In conversation with Jane O ’ Connor, winner of the Hysteria 2020 short story competition

Jane O’Connor was the winner of the Hysteria 2020 short story competition with her story The Flower Box published in the Hysteria 7 anthology. Jane is a writer of short stories and novels, as well as a researcher and reader in Childhood Studies at Birmingham City University. Her latest novel,’The Trial of Gwen Foley‘ is due out July 2021 and published by @Bloodhoundbook Listen to the interview and her reading of The Flower Box https://lindaph.me/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Jane-oconnor.mp3 Key takeaways from this episode: Jane began writing fiction during her second maternity leave. The novel she started with was runner up in a debut novel competition and published by Penguin, it’s called Needlemouse. The genre she writes in is called UpLit – for uplifting. Everything she writes has a happy ending, even if it’s not classically seen as that. Her central characters are often middle-aged women as she feels this population is very under-represented in modern fiction. As an academic she had to learn the craft of writing and that allowed her to move easily into the emotional writing you get with fiction. Her favourite quote is from John Yorke’s book Into the Woods: how stories work. “When we write fiction we go into the woods to find a part of ourselves that is lost and we bring is back in the form of a story.” The inspiration for her winning short story is Pansy, a dog she knew as a child. We’re often not aware of t...
Source: The Hysterectomy Association - Category: OBGYN Authors: Tags: Podcast author interview hysteria 2020 hysteria 2021 hysteria 7 Source Type: news