Adam Marek Interview: Manchester Literature Festival
A rare voice in short story fiction, Adam Marek has the ability to unsettle and provoke in a single sentence. Before his appearance at Manchester Literature Festival, he tells The Skinny how visions of monsters hide fears of a more material kind
Adam Marek wrote his first short story collection aged seven. He still has the only copy, and over the phone gives a brief synopsis of its contents. In one of the stories, a character looks out of their bedroom window. It’s night-time, and, in the darkness, the trees and bushes take on the appearance of witches and ghosts.
This scribbling of a pre-pubescent Marek acts as a pretty good hint to his future output, to his interest in the short story – a form he describes as allowing a “huge amount of creative freedom,” the most suited to “experimenting with absurdist conceptual ideas” – and to his thematic preferences of the surreal and unsettling, which he’ll be discussing at Manchester Literature Festival this month. He attributes this preference to a childhood diet of Stephen King, Japanese monster movies and fantasy comics.
Marek has published two critically acclaimed collections, Instruction Manual for Swallowing and The Stone Thrower. Both works demonstrate a mad inventiveness – though Marek comments on the ever-present “fear of sitting down to a blank page” – and a talent for vivid, sharp prose.
He’s interested in the “inter-zone between fantasy and reality.” One, he believes, can be used to help make sense of the other: “I think the best way to write about the normal human experience is by using some trope of science fiction, by fusing the fantastic with the everyday,” he explains.
In the short story Testicular Cancer Versus The Behemoth, from his first collection Instruction Manual for Swallowing, a man is diagnosed with cancer. He wanders through the streets, distraught. Elsewhere in the city, a gigantic monster is causing havoc. The man, oblivious, wonders why everybody seems so distracted. Fear and anxiety of very different kinds are forced to co-exist, and help to define the other.
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When we speak, Marek is just back from an unconventional computing conference in New Zealand. On commissions for Comma Press anthologies he’s also visited Sicily, looking at work on bio-buildings, and a facility researching cross-species impregnation (afterwards, Marek wrote a story in which a women gives birth to an orangutan). Presently he’s working with Dr Penny Lewis on research into sleep and memory; his latest piece for Comma looks at the effects of sleep therapy for traumatised primates.
Marek gains “endless ideas” from working alongside researchers and scientists, although his fascination is always tempered by apprehension. “You’re like risk assessment officers for the future,” he says, “you take their research in a very dystopian way.”
Following the publication of his first collection Marek became a father. His first son was born with autistic tendencies, difficult-to-control epilepsy and learning difficulties. The stories of his second collection are tied to the experience of parenthood, of caring for the vulnerable. In one, a father and son rescue birds choking on fish, pulling little bodies from the birds’ throats.
About the way his personal life figures into his fiction, Mayek says: “When snowflakes form you have to have dust from the atmosphere, tiny grains from which they can grow. I think of my own experiences as like that dust… part of myself as the starting point to grow something else.”
With the Festival on the horizon, how does Marek enjoy public readings? He used to find it “absolutely petrifying.” Now, he says, it’s “the best feeling in the world if somebody at the end says it’s had some effect on them; it means those months and years have been well spent. And the experience of hearing a writer read their work adds so much, changing how you read their work, personalising it.”
Adam Marek is in conversation with the Chinese satirist Diao Dou on Sat 17 Oct at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, 4pm, £6 (£4)