Tim Conley: 'Short fiction is a lot more liberating'

We've already heard from Cynthia Zarin, Rodrigo Urquiola Flores and the translator Shaina Brassard in this Winter series – we'll be welcoming Cynthia Banham and Samuel Rigg on to the podcast over the next few weeks. But this time we're putting Tim Conley on the turntable with his short story Records.

While Conley does confess to owning a few vinyls, he's fascinated by the idea that a record can also be "something that we regret". If you look at where the word comes from, he continues, "to record something is to have it by heart, again. That intrigues me, because there are things that we want to forget and things that we want to remember."

In Records, the author explains, "Anna's trying to forget and the ghost is trying to remember, or reclaim a past that he once had".

As a literature professor who writes on Joyce, Nabokov and Beckett, Conley admits that his own fiction can be a little highbrow, but insists that it's "not without a great deal of feeling".

"Thinking and feeling are not opposed to each other," he says. "As AI debates show us, people seem to think that thinking is somehow greater than feeling, and that's not true. They're both a very humane human activities."

Conley's fiction is also shot through with humour, but that's only part of the picture.

"It has to be fluid," he says. "Funny is part of a strategy, but it's not exactly a goal in itself."

This kind of variety is what draws Conley to short form fiction.

"The novel can be swallowed up a lot more by convention," he argues. "In some ways it's more compromised."

If the novel is "a little more tyrannical", Conley adds, the short story "is a lot more liberating in a weird, weird way. It also can linger."

We'll be hanging around with Samuel Rigg next time and his short story At the Rink.

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