Stephanie Wilderspin

Stephanie Wilderspin grew up in Essex, raised by the stereotype of a single mother on benefits. She graduated with a degree in American Literature with Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, and currently works as a researcher for a prominent TV broadcaster. Stephanie’s writing often explores social issues with a focus on gender, sexuality, class, and mental illness. She enjoys finding unorthodox ways to explore serious issues; from playing with format and structure, to utilising comedy to navigate difficult topics to make her writing more relatable, whilst retaining the message at its core.

REFRACTED follows a young woman after a suicide attempt. The event splits her life into fragments, which she defines by colours to better explore the multiple manifestations of mental illness, as well as the self-censorship that comes with trying to hide its symptoms in order to lead a “normal” life.

 

To find out a little more about her work, we asked Stephanie the following questions…

What inspires your work?

A lot of my work is centred around social issues and will often form around a topic that I have been reading about a lot at the time, or even experiencing myself.  But inspiration can also come from things such as playing a video game in a certain setting that I want to further explore. Or realising that something I want to read doesn’t exist, so I might as well write it for myself, I guess.

Tell us a bit about your writing process…

If I have a story that I’m really invested in, it will take up my entire life. I daydream constantly and have scribbled pieces of paper in pockets and bags and all over my desk when I have an idea that I’d really like to write. Whether they ever get written, is another thing; I either go for months unable to write more than 100 words at a time, to suddenly being able to sit and write 3000 words in one sitting.



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