text: Pocket Casts is one of the best podcast / podcatchers out there. This is their webapp packaged as a desktop app. The actual webapp itself is the official code from Pocket Casts/NPR. This snap was packaged by Ricardo N Feliciano (FelicianoTech).
  
  I’ve just finished my Joyride to Jupiter and, by Jove, I’m chuffed to bits that Nuala O’Connor, the author of this deeply moving and provocative collection of short stories is here to answer some of my questions. Welcome, Nuala.
  I wonder if you think the form a challenge still, and what keeps you coming back to short stories, given that novels are often regarded as more lucrative and poetry more respected?
  Short fiction is a deeply challenging form; I fear stories and love them. I’m afraid because when I finish one, I find it hard to believe I’ll ever write another one. I wasn’t always like that – things spilled out of me. But my head has shifted into the long mode of the novel and that’s a building and rebuilding process that takes years. Whereas the story is a faster, freer construction, and it has teetering legs. I wish story writing was easier, less fraught. Conversely that wobbly tension and intensity is also what I like about them – there’s an element of puzzle solving and the scale feels minute but important. I adore the detail of short fiction, the balancing of motifs and characters and events. Stories are so stunning when done well – people like Alison MacLeod and Flannery O’Connor amaze me with their exquisite stories. I long to be that good so I keep trying.
  “When I write about subjects that are close to me, such as pregnancy loss and secondary infertility, I don’t aim to write to expunge myself of grief, but to work out what happened and why, to get a clear view of a chain of events, and to see how my characters are able to deal with their troubles on an emotional level. To see how they survive.”
  I was reading Louise Glϋck’s “Telescope” around the same time, that is a sort of demonstration of the curiosity you describe, I think, but a more obvious analysis.
  The chain is there: the reader is watching the poet watching themselves, yet the reader can only watch.