Harriet Kline, author of 'This Shining Life' - Using work as inspiration, the monster that gets her started and the meaning of life
Writer's Routine
Dan Simpson
4.9 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 4 February 2022
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Harriet Kline is an award-winning short story writer. 'Ghost' won the Hissac short story competition, 'Chest of Drawers', the London Magazine short story competition. Her work has been published online, in magazines and played out on BBC Radio.
Her debut novel is 'This Shining Life'. It's all about Ruth, who loses her husband Rich, and sets out on a mission with her son Ollie to solve puzzles he left for them, in a bid to discover the meaning of life. It's funny, beautiful and about love and loss.
It was inspired by the sad death of a friend, which oddly made her feel more alive than ever, and also her work as a registrar, where she is surrounded by life and death all day.
We talk about how she tried to find the meaning of life while writing the story, also why it started out as many short stories, and about the monster that gets her to work in the morning.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, welcome along to writer's routine where we take an inside look at an author's |
| 0:13.6 | creative day. This week is with Harriet Klein, an award-winning short story writer who has just |
| 0:20.0 | published her debut This Shining Life. |
| 0:23.1 | We talk about the monster that helps her write, also about her journey to publication, |
| 0:27.9 | and how it all started with the death of a dear friend, and how after that she lost the one thing |
| 0:34.5 | that she had learned from the time. |
| 0:36.6 | Oh, this is awful. I've lost my |
| 0:38.2 | authenticity. It's like I've lost my friend and now I'm losing this, this, you know, the one |
| 0:45.2 | thing that he gave me. I'm losing as well. And it was, you know, that was really upsetting. |
| 0:51.9 | And I was thinking about that. And then I was watching all the people around me grieving for this friend. And I started to notice that I thought, actually, this is happening to everyone. That as we're going through the grieving process, we are all sort of losing some sense of what that really means and what it means to be alive. |
| 1:13.8 | And then it was a little bit after that that I thought, |
| 1:17.6 | I want to write about this and I want to write about the different ways that people grieve |
| 1:24.1 | and the different ways that people are truly alive. |
| 1:27.1 | There is more on the way with Harriet Klein in this week's writer's routine. grieve and the different ways that people are truly alive. |
| 1:31.2 | There is more on the way with Harriet Klein in this week's writer's routine. |
| 1:45.5 | Yes, welcome along. My name's Dan Simpson. Thanks for finding us for following, streaming, sharing. |
| 1:51.3 | However you've reached us, managed to be here. I appreciate it. Thank you. It's writer's routine. |
| 1:56.4 | It's where we take a look inside an author's working day. How do they plan it? How do they get stuff done? How do they take the initial seed of an idea and make it a full-on oak tree of a beastly story? |
| 2:05.4 | Or some less cliched metaphor. |
| 2:08.2 | It's all of that. |
| 2:08.9 | It's on the way. |
| 2:09.8 | This week, we're with Harriet Klein. |
... |
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