Interview with Sukie Wilson, 2024 Desperate Literature Prize Winner

How did you decide to submit for the Desperate Literature Prize?

My friend Char Heather (who runs the writing group I’m part of) encouraged me to send in one of my stories – I needed convincing, because I’d only just started sending my work out into the world. I remember prevaricating a lot over applying, and in the end I convinced myself by saying “I might as well, it’s not like I’m going to win!”

How did you decide to write this story?

I think of it less as deciding to write, more as regularly being jumped by a story in a dark alleyway. My writing practice involves a fairly rapid turnover of new work, choosing what I’ll write based on instinct & whatever concepts feel most interesting to me at the time. I’ll have a stray thought that catches my attention, and like a snowball downhill it gathers story-parts until it’s so big I can’t do anything but write. In February of last year, I was thinking about how difficult it can be to properly understand other people’s perspectives as an autistic person. That was the instigating thought, which lead me to thinking about inaccessibility, work, and mind reading. This is the ‘mulching’ or ‘composting’ phase of my practice – I spend a few weeks thinking, not actually writing anything. When I’d mulched the idea enough, I sat down and wrote Leaving Night Country within about two hours. I left it alone for a couple of weeks, then made one or two editing passes. I think I added two paragraphs and fixed some typos. That’s the version that I’d later send to Desperate Literature, but at the time it was just another story I’d felt compelled to write. I write about one story a month like this, so once it was finished I was immediately composting the next idea.

How did you know when you knew what you were writing about?

I know the mulching phase is over when I start writing the first line of the story in my head. So I suppose, I knew what I was writing about when I thought “I would rather have stayed in Night Country”. The rest of the story just tumbled out from there.

While there is no literal dialogue in your piece, your narrator’s thoughts make the other characters come alive. How did you make this work?

The fantasy of reading minds often seems to me to be, figuratively, about rebuilding the tower of Babel. Barriers preventing true communication are dissolved, allowing for unfettered understanding. It’s a very neat solution. Since I love making things difficult, I decided that reading minds should function as a disability for the narrator of LNC. I wanted it to be clear, too, that the fact of their disability is in part environmental – they’re in a space where mind reading isn’t accommodated, but there are people and places for whom it would be normal, even if it isn’t perfect there either. That friction comes through in the lack of dialogue. Communication becomes guesswork, like interpreting a stranger’s dream. It’s a story about, among other things, the granular difficulty of communication and understanding. It felt right to explore that without dialogue. I think the speechlessness works because it has a purpose within the story, it’s contributing something that dialogue couldn’t.

When you finished writing this piece and you looked back at it, what surprised you?

Often when I re-read my stories, they feel like they belong to someone else. I think because I spend so little of my writing process actually putting pen to paper, I don’t get overly attached to what I’ve written. When I re-read LNC for the first time, I turned to my partner and said “whoever wrote that did a decent job!” I’m always surprised when the work isn’t terrible, and even more so when I remember that I’m the one who made it that way.

If you were to write the same story today, how might it be different than how you wrote it before?

I think if I were to approach the story today I’d probably pick a different name for Night Country, as much as I love it. Apparently ‘night country’ is a colloquial term for the long dark night of the arctic circle, and is part of the title of a popular TV show – both facts I was unaware of at the time of writing. I should probably have looked that up first, but we live and learn!

What has it been like for you to win the Desperate Literature Prize?

Surreal. I had only applied to one other prize before Desperate Literature, and had only been writing at all for a couple of years. I applied because I thought it would be good practice to get rejected – I never expected to actually win. It was a huge confidence boost to have my work recognised in this way. Before winning, I’d told myself that the wider world wouldn’t be interested in my weird little stories. That’s not true now, if it ever was to begin with. On the surface not much has changed, because I’m still in my rhythm of mulching for weeks then manically bashing out a story in an afternoon. I think I’m taking more risks, though, both in what I apply for and in my actual writing. I’ve since won a London Writers Award, which I felt much more confident in applying for with this win already under my belt. It’s also given me licence to get even weirder with my story concepts, because there’s a precedent for it to be received well. Leaving Night Country being published, in both the prize anthology and the London Magazine, was one of the best parts of winning. Sometimes strangers will message me to tell me what they thought of it, which I love! The reminder that my work is out there, free-roaming and building relationships with readers as its own entity, boggles me every time. I’m working on my short story collection with a seriousness I couldn’t muster before. My dream of getting it published doesn’t seem so outlandish now.

What are your plans for your time at Civitella?

The team at Civitella have already been so accommodating of me and my access needs, I’m really looking forward to my week there in August. This feels like a once-in-lifetime invitation, so I’m making the most of the residency and stretching it into a month long trip. I’ll be driving a motorhome overland to Italy and back, though France, Germany, and Austria. This is partly because my immune system isn’t cut out for air travel, and partly just because I’ve always wanted to do a road trip like this. My plan is to be a sponge, soaking up experiences so that I can wring them out onto the page. By the time I reach the castle, I hope I’ll have plenty of stories waiting to be written.