A Birkbeck alumnus from the MA in Creative Writing class of 2023, Louie Conway has won second prize in the esteemed Brick Lane Bookshop Short Story Prize, for his piece ‘Un.’
The story takes us on a detailed journey of a young man’s morning, as he babysits his eleven-month-old niece. Her hands slapping the tiles as she crawls around the space, his hands busy on his smartphone as he switches between apps and worlds. The contrast to their two different realities is stark, and a little depressing in its unconnectedness.
Influenced by a slew of podcasters and ultra-masculine thought-provokers, the young man struggles to place himself in the war on traditional masculinity. Do women like that, or do they hate it but subconsciously love it? Conway uses a detached, omniscient perspective, to great effect. He’s able to analyse the protagonist in a very clinical manner, unpacking his desires and base fears.
“The baby’s brain being, at this early stage of development, comparable to the brain of an adult under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs: wide open and hypersensitive.”
It’s an interesting choice, to give the baby a rather snobbishly intellectual vocabulary, and letting her describe her senses as if she were reciting it to a packed University Lecture Hall. But it works – in fact, it’s what makes this story so unique. Conway makes way for the adult and infant brains to meet as peers. It’s funny, and it’s clever.
“The baby understands with a kind of instinctive visceral despair that a process of change is underway which, once complete, cannot be reversed.”
I had a chat with Louie, to ask him about the research and inspiration behind Un.
“People say that your first novel is informed by everything you’ve been thinking and learning about up to that point. I pretty much blew it all on one short story. Neuroscience, physics, the hard problem of consciousness, psychedelics and philosophical idealism are topics I’ve been reading about in a fairly shallow, unstructured way for years out of my own curiosity. Also my sister had recently had a baby around the time I started writing the story, and I was fascinated with the question of what the hell she (the baby) thought was going on here in the world, having just shown up. The work of Alison Gopnik and Lisa Feldman Barret helped with imagining that.”
What other stories/short stories inspired you for this piece?
“I really enjoyed a collection called Reward System by Jem Calder, who uses hyper-specificity in a way that makes the familiar things he describes – phones, vapes, bottles of wine – seem uncanny or altogether bizarre. Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett is written in a voice that’s winding and wildly digressive as well as meticulously rhythmic and precise, so she was a big influence on the sentence level. As was David Foster Wallace’s collection Oblivion, which made me want to see if I could write long, showy sentences that carried an emotional payload. And obviously the creative writing workshop staple “Bullet in the Brain” by Tobias Wolff.”
What are you working on now?
“Right now I am cycling through three unfinished short stories, trying to inch them towards endings. When I’m feeling particularly brave, I do some work on “my novel”, which engages with similar themes to ‘Un’, but in a realist mode, and much shorter sentences.”
Un is quietly powerful, and brilliantly turns Chekov’s smoking gun technique on its head. He shows us a number of smoking guns, then—no spoilers—finds a way to surprise the reader.
The story is available to read online in The London Magazine, and will be published in the Brick Lane Bookshop 2024 Short Story Anthology shortly.
SUMMER KENDRICK IS ONE OF THE MANAGING EDITORS OF MIR AND A RECENT ALUMNUS OF THE BIRKBECK CREATIVE WRITING MA. HER BOOK GROUP, CLITERATURE CLUB, CAN BE FOUND ON INSTAGRAM AT @clubcliterature,