Ben Pester’s Short Stories Explore the Idea of Being Left Behind

Following up the success of his short story collection, published only last summer, Ben Pester’s collection of short stories, Sail Away Land, are like anxiety dreams in prose. Here we speak to the author about his writing process

Following up the success of last summer’s The Expansion Project, Ben Pester’s short story collection Sail Away Land retains some of its nightmarish corporate paranoia. The first and last stories of the collection – Around the Time of My Promotion and Exit Interview for a Valued Colleague, respectively – are tinged with it, exploring the unfurling psyche of its characters through the setting of work meetings. 

Pester’s interest in work culture continues to emerge in a number of other stories, but Sail Away Land approaches a myriad situations, from the very familiar (say, a dinner party) to the less so (almost everyone has suddenly found that their stepfathers have returned, even if they didn’t have one to begin with). But even when the story begins within a recognisable space, it doesn’t take long for Pester’s dream-like prose to untether itself and the reader. 

Below, Pester talks about his writing process, the idea of being left behind as a recurring theme in his work, and the elusive other space that is Sail Away Land.

Valeria Berghinz: It’s been less than a year since The Expansion Project – what did you find different in the process of writing a novel compared to writing short stories?

Ben Pester: The biggest difference is attention span. With a collection, you vaguely think that eventually it’ll become a book, but individually you’re focused on the stories themselves. These stories are thematically connected, but they’re not narratively linked, so you’re not necessarily thinking about the collection as a whole while writing.

You get these bursts of maybe two or three weeks where you’re getting a story down. It can happen very quickly. The idea arrives, you make a few notes, and suddenly you can picture the whole story. Then it takes however long it takes – a week, two weeks, a month, two months. But eventually the story is done, and then the next one comes when it comes.

VB: I saw you read Catmint at a Soho Reading Series event, and I thought about it a lot whilst reading the collection. There’s something very quick and propulsive about the language – it almost mirrors speech in the sense that you never quite know what’s coming next, or when reality might suddenly shift. Is that relationship to speech something you consciously think about in your writing?

BP: I think so. Obviously there are images and effects that emerge through reading, but voice is probably the most important thing for me. I’m really interested in the relationship between writing and speech – storytelling on paper, but still connected to speaking.

I recognise what you mean. I can sort of hear myself saying the story, if that makes sense. But when there are different characters, it’s not my voice anymore. The narrators tend to have their own cadence, their own way of speaking, and if they’re narrating the story then their voice becomes the tone of the story itself.

VB: Tell me about your first and last stories, Promotion and Exit Interview. 

BP: I like that sort of structure in a collection, an in and an out. I didn’t write those two stories specifically to mirror each other, but I am interested in work. Interviews are also an interesting narrative frame. They give you a way into what you actually want to write about.

So Promotion is partly about love, partly about cycles in life, and about feeling left behind or trapped in repetition. Then Exit Interview is also about being left behind, but from the other side. In the first story there’s this pressure to move forward. It’s framed as memory, somebody answering an interview question while remembering previous versions of the same situation. Whereas Exit Interview is somebody speaking to an unseen other after being left behind.

“Every journey creates an untold story about abandonment or loss” – Ben Pester

VB: I did recognise that idea of being left behind as a major theme throughout all the stories. 

BP: I think that’s probably true of all my work. It’s almost a counterpoint to the traditional Western monomyth: the story of leaving home, moving forward, growing, discovering something, eventually finding peace through departure. But every time somebody leaves, somebody else is left behind. Every journey creates an untold story about abandonment or loss.

What interests me isn’t just loss itself, but the changes that happen when you re-encounter someone you’ve lost, or when you revisit those memories. If you’re abandoned or grieving, you enter a cycle of repetition. You tell yourself the same stories over and over because there’s no future anymore with that person or situation. And then, if you encounter them again, or something that reminds you of them, your relationship to the memory changes. Your relationship to yourself changes too, because our memories are tied to who we are psychologically.

I think it’s a subject I’ll keep returning to. Parenthood and childhood too, because they’re full of separations. At some point there’s always a separation between you and your parents, or between you and your children. It feels incredibly present to me.

VB: Is that why you made Sail Away Land the titular story? 

BP: I wrote that story while I was thinking most intensely about the concept of Sail Away Land itself. The phrase actually came from my daughter when she was very little. She used to tell me that Sail Away Land was where she went when she fell asleep, and that she remembered being there before she was born. Her version is obviously very different from the one in the book, but I was completely under the spell of that idea. I didn’t want the story to explain the title. Instead it’s about a place that’s inaccessible to that particular character, somewhere they’re not welcome. That feels sad to me. Whereas maybe the rest of the collection has more access to that strange space. Everything is slightly dreamlike: meetings, dinner parties that don’t quite make sense, world events that don’t fit together properly. All of that feels closer to Sail Away Land. Some stories are inside it; others are outside it, wanting access.

VB: I noticed several moments where narrators become self-aware about storytelling itself. In one story the narrator says: “I’m saying all this (am I saying it? What actually is this that I am doing?)” Variations of that appear throughout the collection, and on one occasion the narrator is explicitly named Ben Pester.

BP: The Ben Pester thing is partly just honesty. Sometimes giving the narrator another name would only function as disguise, and I’m not interested in disguising it. That’s one of the pleasures of short stories too: everything doesn’t have to connect in the same way it would in a novel. So if I do that once, I can just do it once. 

But the “What am I doing? Am I speaking?” thing genuinely fascinates me. Narrative voice is strange. You and the reader agree to suspend reality together. It isn’t quite a diary, or a recording, or an interior monologue, or a letter. So I like making narrators aware of that uncertainty. It makes the boundaries of the story feel thinner somehow, like the membrane around it is becoming permeable. If there’s an extra tension there, some little frisson, that interests me.

VB: You mentioned that you’ve already turned in your next novel?

BP: Yeah, but I’m not constantly producing books – I’ve been writing for a very long time. The period I’ve been published is tiny compared to the amount of time I spent writing before publication. So although it feels quick from the outside, there’s actually a huge amount of older material underneath it. And honestly, I’m just better at writing now than I was when I first tried some of these ideas. A lot of it is practice and failure. Just continuing. That’s probably 90 per cent of writing, really. Some people arrive fully formed and do incredible work immediately, which is wonderful. But there are also people like me who keep going because they have this strange optimism that eventually the work will become good enough. Eventually you reach a point where you’re more in control of what you’re doing. But that took me a very long time.

Sail Away Land by Ben Pester is published by Granta Books and is out now.