Pete Segall: 'I don’t feel like it’s my job as a writer to answer questions'

We began this Summer series of podcasts with AL Kennedy arguing that the empathy which powers fiction makes writing it a political act. We'll be talking fiction – or maybe politics – with Sheyla Smanioto, Ali McClary and Dafydd McKimm over the next few weeks. But this time we're zooming in on Pete Segall and his story Bolex Man.

Segall tells us that this series of snapshots emerged after he took up analogue photography. He was wandering around the neighbourhood taking pictures of "the same buildings, the same places" and he began to ask himself "if there are posts in some kind of Facebook group about 'Is there this weird guy taking pictures of your house?'"

As his fictional neighbourhood and its inhabitants came into focus, it became clear the story was about "looking and looking back and being looked at," he continues, a feeling that is "very modern".

"There's a very ambient feeling of being watched," Segall says, "of being perceived."

Bolex Man is a story assembled out of fragments – an accommodating form for someone who "writes in very small bursts" – and it's up to the reader to fill in the spaces between each frame.

"I don't feel like it's my job as a writer to answer questions," Segall explains. "I feel like it's my job to ask, 'What is going on?' To delineate the experience of not knowing what is going on."

After years in which Segall tried to write "conventional fiction" with plot and character, he's embraced his natural rhythm.

"If that means that a story ends up being four words long," he says, "then a story is four words long. And I am in love with that."

Next time we'll be falling for female friendship with Ali McClary and her short story Proper Magic.

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