I had to look up the definition of fen.
A fen is a type of wetland. It’s similar to marshes, bogs and swamps.
Not surprisingly, landscape plays a key role in many of the enchanting tales in this collection of short stories from Daisy Johnson.
The stories in Fen are anchored in the ordinary and humdrum.
There are tales of young love and romantic rendezvous, the routine of marriage, home and children, and the goings-on at the neighborhood hole-in-the-wall pub.
But in Fen nothing is ordinary.
Within these everyday tales there are dark and magical threads. Mischievous underpinnings have been woven into the mundane of day-to-day. Seemingly inexplicable things take place alongside the daily doings of regular folk.
As the stories unfold things occur that seem magical, fantastical, fey, but underneath there is a darkness.
Many characters seem to be on the cusp, somewhere between youth-and-adulthood, human-and-animal, good-and-evil.
Real people live their lives here. They wrestle with familiar instincts, with sex and desire, with everyday routine. But the wild is always close at hand, ready to erupt.
This is a place where animals and people commingle and fuse, where curious metamorphoses take place, where myth and dark magic still linger. So here a teenager may starve herself into the shape of an eel. A house might fall in love with a girl. A woman might give birth to a – well what?
Fen by Daisy Johnson
Reading this you begin to feel like a being trapped in a murky habitat, never quite sure if you are on solid footing.
I discovered this short interview with the author, Daisy Johnson, where she speaks of growing up in the fen between Cambridge, England and the coastal region, and how landscape shaped she writing process. She also speaks of the importance of creative writing classes.
I find hearing about writers process for writing interesting.
I read this collection of short stories some years ago, but the feeling and imagery these stories generated has remained with me, bouncing around in the back of my head. I keep thinking about the settings and I start to feel the dampness settle into my bones. I remember the dimly lit pub and wonder what became of the teen girls who lurked about the place.
This short story collection is winsome and weird, and most certainly worth reading.
The Seventeenth Line 