
Photo of David Medalie: provided
Short.Sharp.Stories is a platform showcasing established and emerging South African short story writers. For the 2025 anthology, Power: Short stories that light the dark, writers imagined “power” in fictional terms – how it influences and affects us, including political and personal power, and the ever-present issues of loadshedding.
In this Short.Sharp.Stories interview, Lynn Joffe chats with David Medalie, author of the short story “A recreated world”, set in a small town, in which two characters, Tally and Ashwin, have a meaningful interaction.
David Medalie is a professor in the Department of English and director of the Unit for Creative Writing at the University of Pretoria. He supervises postgraduate work in English and creative writing. He is a short story writer, novelist and anthologist and is currently working on a new collection of short stories. His publications include Recognition, a collection of South African short stories, which he edited for the Wits University Press. In 2023, his short story “Milly takes a husband” was included in the Short.Sharp.Stories collection entitled Fluid: The freedom to be.
You have included an epigraph from the work of Virginia Woolf. How does this quote foreshadow the work? Are you warning the reader of what is to come? “Ah, but she was not merely a twitcher of individual strings; she was one who seethes wandering bodies and floating voices in a cauldron and makes rise from its amorphous mass a recreated world.”
The quotation comes from Woolf’s novel Between the acts, published in 1941. It is a description of the character of Miss La Trobe, who is an artist, but also someone whom Woolf depicts as isolated from the other characters. The character of Tally in my short story is not identified explicitly as an artist, but I think there’s a form of social artistry in the way in which she engages with Ashwin and in what she plans to do as she seeks her own version of a “recreated world”. The tension between belonging and isolation also runs through the story.
How does this epigraph tie in with your story and the theme of power?
The description of Miss La Trobe makes her seem like a witch, but also an alchemist. Instead of transforming base metals into gold, as alchemists sought to do, the valuable substance she produces as she brings bodies and voices together is a “recreated world”. In her own way, this is what my character, Tally, wishes to do. In this time in which we see about us so many brutal forms of power, crushing everything in their path like a juggernaut, the “recreated world” Tally strives for is a countervailing force which draws its power precisely from the fact that it refuses the wider, dystopian pattern and its ostensibly remorseless logic.
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In this time in which we see about us so many brutal forms of power, crushing everything in their path like a juggernaut, the “recreated world” Tally strives for is a countervailing force which draws its power precisely from the fact that it refuses the wider, dystopian pattern and its ostensibly remorseless logic.
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Tally tries to find common ground with someone whose circumstances are very different from her own, using humour and tact to assert a shared humanity. Do you see this as a form of empowerment, as the interaction between Tally and Ashwin does not conform to what is conventionally understood as power and its imposition? What racial lines are you crossing here?
Yes, this is, for me, one of the most important forms of power in the story. Their interaction is marked by an appreciation of each other as human beings and as individuals who find common ground but have their own distinct identities and histories. The disparities in background and circumstance – of which race is a part – are not negated, but they also don’t function deterministically as far as their relationship is concerned. There is humour in their interaction, and that is significant: humour, I believe, humanises situations and reinforces bonds between people.
You have often channelled a female perspective into your stories. What’s the difference between writing a male and female persona?
I don’t really think of it in those terms. The nature of the story and the concerns it deals with will lead me to a certain type of character or consciousness. Achieving authenticity in that discrete narrative environment is what matters most.
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The nature of the story and the concerns it deals with will lead me to a certain type of character or consciousness. Achieving authenticity in that discrete narrative environment is what matters most.
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In the story, do you see the town as a character? How does this align with the female protagonist? Reflecting her inner and outer state of being?
The town is a presence, but it’s also an absence – partly because it’s been abandoned and is now empty. As we discover, it has a great deal to do with the protagonist, because it is the site of a painful past; but it also becomes an opportunity to forge something new.
Your story is written in the present tense. It brings immediacy and directness. Was this a conscious choice? How do you use this to get into the heads of your characters?
I don’t always use the present tense, but I do like it. You put it very well: “It brings immediacy and directness.” Some stories seem to me to need that powerful pull of the here and now, and this was one of them.
You reference HC Bosman: “placid towns in the surface”; “ferment and turmoil”. Does this create an intertextuality in your story? What induced you to include these references?
The quotations come from an essay Bosman wrote called “The dorps of South Africa”. In the story, Tally tells Ashwin about it. It’s highly pertinent to the story in a number of ways, including Bosman’s view that the tranquillity of a dorp lies only on the surface. Bosman, of course, also used humour – often in a dark or subversive way.
The narrator holds on to “the secret of why” – Tally’s motivations, her fate, her implied fame. What is her motivation to return, to be calm, to transform the ferment and turmoil of the past? The story only hints about Tally’s past. Do you deliberately place clues and not follow them up, leaving the mystery to the reader to figure out?
I wanted her to be an appealing character, but also a rather inscrutable one. It makes her intriguing. I don’t think one has to reveal everything about a character, especially in short stories, where what is implied can be just as important as what is said.
Author and storyteller Lynn Joffe has penned and produced an abundance of multicultural campaigns for South Africa’s top brands and edutainment platforms. She holds a BA from Unisa and an MA in Creative Writing from Wits. She presents interactive storytelling and writing workshops for universities, literary festivals and conferences across South Africa and internationally. Her debut novel, The gospel according to Wanda B Lazarus, was published to acclaim by Modjaji Books in 2020. Her latest brainchild, Solid gold story time, won Podcast of the Year in the South African Podcast Awards and Best Children’s Podcast at the APVA Awards.
Power is available at good bookstores and directly from Tattoo Press: joanne.hichens@gmail.com.
Tattoo Press is an independent small publisher, specialising in contemporary South African short fiction.
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