Steven French is the author of ‘Awd Goggle’ in our first anthology of folklore-inspired stories, Oaths and Offerings. Steven is a retired academic from the University of Leeds. He has reviewed books of fantasy and science-fiction for SF2 Concatenation, and his own short stories have appeared in The Piker Press, State of Matter, and Suburban Witchcraft, among others.
Could you tell us how the idea for your story came together?
Steven French: One line of folklore that I have drawn from, both here in ‘Awd Goggle’ and in some of my other stories, has to do with boggarts. Often portrayed as malicious and ugly, I feel they’ve sometimes been given a bad rap, taking the blame for missing children for example. But there’s also a tradition of the house- or family boggart, who can be protective, and it’s an easy stretch to imagine someone who’s perhaps boggart-adjacent being protective of a place, or even of a particular tree.
The idea of making it a crab-apple tree came from a prompt for a story competition and that brought to mind two things: first, the character Orr from Catch-22 who, as a child, walked around with crab apples in his cheeks, and second, the historical fact that crab apples were used to flavour mead. Putting those together with the other, ancient, folkloric tradition of the ferryman who requires payment for transporting the dead into the underworld and I had the basis for my story.
As for the crab apple tree itself and the orchard in which it sat, the old maps of Leeds show a building known as ‘The Old Boggart (or Bogard) House’ and ‘Bogart’, as a name, is Dutch in origin, given to someone who lived near or worked in, an orchard. I actually didn’t make that connection, or at least not explicitly, until after I wrote the story but it must have been there as I have one of those old maps on my desk!
What advice would you share with budding short story writers?
Keep on writing, even in, especially in, the face of multiple rejections! And follow your own instincts – don’t be put off by critics or editors (!). Say what you want to say and get it out of your head and onto the page.
Could you tell us about your favourite Northern bookshop?
If I’d been answering this a year ago, I would have said Next Chapter Books, which was a women-led bookshop in the Corn Exchange in Leeds but sadly it’s now closed. I was given some excellent suggestions for birthday and Christmas presents there.
I should also mention the fabulous and famous Barter Books in Alnwick, where my wife and I used to stop on our way up the A1. Good butties too!
Finally, do you have a favourite piece of folklore?
I quite like the stories about the Gabble Rachets, flying demonic dogs, some with human heads, which would hunt out the newly dead, making a terrifying racket as they did so. Apparently some old Oxford Professor proclaimed they were just geese, and having heard skeins of geese flying and calling out overhead when I walk our dog in the pre-dawn darkness, I can see why he might suggest that, but I’d like to think people in these parts know what geese sound like!
You can find Steven on Bluesky, and read his story along with other works of folklore-inspired fiction in our upcoming anthology, out 4th June.
