Samuel Rigg: 'Often I find I'm writing about people who are not me'

After hearing from Cynthia Zarin, Rodrigo Urquiola Flores and the translator Shaina Brassard, and Tim Conley, this Winter series of podcasts enters the final stretch. We'll be rounding off with Cynthia Banham next time, but stepping out on to the ice this week is Samuel Rigg and his short story, At the Rink.

Although a short story that explores parenthood and loss is far from his own life, Rigg tells us his short fiction rarely starts close to home.

"Often I find I'm writing about people who are not me," he says, "or are relatively far from my own experience. You obviously need to find a way in that connects."

This connection with an issue that might seem remote can sometimes be fairly abstract, Rigg continues. "If the form comes to you with that subject, then you don't really question it, you just think, 'OK, I know what I'm going to do,' and you go with it."

At the Rink took the author all the way to Scarsdale, a suburb north of New York City where Rigg – like his protagonist – has spent some time.

"Maybe there was a sense in which I wanted to write a character who was an outsider," he says, "because that's how I came to that place myself."

The nuclear family and the picket fence may never have been a dream for every American, but it still holds some power.

"I'm not sure that the suburbs in Britain have the same significance," Rigg suggests, "or quite the same cultural resonance."

We'll be listening out for echoes with Cynthia Banham next time, as we dip our toes carefully into her short story Swimming With Crocodiles. 

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