drained and made hospitable to humans. In Fen, this unstable
landscape exerts an otherworldly influence over its inhabitants. Anorexic girls turn into eels. A house becomes jealous
when its teenage inhabitant falls in love. Women lure men from dating sites to their house and eat them.
Fen has been compared to the stories of Angela Carter, but for me it recalls the poetry of Robin Robertson, known for
reframing myths in a familiarly bleak British climate. Johnson taps into a similar folk tradition: dingy, craggy, loamy.
These stories could stop at their central arresting details but often the 'turn' has yet to come. The teenager's girlfriend
betrays her with the lovesick house, turning the story into a wryly juvenile love triangle. The man-eating women in
'Blood Rites' wake 'with a strangeness inside us we could not identify': they develop a type of remorse. Strange indeed.
The stories themselves metamorphose from traditional short story into something else and back. The typical in them
sticks with you as long as the oddness. The man-eaters listen to Leonard Cohen. In 'Birthing Stones', a busy woman
who also happens to be made out of fen clay reads Madame Bovary and longs for escape. The inhuman is shown to be
very human.
The Australian author Abigail Ulman's debut Hot Little Hands covers similar ground in terms of female experience, but
stays firmly in our precarious real world, where the dangers are human trafficking, child abuse and arbitrary
deportation. In the opening story 'Chagall's Wife', a teenager runs into her teacher outside school and decides to seduce
him. Though not oblivious, she doesn't quite understand the uneasiness she provokes and that Ulman evokes: the
wariness of the adult man being seen with her; the looks others give them. Sheltering in a cinema from rain, they are
glared at by a woman, 'as though we should be paying for the privilege of taking refuge in her dim little foyer'. Of
course, that's not what the glare contains.
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In 'Same Old Same As', another teenager becomes popular at school after accusing her stepfather of molesting her. The
event might or might not have occurred. Ulman shuttles the reader from one belief to another, and it's hard to imagine a
more thorough but also ambiguous treatment of the murky subject. The stories about adults, usually in hip San
Francisco or New York, are less engrossing. It seems that Ulman works best in the thick of worrying moral
compromises.
Converting the ore of the very banal into the truly interesting currency of realism is something that even many wellreceived
authors find difficult. Rebecca Schiff--whose collection The Bed Moved deals with the milieu in which
Ulman's writing isn't completely at ease--has a gift for it.
Some of these stories were first published in the edgy American journal n+1, and their voice is related to writers like
Sheila Heti and Ben Lerner. Schiff's buzzy, concisely wise style is a perfect medium for the trappings of womanhood in
modernity: dating sites, online message boards, webcam sex shows. Like Lerner and Heti's, Schiff's educated middleclass
characters feel that modern life doesn't offer high enough stakes, and want to go headlong into the authentic. They
become 'trauma groupies': in 'The Lucky Lady', women fall for a charismatic cancer sufferer; in another, the narrator
dates World Trade Center survivors.
But Schiff is at her funniest when articulating first-hand grief. In 'http://www.msjiz/ boxx374/mpeg', the narrator's
mother
kept my father's computing magazines by his
side of the bed, in case he came back to life and
needed to order some outdated PCs. She kept
his diabetic candies on top of the computing
magazines, in case he came back still diabetic.
Schiff's prose is loaded with cadences, pitfalls and punchlines. Even when the stories feel gauche or too cute, Schiff
herself is always electrifying.
The purity of the short form can sometimes feel forbidding: the withholdings, the satisfying stories about
dissatisfaction. But this crop of collections, covering similar ground, shows a variety of approaches to shaking up this
pristineness in the modern world.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
McAloon, Jonathan. "Murky subjects, misty settings." Spectator, 3 Sept. 2016, p. 36. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA462228738&it=r&asid=0a1ebfd780137cd2e1d1c91a105d5b04.
Accessed 14 Nov. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A462228738
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Eerie 'Fen' Is Full Of Dazzling, Hard-To-Explain Stories
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May 2, 20177:11 AM ET
MICHAEL SCHAUB
Fen
Fen
Stories
by Daisy Johnson
Paperback, 192 pages |
purchase
"The land was drained." That's the first sentence in Daisy Johnson's haunting short story collection, Fen, and she wastes no time in establishing a setting. The Fens of eastern England are marshlands — or they were, until the 17th century when Parliament ordered them drained and converted into farmlands. One environmental expert has called the draining of the Fens "England's greatest ecological disaster."
In Johnson's stories, the Fens are haunted, or something like it, and it's easy to imagine the creepy events that take place there as nature trying to reclaim itself while at the same time exacting revenge on humankind. The tales are populated by albatrosses, foxes and cats who seem to know more than they ought to, and the result is a creepy but beautiful debut book from an exceptionally talented young English author.
The book's first story, "Starver," opens with the mass slaughter of eels in the marshlands by workers who intended to use them for food. But the plan backfires: the eels refused to eat before they were killed, leaving the workers with fish with no meat on their bones.It then segues to the modern day, when a girl named Katy announces to her sister that she plans to stop eating. For a while, she manages to survive: "I wondered what she was running on, air or determination or anger or something or nothing or someone," her sister thinks. But it ends the way it has to, with Katy starving herself into the form of one of the doomed eels.
The story is emblematic of Johnson's greatest strengths: her wild imagination and ability to create a mood of uneasiness. She brings those attributes to "Blood Rites," a story about a group of young women who lure men to their house to eat them. "When we were younger we learnt men the way other people learnt languages or the violin," it begins. "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."
The tales are populated by albatrosses, foxes and cats who seem to know more than they ought to, and the result is a creepy but beautiful debut book from an exceptionally talented young English author.
It's a deeply disturbing story, and Johnson manages to create tension and suspense even after the women's unusual dietary practices are revealed. It's not a horror story that depends on a twist ending; Johnson prefers to lead with the ominous and make it even darker. Not many writers can pull that off. She can.
In some ways, Fen reads like a pastoral answer to the fiction of Angela Carter That's not to say it's derivative; it's not at all. But Johnson shares Carter's affinity for twisted stories that examine sexuality from the viewpoint of female desire, dispensing with the idea that the male gaze is the last word on anything sexual.
That's the case with "How to Lose It," which focuses on a fumbling first sexual encounter. "Virginity was a half-starved dog you were looking after, wanted to give away as quickly as possible so you could forget it ever existed," Johnson writes. "It was the lingo of sales and stocks; what was the best deal, when was the right time to sell it all." It's a starkly unsentimental story, with Johnson refusing to allow the reader to look away from the awkwardness.
The book's finest story is "The Scattering," told in three parts. It follows Matilda, a teenage girl, and her older twin brothers, Arch and Marco. Matilda is "threaded through with cynicism, taut with anti-belief," and doesn't know quite what to make of her pugnacious siblings, always at each other's throats. One of Matilda's brothers finds a partner and has a child; the other dies in the woods while pursuing a fox, and comes back in another form. It's a troubling story with themes of violence and incest, but it's beautiful, and in a way it's a key to the whole book — the reader learns that the stories are connected, and then it's hard to resist the urge to read them all again.
It's difficult to explain Fen; it reads like a book that doesn't want to be explained, only experienced. And thanks to Johnson's accomplished writing, dazzling imagination and unique point of view, it's one hell of an experience. Fen is a haunting book about a haunted place, and it's more than worth it to take the trip.
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Short stories
Fen by Daisy Johnson review – an impressive first collection
Johnson’s surreal and atmospheric stories are set in a liminal landscape where girls become eels
Fecund flatlands … Wicken Fen in Cambridgeshire.
Fecund flatlands … Wicken Fen in Cambridgeshire. Photograph: Alamy
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Sarah Crown
Saturday 18 June 2016 07.00 EDT Last modified on Wednesday 20 September 2017 05.57 EDT
There was a time when East Anglia’s fenland was nothing more than a silty mix of fresh- and saltwater marshes into which people rarely ventured, an unstable place with one foot on solid ground and one in the sea. Attempts were made to drain it as far back as Roman times, but it wasn’t until the 19th century that technology advanced to the point where its freedom from flooding could be guaranteed. Today it is heavily cultivated, its fertile soil providing some of the country’s richest farmland. But for all that, it remains conditional: a tricksy, liminal landscape lying below sea level whose web of fields and schools and houses is wholly dependent on the system of pumps and embankments that has been constructed to protect it. There is an uncanniness to the fens that derives both from their singular geography (the lack of firm perimeters; the edgeless, overlit swaths of sky-filled water) and their essential provisionality; the ever-deepening sense, in this age of global warming, that their inhabitants are living on borrowed time, in a borrowed place.
Daisy Johnson’s debut short story collection is set entirely in this flat, saturated country. Through her tales, she taps into that uncanniness and makes it original and gripping. Boundaries shift and slide and myth and folklore seep up from the sodden ground and insinuate their way into her characters’ solid-seeming lives.The physical fluidity of the fens wells up and washes over everything, so that the barriers between past and present, fact and fiction and even humans and animals become liquid and unreliable, too. An albatross bursts in through the kitchen window of a reluctantly pregnant woman, ready to relieve her of the baby. A dead boy is reincarnated – perhaps – in the body of a fox. In the opening story, what begins as an unexceptional tale of an unexceptional teenage girl – party-going, netball-playing, makeup-wearing – abruptly shifts into something remarkable. When she states her intention of “stopping eating”, we brace ourselves for the inevitable slide into anorexia – but in this fenland setting, the act of self-deprivation effects not a reduction, but an astonishing transformation. The girl turns into an eel, and the story concludes with the narrator (her sister) carrying her in a wet towel to the canal at the bottom of the school field. “I lay her on the ground, jerked her free from the towel, pushed her sideways into the water. She did not roll her white belly to message me goodbye or send a final ripple,” she says, unexcitedly. “Only ducked deep and was gone.”
The matter-of-factness with which Johnson accommodates such fantastical events, and the restraint of her language, is further bolstered by her depictions of the provincial towns in which the action takes place. These are stories in which houses fall in love with girls; in which a mother gives birth to a messianic boy whose sucks her mind and memory dry; in which beautiful young women bring men home and literally devour them. But there are also stories set in towns where everyone knows everyone else from school and the pub is always called the Fox and Hounds, and in houses jam–packed with the humdrum paraphernalia of modern life: microwaves and reheated curries; televisions; nail varnish. Such sturdy details save the stories from edging into whimsy; more than that, their mundanity contributes to the collection’s creepiness. Women who feast on their lovers are the stuff of fairytales; women who feast on their lovers and make toast and paint each other’s nails afterwards are far harder to exorcise.
And it is women, alongside the East Anglian landscape, who are the subjects of this collection. Johnson’s protagonists are all female, and mostly young: women who are either in the process of transitioning from girlhood to womanhood, or recently graduated and exploring the powers it bestows on them. By drawing parallels between the state of femaleness and the fens, she reclaims the tired cliches of women as fluid, changeable, governed by mysterious tides and turns them on their head. In a liminal land where boundaries are unreliable and endlessly shifting, her women fit right in; her men, by contrast, are lumpen, coarse, animal in intellect rather than in desire. The women flow around them like water, moulding and moving them without seeming to do so. At its best, Johnson’s heady broth of folklore, female sexuality and fenland landscape reads like a mix of Graham Swift and Angela Carter.
The collection isn’t always at its best, of course; the all-female cast list seemed to feel a little undifferentiated by the end, and there were moments when the language seemed not so much uninflected as flat. But for atmosphere, originality and plain chutzpah, this is an impressive first collection. Next time I visit East Anglia I’ll be keeping my wits about me.
• To order Fen for £10.39 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
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TheBlueGnu 19 Jun 2016 3:33
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I've just finished this. Like Sarah Crown, I found that towards the end I was struggling to differentiate between the protagonist of one story and the next, leaving me with a sense that I'd read the same story more than once. Which isn't to say there aren't some wonderful stories in Fen, but I found myself longing for more variety in the characterisation. One thing I did enjoy is the way Daisy Johnson cross-references between stories the places (the Fox and Hound; and I'm sure it's the same F&H in each story) and people (January Hargreaves and the poor girl who lost her virginity to a bicycle!) of the fens.
Oh, and I have to pay tribute to the book's designer. Fen 'tis a beautiful thing!
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KThorpe 24 Jun 2016 2:20
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I would counter the portrayal of the Fens at the start of this piece given the Iron Age finds.
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Debut Stories Blend Beastly Transformations With Teenage Turmoil
By HERMIONE HOBYMAY 26, 2017
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FEN
Stories
By Daisy Johnson
192 pp. Graywolf Press. Paper, $16.
Some short story writers lay such claim to landscapes that those places become unassailably theirs: Annie Proulx has Wyoming, the South belongs to Eudora Welty, rural Canada will always be Alice Munro’s. With this debut collection, “Fen,” the young British writer Daisy Johnson stakes her fictive territory on the Fens, the expanses of once flooded, now drained land in the east of England.
Johnson has a marshy imagination and wind-whipped prose; the latter is an effective counterweight to the sometimes hyperbolic lore of this shape-shifting world. Here, where both land and life are flat, the privations of rural teenage existence yield wild and elemental bewitchments. An anorexic sister metamorphoses into an eel, a twin reincarnates as a fox, a dead young man is a revenant dripping newly lethal language. These tales are narrated by watchful, quietly potent girls sidelined by the bluster of boys. Sometimes, these girls are tartly funny. In one story, virginity loss is plotted somewhat grimly: “You do not shave your legs or pubic hair. It is not a wedding night, nor a parade or a party or an invitation. You are not a welcome mat.” In another story, “Blood Rites,” that sentiment is twisted, savagely, as three bloodthirsty beauties fresh (or rather, rotten) from Paris ready themselves for a predatory night out. They shave, they pluck, they moisturize, “until we shone white and slick through the dim; painted crimson ‘yes’ markers on our mouths.”
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Virginity, that “half-starved dog” you “wanted to give away as quickly as possible,” is a perennial preoccupation, and yet this most adolescent concern glints with a wisdom that feels like augury. Johnson includes a trenchant account of female self-effacement in the name of desire: “You watch yourself pretend you’ve never known anything in your life and never much felt the compulsion to. You want to make him think you have no history or education; that you might have had language once but it’s gone now. You want to make him think you’re so scrubbed clean of any sort of intelligence that he can lay himself out on you and you’ll soak him up.”
Elsewhere, characters can be strained thin by their narrator’s wish for them to be more than they are. Arch, the half-feral twin brother of “The Scattering: A Story in Three Parts,” is a tediously cocky and pugnacious teenager, one who licks blood off his fingers because “everybody had to know how much he didn’t” care. To his wide-eyed sister though, he is a godlike figure evoking James Dean. Arch’s posturing is so prosaic that the lines “He didn’t belong anywhere real. Certainly not there” deliver a queasy dissonance. How can a reader share in this infatuation? But this, after all, is the way of adolescence — to make much out of next to nothing. Or, to put it another way, to make folklore out of the feckless.
The author herself seems to know that there are more enduring means of mythmaking than the apotheosis of teenage boys. By the book’s end, we see the associations running between these stories like tributaries. The prey of “Blood Rites,” a man who uses the rote monosyllables of porn “with a regularity which dried them meaningless,” is both the surviving twin of “The Scattering” and the absent sailor in “The Superstition of Albatross”; the girl turned eel of “Starver” seems to be the fish “with an almost human intelligence” in the final story. These crosscurrents of connection add up to a consonance that might almost be mythic.
Hermione Hoby’s debut novel, “Neon in Daylight,” will be published in January.
A version of this review appears in print on May 28, 2017, on Page BR19 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Her Inner Eel. Today's Paper|Subscribe
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THE OTHERWORLDLY INTRIGUE OF DAISY JOHNSON’S FEN
REVIEWED BY E.B. BARTELS
May 9th, 2017
I woke up at 3 a.m. to pee the other night. This was not unusual. I like to drink tea before bed, and I usually wake up at least once in the night to relieve myself. What was unusual was that before falling asleep, I read a story by Daisy Johnson. I dreamt of deep pools thick with eels, of lips dripping with human blood, of an albatross standing on the kitchen table. This time, when I got up to use the bathroom, I was not fully awake, so heavy pressed the dreams. My shadow seemed to move on its own; the walls of my apartment appeared to be breathing. And when I heard a rustling on the other side of the bedroom door, never did it occur to me that it was just my boyfriend, puttering around the apartment after a late bartending shift. I stared at the door certain that a pack of violent foxes was clawing at the other side. I gasped and screamed and, finally, woke myself from the dreams.
At night she couldn’t sleep for the whales that came breaching up through the house’s watery foundations, rent apart the floorboards to flip through, circled the bed in sharkish lines until that is what they were: sharks made from all the letters he’d used to describe them, right up to the tottering S that made up the apex of each fin.
It was harder being left behind.
It’s not easy to break free from the world that Johnson creates in her debut collection of short stories, Fen. Each of the collection’s twelve stories take place in the fens—a region of marshland in eastern England. The fens have provided otherworldly intrigue for many writers before Johnson, including supernatural fantasies by John Gordon, science fiction tales by Peter F. Hamilton, paranormal mysteries by Gladys Mitchell, and ghost stories by M.R. James. J.K. Rowling wrote in her Harry Potter series that Salazar Slytherin, the serpent-tongue-speaking co-founder of Hogwarts, hailed from the fens. Johnson falls into the tradition of these writers, celebrating the place’s mystery and magic, and the fens themselves are a character in each of her stories, like Emily Brontë’s moors. The deep canals, the drained marshes, and the dark mud pervade every page. Her stories are rooted in the dark mystery, natural beauty, and potential for magic that permeates the fens.
The fox sat on its haunches on the floor of the hall and looked up at her. There was a moment, less than that, when she thought she would break it between the ribs or at the neckline. The words she’d given it, his words, would come out easy, as easy as making a baby from clay, easy as swimming to the sea when you had fins rather than legs.
The creature, rusted across the chest, put its head on one side and cracked its mouth an inch or so, panted. She waits for what it would say. A farewell or thank you or promise of return.
While Johnson should not necessarily be classified as a horror writer, her gothic fiction embraces some of the most terrifying elements of the real world and mixes them with the stuff of nightmares. Roald Dahl, another British writer who made the supernatural commonplace, took the greatest fears of childhood and transformed them into witches, giants, and children who morph into blueberries if they misbehave. Johnson is the Dahl of the teenage years. Many of her characters are young and working their way through adolescence. They experience heartbreak, confusion, isolation, and a desperate desire to fit in. They experiment with drugs, alcohol, and sex. They are doing the work of growing up. One of Johnson’s characters thinks, “there must be moments which were the beginnings of ends.”
Johnson’s stories embrace the beginning-of-the-end feeling of being a teenager—the end of childhood, the beginning of adulthood, moving away from birth and closer to death. But those commonplace feelings are cloaked in the surreal elements of Johnson’s world. A teenager struggling with an eating disorder starves herself into an eel. A boy who likes to get drunk and pick fights morphs into a bloodthirsty fox. A girl falls in love with another girl, and the house she lives in becomes jealous. A young woman, who goes on Internet blind dates at a local restaurant, is actually a golem sculpted from fen mud.
Fen mud was not like the mud forced to yield crops in other places. Darker than that and wetter and the first child formed on the kitchen table was something of the same, a hunched figure leaking away. She made two of them. Slapping heads onto shoulders, rolling legs thin, fixing bulbous hands into place. Their heads were heavy blocks, features done quickly in the last seconds before she gave up, ears lopsided, eyes slitted with the end of her key, mouths a studious line.
Some stories are stronger than others. The ones heavily charged with surrealism—where magic is accepted as part of everyday life, where souls move between people and animals—stayed with me the longest. But Johnson’s stories are all connected. In the fens, everyone knows each other. Everyone hangs out at the one local bar—the Fox and Hound. A pregnant bartender keeps showing up. Everyone talks about the foxes overrunning the fens, being gassed in their holes in the earth. A brother comes home drunk, raving about a girl who starved herself into a fish and a house that fell in love with a girl. Everyone talks about the draining and flooding of the land. Johnson’s world is a magical place, but it is also rooted in the painful realism of a small, gossipy town. Characters overlap, and their fates passed on from one to the next. As Johnson writes, “This was a place where people understood the possibility of bad luck being passed on and kept clear.” But it seems impossible to keep clear. The small town can be oppressive, and many of Johnson’s characters are intent on finding an escape.
She pulled her socks off, stood somehow serenely balanced to remove trousers and T-shirt. She swam down, breath potent between her ribs. She lost light all the way down until it was dark enough only to feel the motion of something brushing at her leg.
As a reader, the world of Fen won’t leave you. That is Johnson’s power as a writer—she creates a dark, self-aware world that feels heavy and gray and covered in mist. In her universe, if you’re lonely, you can befriend a fish. Words don’t just cause emotional pain, but they form burns and welts. The ones you love can come back from the dead. To read Johnson’s stories is to live in dreams, at once both disturbing and comforting.
E.B. Bartels is from Massachusetts and writes nonfiction. Her work has appeared in The Toast, The Rumpus, Ploughshares, Fiction Advocate, and the anthology The Places We've Been: Field Reports from Travelers Under 35, among others. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Columbia University. You can visit her website at www.ebbartels.com, see her tweets at @eb_bartels, and read her haikus about strangers’ dogs at ebbartels.wordpress.com. More from this author →
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THE OTHERWORLDLY INTRIGUE OF DAISY JOHNSON’S FEN
REVIEWED BY E.B. BARTELS
May 9th, 2017
I woke up at 3 a.m. to pee the other night. This was not unusual. I like to drink tea before bed, and I usually wake up at least once in the night to relieve myself. What was unusual was that before falling asleep, I read a story by Daisy Johnson. I dreamt of deep pools thick with eels, of lips dripping with human blood, of an albatross standing on the kitchen table. This time, when I got up to use the bathroom, I was not fully awake, so heavy pressed the dreams. My shadow seemed to move on its own; the walls of my apartment appeared to be breathing. And when I heard a rustling on the other side of the bedroom door, never did it occur to me that it was just my boyfriend, puttering around the apartment after a late bartending shift. I stared at the door certain that a pack of violent foxes was clawing at the other side. I gasped and screamed and, finally, woke myself from the dreams.
At night she couldn’t sleep for the whales that came breaching up through the house’s watery foundations, rent apart the floorboards to flip through, circled the bed in sharkish lines until that is what they were: sharks made from all the letters he’d used to describe them, right up to the tottering S that made up the apex of each fin.
It was harder being left behind.
It’s not easy to break free from the world that Johnson creates in her debut collection of short stories, Fen. Each of the collection’s twelve stories take place in the fens—a region of marshland in eastern England. The fens have provided otherworldly intrigue for many writers before Johnson, including supernatural fantasies by John Gordon, science fiction tales by Peter F. Hamilton, paranormal mysteries by Gladys Mitchell, and ghost stories by M.R. James. J.K. Rowling wrote in her Harry Potter series that Salazar Slytherin, the serpent-tongue-speaking co-founder of Hogwarts, hailed from the fens. Johnson falls into the tradition of these writers, celebrating the place’s mystery and magic, and the fens themselves are a character in each of her stories, like Emily Brontë’s moors. The deep canals, the drained marshes, and the dark mud pervade every page. Her stories are rooted in the dark mystery, natural beauty, and potential for magic that permeates the fens.
The fox sat on its haunches on the floor of the hall and looked up at her. There was a moment, less than that, when she thought she would break it between the ribs or at the neckline. The words she’d given it, his words, would come out easy, as easy as making a baby from clay, easy as swimming to the sea when you had fins rather than legs.
The creature, rusted across the chest, put its head on one side and cracked its mouth an inch or so, panted. She waits for what it would say. A farewell or thank you or promise of return.
While Johnson should not necessarily be classified as a horror writer, her gothic fiction embraces some of the most terrifying elements of the real world and mixes them with the stuff of nightmares. Roald Dahl, another British writer who made the supernatural commonplace, took the greatest fears of childhood and transformed them into witches, giants, and children who morph into blueberries if they misbehave. Johnson is the Dahl of the teenage years. Many of her characters are young and working their way through adolescence. They experience heartbreak, confusion, isolation, and a desperate desire to fit in. They experiment with drugs, alcohol, and sex. They are doing the work of growing up. One of Johnson’s characters thinks, “there must be moments which were the beginnings of ends.”
Johnson’s stories embrace the beginning-of-the-end feeling of being a teenager—the end of childhood, the beginning of adulthood, moving away from birth and closer to death. But those commonplace feelings are cloaked in the surreal elements of Johnson’s world. A teenager struggling with an eating disorder starves herself into an eel. A boy who likes to get drunk and pick fights morphs into a bloodthirsty fox. A girl falls in love with another girl, and the house she lives in becomes jealous. A young woman, who goes on Internet blind dates at a local restaurant, is actually a golem sculpted from fen mud.
Fen mud was not like the mud forced to yield crops in other places. Darker than that and wetter and the first child formed on the kitchen table was something of the same, a hunched figure leaking away. She made two of them. Slapping heads onto shoulders, rolling legs thin, fixing bulbous hands into place. Their heads were heavy blocks, features done quickly in the last seconds before she gave up, ears lopsided, eyes slitted with the end of her key, mouths a studious line.
Some stories are stronger than others. The ones heavily charged with surrealism—where magic is accepted as part of everyday life, where souls move between people and animals—stayed with me the longest. But Johnson’s stories are all connected. In the fens, everyone knows each other. Everyone hangs out at the one local bar—the Fox and Hound. A pregnant bartender keeps showing up. Everyone talks about the foxes overrunning the fens, being gassed in their holes in the earth. A brother comes home drunk, raving about a girl who starved herself into a fish and a house that fell in love with a girl. Everyone talks about the draining and flooding of the land. Johnson’s world is a magical place, but it is also rooted in the painful realism of a small, gossipy town. Characters overlap, and their fates passed on from one to the next. As Johnson writes, “This was a place where people understood the possibility of bad luck being passed on and kept clear.” But it seems impossible to keep clear. The small town can be oppressive, and many of Johnson’s characters are intent on finding an escape.
She pulled her socks off, stood somehow serenely balanced to remove trousers and T-shirt. She swam down, breath potent between her ribs. She lost light all the way down until it was dark enough only to feel the motion of something brushing at her leg.
As a reader, the world of Fen won’t leave you. That is Johnson’s power as a writer—she creates a dark, self-aware world that feels heavy and gray and covered in mist. In her universe, if you’re lonely, you can befriend a fish. Words don’t just cause emotional pain, but they form burns and welts. The ones you love can come back from the dead. To read Johnson’s stories is to live in dreams, at once both disturbing and comforting.
E.B. Bartels is from Massachusetts and writes nonfiction. Her work has appeared in The Toast, The Rumpus, Ploughshares, Fiction Advocate, and the anthology The Places We've Been: Field Reports from Travelers Under 35, among others. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Columbia University. You can visit her website at www.ebbartels.com, see her tweets at @eb_bartels, and read her haikus about strangers’ dogs at ebbartels.wordpress.com. More from this author →
Filed Under: BOOKS, REVIEWS
RELATED POSTS
Girls Who Know: Jenny Zhang’s Sour Heart
Scripting New Narratives: Mandy Len Catron’s How to Fall in Love with Anyone
At the Intersection of Personal and Political: Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now edited by Amit Majmudar
Hunters and the Hunted: The Last Wolf & Herman by László Krasznahorkai
The Occupation of America: Moving Kings by Joshua Cohen
OTHER COOL STUFF
What We’re Reading in December!
The Dangers of the Earth’s Extremes: Jessica Goodfellow’s Whiteout
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Welcome to The Rumpus! We’re thrilled you’re here. At The Rumpus, we’ve got essays, reviews, interviews, music, film, fiction, and poetry—along with kick-ass comics. We know how easy it is to find pop culture on the Internet, so we’re here to give you something more challenging, to show you how beautiful things are when you step off the beaten path. The Rumpus is a place where people come to be themselves through their writing, to tell their stories or speak their minds in the most artful and authentic way they know how, and to invite each of you to do the same. We strive to be a platform for marginalized voices and writing that wouldn't find a home elsewhere. We want to shine a light on stories that build bridges, tear down walls, and speak truth to power. What we have in common is a passion for fantastic writing that’s brave, passionate, and true (and sometimes very, very funny).
© 2017 THE RUMPUS
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ShareThis Copy and Paste:) Not the end of the Internet, but you can see it from here. Twitter Facebook Tumblr Feed THE DAILY RUMPUS GET OUR OVERLY PERSONAL EMAIL NEWSLETTER TOPICS COLUMNS LETTERS IN THE MAIL LETTERS FOR KIDS BOOK CLUB POETRY BOOK CLUB STORE THE OTHERWORLDLY INTRIGUE OF DAISY JOHNSON’S FEN REVIEWED BY E.B. BARTELS May 9th, 2017 I woke up at 3 a.m. to pee the other night. This was not unusual. I like to drink tea before bed, and I usually wake up at least once in the night to relieve myself. What was unusual was that before falling asleep, I read a story by Daisy Johnson. I dreamt of deep pools thick with eels, of lips dripping with human blood, of an albatross standing on the kitchen table. This time, when I got up to use the bathroom, I was not fully awake, so heavy pressed the dreams. My shadow seemed to move on its own; the walls of my apartment appeared to be breathing. And when I heard a rustling on the other side of the bedroom door, never did it occur to me that it was just my boyfriend, puttering around the apartment after a late bartending shift. I stared at the door certain that a pack of violent foxes was clawing at the other side. I gasped and screamed and, finally, woke myself from the dreams. At night she couldn’t sleep for the whales that came breaching up through the house’s watery foundations, rent apart the floorboards to flip through, circled the bed in sharkish lines until that is what they were: sharks made from all the letters he’d used to describe them, right up to the tottering S that made up the apex of each fin. It was harder being left behind. It’s not easy to break free from the world that Johnson creates in her debut collection of short stories, Fen. Each of the collection’s twelve stories take place in the fens—a region of marshland in eastern England. The fens have provided otherworldly intrigue for many writers before Johnson, including supernatural fantasies by John Gordon, science fiction tales by Peter F. Hamilton, paranormal mysteries by Gladys Mitchell, and ghost stories by M.R. James. J.K. Rowling wrote in her Harry Potter series that Salazar Slytherin, the serpent-tongue-speaking co-founder of Hogwarts, hailed from the fens. Johnson falls into the tradition of these writers, celebrating the place’s mystery and magic, and the fens themselves are a character in each of her stories, like Emily Brontë’s moors. The deep canals, the drained marshes, and the dark mud pervade every page. Her stories are rooted in the dark mystery, natural beauty, and potential for magic that permeates the fens. The fox sat on its haunches on the floor of the hall and looked up at her. There was a moment, less than that, when she thought she would break it between the ribs or at the neckline. The words she’d given it, his words, would come out easy, as easy as making a baby from clay, easy as swimming to the sea when you had fins rather than legs. The creature, rusted across the chest, put its head on one side and cracked its mouth an inch or so, panted. She waits for what it would say. A farewell or thank you or promise of return. While Johnson should not necessarily be classified as a horror writer, her gothic fiction embraces some of the most terrifying elements of the real world and mixes them with the stuff of nightmares. Roald Dahl, another British writer who made the supernatural commonplace, took the greatest fears of childhood and transformed them into witches, giants, and children who morph into blueberries if they misbehave. Johnson is the Dahl of the teenage years. Many of her characters are young and working their way through adolescence. They experience heartbreak, confusion, isolation, and a desperate desire to fit in. They experiment with drugs, alcohol, and sex. They are doing the work of growing up. One of Johnson’s characters thinks, “there must be moments which were the beginnings of ends.” Johnson’s stories embrace the beginning-of-the-end feeling of being a teenager—the end of childhood, the beginning of adulthood, moving away from birth and closer to death. But those commonplace feelings are cloaked in the surreal elements of Johnson’s world. A teenager struggling with an eating disorder starves herself into an eel. A boy who likes to get drunk and pick fights morphs into a bloodthirsty fox. A girl falls in love with another girl, and the house she lives in becomes jealous. A young woman, who goes on Internet blind dates at a local restaurant, is actually a golem sculpted from fen mud. Fen mud was not like the mud forced to yield crops in other places. Darker than that and wetter and the first child formed on the kitchen table was something of the same, a hunched figure leaking away. She made two of them. Slapping heads onto shoulders, rolling legs thin, fixing bulbous hands into place. Their heads were heavy blocks, features done quickly in the last seconds before she gave up, ears lopsided, eyes slitted with the end of her key, mouths a studious line. Some stories are stronger than others. The ones heavily charged with surrealism—where magic is accepted as part of everyday life, where souls move between people and animals—stayed with me the longest. But Johnson’s stories are all connected. In the fens, everyone knows each other. Everyone hangs out at the one local bar—the Fox and Hound. A pregnant bartender keeps showing up. Everyone talks about the foxes overrunning the fens, being gassed in their holes in the earth. A brother comes home drunk, raving about a girl who starved herself into a fish and a house that fell in love with a girl. Everyone talks about the draining and flooding of the land. Johnson’s world is a magical place, but it is also rooted in the painful realism of a small, gossipy town. Characters overlap, and their fates passed on from one to the next. As Johnson writes, “This was a place where people understood the possibility of bad luck being passed on and kept clear.” But it seems impossible to keep clear. The small town can be oppressive, and many of Johnson’s characters are intent on finding an escape. She pulled her socks off, stood somehow serenely balanced to remove trousers and T-shirt. She swam down, breath potent between her ribs. She lost light all the way down until it was dark enough only to feel the motion of something brushing at her leg. As a reader, the world of Fen won’t leave you. That is Johnson’s power as a writer—she creates a dark, self-aware world that feels heavy and gray and covered in mist. In her universe, if you’re lonely, you can befriend a fish. Words don’t just cause emotional pain, but they form burns and welts. The ones you love can come back from the dead. To read Johnson’s stories is to live in dreams, at once both disturbing and comforting. E.B. Bartels is from Massachusetts and writes nonfiction. Her work has appeared in The Toast, The Rumpus, Ploughshares, Fiction Advocate, and the anthology The Places We've Been: Field Reports from Travelers Under 35, among others. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Columbia University. You can visit her website at www.ebbartels.com, see her tweets at @eb_bartels, and read her haikus about strangers’ dogs at ebbartels.wordpress.com. More from this author → Filed Under: BOOKS, REVIEWS RELATED POSTS Girls Who Know: Jenny Zhang’s Sour Heart Scripting New Narratives: Mandy Len Catron’s How to Fall in Love with Anyone At the Intersection of Personal and Political: Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now edited by Amit Majmudar Hunters and the Hunted: The Last Wolf & Herman by László Krasznahorkai The Occupation of America: Moving Kings by Joshua Cohen OTHER COOL STUFF What We’re Reading in December! The Dangers of the Earth’s Extremes: Jessica Goodfellow’s Whiteout The Rumpus Mini Interview #109: Anaïs Duplan Rumpus Original Poetry: Two Poems by Michael Bazzett Swinging Modern Sounds #84: Music for Spaceships You May Like These HAPPYPONY 7.5'Premium Chris… $79.33$85.99 (172) Best Choice Products 6' Premium Hinged Artific… $54.94 (806) Best Choice Products 7.5' Premium Spruce H… $89.94 (254) Lavish Home Solid Color Bed Quilt, Full/Que… $22.27 (478) Ads by Amazon HELLO Welcome to The Rumpus! We’re thrilled you’re here. At The Rumpus, we’ve got essays, reviews, interviews, music, film, fiction, and poetry—along with kick-ass comics. We know how easy it is to find pop culture on the Internet, so we’re here to give you something more challenging, to show you how beautiful things are when you step off the beaten path. The Rumpus is a place where people come to be themselves through their writing, to tell their stories or speak their minds in the most artful and authentic way they know how, and to invite each of you to do the same. We strive to be a platform for marginalized voices and writing that wouldn't find a home elsewhere. We want to shine a light on stories that build bridges, tear down walls, and speak truth to power. What we have in common is a passion for fantastic writing that’s brave, passionate, and true (and sometimes very, very funny). © 2017 THE RUMPUS NAVIGATION Home Art Books Comics Film Rumpus Originals Media Music Politics Sex Television Your support is critical to our existence. Who We Are Writer’s Guidelines Contact Us The Daily Rumpus FAQ Advertise Not the end of the Internet, but you can see it from here. Twitter Facebook Tumblr Feed THE DAILY RUMPUS GET OUR OVERLY PERSONAL EMAIL NEWSLETTER TOPICS COLUMNS LETTERS IN THE MAIL LETTERS FOR KIDS BOOK CLUB POETRY BOOK CLUB STORE THE OTHERWORLDLY INTRIGUE OF DAISY JOHNSON’S FEN REVIEWED BY E.B. BARTELS May 9th, 2017 I woke up at 3 a.m. to pee the other night. This was not unusual. I like to drink tea before bed, and I usually wake up at least once in the night to relieve myself. What was unusual was that before falling asleep, I read a story by Daisy Johnson. I dreamt of deep pools thick with eels, of lips dripping with human blood, of an albatross standing on the kitchen table. This time, when I got up to use the bathroom, I was not fully awake, so heavy pressed the dreams. My shadow seemed to move on its own; the walls of my apartment appeared to be breathing. And when I heard a rustling on the other side of the bedroom door, never did it occur to me that it was just my boyfriend, puttering around the apartment after a late bartending shift. I stared at the door certain that a pack of violent foxes was clawing at the other side. I gasped and screamed and, finally, woke myself from the dreams. At night she couldn’t sleep for the whales that came breaching up through the house’s watery foundations, rent apart the floorboards to flip through, circled the bed in sharkish lines until that is what they were: sharks made from all the letters he’d used to describe them, right up to the tottering S that made up the apex of each fin. It was harder being left behind. It’s not easy to break free from the world that Johnson creates in her debut collection of short stories, Fen. Each of the collection’s twelve stories take place in the fens—a region of marshland in eastern England. The fens have provided otherworldly intrigue for many writers before Johnson, including supernatural fantasies by John Gordon, science fiction tales by Peter F. Hamilton, paranormal mysteries by Gladys Mitchell, and ghost stories by M.R. James. J.K. Rowling wrote in her Harry Potter series that Salazar Slytherin, the serpent-tongue-speaking co-founder of Hogwarts, hailed from the fens. Johnson falls into the tradition of these writers, celebrating the place’s mystery and magic, and the fens themselves are a character in each of her stories, like Emily Brontë’s moors. The deep canals, the drained marshes, and the dark mud pervade every page. Her stories are rooted in the dark mystery, natural beauty, and potential for magic that permeates the fens. The fox sat on its haunches on the floor of the hall and looked up at her. There was a moment, less than that, when she thought she would break it between the ribs or at the neckline. The words she’d given it, his words, would come out easy, as easy as making a baby from clay, easy as swimming to the sea when you had fins rather than legs. The creature, rusted across the chest, put its head on one side and cracked its mouth an inch or so, panted. She waits for what it would say. A farewell or thank you or promise of return. While Johnson should not necessarily be classified as a horror writer, her gothic fiction embraces some of the most terrifying elements of the real world and mixes them with the stuff of nightmares. Roald Dahl, another British writer who made the supernatural commonplace, took the greatest fears of childhood and transformed them into witches, giants, and children who morph into blueberries if they misbehave. Johnson is the Dahl of the teenage years. Many of her characters are young and working their way through adolescence. They experience heartbreak, confusion, isolation, and a desperate desire to fit in. They experiment with drugs, alcohol, and sex. They are doing the work of growing up. One of Johnson’s characters thinks, “there must be moments which were the beginnings of ends.” Johnson’s stories embrace the beginning-of-the-end feeling of being a teenager—the end of childhood, the beginning of adulthood, moving away from birth and closer to death. But those commonplace feelings are cloaked in the surreal elements of Johnson’s world. A teenager struggling with an eating disorder starves herself into an eel. A boy who likes to get drunk and pick fights morphs into a bloodthirsty fox. A girl falls in love with another girl, and the house she lives in becomes jealous. A young woman, who goes on Internet blind dates at a local restaurant, is actually a golem sculpted from fen mud. Fen mud was not like the mud forced to yield crops in other places. Darker than that and wetter and the first child formed on the kitchen table was something of the same, a hunched figure leaking away. She made two of them. Slapping heads onto shoulders, rolling legs thin, fixing bulbous hands into place. Their heads were heavy blocks, features done quickly in the last seconds before she gave up, ears lopsided, eyes slitted with the end of her key, mouths a studious line. Some stories are stronger than others. The ones heavily charged with surrealism—where magic is accepted as part of everyday life, where souls move between people and animals—stayed with me the longest. But Johnson’s stories are all connected. In the fens, everyone knows each other. Everyone hangs out at the one local bar—the Fox and Hound. A pregnant bartender keeps showing up. Everyone talks about the foxes overrunning the fens, being gassed in their holes in the earth. A brother comes home drunk, raving about a girl who starved herself into a fish and a house that fell in love with a girl. Everyone talks about the draining and flooding of the land. Johnson’s world is a magical place, but it is also rooted in the painful realism of a small, gossipy town. Characters overlap, and their fates passed on from one to the next. As Johnson writes, “This was a place where people understood the possibility of bad luck being passed on and kept clear.” But it seems impossible to keep clear. The small town can be oppressive, and many of Johnson’s characters are intent on finding an escape. She pulled her socks off, stood somehow serenely balanced to remove trousers and T-shirt. She swam down, breath potent between her ribs. She lost light all the way down until it was dark enough only to feel the motion of something brushing at her leg. As a reader, the world of Fen won’t leave you. That is Johnson’s power as a writer—she creates a dark, self-aware world that feels heavy and gray and covered in mist. In her universe, if you’re lonely, you can befriend a fish. Words don’t just cause emotional pain, but they form burns and welts. The ones you love can come back from the dead. To read Johnson’s stories is to live in dreams, at once both disturbing and comforting. E.B. Bartels is from Massachusetts and writes nonfiction. Her work has appeared in The Toast, The Rumpus, Ploughshares, Fiction Advocate, and the anthology The Places We've Been: Field Reports from Travelers Under 35, among others. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Columbia University. You can visit her website at www.ebbartels.com, see her tweets at @eb_bartels, and read her haikus about strangers’ dogs at ebbartels.wordpress.com. More from this author → Filed Under: BOOKS, REVIEWS RELATED POSTS Girls Who Know: Jenny Zhang’s Sour Heart Scripting New Narratives: Mandy Len Catron’s How to Fall in Love with Anyone At the Intersection of Personal and Political: Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now edited by Amit Majmudar Hunters and the Hunted: The Last Wolf & Herman by László Krasznahorkai The Occupation of America: Moving Kings by Joshua Cohen OTHER COOL STUFF What We’re Reading in December! The Dangers of the Earth’s Extremes: Jessica Goodfellow’s Whiteout The Rumpus Mini Interview #109: Anaïs Duplan Rumpus Original Poetry: Two Poems by Michael Bazzett Swinging Modern Sounds #84: Music for Spaceships You May Like These HAPPYPONY 7.5'Premium Chris… $79.33$85.99 (172) Best Choice Products 6' Premium Hinged Artific… $54.94 (806) Best Choice Products 7.5' Premium Spruce H… $89.94 (254) Lavish Home Solid Color Bed Quilt, Full/Que… $22.27 (478) Ads by Amazon HELLO Welcome to The Rumpus! We’re thrilled you’re here. At The Rumpus, we’ve got essays, reviews, interviews, music, film, fiction, and poetry—along with kick-ass comics. We know how easy it is to find pop culture on the Internet, so we’re here to give you something more challenging, to show you how beautiful things are when you step off the beaten path. The Rumpus is a place where people come to be themselves through their writing, to tell their stories or speak their minds in the most artful and authentic way they know how, and to invite each of you to do the same. We strive to be a platform for marginalized voices and writing that wouldn't find a home elsewhere. We want to shine a light on stories that build bridges, tear down walls, and speak truth to power. What we have in common is a passion for fantastic writing that’s brave, passionate, and true (and sometimes very, very funny). © 2017 THE RUMPUS NAVIGATION Home Art Books Comics Film Rumpus Originals Media Music Politics Sex Television Your support is critical to our existence. Who We Are Writer’s Guidelines Contact Us The Daily Rumpus FAQ Advertise ShareThis Copy and Paste:)
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Fen: Stories
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PLAYING YOU FALSE: DAISY JOHNSON’S FEN
Amber Caron
Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2017. 208 pages. $16.00.
In her diary, Virginia Woolf wrote of the “attractive but impossible task of describing the Fens.” She longed for “one expressive quotation” to capture the landscape; instead, she ended up with “so much feeble word painting.” The Fens is difficult to describe, in part, because it shouldn’t exist, at least not in its current form. Britain’s east formerly consisted of swampy floodplains that were mostly uninhabitable. Human settlement was concentrated on small “islands” that rose above the waterlogged marshes, where people survived by trapping eels and hunting fowl. After 200 years and many false starts, the area was systematically drained and transformed into rich farmland that exists there today. Ordnance surveys of the region show not only the large waterways like the River Ouse (where Woolf would later take her own life), but also the extensive drains and ditches that border fields of beets, potatoes, pumpkins, and rapeseed.
“The land was drained,” explains the narrator in the first story of Daisy Johnson’s debut story collection:
They caught eels in great wreaths, headless masses in the last puddles, trying to dig into the dirt to hide. They filled vats of water to the brim with them: the eels would feed the workforce brought in to build on the wilderness. There were enough eels to last months; there were enough eels to feed them all for years.
But the eels have another plan. In what is seen by the characters as an act of revenge, the eels refuse to eat. They reject rats, sardines, bread, offal, starving themselves to the bones.
It was, they were certain, a calling down of something upon the draining. Some said they heard words coming from the ground as the water was pumped away and that was what made the eels do it, starve themselves that way.
In the end, the townspeople shovel the dying fish into large piles and set them ablaze.
The stories in Fen are rooted in the landscape but only loosely inspired by the region’s history. By beginning here, Johnson seems to suggest that the unnatural draining of the fens was the signal event for the surreal events that unfold in a modern world: a girl starves herself into the shape of an eel. A dead brother returns as a rather bossy fox. An albatross settles in at a kitchen table. A house falls in love with a girl. There are consequences, these stories imply, for draining the swamp.
Johnson’s stories are compulsively readable, keeping you perched on the edge. You think you know what’s happening, but you’re not entirely certain, and while the mystery itself is enough to keep one reading, it’s the writing that really captures the attention. Johnson employs fragments regularly and to great effect. Her sentences tend to be short and declarative. Dialogue is clipped and rarely extends beyond a single line of text. “Blood Rites” provides an example of both the mystery of these stories and the sharp prose. Halfway through the story, the female narrator picks up a man at the pub and brings him home, where her two friends—Greta and Arabella—wait in nightgowns. The man doesn’t seem surprised to see them there. They engage in a little small talk, but what follows isn’t sex. Greta “got the first try” because she had “been hungry the longest.” The two other girls “asked her if he had the flavor of love and [Greta] only smiled a scarlet smile and said he tasted the way burrowing into the earth, mouth whaling open, would taste.” The reader approaches this moment knowing something is strange about the seduction, but cannibalism probably isn’t on the radar. But there were clues along the way. All those references to hunger were not just some stand-in for passion or desire but also a nod to the literal. The night Greta returned home with roadkill is seen in a new light, as is the time when an uneasy Arabella raids the butcher and returns home to cook “a storm of meat pies, of roasted birds inside birds and thick, heavy, unidentified stews.” The narrative has prepared us for ravenous rapture, yet the cannibalism is still shocking. As Johnson closes the door on one mystery, another opens up:
The next day we woke with a strangeness inside us we could not identify. Tried to stave it off with our favorite songs, our best dresses, opened all the windows to air the house through.
I feel—Greta started to say and Arabella gave her a look good and hard enough to silence her. Said: I’ll paint your nails.
I lay watching them. I felt heavy, ached through. Not full—rather bored, weary.
I feel—Greta started again.
Stop it, Greta, Arabella said. It’s fine.
But things are not fine, and the story closes in an unexpected and completely satisfying way.
Johnson isn’t afraid to experiment with structure. The best example comes in “The Scattering,” a three-part story that begins with the final scene before leaping back in time to move chronologically through the narrator’s troubling and intimate relationship with her brother. The structure here serves to foreground both the surreal aspects of this world and the emotional wound left after a brother’s disappearance. Other stories that play with structure are somewhat less successful. “How to Fuck a Man You Don’t Know,” for example, is divided into nine sections and told in reverse chronological order. Ultimately the countdown becomes predictable and flattens rather than heightens the tension, but even when the structure falters Johnson still delivers with a fresh and frank portrayal of female sexuality and desire.
As with any linked story collection, there’s the question of what holds these twelve stories together. There’s the obvious: geography, landscape, a shared history, and recurring landmarks. We return again and again to the Fox and Hound Pub where characters work, drink, party, flirt, and meet for liaisons. The sets are functional and provide sufficient texture to envision the region and its people. But two other elements provide a more subtle link. One is the way Johnson weaves folklore, myth, and superstition through the stories. Another is water. One character jokes about the draining and is stared down, “as if this were a thing you could not mention, were not allowed to mention.” Another character imagines “the flood water was starting to rise back across the flats so it could hear her confess.” Still another imagines giving birth to “human children that would come with the tides and have gills as well as lungs, webs between their toes and fingers.” From the moment the area is drained in the first story’s first sentence, water remains a presence, hovering at the edge of the character’s lives, ready to reclaim whatever it can, in whatever way it can.
“The fen plays you false at every step,” Virginia Woolf wrote in her journal. “I walked through a jungle of reeds & fell up to my nose in mud.” Maybe she got the description right after all.
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Amber Caron
AMBER CARON’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Agni, Southwest Review, Greensboro Review, and The PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2017. She is the recipient of the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, Southwest Review’s McGinnis-Ritchie Award for fiction, and a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. She has an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars.
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HOME Arts&Culture
Book review: Literary maelstrom draws us in to the Fens
The force of language entrances in Fen – Daisy Johnson's debut collection of tales of beauty and the macabre.
Matthew Adams
Matthew Adams
June 7, 2016
Updated: June 7, 2016 04:00 AM
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Fen by Daisy Johnson is published by Jonathan Cape.
Fen by Daisy Johnson is published by Jonathan Cape.
Daisy Johnson’s debut publication is composed of a series of linked short stories that take place in the marshlands of eastern England.
This sprawl of coastal terrain, often known as the Fens, has frequently attracted the attention of contemporary novelists (one thinks of Graham Swift’s Waterland, of Peter Kingsnorth’s The Wake). They are attracted by its strangeness: by the richness of a landscape that seems to confound the distinction between land and sea, that hosts horizons so vast as to seem calculated to inspire feelings of introspection, uncertainty, of terrible portent. Things don’t work normally here.
Nor do they work normally in Johnson’s Fen. This is a world in which the peculiarity of the environment is manifest both in the lives and the natures of its inhabitants, and in the lineaments of the non-natural structures that have been made there.
In the book’s opening tale, Starver, we encounter a young woman who, having decided to starve herself, slowly assumes the form of an eel. In its successor, Bloodrites, two young women who have recently returned from Paris lure men back to their Fenland house with the intention of eating them.
In A Bruise the Size and Shape of a Door Handle, the young Salma finds herself living in a house that has become sentient, and grows possessive of her and jealous of her lovers – so much so that it eventually consumes them by way of weird mechanisms of absorption: “Margot’s left arm was swallowed to the elbow in something that once was wall and now was loose, flabby. With a dry gasp her legs vanished to the knee.”
And in a later story, Birthing Stones, we are introduced to an apparently normal woman who, while waiting in a restaurant for the arrival of a date, is shown to be something other than fully human, crafted out of Fenland muds: “she would not tell him about being more field than human ... On hot days she heard the internal crackings of her baked insides, felt the make-up run from her clay skin.”
The stories in which these compelling inventions feature are also stylistically arresting. Johnson is possessed of the rare ability to trust in the power of language, and this allows her to trust in the force and the fecundity of her voice.
She can summon characters into being and fill them with life with astonishing concision and vigour (you are told relatively little about the figures who populate her book, but somehow you feel you know them intimately), and she is able to capture the world in constructions that are unusual, precise and often beautiful.
A woman swimming underwater is brushed by an uncannily powerful fish and feels “a thin lance of electricity through her leg”; an unwanted catch is described as “a wriggling usurper”; a muscular man has “elbows pistoning out from his body”; a woman emerging from a pool deposits “water coming off in a sheet”; handwriting appears as “dense, tight little letters against the sick white of the paper”; characters go in search of “a length of air against the dull iron of living”. And when bad weather is approaching? “A storm was unbuckling itself from somewhere.”
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.
The result is an assembly of imaginings that linger in the mind as dark miracles and shadowed celebrations, and as intensely resonant reckonings with our hidden ways of being.
Matthew Adams lives in London and writes for the TLS, The Spectator and the Literary Review.
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