Suzannah Evans Furnass is the author of ‘good-dark-night’ in our folkloric anthology Oaths and Offerings.
As Suzannah Evans, she has published two poetry books, Near Future and Space Baby with Nine Arches Press, and two pamphlets, including Green, a reimagining of climate anxiety through the figure of the Green Man, published by Bad Betty Press in 2024. In 2019 she was a Gladstone’s Library Writer in Residence, and in 2021 received a Northern Writers’ Award. ‘good-dark-night’ is her first piece of published fiction.
We spoke to Suzannah about her influences, from long-term nuclear waste warning messages to Irish fairy forts, her favourite Sheffield-based bookshops, and more!
How did you approach the theme of folklore through your story?
I am usually writing about the future in some context or another, and I am very interested in how that future features a collective remembering, misremembering or forgetting. I feel as if I’m alive at the end of something, with no idea what will come next, and what will be remembered of the way things are now, or how much choice we might collectively have over that. Every empire and civilisation that has ever existed has fallen into folklore, history and belief and I find the intersection of those three things quite thrilling.
The story contains standing stones, which I am fascinated by precisely because we’ve lost or forgotten what they were for. The standing stones in the story were also created for a purpose, but sadly for the characters that purpose has been forgotten.
The story also follows some perhaps predictable narratives from our time; climate change and the persistence of plastic waste. Our contemporary collective return to folklore could be seen as a response to things like this, to the loss of connection with the environment. Perhaps in the future a new kind of folklore will exist around it.
Were there particular folk histories, traditions or stories you drew from?
The Pilgrims in the story are based a little on Thomas Sebeok’s idea of the Atomic Priesthood, but they’ve forgotten a lot of what they used to know. Long-term nuclear waste warning messages is one of my most-visited Wikipedia pages.
An Irish archaeologist called Patrick McCafferty has theorised that standing stones or ‘fairy forts’ in Ireland were actually settlements formerly decimated by anthrax, and that anyone who chose to dig there risked the disease being unearthed, thus leading to superstition that these places are places the fairies don’t want you to go, or you’ll be struck down. I liked the idea of standing stones as a warning, mistaken for a holy place, or some mixture of the two.
What advice would you share with budding short story writers?
This is my first published story, so I’d say I’m amongst you. But ‘be as weird as you need to be’ has always been my writing credo.
Could you tell us about your favourite Northern bookshop?
Sheffield has a wealth of good, friendly independent bookshops and so it’s hard to pick just one. For poetry I love Rhyme and Reason, which always has whatever new title I might be looking for, despite its tiny poetry bookshelf! Juno Books is a Queer Feminist bookshop and they’ve given me some brilliant title recommendations over the years. And La Biblioteka does some fun events and stocks poetry magazines that you can’t find anywhere else!
Finally, do you have a favourite piece of folklore you’d like to share?
I don’t know if I have a favourite, but I’m quite interested in the sort of ‘micro folklore’ that families build within themselves – growing up, for example, everyone knew about the tooth fairy but only my family seemed to know about ‘fairy cake-hole’ a mysterious being who took chunks out of baked goods unseen, usually overnight. Whether it was just my dad looking for a snack is still disputed.
