A Conversation with Author Gianni Washington

Gianni and I met 15 years ago as students at University of Glasgow, and we immediately bonded over shared interests in writing and literature. I remember asking Gianni what she wanted to do in the future. “I want to be a writer,” she said. “There’s really nothing else I want to do.”

Fast forward a few years and Gianni has completed a PhD in creative writing at University of Surrey, worked as a bookseller at Foyles Bookstore in London, and published her debut short story collection Flowers From the Void this year. The haunting tales are united not only by genre but by displays of what makes us human; in particular empathy, loss, emotional isolation, and vulnerability. I recently chatted with Gianni to talk about specific stories and characters in her book, as well as writing in general. I’m excited to share our conversation here.

Katy: Let’s jump right into it! My favorite story in the collection is “Take It From Me.” The protagonist’s love interest is called Mateo (or Matty), and their families are both from coastal Spain. You told me about this story while I was pregnant with my son (also called Matty) in Madrid.

One of my favorite lines of the book is in reference to Mateo: “There’s no need to contort yourself into the shape someone likes best when what they like best is you.”

Gianni: I wrote this story before Matty came along, and it feels even more special now.

Katy: I also connected to this story on a different level. The idea that when a relationship ends, you can feel less whole than you were before. I think many people can relate to this feeling.

Gianni: A lot of me is in these stories. That’s another good thing about writing horrific things – seeing beyond the realm of “possibility” – is I get to write my own experiences within that without people really realizing it.

The ideas for “Take It From Me” came from the way it’s impossible for me to hide my emotions. I always end up feeling so exposed when I’m miserable. I once dated someone I worked with, and when that ended, I was often visibly upset during my shifts. I couldn’t recover as easily as I might have had we been working in separate places.

K: Yeah, everyone could see your wounds.

G: One of my friends once called me “a walking wound.” She was right.

Katy: That reminds me of a line in “When I Cry, It’s Somebody Else’s Blood.” The Creature sees humanity and finds it captivating: “Every person whose memories the creature viewed had been wounded and wounded others in return, but causing pain was a form of closeness. It was how they shared themselves with another.”

This idea of how pain is linked to closeness surfaces most prominently in the story “Under Your Skin,” in which Philip endures beatings by Martin as a way to have a little human connection. He prefers pain to invisibility. Later, we get to the scene when they’re at the funeral parlor and they share a moment that feels really erotic, and I thought, wait a minute, this guy has been hurting and terrorizing you and you’re attracted to him?

Gianni: I wanted to get at the push and pull you feel when a person who might be dealing with abandonment issues will basically accept anything from someone. I know you’re not treating me well, but I need something and you’re giving me something.

I wrote “Under Your Skin” after I read It. That story’s treatment of childhood is interesting; how seriously he takes it. Childhood is so significant to our perception of ourselves. The way Stephen King writes bullies and psychologizes them was also a big inspiration.

Katy: The theme of emotional isolation and an inherent desire to connect recurs in nearly every story. Going back to “Take It From Me” is the idea that we lose parts of ourselves with every failed relationship. In your story, people literally lose body parts.

Gianni: Right, the weird thing isn’t the weird thing in-universe. As a reader, I appreciate being dropped into worlds where certain aspects aren’t explained. Like, this is just how it is. You’re forced to turn your attention elsewhere. In “Take It From Me” everyone’s body parts fall off in response to emotional trauma. The nice thing about this story is that the protagonist puts herself back together again.

Katy: So many of these stories are body-centric. Why do you choose to write the body?

Gianni: I lean towards focusing on the body because that’s the easiest way to connect what you’re feeling inside with some other tangible thing, a thing that’s easier to describe or picture. The reader might not have had this particular emotional experience, so I’ll pair it with a physical experience they can understand. I write a lot more body horror than I originally intended, but I pair that with a lot of emotional introspection and psychological horror to sort of balance it.

Katy: Another theme of the book is performance. Can you share more about that?

Gianni: I often think about how things look from the outside. Like what emotions people seem to be expressing from the outside and the desire to feel what you are seeing. So, it’s like performing a thing in order to get closer to the thing that you want. To become part of the fabric of what you think is going on, which again goes with the theme of wanting connection or wanting to feel you’re part of something.

K: You mentioned Stephen King. Which authors have influenced your work the most?

G: Stephen King is a huge one. He has an inexhaustible amount of material, and he’s really fun to read. Charles Beaumont, who’s written short stories and adapted some of them into Twilight Zone episodes. Nabokov and Toni Morrison, Gabrielle Wittkop who wrote The Necrophiliac. I have a broad range of influences in pretty much every literary genre.

Besides books, I also love animation because of what’s possible there that just isn’t possible in live action. And sometimes I get my ideas from random things. “Redemption Express” came from a meme I saw that said something like “My dream job is Karma delivery person.” I thought, what would that look like?

Katy: I like that your stories come from a range of influences and represent a variety of voices. You have strong female leads, black characters, queer narrators. In “Under Your Skin,” I remember Philip’s mom asking her son something like, “what is that white boy doing to you?”

Gianni: It’s definitely important to note that Philip, a biracial boy, is allowing himself to be treated that way by a white person. But I wanted it to be more about his emotional experiences. In “Hold Still,” that’s a black family. Some of the things they say, I grew up hearing.

It’s important to me that representation is there because of something Toni Morrison wrote about in Playing in the Dark: you have to stake your claim somehow on those characters. All English lit students know that if there are no specific racial markers in a story the default assumption is that the characters are white. To claim them as being part of my own community is important.

I also believe that people from any marginalized group aren’t responsible for educating other people on the struggles they endure. There’s a lot of excellent work out there that fulfills that educational purpose, but I don’t currently have a desire for my work to do that. I mainly write with the hope that black readers will enjoy seeing themselves as main characters in stories that don’t center race since so much of our actual lives already revolve around that.

Katy: Before this collection, I had never read any of your fiction. I was surprised in the best possible way to read writing so elegant and inventive with storylines that continue to haunt. You balance terror and shock with moments of real tenderness and empathy.

G: Thank you! You probably haven’t read any of my stuff because I rarely share my fiction with anyone until it’s done. I’m kind of weird about that.

K: How do you know when it’s done?

G: I know that a story is finished when I feel I have gotten to the emotional heart of it, when a character has learned the thing they needed to learn about themselves. Sometimes I’ll carry that lesson through to the story’s end, letting them grapple with it. Sometimes I just want to have them hit that wall of discovery at the end, without spending any more time on it. Once we get to that point, I feel like the rest is bells and whistles.

Katy: What was the publication process like in the U.K., where you spent many years living, working and studying? I understand Serpent’s Tail published the U.K. version and CLASH Books brought the book Stateside.

Gianni: So much of the publication process in the U.K. was as a result of working at Foyles, where I was a bookseller. Every single one of us was doing the thing. Like the people who worked in the drama department were screenwriters and filmmakers, and the people who worked in the music department were composers. Some of my coworkers had published books. Being surrounded by colleagues like that helped me realize it’s ok to be this way – this passionate about something. I even met my agent at Foyles. I formed so many connections there that helped bring this book to life.

Katy: Ok, last question. Which story was the one you enjoyed writing the most, or the story you think about most?

Gianni: I cycle through a lot of them. “Mr. Hide” is one of my favorites. That’s the one that got me out of a slump, actually. And it was the first thing that I had finished in over a year. I remember thinking, Thank God, ha ha!

I think about that story a lot because my mom and I talk often about aging and childhood perceptions of adults and how even as you move through life you are still yourself. And yet there are all these expectations put on you. In “Mr. Hide” I wanted to demonstrate that the protagonist, Myra, isn’t perfect. She loves her son, but sometimes she’s distrustful of her son. Sometimes she’s distrustful of her own feelings about her son.

I did this whole story key for my editor where I gave her background information that isn’t necessarily included in each story. Like with Myra, the things she’s imagining can’t exist without her. And other people don’t see the things she has brought to life unless she’s nearby. So, because her son Darius is always around her, maybe other people can only see him for that reason.

Katy: I like that the collection ends with “Mr. Hide” because it really asks readers to consider what is real and what is imagined. At the same time, you create a realistic emotional landscape around the parent-child relationship while inverting our expectations.

Gianni: In each of these stories there’s the fundamental idea that if you or I were faced with the same similarly bizarre situations, we would have access to the same range of emotions, regardless of our individual circumstances. Even if you can’t relate to what a character is going through, you can probably relate to how it makes them feel.

You can find Gianni here: https://www.instagram.com/kaonashigigi/