For some time before I wrote ‘Joy’, I’d been having strange feelings. I didn’t know what to make of them, or how to explain them. They occurred in bouts a few times a year. They were blasts of intense, untethered happiness, often ambushing me in very mundane settings. Ironically, they made me feel a little lonely afterwards, as I couldn’t think of anyone I could talk to about them who wouldn’t find me loopy. So, I kept quiet. Eventually, I confided in my husband, who listened, and told me he didn’t experience such things. I expect he thought I was loopy.

I’d also become interested in how, in extreme moments, even the most irreligious people will reach for religious language. I’d noticed this in myself. Was it that religious words could achieve something no other words could, and if so, did that mean their impact was culturally cultivated, or did the source of these utterings come from a deeper part of us, from some mysterious, inchoate place?

In addition, I’d had the experience at my Dad’s funeral of things being said about him that sounded fitting, (in a generic sense), but which simply weren’t true of him. I think this happened because the vicar, with kind intentions, had talked to my brother and I before the service, to get an idea of who my father was, in order to speak well of him… But the vicar either hadn’t listened very carefully or he’d been unable to read his notes because what came out was a garbled mix of half-things we’d said and other reflections that seemed to be about a (far more worthy-sounding) stranger. Perhaps these were words from other services the vicar had spoken at? I remember the side-eye us family members were giving each other as we tried not to find this amusing. My Dad would have found this funny.

Going back to the transcendent feelings, eventually I did what I always do when I can’t quieten something in my mind: I tried to put what it felt like down on paper, where I could see it. When I began writing about Eric, I had no idea it would become a story. In fact, I had little idea that it would as I have for most of my life been interested in screenwriting (as my alter ego Karen Featherstone) which often has a bedrock of structure: one event leads causally to another. I was probably drunk on linear narratives at the time, so in the early stages of ‘Joy’, I just wanted to read back to myself a character who was experiencing the same feelings I had. I already knew Eric’s gusts of bliss wouldn’t have a specified cause, so I presumed it would fail as a story. In the end, I followed Eric through a day in his life, so his morning-to-evening progress provides a default structure of sorts.

I named my character Eric (my Dad’s name) as a placeholder, thinking I’d change it later. Only I never did. This shows how stories are rarely finished. You just have to pull the rug at some point and stop amending them.

Several drafts of ‘Joy’ were attempted, on and off, over four years. I never felt I’d got it right. Occasionally I’d send it out, and was not really surprised when it didn’t get anywhere. I assumed a person reading it who had not experienced reasonlessly transcendent feelings would not rate it at all. But something in me knew it was my best, most emotionally true story yet. I thought if it could just land on the right desk, in front of a person who saw beyond the on-purpose grammatical error in the first line ‘…Laura was not there yet, with her life.’ An error I corrected over and over again before putting it back in just because it felt (wrongly) right… and then it was read by Dr John Lavin.

I am so pleased this story made it into The Lonely Crowd #14. If there is another person who reads it who feels a sense of recognition with Eric, I will be so pleased for them. I don’t know what that makes us, but I don’t think it means we are loopy.

You can read ‘Joy’ here and in Issue 14 of The Lonely Crowd.

Karys Frank is the winner of the 2023 Lindisfarne Prize for Crime Fiction. Her short stories have been published in Mslexia, by Retreat West Books and also by Otranto House Books. Frank is also the recipient of a Northern Writers’ New Fiction award from New Writing North.