‘People Who Want History Want History’: Experimenting with temporal, environmental and narrative dislocation in short fiction about dementia

This article explores the challenges and possibilities of writing ‘People Who Want History Want History ’ – a short story structured around a ‘reminiscence interview’ as part of the induction process in a dementia care home. Told entirely through documents (interview transcripts, excerpts from a staff manual, care home marketing material etc.), the story avoids a fixed narrative perspective, leaving plenty of hermeneutic gaps for readers to grapple with. I reflect on the specific choices I made while writing this story and the way I aimed to draw attention to the power structures of institutional landscapes, the damaging stereotypes around dementia and narrative expectations of readers. Drawing on ethnographic projects and other short stories as inspiration, I consider the interesting echoes between the way dementia disrupts narrative, and the suspended temporality of the short story form. In examining and reflecting on this story, I attempt to illuminate the way short fiction can draw attention to the troubling and multivalent stories that might emerge when sustained narrative becomes impossible.