An Interview with Peter McAllister (Issue 7)
ZM: What led you to go back to writing after a career as an art dealer?
PM: Since childhood I’ve always loved telling stories, both my own and others’. As an art dealer, I would relay the stories of incredible visual creatives and the artwork they produced, but I never felt completely satisfied; I wanted to be writing my own work, being creative myself.
When covid hit I was afforded the time to write fiction and poetry again, after many years. Once I started, I couldn’t stop and now, nearly five years later I feel like I’m still just getting going. Like many, the lockdowns gave me a new perspective on life and really made me think about what I wanted out of it. Writing is everything to me these days.
ZM: What is the focus of your PhD, and are you enjoying it?
PM: I’m loving it. My thesis focusses on the intersection of short story collections and novels, analysing the way both forms reveal narrative. I’ve become fascinated with linked short story collections that are marketed as novels (such as Cloud Atlas, Olive Kitteridge, Winesburg, Ohio) and am exploring the pervading opinion that novels are ‘better’ than short stories.
ZM: What was the inspiration behind Inkfish, and what do you look for in a poem or short story? Are there challenges associated with running an online magazine, and has this changed over the years?
PM: Inkfishmag.com is relatively new. I set it up at the beginning of 2024 with a fantastic writer and friend, Kate Horsley. We wanted to work together on something fun and are passionate about finding the very best poetry and literary fiction out there. We’re always sending each other links to stories and poems we’ve found and fallen in love with, so setting up a website to showcase some of it seemed like a natural progression.
We look for work that grabs us from the first line and keeps us going until the end, so that we can’t take our eyes from the page. I suppose the most challenging aspect of it is working our way through all the submissions and choosing favourites that will work for the upcoming edition; it’s heartbreaking to have to turn down incredible writing, just because it won’t fit with what we’re already doing.
ZM: In your own writing, is the form of an idea always clear before you put pen to paper?
PM: It really varies. Sometimes I start with a theme, item or action and just freewrite; something will often reveal itself as I go that then becomes the focus for the piece as I redraft. Other times (usually first thing in the morning) I have a very clear story/narrative in mind and can sit down to type out a first draft in one go that isn’t that different to the finished product after it’s been edited.
ZM: Do you find common themes in your writing?
PM: Yes, I keep returning to loss, whether that be loss of love, life or happiness. Also challenging relationships, which can often cross over with the theme of loss.