My guest today on What Cathy Read Next is Angel Dionne, author of Sardines. It’s her first collection of short fiction and was published on 31st December 2023. You can find out more about Sardines below as well as read Angel’s fascinating answers to my questions, including why short stories and flash fiction are her ‘sweet spot’, and the significance of her book’s title. She also reveals the equally intriguing title of her next collection.
About the Book
“Sometimes, he wished things had been different for him.” – from the title story
It is a universal enough truth that human beings are social by nature. There is space within us which normally fills up with relationships and rich experiences. When we are rendered solitary by circumstance or temperament, however, that space fills instead with the symptoms of loneliness. Angel Dionne’s dry, observant short stories pull back the lid of that claustrophobic way of life, giving us a vantage on the minor existential pains of people talking most often to themselves.
In this the author’s first collection, readers will find twelve tinned tales of a world both familiar and disquietingly austere. For all of her economy of expression, Dionne’s investigations into the scenes — hair salon, butcher’s, library, zoo, café — and occurrences of everyday life — a read-through of the paper, a conversation at the cash-out, an inquiry into the open job — are meticulously observed.
Dionne’s story-telling is a kind of narrative atomic theory, in the same philosophical school as the writing of Nancy Huston, Édouard Louis, Valeria Luiselli, Thomas Bernhard, I. L. Peretz. Life, Dionne shows, is not so abstract or so complex that it cannot be made sense of. With sympathy, wit, and a relentless eye for detail, she demonstrates how to discern the commonplace minutiae of human existence, and how to see the ways they interact and compound until the mundane begins to resonate with human meaning.
Find Sardines on Goodreads
Purchase Sardines from Amazon [link provided for convenience not as part of an affiliate programme]
Q&A with Angel Dionne, author of Sardines
Q. You’ve had work published in numerous anthologies and journals, but this is your first collection of short stories. How did you go about putting together the collection?
A. Most of the stories in Sardines were written under the guidance of my PhD supervisor, Dr. David Medalie. During my PhD program, I wrote ten of the twelve stories that comprise the collection. The remaining two – “An Honest Day’s Work” and “A Very Good Man” – were written post-graduation. Writing these final two stories proved to be quite challenging, and I believe that was due to the absence of external pressures like looming deadlines. I’m one of those authors who works well under pressure but occasionally struggles with procrastination without it.
Q. What is the significance of the collection’s title?
A. The title of the collection is also the title of the first story. However, I believe the title is significant in that it captures the essence of my characters’ lives. The characters live pinched lives both in terms of where they live and how they live. The majority of the stories are set in cramped tenement buildings where my characters live side-by-side with people who they choose to isolate themselves from. These self-imposed states of isolation result in characters who live claustrophobic lives. They are, in essence, not unlike the tiny fish you find crowded together inside tin of sardines.
Q. Are there any common themes to the stories?
A. I wanted the stories to explore the theme of unresolved guilt, which was inspired by the three spheres of guilt which Martin Buber outlines in “Guilt and Guilt Feelings” (1957). I came across this paper while writing the research portion of my PhD dissertation, and I immediately knew that I wanted to illustrate Buber’s ideas using fiction to show how unresolved guilt impacts authentic human relationships, particularly within the framework of Buber’s “I-Thou”. The stories contain open endings, leaving the readers to ponder whether the main characters have resolved their guilt.
Q. What do you enjoy about writing short stories, and what are the challenges?
A. Writing short stories gives me the opportunity to create an intimate portrait of my characters. I’m able to fully explore their self-imposed states of isolation, their existential guilt, and their relationships (or lack thereof) with others. I believe that short fiction gives me just enough space to capture the characters’ states of mind.
I think my main struggle is that I tend towards extreme brevity. It’s sometimes difficult for me to write a story longer than a thousand words. In this sense, the stories in Sardines were difficult to write as a few of them (particularly the title story) contain six to seven thousand words.
I occasionally consider writing a novel, but I think short stories and flash fiction are my sweet spot.
Q. In a recent interview you revealed that your love of writing started in childhood. Do you remember the first story you wrote?
A. My earliest attempts at storytelling began before I could even spell. I loved telling stories, and I’d sometimes ask my mother or grandmother to transcribe them for me. I found one of these stories recently, written in my grandmother’s handwriting. It features a little girl who, frustrated with her teacher, throws chewed bubble-gum into her hair.
The first story that I can remember writing down myself was a non-fiction story. Every year from first grade to twelfth grade, we were required to write a story as part of an annual writing competition called Young Authors. In the first grade, I wrote a story about my best friend’s illness, and it won the first-grade competition.
Q. Do you have any writing heroes and, if so, how have they influenced your own work?
My personal writing hero is author Cathie Pelletier. I had the privilege of being her student during my undergraduate studies at the University of Maine at Fort Kent where she was a visiting professor. My Victorian Literature course had been cancelled, and I needed to fill the spot, so I signed up for Cathie’s course.
Despite my lifelong love for writing, I was often told there was no money in it and that it wasn’t a viable career prospect. While my mother fully believed in my potential as a writer and hoped I would study writing, I instead allowed myself to be dissuaded by others.
Nonetheless, I enrolled in the course. It was not by any means an easy class. However, I benefitted enormously from Cathie’s feedback and the feedback given to me by my peers. Sometimes, the critiques were difficult to digest, but I came to understand that it wasn’t personal. Critique is an opportunity for growth. It’s because of Cathie that I realized my dream of becoming an author was indeed possible despite what I had been told.
Q. What are you working on next?
A. I’m currently working on another collection entitled Weakly Electric Fish Garden. It’s a highly experimental collection of surrealist prose in verse form.
About the Author
Angel T. Dionne is an associate professor of English literature at the University of Moncton Edmundston campus. She holds a PhD in creative writing from the University of Pretoria, and she is the founder/head editor of Vroom Lit Magazine. Her writing has been featured in several journals and anthologies. She is the author of a full-length collection of short fiction, Sardines (ClarionLit, 2023), and two chapbooks, Inanimate Objects (Bottlecap Press, 2022) and Mormyridae (LJMcD Communications, 2024).
Connect with Angel
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