Author Q&A with Corinne Harrison
May 8, 2025
Corinne is an author, digital nomad, and avid traveller. Her fiction has appeared in The Bond Street Review, Remington Review, Elegant Literature, inScribe, Cool Beans Lit and others. Her flash fiction, Flying Fish, appears in our spring issue.
Tell us about yourself.
Three years ago I put all my possessions in storage, stopped renting accommodation and decided to house sit for different properties and pets across the UK as a way to live, as I’m lucky enough to work remotely. My life is now taken up with travelling every few weeks, exploring new places, dog walking and writing. I’ve found my travels have always informed my writing and I use my stories to explore different cultures, histories and places.
What unique or surprising detail can you tell us about the origin, revision process, and/or final version of your piece appearing in this issue?
Flying Fish was inspired by a painting in a place I was house sitting for in Wimbledon, London. It was a period when I was attempting to instil the habit of writing every morning (which … I’ve half kept up). The painting showed several women scattered on a beach, picking up bottles from the sand. It wasn’t clear which country the painting was set in, but the owners of the house frequently travelled to South Africa, something which was evident from the decorations in the house. I decided the painting was set in Cape Town and the story that emerged came from musings on what had brought those women to the beach and why they were picking the rubbish strewn across it.
What did you learn (about yourself or craft or life in general) through writing and revising it?
Writing this story was an exercise for myself in whitling down a story to the bare essentials and I learned that the revision process is valuable for detecting those elements that are superfluous. It started as a longer piece, but I decided to try and cut it down only to its most important moments. I wanted to play around with characterisation and reveal the life of the protagonist through a short exchange with a stranger.
What do you hope readers take from the piece?
The story took several forms throughout the writing process, but I wanted the final draft to show a brief encounter that may have been uneventful on the surface, but one that highlighted separate extremes of living experienced by different people in one place. The protagonist and the boy are both on the beach in the early hours, but their different reasons for being there highlights the disparity in their socio-economic states and the racial segregation that is present in a lot of places in the world.
Ultimately, I hope that through my piece, readers will get a sense of place and how it can mean entirely different things to different groups of people.
What fuels your desire to write (or engage in other creative outlets)? Or what have been the biggest influences in your writing?
I think creative outlets are important for making sense of yourself and the world around you, so I’ve come to see writing as something that’s incredibly therapeutic. I’ve always been an avid reader and I’ve been writing since I was young, but since making writing a habitual part of my life, it’s become that moment of the day I look forward to!
How do you make expression a part of your daily life? Or how do you find a balance between your writing and other responsibilities?
I sometimes use my writing practice time to record my travels or I’ll use daily writing prompts to guide my writing practice. I’d love to say I wake up at the same early hour every morning to write before work, but I unfortunately like my morning lie-ins too much! Fitting it around other responsibilities is often a case of seeing what the day brings and finding time to write in the spare hours in mornings, afternoons or weekends.
What do you think when you hear, “the good life”?
When I hear “the good life”, I think of a life filled with travel, new experiences and time with friends and family.
Thank you, Corinne, for being a part of our growing community and for spending extra time with us on this Q&A. Best wishes with writing and wherever your travels take you next.
