‘Sharpened pencils are for novices’: An Interview with Rachael Smart

By Naomi Adam

My memoir is true, my fiction isn’t, but both organically inform the other. I am a survivor of coercive control and long-term post-separation abuse, and nobody lives through intimate terrorism without it colouring their work.  

Letters are important to our latest contributor, Rachael Smart. So much so, that she will send them even when she’s unsure whether they will ever reach their intended addressee. When I ask who received her most recent missive, she reveals that it was Dolgellau, a mountain town in Wales. Or, at least, she hopes it was received. ‘It was, quite simply, a deep and cellular thank you for my frayed calf muscles and the quietening presence of sheep,’ she explains. ‘I wanted to say thank you, too, for the cool mint of the mountains and the purpling velours of the heath, for the mudflats and the sandpipers, and the tide’s reassuring pull and draw.’ At a loss as to where to direct this post-staycation praise, Rachael ultimately opted for:

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The Littlest Black Lamb Who Fed Voraciously,

Top Field Where You Stopped to Eat the Skittles,

Dolgellau

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‘I can only trust it got there,’ she observes wryly.

This entwining of high and low, the pairing of striking synaesthesia with recognisable, supermarket-shelf references, is something of Rachael’s hallmark. Her writing is by turns humorous and harrowing, at once evocative and enigmatic – characteristics as apparent in her most recent correspondence to The Letters Page as in her responses to a series of interview questions I sent across to her via email. In one, she recalls ‘a flimsy adolescent romance with a teenage boy built like a cow shed,’ and the un-spellchecked sign-off that to a love letter that sealed his fate: ‘Goodnight, my Sweatheart. Outraged.’ In another, her works-in-progress are self-deprecatingly deemed ‘surreal little fictions, fizzy fish bright.’

Rachael is no stranger to us here at The Letters Page. Studying for a Master’s degree, she worked as an intern on our placement programme, and she last wrote to us back in 2020, huddled at the ping-pong table which served as her office desk during the first pandemic lockdown. Her latest letter begins by acknowledging the gulf between those panicked months and the present moment. ‘It has been an age since we spoke way back in the wilderness of Covid,’ she muses – likely as startled as the rest of us by the concertinaing of time that has launched us from the early days of the decade into the maw of its middle. In the intervening years, Rachael hopes that her writing voice has become more urgent. Yet she continues to draw ideas from the objects that surround her: furniture (see the aforementioned ping-pong table), debris, animals, and souvenirs are among the sources of inspiration she lists.

Rachael’s most recent letter invokes the 1993 film The Piano, a New Zealand-set and -shot arthouse production that collected three Oscars, including Best Original Screenplay for its director Jane Campion. Its protagonist Ada, a mute woman constrained by the mores of Victorian society, finds an outlet in her virtuosic piano playing – and Rachael finds in Ada’s story a metaphor for art as salvation from oppression and abuse. Rachael’s personal connection to these topics is palpable in her letter, and in interview she notes that ‘nobody lives through intimate terrorism without it colouring their work.’ This lived experience also informs the letter’s footnote – an acknowledgement of the many loopholes in local stalking prevention orders that is ripe with frustration.

Given the intertext of Rachael’s letter, it’s somewhat surprising that she’s avoided the small screen for the better part of 15 years. And while she does love going to the cinema – ‘it is a great luxury to be seduced by a big screen from a bucket seat’ – she is conscious of the stifling effect that the visual medium can have upon creativity. ‘Because the visuals are already formed, I struggle with what is left to tell,’ she admits.

When not preoccupied penning letters of appreciation to local flora and fauna, Rachael has written for outlets including Ink, Sweat, and Tears, Milk Candy Review, and most recently, Bath Flash Fiction. Ironically, she harbours a fervent hatred of the term flash fiction: ‘so reductionist for a form of writing which, when done successfully, makes as full and lasting an impression as a longer short story.’ Matchbox fiction, glimmer fiction and glow fiction are among her proposed alternatives for a rebrand. (Literati: take note.)

Rachael is also a frequent contributor to the lifestyle and advice website The Motherload, where her bio mentions that she ‘writes best when the pencil loses its point.’ As Rachael explains, this is more than a striking turn of phrase: ‘I use pencils because you can erase. If that pencil becomes blunt and woolly-ended from use and you no longer erase or know what time of day it is, you have written a very fine draft.’ And the sharpened pencil? They’re for novices, according to Rachael, who instead makes sure it’s her prose that’s sharp, and smart.

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The Letters Page team are back in the office, and ready to read your real letters again – written with pencils blunt or sharp (or even a ballpoint). We publish stories, essays, poems, memoir, reportage, criticism, recipes, travelogues, and any hybrid forms, so long as they come to us in the form of a letter. We are looking for writers of all nationalities and ages, both established and emerging.

Your letter must be sent in the post, to:

The Letters Page, School of English, University of Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK

See our submissions page for more information.