What if Orchids Grew From Your Belly Button: Katy Wimhurst
What if Orchids Grew From Your Belly Button: Katy Wimhurst
What if orchids grew from your belly button? What if your hair was replaced by a lucious plant? What if you could suck up everything you hated in the world with a hoover? What if, in a world of scarcity, chocolate was outlawed? My new book of short fiction poses these important existential questions!
Strange tales have always captivated me. As a child, I adored Lewis Carroll more than CS Lewis and Green Eggs and Ham more than Black Beauty. When I grew up and discovered the likes of Franz Kafka, Angela Carter and Gabriel García Marquez, I knew that type of adult fiction was where my imagination felt at home. More recently, authors like Sara Rose Etter and George Saunders have blown me away.
I hope An Orchid in My Belly Button is more than just a strange, fun book, though. What I love about speculative fiction is that it is entertaining while forcing us to re-imagine things we thought we knew; it is playful and political at the same time. As the writer Nalo Hopkinson says, ‘Speculative fiction is a great place to warp the mirror, and thus impel the reader to view differently things that they’ve taken for granted.’
An Orchid in My Belly Button warps the mirror through its mix of magical realism, dystopian fiction, surrealist and urban fantasy. Key themes are nature and the environment. In one piece, electronic goods — hoovers, washing machines, food mixers — mysteriously turn up all over London in greater and greater numbers. In another, environmental art keeps popping up on a beach but no one knows from where. In a third story, a sceptical man who becomes ill because of oil pollution has no choice but to seek help from a shaman. In each case, I reflect from an odd angle on the human relationship with nature or the environment.
The book also explores outsiders and misfits, those who are ‘other’. Regardless of whether they have a fox tail or birds that nest in their hair, they face prejudice and struggle to fit in. Until, that is, they find the strength to fight back through community and connection. My interest in ‘others’ dates back to my postgraduate studies in social anthropology, but recently has been sharpened by my experience of severe chronic illness — disability makes one an ‘other’.
An Orchid in My Belly Button is out from Elsewhen Press on 28 February 2035. It is available in paperback and as an ebook.
Bio:
Katy Wimhurst has had three collections of short stories published — An Orchid in My Belly Button (Elsewhen Press, 2025), Snapshots of the Apocalypse (Fly on the Wall Press, 2022) and Let Them Float (Alien Buddha Press, 2023). Her fiction has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies including The Guardian, Writers’ Forum, Cafe Irreal, Kaleidotrope, and ShooterLit. Her first book of visual poems, Fifty-One Trillion Bits, was published by Trickhouse Press (2023). She sometimes writes literary essays on speculative fiction and interviews writers for 3AM Magazine. She blogs at https://whimsylph.wordpress.com. She is housebound with the illness M.E.
About the book:
These stories savour the surreal, flirt with magical realism, dabble with dystopia. A boy sees the ghosts of dead crabs. A girl with a fox tail is bullied. A disenchanted woman sprouts orchids from her belly button. Fashion models pursue the trend of having plants as hair. Electronic goods amassing all over London herald an apocalypse. Darkness and wonder, the strange and the ordinary, interweave to offer an environmental and social portrait of our times. Guaranteed to evoke a response, whether a giggle, a gasp, or a nervous gulp, these stories will stay with you, enriching your perception of the world.
Surreal, absurdist, magical realist; Katy Wimhurst writes speculative fiction that meditates on our reality. Although bleak themes are examined – dystopian futures, the climate crisis, bullying – a quirky imagination and wry humour lift the tales above the ‘realm of grim’.
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Category: On Writing
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