“The act of reading is a bodily experience”: an Interview with Mia Gallagher

Abstract

With Shift Mia Gallagher put together a collection of short stories which have been in the making for about thirty years. As many stories had been published separately in journals, they were given an overhaul to fit the new context: narrative perspectives were rewritten, layers added, so that the fifteen stories formed a new composition, variations on a theme. The collection forms a fugue building towards increasing weirdness, using faery tale techniques and magic realism to illustrate different shades of the uncanny. Emotions, originating in the protagonists’ unconscious, in a family’s past, whirl around yet are tightly structured. Gallagher’s prose is physical but focusing on the in-between: people’s perceptions shift, gender is fluid, objects metamorphose constantly. Her aesthetics are inspired by Baroque theatre, David Lynch and Francis Bacon.