#the rental heart

Kirsty Logan’s fantastical fiction has thrilled me for nearly four years now, and I’ve been lucky enough to work with her hereandelsewhere online, but my favorite experience (so far) has been reading her debut story collection, The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales. These twenty surreal and sumptuous stories defy tidy labels. Fairy tales, magical realism, steampunk, literary fiction. It’s all there.

Logan’s work is humming with dreamy, erotic energy. Every detail, even the mundane, is scandalously compelling. Her characters are far from meek damsels and hollow princes–they are adventurers; positively lusty with their desire to discover what fate has in store for them. Witches, coin-operated boys, Eros-soaked lovers, an imprisoned empress, a girl with antlers, a boy with a tiger’s tail. Many of them are at liminal stages in their lives, in the twilight of adolescence or facing a major personal upheaval. Some of them live within traditional fairy tale retellings, and some of them live in their own contemporary fables, but every one of them is stuffed with lust and loss. They all seek love or a worthy substitution, and from Logan’s dark, wild worlds, they will haunt you.

1) First of all, when and how did you find out that Salt wanted to publish The Rental Heart?

It was an unexpected tweet. I have my phone set to flash up Twitter messages and Facebook comments but not new emails, and as I was getting ready to go out with my girlfriend Annie one afternoon I noticed a Twitter message flash up: CONGRATULATIONS. I had no idea what I was being congratulated on (though it’s always nice to be congratulated, no matter what it’s for). So I checked my email, and there was a lovely message from Salt saying I had won the Scott Prize and they were going to publish my book. Annie and I jumped around the room for a bit going WOOHOOOOO, and then we went out for a coffee. It was a good day, though really it was just the first step in a long process. I know in films there’s always The Moment where they get The Phone Call and then Everything Changes. But that made me realise that in life it doesn’t go that way. Book publishing is generally a slow and staggered process, and there’s not one big explodey moment where you’re showered with glitter and praise.

But as often happens in life, what I thought I knew turned out to be wrong, because for my next book I did get The Phone Call and The Moment! I was in a cafe and my agent called – the cafe was noisy and she was in a car with her baby in the back, so it was all rather loud and I knew I’d misheard her when she said ‘We’ve got an offer, are you sitting down?' It was only two days since she’d sent out the manuscript so I knew I’d misheard, as it takes months for editors to even glance at your manuscript. But no, it was true, and the offer was so fast and so amazing that I was glad that I’d been sitting down because if not I’d have fallen over. Now I try and live by a Dutch proverb: “Don’t worry. It will happen differently anyway”. Publishing, like life, often surprises you.

3) Which story was the most difficult to write and why?

They were all easy, and they were all ridiculously hard. Ideas are simple and plentiful – I have more story ideas right now than I could write for the next ten years, and every day another one appears. I don’t struggle to create worlds or situations, or to put sentences together. But there is one thing that I find near-impossible, and struggle with on every story I write: the 80% mark. I don’t know what it is, but something happens when I’m about 80% through a story when I just… stall. I’m frustrated, I’m bored, I know how to finish the story but I just can’t do it. I have to really push myself through. It helps to talk it out with other people, to take a break, or sometimes to just put my arse in the chair and my hands on the keyboard and just write the bloody thing. It never gets easier.

4) The Rental Heart glides from one setting to the next, spanning the past few hundred years and two continents. I love your ability to slip into unfamiliar times and places and make them so sensually real. When you begin a story, is there a time period and/or setting that comes most naturally to you?

I always have a sense of the 'world’ of the story before I begin it. My process for coming up with a story basically consists of daydreaming. I get on a bus or train, put in my headphones, and listen to music while watching the scenery pass by the window. I need movement – a walk is okay, but a trip on public transport is best. By the time I get to where I’m going, the story has always taken shape in my mind.

I like that you’ve used the phrase 'sensually,’ as that’s how it works for me at first: purely in the senses. When I’ve figured out the story’s world I don’t necessarily know what will happen, who it will happen to, or exactly where – but I do know the tone and feel of the story, certain sights and smells and sounds, perhaps the temperature of the air or the texture of the ground.

So much of our sensual experience is based in place, and that’s what comes together for me when I’m starting to write a story. Not in the sense of a specific place like Rome or Skye or Minnesota, but in a more general sense: by the sea, in an isolated place, at the edge of a city. First I get the feel for the setting, and then I’ll decide on the specific place. Often my stories are set in unreal and unspecified places: the woods, the island, the city. The places usually have a Scottish or Northern European feel, though, even if it’s not specified, because those settings are most familiar to me.

Even when I write stories that aren’t set in the present, they’re rarely historical in the strict sense – I’m sure a historian would shred them to pieces! I often write in 'fairy tale time’: a vague past, a once-upon-a-time that might not be historically real but is real in a timeless sociological and emotional way. 

5) Speaking of settings, how important is your upbringing and current life in Scotland to your literary aesthetic?

Scotland is so inspirational to me. Although I’m Scottish by family, I was actually born in a small town in the English Midlands, and it was dull dull dull. Both my parents are from Scotland, and my family moved back to Glasgow when I was 13. If I’d stayed in that English town I certainly wouldn’t be the same writer I am today. 

So much of Scottish culture is water-based. Glasgow isn’t by the sea, but it’s got a strong history of shipbuilding – the US still buys old ships that were built on the Clyde river by Glasgow’s shipbuilders, because they’re so good. I love Scottish mythology and folktales, and many of those stories (selkies, kelpies, mermaids) are based on the sea. If you look on a map, Scotland is a very craggy country with lots of coastline, and many small islands off its north and west coasts, so there’s a lot of connection to the sea. To give you a sense of it, England has 1,988 miles of coastline – but Scotland has 10,246 miles.

My dad was also a big influence on me, and I’ve always associated him with water and the sea. He was born on the small Scottish island of Bute. When I was a child he had a small sailboat called First Symphony on Lake Windermere in England, and used to take me out sailing. After he died, my mother and brother and I scattered his ashes on the beach at Culzean Castle, which looks out on Bute. Now every time I’m by the sea, I feel that I’m with my dad.

I’m currently working on my third book, a collection of linked stories called A Portable Shelter. It’s inspired by Scottish and Scandinavian folk tales. Part of the research for the book is to travel around the Scottish Highlands and Islands, and I did the first part of that recently when my girlfriend Annie and I went up to the Applecross peninsula with our lurcher puppy Rosie. The landscape there is glorious, whether it’s endless blue skies or torrential rain (and we got a bit of both!). I ate local squat lobster, went out on a fishing boat, explored lochs, and climbed seaweed-slippery rocks. I even stripped to my knickers and waded into a loch to retrieve Rosie’s ball when I threw it in deep water. And it was a particularly memorable trip because Annie and I got engaged. So many of my memories are linked to Scottish landscapes.

Photo by Luis del Rio.

6) What are your favorite fairy tale retellings?

I’m madly in love with Emma Donoghue’s Kissing the Witch. I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on retold fairytales, and to my mind Donoghue’s was the only book that actually subverted fairytales at their base level, rather than just changing a few details or flipping characters around. It’s sadly out of print now, but if you can find a copy then grab it. Reading it is an education.

7) If you could turn one of the book’s stories into a short film, which one would you choose and why?

Conversation by Dawn WestandKirsty Logan.