In Conversation with Catherine Hurcombe

After realising Queen’s café was going to be too busy for our conversation, we move to a table in The Ram’s beer garden. It’s one of the first truly warm days of summer and both of us are nearing the end of our undergraduate degrees.

I’ve known Catherine since we both started at ENIGMA in September 2021 as fiction editors. When I won the election to become Journal Director in June 2023, Catherine was my first choice to become our next Head of Fiction. Fortunately for me, she applied to take up this role before we even broke up for summer.

Whenever you talk to Catherine, you get the impression that her every word is carefully selected and you appreciate that even her casual remarks are deep insights into whatever subject we are discussing. Her stories have always fascinated me, particularly her use of supernatural and folkloric characters to delve into deeply human conditions.

You can read her stories, including the ones discussed in this conversational portrait, here.

BEN BLACKWELL: Thanks for letting me interview you today. We’re going to talk about previous short stories that’ve been published in ENIGMA: The Last Prayer, Selkie, and Let Me Tell You the Story. Before we get into that, I want to start with a bit of background to your writing. Your publications with ENIGMA so far have been short stories. Has that always been the case with what you’ve written or have you tried anything else out?

CATHERINE HURCOMBE: Yeah, I think for the most part it tends to be short stories. I’ve dabbled in poetry but it doesn't usually work out as well. I’ve written a novel before. I’m currently writing my second. But short stories, I find it’s quite a nice way to fill the gaps. When you’ve got a small idea, it’s something you can really work with and really polish, more than anything longer.

BB: Yeah, I imagine especially being at university and doing all of that work, short stories is not as much of a commitment as a novel, let’s say, just because you can get it done—

CH: Yeah, absolutely.

BB: —within a week.

CH: I mean, I only started writing my recent novel as soon as I submitted my dissertation. I think I had an idea two days after. And then I was like, right, I’m going to start writing again, but if you'd ask me “what have you thought about writing a novel” when I was doing my uni work, I would have just said no.

BB: One-hundred percent. With the first novel, is that something you’re going to keep under wraps or do you have any plans with it?

CH: I thought about it before. I thought about looking into publication, but I just don't think it’s there. I was quite young when I started writing it and my writing style has changed quite a lot since then. So, I think it would just need a lot of work. I’m happy just keeping it there as a practice.

BB: Yeah, nice. Would you say you have any particular stories, or particular authors that you’d say are inspirations to your type of writing?

CH: I’d say, a lot of fantasy authors mainly, because that’s what that’s what I tend to write most. I’d like to say people like Erin Morgenstern, but I don't have as good a lyrical voice. I'm much better with something a little bit more practical.

BB: Was that the person that wrote The Night Circus?

CH: Yeah, and The Starless Sea.

BB: I've been meaning to read that for a while. I haven’t got around to it.

CH: I definitely recommend it.

BB: Just talking about your degree, you study English and Classics. One thing I've noticed within some of your fiction is the prominent use of mythological or folkloric characters. So in Selkie, for example, would you say there’s a particular reason you kind of go for that angle of the mythological rather than, let’s say, the story be about just a normal woman trapped in a marriage?

CH: I think I’m always quite drawn to mythology and folkloric stories. That's what I like to read. That's what I've always got a lot of pleasure out of. Things like fairy tales as well, I’ve always been quite a prolific reader of those, so I think it just leaks through into my writing because I think writing is a form of escapism. It's like reading. So all I want to write is things which are more divorced from the real world.

BB: Yeah. Would you say that when you are using figures that are divorced from the real world, that allows you to push the boundary a bit more than if you're using real life figures.

CH: I think so, because I think when you're writing something realistic, you tend to avoid certain topics that feel a little bit closer to the truth. Whereas if you're writing anything sort of fantasy or mythology theme, there's a bit of a barrier there so you can talk about these things that affect the real world, but with a little bit of a safe distance.

BB: Yeah, so you have a bit of perspective from what you're writing about. Within Selkie as well, you use the second-person which isn’t as common for most writers. They tend to use a first-person or a third-person. What was your decision behind using that and what effects do you think it creates within Selkie?

CH: So, I actually wrote Selkie for a portfolio I did during my second year for the short story creative writing module. For my essay on that, I wrote about the use of the second-person and how you can use the second-person in short stories. Because I think it's quite interesting that not a lot of people are writing with it and that it’s so contentious. When I was researching for that, I saw so much stuff online about people complaining, “Oh, I couldn't understand it if it's in the second-person. I just I just can't relate to any of the characters.” And I just thought it was interesting to try and play around with that and try and make something more personal by using a form that people tend to avoid.

BB: A couple of years ago, I started trying to experiment writing in second-person and when I first started doing it, it felt very clunky to me. But I realized very quickly, the issue was, I was just started every sentence with “you.” So “you do this, you do that.” But then you read some other works. I don't know if you’ve read Bread by Margaret Atwood?

CH: I haven’t, no.

BB: It’s a short story that’s in the second-person and that's a really good example of it feeling like a very fluid story and doesn’t have the interruption that some people accuse second-person of having.

CH: Yeah, I think it’s about writing and reading it enough that it feels more natural. If you're too aware that you’re doing something a little bit different, you’re obviously not going to write in the same way as you would normally. So I think as soon as you start reading and writing more of it, it just becomes almost second nature.

BB: Yeah. I guess. That’s the same with pretty much everything with writing. If we’re trying to experiment with something new, it’s good to read up on it first. So just moving onto Let Me Tell You the Story, you focus on the outside figure of a witch. Is this the same kind of technique you're using of using a mythological figure to push something that you wouldn’t as much if it was based on reality?

CH: I think so. It’s hard to say because I don’t know if it’s always a conscious decision, because I read so much folklore and mythology. I’m distantly aware that obviously that’s what it’s doing and it’s exploring human nature through these outside characters. But at the same time, there’s just little parts of me like, “I really fancy writing about a witch”, or something fun, something that’s made-up, but really getting to explore that and invent your own rules for it as well. If you're writing about something folkloric and mythological, there’s no set guidelines on how these characters are supposed to be written or come across. You can really just explore and have fun with it.

BB: Yeah, of course, I guess you delve slightly into the stereotype of the witch within that story even. So you talk about the outside view of the witch as evil with enchanting spells, but then you delve into this more complex, human aspect of the character within it.

CH: That’s definitely what I was trying to go for so it's good that it comes across. I think that was my main goal: writing a sympathetic character in a less traditionally sympathetic role. And I think there's a lot of good fantasy fiction and magical realism doing that at the moment. There's this big trend in writing about witches and vampires and werewolves. And I'm really interested in seeing where all of that is going and how these characters can get just increasingly complex as it evolves.

BB: I'm not much of a fantasy reading myself but following on from the outside perspective of a woman compared to their actual story, I guess you can link that to the uptrend of Greek Legends. So people like Jennifer Saint or Madeleine Miller, they've been writing feminist stories from women we mainly know from their attachment from the traditional heroes.

CH: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's all part of a sort of wider goal of trying to reclaim women's voices in fiction and take traditionally, female characters, who are usually villainised or just not given, like you said, not given much of a voice at all and just to adapt those characters and adapt those androcentric stories. I think that there's some really interesting scope that. I've read quite a lot of Greek mythology adaptation as well. Jennifer Saint is one of my favourite authors so I definitely think that sort of focus on women's voices is definitely there. I do tend to lean towards female characters a bit more.

BB: Within Selkie and Let Me Tell You the Story, there's a big focus on male-female relationships. Would you say this is something that you designed into the story or is it something that emerged when you started writing it?

CH: I tend to write about relationships quite a lot in my work because I think it's quite a useful medium for exploring that human connection and the humanity of these inhuman figures is how they interact with other people romantically. I think in the case of Selkie, the relationship is a more stereotypical abusive relationship. It's designed to represent the self-hurt, and the abuse that she's facing in her daily life. Whereas I think with Let Me Tell You the Story, the goal was to rewrite a fairy tale and I think it's having that heteronormative relationship, but with a slight twist of it being the witch-like character. That’s how I built on that fairy tale aspect.

BB: Within The Last Prayer, I was quite impressed with your handling of time over generations, starting in mythological times, and then you end with space travel. Did you have any difficulties covering such long periods within the short story, especially given the limits of the form?

CH: I think it's definitely a daunting task to give yourself. I think it probably helped that, like I said, that I've read a lot of mythology retellings. So I've read a lot of books from the perspective of Greek gods, which means that you get an idea of how time passes differently for an immortal character. And I think when you're writing an immortal protagonist their relationship to that time is different. You don't need to focus on all the same details that you would if you were writing about, say a character who lived on Earth through all of this time. Whereas, I think in that story Hestia is very much divorced from what's happening on Earth. So she's witnessing what's going on, but she's from such a distance that she's never going to appreciate all the intricacies of what's happening over time.

BB: Would you say the two main components of that story are Hestia and humanity as whole, rather than any specific characters within that?

CH: I think so because the story is primarily about her isolation and it's about the loneliness of being this last surviving God. The fact that humanity turned away from these Gods means that she's even more alone than she used to be. And now all she can do is watch them from a distance, so they're no longer individuals communicating with her anymore. They're just this mass of people who she can watch like it's a TV show.

BB: Would you say you have any influence from media development today? So you talk about that like a TV show. We talked earlier about how representations of mythological and folkloric characters have changed in recent years. Would you say there are things today that have changed your perspective on that?

CH: I've never really thought about it like that too much. Obviously again I think a lot of it is just influenced by what I've read and what I've watched. And I think in terms of mythology, a lot of it does come from those retellings so I think for me, it's mainly just what have I seen through retellings, and how has the culture of writing about mythological characters changed. Because obviously, every author when they write about mythology, brings something different about the modern world that influences them. So, I think it's hard to know exactly what those influences are, because you're just imagining this character through your own lens. You don't necessarily know what that lens is.

BB: Of course, yeah. You talk about reading as a large influence on your writing. Do you install much of your own experiences into what your writing, or selecting of which perspectives to talk from?

CH: Yeah, I think I do. It's definitely easier to write about characters whose experiences you can relate to, in a certain sense. So, when I started writing Selkie, the whole relationship originally was, and it still is if slightly mellowed down from the first draft, an allegory for OCD. I've been living with OCD for the last decade. The relationship with her husband was an allegory for an experience of living with that voice in your head telling you these horrible things. And the sort of the needs to find a way to escape that and become your own person.

BB: Yeah, I was going to say, when I first read Selkie, I felt almost suffocated by the presence of the husband and that’s your reflection on OCD.

CH: Yeah, definitely.

BB: Just as a final thing, you’ve said you’ve started writing your novel now, after you handed in your dissertation. Do you think you're going to carry on working on that? Or will you be going between a few projects?

CH: I think I'm going to try and focus on that at the moment, but I think that if another idea comes up, I'm not just going to let it go. It'll be the classic thing of waking up in the middle of the night and needing to just sort of grab my phone, write it in my notes app before I forget it, and going back to sleep, which is usually how most of my ideas come about.

BB: I’m the same, to be honest. For some reason, the ideas start coming at three in the morning.

CH: Yeah, you're just about to fall asleep and then suddenly that's when you think something.

BB: You know, you've spent hours at your desk all day and thought of nothing.

CH: Yeah. As soon as you stop thinking about it, that's when you actually come up with something.

BB: That's when inspiration strikes. Brilliant. I think that's pretty much everything I wanted to talk about today. Cheers for coming along today.

CH: Oh, no worries.