Q&A with Hannah Gibson

We are delighted to be adding Hannah Gibson’s “Woodworm” among our ranks of slightly unsettling, incredibly fabulous fiction stories this week! This is a story does an excellent job exploring a flawed character, and the ways in which grief and fear can worm into the brain and begin an unraveling. Below is an insightful discussion between Gibson and one of our editors, Rachel Walshe.

There's a beautiful interplay between the modern/urban world and then the natural world, with a folkloric feel, rooted (if you'll pardon the pun) in the image of the supposed dead tree. Is this interplay something that you meditate on often? 

I think about ‘place’ a lot. I am based in Belfast, I grew up here and have lived here most of my life. People have always migrated to cities to live and to work. Being from and staying in the place that people move towards or away from, I used to feel like I had missed out on this migratory experience. In the city it can be easy to feel disconnected from the natural world and your place in this history too, especially when you are younger. 

But now I see the urban/modern and natural/folkloric are not separate realms but a continuation of each other. Across Ireland, even in the cities, conflict and stories and struggle has always been agrarian. Belfast is a small city and whilst there is a city/townie/culchie divide, this plays against different identity lines more explicitly. The 'urban' and the 'natural' are layered over each other and always co-existing. Sometimes the modern is less ‘developed’ than the historic: the river Farset still flows under High Street, the Comber Greenway used to be the train line, the old Mackies factory site is lying disused with a campaign to build social housing on it being blocked at government level. 

In Belfast, you can almost always see the hills or the sea or the river from the city. It takes very little time to reach fields or to find green spaces. Every building that is more than 30 years old has a folk story or a ghost story or a history of something that happened during The Troubles attached to it. I am trying more and more to write from here and about here too. The more I/you/we listen and pay attention to what is happening/has happened, the more I/you/we understand and become familiar with the beats of a place and see how it interacts with itself and everything else. 

That's so beautifully articulated. That disconnect you initially speak of I think is a very universal feeling, there seems to be an awakening to the idea that as you said, the urban and the natural are not separate. And yet, in Daniel there does seem to be a separation - one of the first things we learn about him is his disdain for this tree. And by the end, seemingly out of spite towards his daughter, he cuts it down. What is it about Daniel that he cannot abide this connection? 

The character of Daniel really embodies refusal and avoidance. He is a selfish man and this comes from a place of fear of rejection or of looking stupid. I wanted to explore how this cowardlyness can corrupt relationships between parents and children in multiple directions. Daniel is motivated by his own convenience at the cost of the meaningful relationships in his life, but he does not realise this until the loss has happened. A lot of his anger is misdirected at his recently deceased mother and his daughter and their close relationship.

Daniel also represents productivity and control. We see this in how he wants to get his mother’s funeral over with quickly and in his desperation to get back to work. Beyond the urban and the natural world, he occupies an almost ‘unreal’ capitalist space, one of money and non-specific commerce, outside of grief and love. Placing him in a grief setting creates the tension of the story because he is forced to interact with the things he is the most disconnected from.

It feels like there is a real intentionality to your writing, and the pacing of this is so well done. Do you find you come to the page with a story already forming, or do you let it sort of take you on a journey? 

I am glad that you see this piece as intentional. I think this is a tough question! Regardless of a piece being realised prior to or during the process of writing, ideas interact differently on a page than they do when they are in my head. This is the joy of writing. It is in the space between translating from thought into sentences that I find fluidity in my work. 

It helps that thinking is a big part (maybe even the biggest part) of the work. I work full-time and am a community organiser with my tenants’ union too. I do not always have a lot of spare time to dedicate to concentrated writing, but I really value having time to think. My thoughts are stimulated and gathered when I am out in the world; out of my house, working, going to the pub, chatting, moving my body, engaging entirely with people for my writing about anything to feel worthwhile. When I am publishing work, I want to communicate something beyond my own self, even if it is within the limits of my own subjectivity.

I completely agree with you on the time and space to think in terms of writing, even outside having dedicated "writing time". How do you find navigating writing and giving yourself the space to write with other commitments? 

It helps that I want to write! It is not something I have to force myself to do, but rather something I find myself slipping into when I am left to my own devices. Writing is how I make sense of the world and myself, so whether it is working on a short story, an essay for Substack or a Letterboxd review, I get pleasure from the process. 

I purposefully sidestepped being a career writer in my earlier twenties. Then, I was so disciplined about writing every day, but I felt so much pressure about never writing well or enough that I found myself writing in circles. Now I have changed my expectations around it all. I try not to force anything and try to view my work as a lifelong act. I want to get better at writing and I can only do this by keeping on doing it. If I am writing and thinking and reading and spending time engaging with art at all, I am succeeding. The process of all these things are their own reward. 

Lastly, when was the last time you read something where you felt kinship with the author in terms of a shared view of the world? 

This is a good question. Really recently I have enjoyed reading Sinead Morrissey’s memoir Among Communists and James Baldwin’s Another Country. Last summer, I read and was struck by Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, both of which have stuck with me in the long months since I finished the series. The most recent author who has surprised me in how much I have enjoyed their work is Miriam Toews. 

I try to read widely and engage with work that challenges me both in its content and its form. I do not think that kinship of my own worldview is something I look for explicitly when I am reading, and I often find the closer a piece is to my own stance, the more I notice (and am frustrated by) the little differences. Familiarity often creates gulfs of uncanny valley. I love reading work that is truthful in itself and that examines relationships in a wider social context. I like work that pulls from what the author knows and is clearly, intentionally interacting with. 

I also like being recommended pieces and I love reading the same pieces as other people and getting to discuss them. I am in a book club with my tenants’ union. We meet monthly and are focussing on reading political theory around housing. It has been so helpful with keeping me disciplined with reading theory (one of my New Year's resolutions for 2026), but the discussion at each meeting is actually the highlight. Everyone pulls such different angles from each piece we read. It is always good to be reminded that none of us can hold everything in our heads. There is always something you are missing and so there is always something to learn.,