Mike Fox, writer of short stories
Hot off the press! You can order my new story collection, Things Grown Distant, with superb photographic images by Nicholas Royle via this link
Welcome to my website – thanks for coming to have a look. As you might guess if you’ve found your way here, it’s mainly about short stories, though there’s also information about other writing I’ve done, a little on my other great interest, music, and also my most recent news.
If you work as a therapist, as I once did, you might come to the conclusion that we’re all built from memories. And the building is always changing: new rooms, new windows, even different foundations. The exploration of memory, as a theme and phenomenon, was a lot of what drew me back to writing: first articles deriving from my therapeutic work, then to the different creative possibilities involved in writing fiction.
Memory is a shapeshifter: almost never identical in any two people, always reconfiguring as the axis of remembering shifts. Does your life change because you change the way you describe it? Do you change if you change how you describe yourself? As memories accumulate they alter how we see things. A number of my stories explore the frames of reference that are available at different times of life, the contrasting perspectives of an older and younger self, what we aspire to when young and value in retrospect - rarely the same thing.
The more short stories I write, the more I come to see them as micro-worlds, with their own laws and their own conditions of existence. There’s a certain freedom in taking this view, I feel. As a result I'm increasingly interested in the way my characters inhabit space, to the extent of imagining the environments they move through as characters in themselves. If memory is inherently dynamic, then so must be our relationship with the physical world around us, how we perceive it, how we interact with it, what we remember about it when it has changed.
Which raises the question of truth. Even when we try to tell the truth, it’s our truth, coloured by who we are, what we’ve done, and what we understand at the time of telling. Listening to so many carefully described accounts of real life events, I’ve come to the conclusion that we are all, in our own way, unreliable narrators. So my characters try to describe the truth. But it’s their truth from their immediate perspective, and if you asked them tomorrow, they might say something different.
If you'd like to read some published stories click here
For my latest news click here
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