They called the children night commuters. You used to find this strange, writing fundraising copy at your desk in Sydney, trying to squeeze emotion from dry UN reports. For you, the term conjured up Dickensian images of children going…
I have been writing short fiction for over thirty years and, while I am now hard at work on my second novel, the short story form remains my one true literary love. For me, it is a playground where I can take risks and explore a variety of genres, subjects, locations, and points of view, without the need for complex world-building and plot development. I have published historical, speculative, satirical, realist and biographical stories, spanning three centuries and set everywhere from the Moscow underground to a Parisian storage facility and the Sahara Desert.
While my stories may be difficult to categorise, I can identify patterns in my writing craft. Many of the stories grow from a single arresting image or idea in a news item, documentary or conversation that resonates with me. I scribble these down in my writing journal and carry them around, sometimes for years, until the shoots of a story begin to grow. Stray dogs riding the Moscow subway in the 1950s; the scorched statues of Notre Dame lying under shrouds in a warehouse on the outskirts of Paris; a family chugging through a flooded shopping arcade at night, dodging the floating shop dummies and hangers. My stories often open with a lyrical paragraph or two containing the seminal image and open out from there.
‘Minefield’ is a good example of this. In my professional role as a copywriter for charities and not-for-profits, I wrote extensively on Uganda’s ‘night commuting’ children, and the image has haunted me for years. At the same time, I’d been wanting to explore my conflicted feelings about working in the fundraising sector. No matter how worthy the cause or organisation, fundraising itself has become a highly competitive and professionalised industry, a branch of marketing focused primarily on fulfilling the needs and expectations of Western donors.
I reflected on this while working in the field, and made sketchy notes in my journal as I came face-to-face with the complex reality of conflict zones and humanitarian crises. The term ‘white saviour’ was yet to be coined, but I was skirting around the concept. I was keen to interrogate my feelings through fiction but held off for over a decade, fearing that I would be biting the hand that feeds me.
Then, in June, I heard about the CRAFT 2025 Short Fiction Prize and read Halle Hill’s comments on what she was looking for as Guest Judge. ‘When I’m reading short fiction, I am looking for bravery and something wrestled with on the page,’ she wrote. I printed out her comments and stuck them on the wall behind my computer screen. I pulled out an old writing journal and a dusty photo album. It was time for me to overcome my misgivings and wrestle this difficult story to the ground.
ALISON GIBBS lives in Sydney, Australia, where she runs a writing consultancy, producing content and copy for the not-for-profit sector. Her short stories have been published and broadcast in Australia and the UK, and have received numerous awards, including the prestigious 2021 Griffith Review Emerging Voices Prize. Alison has a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of Technology, Sydney. Her debut novel Repentance was published by Scribe in Australia and the US in 2021. She is currently working on a second novel and a short story collection. Find her on Facebook @aligibbsauthor.
