IN CONVERSATION
Scott McNee is a writer from Glasgow, Scotland. His short fiction and poetry have been published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, New Writing Scotland, Vastarien, Tether's End, Kalopsia, Gutter, Quotidian and The Grind.
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Let's start with 'Jellyfish,' published in New Writing Scotland 40, which I enjoyed reading very much. The sour acrid filthy aesthetic feels very real. Your writing is very visceral and immediate, and pulls the reader right in. Fast paced and plotty but then, the reader has to process the fact that the whole time when the characters talk existential dilemmas, labour woes, and the Bible, they're cleaning toilets -- finding whole eggs and getting bitten by jellyfish -- which have infested the system. Ouch. Tell me, are most of your storyworlds dystopian, or set in the End of Times? What interests you about dystopian lit, and do you often see parallels between the (kinda dystopian) world we're already living in and the worlds you create?
There’s Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nobel quote where he says that instead of ‘write what you know’, the thing he wants his fiction to ask is ‘This is the way it feels to me… Does it also feel this way to you?’ I think that’s true for all fiction anyway, but it’s perhaps even more obvious when you’re dealing with horror or apocalyptic and dystopian lit, things that are born out of anxiety or depression or fear. With something like ‘Jellyfish’, the lighter jokes are just essentially that most employment is absurd and essentially abstract – but it’s something we’re doing in the midst of absolute insanity. The poles are melting and the bees are dying but you better justify your job daily to a clade of middle managers. The 24hr access to news doesn’t help – that’s a lot of dead bodies you’re being told to ignore. Maybe that’s useful for writing, but I think I’d feel a lot better without all of it.
At the same time, Jellyfish is just human behaviour. The two main characters are anxious and smart, but there’s only so much one primate can deal with at one time. We’ll still be rambling like Kestrel about odd jobs and dating until the point we can’t feed ourselves. All you can do is focus on what’s immediate.
I don’t think even half of my stories are intentionally apocalyptic but I think a lot of my characters have some sense of it, even in the more grounded lit fic. It’s not an uncommon feeling – The Sopranos even starts with Tony saying that he feels he ‘came in at the end’ and Dr Melfi’s heard it from a million patients already. I think Ridley and Kestrel strike some sort of balance at the end of ‘Jellyfish’ – if only if they’ve realised there’s no point in arguing with each other.
I’m glad I wrote Jellyfish before I saw the film Onibaba – its premise is an older woman and a younger woman arguing as they throw corpses into a big pit during a war and that’s close enough a premise that the whole thing might have ended up an unconscious rip-off.
'The Bones of Small Mammals' (published in Vastarien) reminded me of Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea… I love the sea… I love how the sea is so different on different continents. Why, even on the same landmass -- the coast of the Arabian Sea is rockier than the Bay of Bengal – and I’ve imagined many stories on its shores, ancient and modern, earthly and otherworldly. The bleakness of the British coast intrigues me as well, and I keep returning to it, both metaphorically and physically. So, tell me what draws you to the sea? The bones of small mammals? Or driftwood? Do you think you are placing your characters there because their minds are more chaotic than the sea?
I’ve actually not read any Iris Murdoch; I’ll need to start! I was thinking a little bit of Robert Altman’s Images at the time. And Punch, but I’ll get to that.
To start off on a bit of a tangent, I love Takeshi Kitano’s movies, and he does something brilliant with the sea in a few of his, but in particular Sonatine – these gangsters spark a turf war that’s going to end badly for everyone, but the entirety of the second act is them retreating to a beach house and playing kids’ games in the sand. They’re just hanging out in front of this primordial vista playacting at shooting each other – a pretty clear shorthand for their lives in general. You could do something similar with space I suppose, but it’s cold and dead; the sea’s only hostile to our consciousness – it’ll happily have us back in the soup we land animals crawled out of millions of years ago. It’s our natural state.
The British coast, on the other hand – it’s grim enough because of our weather, but basically every beach and coastal town in the UK is a story of intentional neglect and decay, the flotsam and jetsam of forty-odd years of neoliberal bullshit. The places that survived the initial scourge have been possessed by Air B&B. It’s made of rotten merry-go-rounds and scary public information films and Punch and Judy. (Punch is a black comedy, which I ordinarily love, but there’s something just innately wrong about the guy, this creepy little man who will not die and kills everyone else while a sparse crowd tries to laugh at modern references the puppeteer’s thrown in to stay relevant – maybe Punch will reference an iPhone while he caves his wife’s head in, that sort of thing). In ‘The Bones of Small Mammals’, it’s no wonder the main character ends up there; he’s a ‘traditionalist’ and a ‘disciplinarian’, which are nice words used to paper over the bones and the abuse. There’s also a point of comparison with M.R. James’ ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ – there our stuffy narrator is embarking on a Nice and Sensible Victorian/Edwardian coastal holiday – the horrors he uncovers are pre-Christian, a threatening past lurking under the surface of his neatly categorised world. In ‘The Bones of Small Mammals’, our own Mr Richard James (I maybe regret how smug I was with that name) comes into the ruins of what was essentially the ideal Edwardian holiday resort – what’s lurking there is far more base, and in him.
There’s a documentary called From the Sea to the Land Beyond about the UK coast; it’s mostly archive footage and the band Sea Power did the soundtrack – it’s genuinely fascinating.
'Mallaig Sprinkling Song' from Gutter 17 – it’s so beautifully done. I love how things progress from feeling soft like grass to all the motors and tension and anxiety. This story is about a bunch of boys in camp. What inspired you to write this? Do you see these stories as reflections/analysis/mirrors of masculinities?
I’m glad you like it – it’s quite an old story at this point and I think it shows some sloppy prose that I wouldn’t use now, but I don’t want to do a George Lucas and start editing published work.
Scout camp is a strange place. It’s aping at a sort of military air with the uniforms and they’re trying to trust you with axes and campfires and a little independence. In practice, this creates a bit of a stray dog atmosphere, where kids are wandering around doing the first thing that comes to mind. I suppose it is a bit of performative masculinity – that independence is just a façade and you know deep down you probably shouldn’t be trusted with fire (I still shouldn’t). Most people deal with that fine in the end, but Alex in this story is that sort of arse who passes as ordinary on most occasions and starts pushing at boundaries the second he’s given any leeway. There’s one in every scout troop, school, university etc. He exists to transgress really, though he’s too cowardly to do that openly.
There is, I think, an odd tranquillity about this piece though – he’s dropped out of humanity and started melding with the grass on a still night; deliberately divesting yourself of higher thought has its appeal and the wilderness is great for that. There’s a water element too of course, so maybe that existentialism is coming in again. Of course, he snaps his ankle in karmic fashion and he’s back to being a weaselly little boy in a situation that’s going to be difficult to explain in daylight.
There're a lot of biblical references in your work. Your characters who are believers are often questioned about their beliefs by other characters. Do you consciously do this? – “At times he would have to reckon his faith against a knee-jerk declaration of coincidence, like he was rolling dice” you write in 'Ten Leopards' for Tether's End. This line struck me, as I often mull over metaphysics and faith and the divine, etc., and find meaning in moments that scream: coincidence. Because otherwise I'm just lost in the void.
It's honestly just a consequence of Catholic school and a history of literature that likes quoting the King James Bible. I’ve never been religious or had belief in much of anything, but that sort of thing still impacts you culturally – in a Catholic school that religious aspect can appear in any subject, like the monster in It Follows. You’ll be in maths and the priest will burst in and make everyone go to the offertory. That’s good and bad for literature – religious knowledge helps you parse most texts written pre-20th century and even after; though I’m sure we missed out on a lot of texts that the administration wouldn’t approve of – Edwin Morgan’s on the Scottish curriculum, it’s a little suspicious we never covered him.
I think religion comes out quite negatively in most of my published works – Ridley’s beliefs are sincere in Jellyfish, but they are played for comedy mostly. Aiden in ‘Ten Leopards’ has essentially invented his own, though he’s too arrogant to admit it; Priest in ‘Autumn Still Has Its Migrations’ isn’t a total monster, but he’s organised religion as a colonial pillar, so I wouldn’t view him all that sympathetically. The only benevolent example I can think of is the catchy titular hymn in ‘Mallaig Sprinkling Song’ that temporarily holds off Alex’s trigger finger.
I do exactly the sort of thing Aiden does in that quote, though I tend to see it more through a story structure lens. I passed three dead birds (blackbird, seagull, wren) on the way to work one morning and Mirri had to convince me it wasn’t foreshadowing something. Once during lockdown, I was about to deliver a zoom lecture to first year students and a blackbird slammed into my window, killed instantly. The lecture was on Gothic literature. That’s too on the nose.
Tell me about the significance of Greek myths in your work.
I think the general harshness of folk stories/myths appeals – the fact that a sin or even a social faux-pas can be committed and somehow results in a horrific punishment that makes you really question what’s been deserved (unless they’re still extremely unsympathetic, like Agamemnon). Plus there’s the Ray Harryhausen stop motion monster movies like Jason and the Argonauts that used to play constantly on Channel 5 when I was a kid – it’s hard not to like skeleton warriors.
The minotaur is more specific – both the poem ‘Minos and Asterion’ and the story ‘Autumn Still Has Its Migrations’ are minotaur stories, one literal and one more thematic. I don’t think I discovered that the minotaur actually had a name (Asterion) until I read Borges’ ‘House of Asterion’ a few years back. It roughly means ‘starry one’ or ‘from the stars’ – I did start wondering why they named him if they were so intent on warping him into a tool of the Cretan empire, making a monster they could outsource their cruelty to. King Minos tends not to get too much focus in most tellings, but it seems to me that the whole story just reeks of a sort of an imperial/colonial insecurity, especially with the whole bloodline/ableism angle (I know the minotaur isn’t traditionally biologically Minos’ son, but he is the heir; whereas Lungfish in ‘Autumn’ is his mum and dad’s biological kid). People having been walling up their relatives to make ghost stories for centuries and it’s inextricably linked to this pathetic projection of strength. Probably why Lungfish makes it out okay from his labyrinth of rafters and eaves while none of his family do – I was looking for a little bit of optimism in all that.
Also, the monster as outlier is always interesting – it’s something for a ruling class to point at and everyone so transfixed by how horrible it is that they forget what’s going on at home.
'Autumn Still Has Its Migrations' for Beneath Ceaseless Skies is a work of literary adventure fantasy. This genre excites me. Clearly, the future is gonna be fantastical (reality will blur), and so, literature has to keep up. If I may ask: why do you think we must write adventure fantasy in a literary manner instead of as plain adventure fantasy. Is there a distinction to be made here in the first place? What counts as literary?
My answer to this might be different if I had a book to push right now, but I think genre is mostly marketing. You look at someone like Gene Wolfe who has a quite self-consciously Nabokovian style but he’s always in the hard sci-fi area of the bookshop while there’s far worse prose in the literary section. Shirley Jackson’s horror sometimes; Ursula K LeGuin loved her spaceships. Donald Westlake alternated his prose style with each paperback and he put out one every odd month – it’s great to read one of his comic heist books right after the extremely sparse and mean books he wrote as Richard Stark; you’d probably never know they were the same guy if he hadn’t been open about it. And as Martin Amis put it, Elmore Leonard was one of America’s great prose stylists writing crime anyone could read. Any of these authors could be marketed as literature and they’re also fairly marketed as their chosen genres. As long as it isn’t disposable, it’s literature to my mind; as long as you’re thinking about it after you finish. I don’t like when people are snobbish about genre; at the same time it pisses me off when people act as if literary fiction is difficult or incomprehensible – it’s not difficult to try.
One thing I used to always say to students is that a genre’s enemy is its authors who only read that genre – there’s a thousand Lord of the Rings knock-offs by people who had no takeaway from those books other than that they wanted that for themselves. You have to be your own person with your own ideas to bring to the work – if your prose is clean and clear, that’s even better.
If I bring the question back to just this story – the style is intrinsically linked to the character Lungfish. It’s stylised because he has a unique perspective and I think it would be cheaper to present him in my usual third-person approach; so he changes the tenses, overuses proper nouns, gives emphasis to things no other character would emphasise etc.
You have a PhD in Creative Writing. (Whilst I chuckle as I ask you this, because I'm literally going mad writing my PhD thesis, I must yet ask:) What was the biggest challenge you faced during the PhD -- writing/thinking both creatively and critically for three+ years? Existential dilemmas regarding what one is trying to achieve through such a mind-flex? Or something entirely different?
I’ve perhaps got a sadder example than most in that my primary supervisor, Beatrice Colin, passed away right around midway through my PhD. She’d been my teacher right through undergrad and Masters, so we knew exactly how the other worked and how we could properly co-operate. She did a lot of writing for radio drama so there was a lot of back and forth on dialogue in particular – I wonder what she’d make of Jellyfish, come to think of it. She wasn’t really one for the absurd and I’m not sure if I would have brought it to her immediately. She was mainly a historical novelist – The Luminous Life of Lily Aphrodite was probably her best known, and worth looking out for. She’s missed.
There was a bit of chaos resulting– myself and Mara, another PhD at the time, had to get a new primary supervisor (my secondary supervisor was Elspeth Jajdelska for the English lit side of things, who you probably know is great as much as I do) and we wound up all the way over at Stirling Uni for that. Thankfully, that’s where I met the great writer Kevin MacNeill (and his greyhound daemon Molly) who was my primary supervisor for the last half – he has a completely different style of both writing and teaching compared to Beatrice, so the thesis ended up much different from its original (granted, vague) plan with his influence. To bring it back to your question – I don’t think I knew what I wanted from my writing during my PhD; I was only 23 when I started. The critical thesis, sure, I wanted to talk about Flannery O’Conner, William Gay, Davis Grubb etc, all the Southern Gothic classics. Fiction-wise, I think I was very easily influenced. By the time I graduated I think I had a much better idea of what I was capable of and how I could use it.
We found out after Beatrice passed that she had a pop single out in the 1980s, which is a really nice thing to find out about someone. It’s been stuck in my head since 2019; I’m sure she’d find that funny.
What's your favourite form? Short/flash fiction, the novel, or poetry?
I’m going to tentatively say short story because it’s what I started with and it’s still my first instinct with how to approach an idea. Poetry is more of a writing exercise for me and I’ve really never written flash fiction that I’ve been happy with (probably because I start thinking about Kafka’s ‘A Little Fable’ or ‘Before the Law’ halfway through, and you can’t improve on that). Short stories can hit hard without risking length-induced melodrama. Flannery O’Connor said a short story is complete when you realise you’ve said all you need to say about a character (‘nothing more relating to the mystery of [the character’s] personality’) – we don’t need to follow them through the logical results that a novel structure might offer. For example, in ‘The Bones of Small Mammals’, there could be a version where we go through court and the police are flesh and blood instead of surreal shadows and voices converging on the old creep’s drawn blinds, but I don’t really see the point.
But hey, we’ll see what my answer to this is when I’ve gotten through the novel – short story endings aren’t chapter endings, that’s what I’ve been learning so far. That and characters end up more endearing in longform, so you can’t be quite as glib about their fates.
What are you working on now?
The novel – slowly – and a bunch of short stories, some that are almost done and others that are just images sketched out and might not develop into anything (though these can always be plundered for good phrases if so). The novel I’ve been describing vaguely as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre crossed with Children of Men. But to sum it up properly I’ll just quote something a judge yells at the main characters of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia: ‘I do not find that your story excuses your behaviour. In fact, it actually seems like you committed a litany of additional crimes in the process!’
There’s another Lungfish story that I’ve been working on, and there are a few stories that I’ve sent out before unsuccessfully that I try to rejigger once in a while. The novel’s been at 40k words for a while now, which I reckon is pretty good progress – if I was going to give up I think I would have at 10k.
There’s also half a dozen abandoned short stories about boxing, one of which I’ll complete eventually. If a story I’m reading has boxing or a carnival in it, I’m pretty happy.
On Twitter/X, you describe yourself as an occasional writer. So, really, how often do you write?
I think the ‘occasional writer’ description was mostly me being self-deprecating about being a much slower writer than Mirri. We’ve got different processes – she’ll quickly type up a huge first draft and then edit; whereas I’ll plod my way through something editing as I go or write a disconnected scene to be stitched in later.
How often depends. I write a lot of longhand or app notes, so whenever I actually sit down to write much of it is typing up and improving things that have been written in the middle of the night, or on the bus or stuck in a pub toilet etc. It tends to make me feel better about not sitting down to write with a great amount of consistency because I know I have something to start from right away. The thing is that I’m always thinking about writing when I’m not doing it, which is a nice problem to have even if it is a nagging voice telling me to work. Publication is a great end goal of course, but you’ll know as well as I do that the feeling you get when you finish something you’re happy with is better than anything.
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