Introducing Extra Teeth Mentorships: A Chat With Catherine Wilson
During our open submissions window for Issue Four (publishing Nov 2021), for the first time ever we welcomed applications to Extra Teeth Mentorships, in which writers submitting their work to our magazine can be considered for writing support and feedback from Editorial Director Heather Parry. We received a large number of applications in our recent submission period and we’re loving reading through them all – decisions to be made soon!
The beginnings of this programme were a little more ad hoc – we asked Catherine Wilson how she found working with Heather, and hopefully you’ll see why we decided to extend and formalise the mentorships going forward! If you’ve already applied for our next round of mentorships, hopefully this will give you an idea of what to expect…
1. When we asked if you might be interested in an informal mentorship with Extra Teeth, what did you expect from the experience? Can you tell us about how the mentorship went from your perspective?
CW: I originally submitted a non-fiction essay to Issue 2 of Extra Teeth, at that point I hadn’t really touched short story writing much. I had a couple of vague pieces half-drafted, but I found short fiction a real challenge - I have been writing poetry for the stage since about 2014 and more for the page since about 2018 (with a lot of crossover). The first relies on an audience, and the second is about being as brief as possible - two things that you have to relearn how they can work when it comes to longer fiction!
The essay didn’t make their cut, but when Extra Teeth offered mentorship I expected I might get a couple paragraphs of notes in response to the essay, and I was incredibly thankful that it grew into much more than that!
Heather and I did our calls over the phone - avoiding travelling and Zoom fatigue at the same time - every 2-3 months. I would send her a couple of pieces a week or so before so she could make suggested edits, and then we would talk about them together. This was on a line-by-line basis, but also on a larger scale - what do you want this piece to do? What is the main idea? How do you want readers to feel? I learned a lot about how to structure a piece and how to write engagingly.
Beyond this, we also spoke about everything else that being a writer entails that isn’t writing. She gave me a much, much needed confidence boost about submissions (i.e., they are brutal, your work is good, it’s okay to be hurt or need a wee boost every now and then) and also about how to use the skills I already had.
2. Has the mentorship helped develop your writing in the long run?
CW: Since I started writing short stories in 2020, I have finished three stories - all of which have been published, or accepted for publication, in great homes: The New Gothic Review, Extra Teeth’s Issue 3 and Open Book’s Unbound. Heather gave me feedback on all of these pieces, except “Fight or Flight” which I submitted to Extra Teeth with no heads up!
Longer term, I would have to say the feedback was invaluable - Heather really improved my confidence in a way that feels career-changing. She was passionate and excited about my work. It was infectious and helped me go back to my work with a sense of what was good about it!
I also felt she gave me a personalised toolkit of editorial ideas. She could articulately explain the specific way I wrote and when it did, and didn’t, work. I remember, for example, her pointing out I kept burying my best lines in the middle of the first paragraph instead of opening with them.
Now, when I write, I have a much better technical understanding of how writing works - from individual words to the full flow of a story. I feel brave to follow my instincts and write more boldly, weirdly and unexpectedly whilst also feeling I have the tools at my disposal to understand how a story works from word-to-word.
3. Your story' ‘Fight or Flight’ was accepted to be included in Issue Three. Can you tell us a bit about writing it, and why you chose to submit it to us?
CW: The story follows a young woman who has to navigate a world where all the men are birds. It’s told in a second-person choose your own adventure storyline, so the reader is firmly in her shoes and has to make decisions about her life as if it was their own.
I started writing it after a couple of my mentoring sessions with Heather with one of the things she had said in the back of my head - you can always go weirder! During our mentoring phone calls we spoke about all the stuff you do around writing - whether that be going on a long walk to have a think, or how what you read and watch builds your skills as a writer. I remember near the end of one call she told me to go and watch The Lighthouse and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night - two very weird films. Her ethos was part inspiration - they’re good films with good stories - and part determination - if someone can make something this surreal, why can’t I? I had a tendency to repeat and over-explain everything in all my stories, and mentoring blasted that right out of me.
I felt “Fight or Flight” would have a good home in Extra Teeth because it did something I hadn’t yet seen in that magazine - mainly, the choose-your-own adventure format - but had an ethos that felt like it fit. It was a weird, self-contained universe like the stories in previous issues from Hidden Ink Child, Martin MacInnes and Jan Carson. I was a huge fan of some of the writers announced for Issue 3, and have a huge inner-critic, but when I saw it in print, it felt totally right sharing company with writers like Helen McClory, Ross McCleary and Alice Slater. We all wrote completely different stories, but they share a difference - a totally unique way of looking at the world.
4. What would you say to someone considering applying for an Extra Teeth mentorship?
CW: Don’t even hesitate. Whether you’ve written one story, or hundreds, have a read of Extra Teeth, see which one feels most at home and send it. Heather gave me advice from the smallest of sparks, so sit down and finish it, then send it with love!
Even if you don’t get the mentorship, you’re still on the Extra Teeth radar - which is a great place to be.
5. What are you working on right now?
CW: My head is still stuck in the universe I set up in “Fight or Flight”, so I’ve been sketching out a couple of pieces that stay in the realm of feminism and feathers! I have also been reworking a longer story I worked with Heather on that’s inspired by some of the abandoned islands along the coast of Scotland.
I’m also a poet, so I’m always playing with words. Sometimes that’s getting as few on the page as possible, and sometimes it’s stretching it out into a story. In my arts coordination role I work with a visual artist called Pearl Kinnear who told me she works on many different paintings at the same time - whilst only a handful may go onto be sold or hang in an exhibition, she needs to keep multiple ideas up in the air or, as she put it, “problem solve one painting with another”.
I’m the same with writing - sitting down to plot or write always feels like tending to a garden rather than focussing on one big tree.