An Interview with Tabitha Potts

Tabitha Potts’ short fiction has been published in literary magazines and anthologies. She was a finalist in MIROnline’s Folk Tale Festival and highly commended in MIROnline’s Booker Prize Competition judged by Ian McEwan. She was the winner of Almasi League’s flash fiction competition judged by Courttia Newland. Most recently she was highly commended by the Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize.

She has an MA in Creative Writing from Birkbeck and a First in English Language and Literature from Oxford University. She runs Story Radio Podcast (storyradio.org) and is currently working on a short story collection and a novel. You can find out more about her on her website tabithapotts.com, Twitter (@tabithapotts), Facebook (@tabithaauthor), and Instagram (@tabithapotts). She lives in London with her family and two dogs, a large white Tamaskan and a small black Patterdale terrier.

Who/what made you want to write? Was there a particular person, or particular writers/works/art forms that influenced you?

My parents were both writers – my father wrote novels and my mother wrote books about interior design, cookery, and paint finishes. As a child, I loved to read, write, and draw pictures, and this naturally led to writing books. I also loved performing in plays and used to put on plays using a shadow theatre I was given. I remember reading The Young Visiters by Daisy Ashford as a child (it was a book written by a nine-year-old girl in 1890) and realising that I too could write books. It took me a long time to get one published, though!

What inspired you to start writing this book?

I began writing again after a long pause when my children were older and I had a number of stories published in various literary magazines and anthologies and wanted to collect them together. I tend to have an image or a sentence that starts a story: Crow Girl was sparked by seeing a girl in a red coat feeding crows in a wood, for example. The Bells of London Town was inspired by a nursery rhyme (“Oranges and Lemons”) and a visit to the bell tower of a church we lived near at that time, St Dunstan’s in Stepney. The Gift, a story about a magical perfume, was inspired by visiting a perfume shop where the assistant told me about perfumes that smelled of blood and metal.

If your book had a soundtrack, what are some songs that would be on it?

“Crow Cries” by Goat Girl for Crow Girl.

“Oranges and Lemons” by Mediaeval Baebes for The Bells of London Town.

“The Curse” by Agnes Obel for The Gift.

Describe your dream book cover.

I think the cover I have now is about as perfect as it could be! I visited the Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park and saw that a local artist, Sophie Harris-Greenslade, had designed a beautiful tea towel for them to sell. I contacted her and asked her if she could design a ‘folk horror’ style book cover for me and she did a wonderful book cover for me. The cover shows a crow surrounded by thorns, a scene from Crow Girl.

What other professions have you worked in? What’s something about you that your readers wouldn’t know?

I have worked as a script editor in television drama and a producer in radio drama for the BBC. I’ve also worked as a documentary and book researcher, web content editor and marketer for various charities and a publishing firm. I think a thing most people wouldn’t know about me is that I can write and edit HTML!

What books did you read (for research or comfort) throughout your writing process?

I think the writer whose work has given me the most inspiration is Angela Carter and specifically her retelling of fairy stories in The Bloody Chamber.

What is one thing you hope readers take away from reading your book? How do you envision your perfect reader?

I would like my stories to stay in readers’ minds like an image from a dream – haunting them.

Are you a writer, too? Submit your manuscript to Atmosphere Press.