In Conversation with Rachel Bulman

Prior to meeting, we decided it would be easier for us to meet in town, deciding on The Glorious Art House, one of the cafés that ENIGMA have held socials for their editors before. We sit in the garden, alone except for an elderly couple. I drink my latte while Rachel sticks to her water.

Rachel was ENIGMA’s sole script editor during the 2022/23 academic year. However, this year, not only have more script editors joined the journal, but she has risen to become ENIGMA’s Head of Script. Over the past twelve months, Rachel has led our script department, doubling its publications from all previous years combined.

Rachel is one of our most diverse writers, publishing fiction, script, and non-fiction with ENIGMA. Despite this variety, I have always noticed a particular interest and focus on nature in her writing, one of the many things I am excited to discuss with her.

BEN BLACKWELL: Thanks for letting me interview you today. We’re going to talk about three of your fiction pieces: To Steal a Cat, Grandma's House, and Bill. Just to start with, I want to give a little bit of context to your writing. We’re focusing on your short stories today, but you’ve published scripts and non-fiction with ENIGMA too. Would you say you have a preferred form or do you enjoy writing across a variety of them?

RACHEL BULMAN: I've always enjoyed the variety of it. I really like trying out different styles, but I think there’s definitely an underscore to my writing in terms of theme. I like playing with issues of power and I always write about nature. I always have plants or birds or water of some kind in my stories, and I haven’t ever really been able to eradicate that. I have tried, but I think that it’s suited to prose most of all.

BB: You talk about how you’re influenced by nature. Would you say you have particular stories or authors that you’d say are particularly important to you?

RB: Gosh, I don't know. I think the nature part of my writing definitely comes from me, my experience. We have a lovely garden at home so most of my childhood memories, I spent in our garden. For example, in Grandma's House, I visualized our garden in terms of where the daffodils are and where the vegetable patch is. Definitely different because that would be dangerous, but that was what I was picturing as I was writing it. And that has definitely informed my writing. In terms of which authors I'm inspired by, it really changes. It's usually based on whatever I'm reading at the moment. I remember, I went through a big Du Maurier phase and I think that informed Bill quite a bit.

BB: I read Rebecca for the first time last year for the adaptations module.

RB: She was actually one of my inspirations for Lakeside, which you might have spotted.

BB: Yeah, I read that.

RB: That was one of my pieces, and Du Maurier’s Monte Verita was one of my inspirations for that and I just loved it. I think she's really cool.

BB: So, you’re inspired by what you’re reading currently. Does that tend to be quite a wide variety, or is it more focused on authors like Du Maurier?

RB: I've never been a particularly habitual reader. I tend to – it’s terrible isn't it – I'll see a book that has a nice cover or that has a picture of a dragon on it. And I’ll be like, “I’ll go for that.”

BB: They say don’t judge a book by its cover, but I always end up doing exactly that.

RB: I'm currently reading a book by Thomas Williams called The Lost Realms which is a historical book. It’s not a storybook. It's about the progression of Anglo-Saxon England or medieval England, actually, and all the different kingdoms that came together to create it. That's something I'm really enjoying and that’s definitely making its way into my writing currently. Obviously the writing style is historical, factual, so I'm trying not to replicate that where I can.

BB: Starting off with Bill, I really like the ambiguity you’ve imbued in the story of whether the dying man in the cave is the same Bill as the protagonist’s ex-husband. I personally interpreted it as it wasn’t, but more important is the perspective of the protagonist as free from her previous relationship, ironically while she's trapped in the cave. Can you expand on why you chose to juxtapose this unhappy marriage with being stuck underground?

RB: I’m not certain to be honest. It really grew from the speaker being trapped in the cave, and the tension and the stress of that situation and how someone might cope with it. So to tie that to another instance where you’ve been trapped, I thought was really interesting. I was trying really hard not to write young, female protagonists at the time, or teenagers. That's definitely a trend that I write because it's in a lot of the stories I read. The protagonists are young. They're free to go on adventures. Whereas a middle-aged woman, a middle-aged divorcee made for such a compelling character in such a stationary position. So it's just her coping with her divorce and by the end of it, this incredibly stressful situation of being trapped in a cave becomes her way of escaping her emotions related to her failed marriage.

BB: I guess that's the saying of the closer you are to death, the more alive you feel.

RB: Yeah, yeah.

BB: You came up with that situation first before the character then? You said that you wanted to set a character trapped in a cave, and then you can add the backstory from there.

RB: Yeah, absolutely yeah.

BB: Did you have any kind of difficulty balancing the dual narrative? You've got to have all the story with being in the cave and that situation, but also the backstory for the character.

RB: Yeah, I really struggled with that actually. It was something that was very difficult to measure. Initially, I didn't have any first-person backstory, because it unbalanced it, but it was really hard to deliver the character’s experience within her marriage without being there, without experiencing those instances. So eventually, I have three flashbacks, where I list off things that happened in her relationship that led to the divorce. I think that worked well. I think I managed to get the balance of her character and her presence in the cave, because it's important that you never feel like she's not in the cave, you know what I mean?

BB: Yeah.

RB: That has to be an omnipresent fear. But also, you still get that first-person experience of what it was like being trapped in that marriage.

BB: Just moving on to Grandma's House, you focus particularly within that on the narrator’s memory and you also focus on the corruption of a state of childhood innocence. Would you say these themes are particularly important to your work as a whole, or just to that story?

RB: Generally, as a writer, I'm a big fan of childhood innocence. It's something I definitely idolise. I'm very nostalgic about it. But in that story, I really enjoyed corrupting that memory. But also just the tragedy of it. I think that's what I wanted to get at: the fact that losing your childhood innocence is a tragedy in itself. And of course, the poor grandma. That's just so distressing for her. But having it from the child's perspective and not even the child that suffered the most – that Observer losing their childhood innocence, their comfort, their grandma's house.

BB: If you're going from a child's perspective, it grants you a certain dramatic irony when adults read it. You brought this up earlier about your use of natural imagery. It's very present in Grandma's House, but also some of your other publications with ENIGMA: Lakeside and Weeding the Garden. What I find particularly interesting is your depiction of the natural world as not inherently positive or negative. So ingredients in Grandma's House can be used to make delicious meals, but they can also poison children. Is there something particular about nature that compels you to draw from it, or is it more based on personal experience?

RB: I'm not sure. I wouldn't call it a duality, but the essence of nature that is not defined as good or bad. It's just this force. This inescapable presence that exists alongside humanity and I think it's so easy to just ignore it. I mean we live in cities, we walk on tarmac, things like that. Like the idea that we can just compress it and ignore it.

BB: It's very easy to become disconnected from nature.

RB: Like walking down the street and seeing weeds coming up through the cement. It's something I've always admired, is the persistence, whether it be good or bad, of the natural world. I also love the colour green, if that helps.

BB: That helps, yeah. I know you said about how you had quite a big garden, but did you grow up in cities, or more rural areas?

RB: The village I grew up in became a town while I was living there. It expanded really rapidly, so in my childhood, the garden is a very preserved area. But I remember we used to go on walks to parks. We used to go on bike rides around the countryside. And I remember those areas shrinking, as I grew.

BB: You saw the development from this village to this—

RB: Yeah, a bit more of a proper town. It was a big thing in my village. We had so much green space around us, but we were so near a large city. So, the development just exploded, especially over the years that I grew up there. So yeah, I think my nostalgia is associated with nature and, as I grew up, the loss of it.

BB: I guess you could draw a parallel between the garden, where there's lots of innocence and loss of it through the mushrooms, and what you’re describing as this loss of nostalgia of the village that turned into town while you were there.

RB: Yeah.

BB: Both in Grandma's House and To Steal a Cat, there's a big focus on family relationships, especially told from children's perspectives. Would you say this is a perspective that you're quite drawn to?

RB: Absolutely. Again, I think I have a massive childhood nostalgia. I think the perspective of a child is so valuable. I think it's massively undervalued generally in adult literature. It's very easy to characterise a child as using less complex words, having less complex ideas, thoughts and feelings. But I think that's really untapped. I think, the way a child expresses their emotions is far more visceral than in the way an adult might. And that's something that I really enjoy exploring. I don't try to punish my speakers but I like to give them those experiences and emotions and see them come out in such colourful and unique ways. I think children have a capacity to forgive, far more than any adult I've ever met.

BB: That kind of description of a child’s voice reminds me of Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart. One of his defining characteristics is his forgiveness for those around him, especially his alcoholic mother. You said a bit earlier about how you were trying to move away from teenage girls’ perspective. Was that just because you thought you were writing too much of it or a different reason?

RB: No, I think I was reading too much of it. I think, especially during my teens, I read a lot about teenage girls who would go and save the world and I really wanted to do that. I really, really wanted to go and fight a dragon and possibly befriend it, you know? But it's so important to take a step back from that. One of the things I really enjoy writing about is the beauty and the power of really small things. So, things like a weed growing up through pavement, or forgiving something small. They really speak to me in a way that I try to convey in my stories. But I really like the idea of looking at one microcosm, so Grandma's House is a good example. It's just one memory, it's one experience, but it's really fundamental in how that child developed.

BB: Especially in the longer prose that you’ve written, like Lakeside and Weeding the Garden, those small, mundanities build up to quite a big crescendo at the end, which I really like within your fiction, because it doesn’t feel like a cheap twist in the sense of it doesn't shock you out of nowhere. It feels earned within the story and how you've written it up to that point.

RB: That's good to know.

BB: In To Steal a Cat, the story begins in 2014 when the protagonists are children and finishes when Siobhan is at university. That's a timeline that roughly matches us up to our own age. Was there any real-life inspiration for that or was it just a figment?

RB: Honestly, no. I'm allergic to cats, quite badly. I think there’s definitely both myself and my brother in the relationship between Siobhan and her sister.

BB: If you don’t mind me asking, who’s who in that?

RB: I’m the older sibling, so especially during my GCSEs, I really pulled away from my brother like Siobhan pulls away from her little sister. And I think the core of the story that I tried to get to was unfortunately, not stealing a cat, but that sibling relationship that becomes strained, and for whatever bizarre circumstance can be brought back together.

BB: Yeah, when the narrator trapped the cat, you knew Siobhan was going to be against that. You knew what the story was going to be, even though the narrator has the best intentions for their sibling. Is there anything else you're working on now or any future projects you have in mind?

RB: I've just finished my children's fiction dissertation. It's really hard writing for children especially. It's far more taxing than I expected it to be.

BB: What kind of age ranges is it?

RB: It's middle grade. So 9-12, I believe. You reach a point where you want to deal with something more complex. You want to, and I've never felt this before, I don't like writing really dark things particularly. Might surprise you.

BB: Yeah, Lakeside and Weeding the Garden aren’t exactly the happiest.

RB: Yeah. I set myself a challenge of writing a novel this summer. I've never actually completed one. I’ve started many but never finished. So I picked a random genre. I picked sci-fi, which is a genre that I despised as a child.

BB: I was going to say, I don't think I've ever read any sci-fi from you.

RB: I'm trying to avoid writing Star Trek. I really like thoughtful sci-fi. I think it can be really interesting and thought provoking.

BB: Yeah, I know people really like the sci-fi books of Andy Weir. He wrote The Martian and Project Hail Mary. I haven't read them myself, but I've heard they’re really good and they're quite human sci-fi, if you know what I mean?

RB: Yeah, it’s about the human experience.

BB: Yeah.

RB: I mean it may surprise you to find out that I have a debilitating fear of space. I hate the idea. I can't imagine anything worse.

BB: It sounds like you're picking quite a difficult genre for you.

RB: I've got to challenge myself. But yeah, I'm really enjoying it. Primarily it's about well – not to spoil it if I ever finish it – but it's about the idea of isolation. If you've ever read Walden by Henry David Thoreau? It's about a man who lives in the wilderness for a year. Obviously not on a foreign planet. It's just his experience being in the wild completely alone. If I remember correctly, the book isn't actually that good. But taking the idea, I wanted to explore that within a sci-fi setting. So it's just this individual living alone on a planet and coping with the isolation, coping with their loss. Which is another part of the story that I haven't actually fleshed out yet.

BB: I guess you can be like a Robinson Crusoe, stuck on an island by yourself. But when you’re on a whole planet by yourself, that becomes the most kind of extreme form of loneliness you can get. Cheers for coming along today.

RB: No worries.

BB: Lush speaking to you.