#francesleviston

It’s been fascinating to follow Frances’s career. I met her at university on a creative writing course where it soon became clear that she not only infinitely outclassed me (I still wake up in the middle of the night cringing about the poems I wrote), but everyone else in the class. She has a unique, unflinching, precise eye. Her two collections of poetry are unsettling and opaque (in the best possible sense). The Voice in My Ear is her first collection of short stories and it’s absolutely brilliant. Here, she meets the reader halfway, although sometimes the reader probably wishes she would back off a little bit. These are intense, eerie, claustrophobic stories – but they are also darkly funny. Her subject seems to be a kind of repressed adolescent trauma, manifested in uneven, uncommunicative relationships, often with mother figures; relationships that are dissected layer by layer until no one is quite sure who is in the right and who is in the wrong. My favourite story was Muster’s Puppets Presents…, which has a terrifying dreamlike logic, but is also very funny in its Lynchian unreality.