Q&A with Linden Hibbert

We are thrilled to welcome Linden Hibbert as our newest contributor to the Wild Umbrella fiction section! In this illuminating interview, Mina El Attar and Hibbert break down the stylistic and narrative choices behind the short story “Claggy.”

There’s a lot of tactile imagery and sensory quality to your writing that is very appealing. It places the reader directly in the narrator’s experience, seeing what they are seeing and feeling what they are feeling. How do you balance these descriptions—these experiences—within the overall narrative?

I should probably explain that I am autistic, and my experience of the world is sensorial—when I describe what a character feels, my automatic starting point is with physical objects, sound, scents, rather than emotions. This story enabled me to foreground the senses and the physicality that I would normally ration.

I like how fragmented the narrator’s stream of consciousness is, yet, how it comes together fluidly to form an articulate point. Is this characteristic of your style or did you find it worked especially well for this character and in this story?

I write in quite a range of styles, loosely-speaking, in the magical end of realism, so  Claggy was very different for me. It was also voice led, in that a voice came into my head and I let it run, which is also not how I usually work. From the initial line of speech, I knew the girl was driven by a compulsion to find answers, and that the flow of the story would mimic her search for answers, including dead ends, circling back on itself, like negotiating a mini labyrinth.

One can assume that the narrator of the story is neurodivergent, especially in regard to how they’re spoken to. Near the end, the father says, ‘they only let normal girls have babies.’ I found this to be done brilliantly without being dramatized or overdone. Did this—writing a character who is neurodivergent, and I believe are also a child—take much practise, or is it something you’re familiar with and have perfected?

For me, one of the sticking points about autism in fiction is that stories require their characters to change, to develop, and yet the experience of autism rather inhibits this. I did not want autism to become an obstacle a character had to get over, or suggest it could be fixed, even temporarily, within the world of the story. That this story was on a quest for answers helped with the structure. I knew the narrative needed to stay close to the girl’s perspective, to flow credibly, and yet its logic diverge from that of the reader, and the girl’s parents; and that like in many family stories, such misunderstandings and differing expectations would be the source of the story’s tension. The words that you highlight from the girl’s father are cruel, but they are also words of his time and show his level of understanding. He comes from a generation that had no commonly known name for autism, where such experiences were largely taboo,  considered a reflection of a parent's moral or personal failing—a weakness, or curse—which the father fears and which shames him. The girl can feel happiness in her misunderstanding of him; the parents, and the father, cannot. Therein lies the tragedy of this story for me.   

I also love writing from the point of view of children. They experience the world bodily and in such an unfiltered way and I try my best to remember those sensations as I write.

Did you experiment much with different ways of telling this story throughout your process? What did your other drafts or edits look like and how did you come to the finalised version?

Oddly, this story had an easy birth. As an autistic writer I find cause and effect difficult. Motivation also can be tricky for me. If I’m lucky, I stumble into these things by happenstance, if unlucky, I must draft and redraft until they become clear. That did not happen here. Much of Claggy came in the original draft— the tone, the voice, the plot points, the cast of characters.  Where I did linger, however, and where I tried to be brave, was in the decision to end the story where it is, with the siblings lying on the ground in the dark, staring at the stars, each with their own thoughts. The question for me was what could and could not be given voice to in the wake of the parents’ comments. The girl’s moment is one of pleasure at what small portion of her father’s words she has grasped and embraced, because she believes they resolve the mystery that people are made like stars, not grown like seed. By contrast, there is a great deal that I would not let her brother say, that he can only think, and which, if the reader follows his thoughts, resonate, hopefully, beyond the end of the story.